ArtSeen
Nancy Spero: The Drawing Center & Galerie Lelong
By David Levi Strauss and Jon BirdIn an early video, made by Patsy Scala, Nancy Spero works in her New York studio in 1973. We see her laying out sections of her scroll Codex Artaud across the wooden floorboards. The camera slowly scans the images and texts scattered over the loosely unfurled hand-made paper sheets that curl at their edges.
Mediating the Void Gabriel Orozco
By Joan WaltemathAfter a few moments amongst the paintings in his recent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery it becomes clear that Gabriel Orozco doesn’t intend to take up a dialogue with the history and medium of painting; he is painting not as a painter, but rather employs the format of abstract painting as a possibility for depicting his geometrical thought.
Nils Karsten
By Thomas MicchelliIn her puff piece on Marcel Dzama in the Style column of The New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon writes that Dzama’s “lugubrious fairy-tale sensibility…exemplifies the latest drift in contemporary art.”
Daniel Zeller
By Jason MurisonDaniel Zeller’s recent exhibition at Pierogi is similar to his last one two years ago. The gallery is filled with a number of fairly large framed abstract works on paper that are so meticulously drawn they look as if they could be photographs of the earth taken from a satellite.
Luc Tuymans
By James KalmLuc Tuymans is one of the current darlings of the European art establishment, and has the resume to prove it. He’s been included in every major show from the Saatchi Gallery’s Triumph of Painting to Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum in L.A.
Egon Schiele
By Stephanie BuhmannTo this writer there is hardly anything more moving in art; there are few artists whose work is more passionate and embracing of life’s dramatic emotions than that of Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918). He is one of the most impressive and highly influential geniuses, the kind who inspires us to live up to our own fullest creative potential.
The Long Ride of Larry Poons
By John ZinsserLarry Poons is famous for having been famous young. The painter, who has just shown ambitious new work at Jacobson Howard in Manhattan and Sideshow in Brooklyn, had his first solo show in 1963 at age 26 at Richard Bellamy’s legendary Green Gallery. His signature geometric “dot” paintings were a highlight of MoMA’s 1965 op art survey, “The Responsive Eye.”
Bob Thompson
By Ben LaRoccoThat’s what it’s all about finally—symbolism with paint. That’s why painters make paintings. Humans can perceive content in form and meaning in the structured presentation of the world’s assembled colors. When we use our bodies and the medium of paint to create an image of our inner struggles, the body is inscribed in the image.
Shirin Neshat
By Hrag VartanianIn her latest exhibition, Shirin Neshat continues her cinematic translation of Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour’s Women Without Men. Her latest filmic installation lingers on a prostitute, named Zarin, in an Iranian brothel, a place saturated with color and languid characters that frame the protagonist’s psychological breakdown.
If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION
By Francis RavenPlato famously banned poets and by extension all artists from his Republic because, among other things, they are at third remove from the truth and they lie. However, we live in an era (and perhaps all eras are alike in this way) in which our government lies to us using simple answers waged to defend current policies.
Judy Simonian
By Shane McAdamsThe relationship between painting and architecture through the years has been a fruitful one. In its adolescence, modern art embraced the mathematical regularity and geometric precision of suspension bridges and steel-frame skyscrapers for their formal and symbolic potential.
John Graham
By James KalmJohn Graham, born Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski in Kiev, in 1887, stands as an avatar within the formative first half of the twentieth century in New York’s burgeoning art world. His biography reads at turns like Dr. Zhivago, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.
Three Generations of Abstract Painting: Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason, & Cecily Kahn
By Roger KamholzThis show gathers paintings, drawings, and prints by Alice Trumbull Mason, her daughter Emily Mason, and granddaughter Cecily Kahn, turning scarce space into lively, intimate space. Kahn and her mother are productive today—both had solo shows in New York galleries in 2005—and a good deal of their work here is very recent.
Aron Namenwirth and Jason Van Anden
By Ben LaRocco“Mixed Feelings” is a curious name for Jason Van Anden’s sculpture. His two robotic figures at VertexList are unequivocal: they laugh incessantly. Circuit boards displayed on the gallery walls show the circumscribed paths of their internal activity while small motion detectors mounted under their chins help them interact with their surroundings.
Richard Pousette-Dart
By Jim LongIn 1951 Life magazine published a now well-known photograph of “The Irascibles,” 15 of the 18 painters who had signed a letter accusing the Met of rigging the jury for a national exhibition of American art. The guy on the far left of the picture (trying unsuccessfully to look as irascible as possible), one of the youngest artists in the group, is Richard Pousette-Dart.
