ArtSeen
Autobiographical Reflections and the Art World
By Joachim Pissarro
I grew up at the complicated and taut interstices between the art gallery world and the avant-garde museum space.
112 Greene Street—Spaces Interior and Exterior
By Bill BeckleyDid you know that SoHo’s streets are named after Revolutionary War generals? Mercer, Wooster, Thompson, Sullivan, MacDougal, Lafayette, Crosby, and, oh yes, Greene.
Gallery Charm
By Ivan GaskellWe often read that art galleries are intimidating, that they do not welcome people of the “wrong” class or ethnicity.
Taps for Joseph Beuys
By Adele TutterAfter Joseph Beuys died in January 1986, my then-partner and now-husband, John Hudak, and I organized a mail art show in Philadelphia to honor his passing. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
Redesigning Resistance
By Joshua K. LeonLate in the last decade, demographers declaimed that the majority of the world’s population exists in cities.
Art Entrances
By Darren JonesYears ago, when I lived in London, making my tentative forays into the art world, passing through the door to a gallery was a momentary ordeal, bedeviled by halting indecision and uncertainty about what lay beyond.
ADRIAN GHENIE Disturbing Dichotomies and New Paintings
By Alana Shilling-JanoffIt is impossible to categorize the curious pleasure that emerges when our most complacent knowledge is challenged.
PHOENIX RISING: NYC 1993 Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
By Thyrza Nichols GoodeveMemory can’t help but lead one through the 1993 show at The New Museum, even if one was too young to be part of it.
SIMON LEE MOTHER IS PASSING. COME AT ONCE
By William CorwinMOTHER IS PASSING. COME AT ONCE is an enigmatically fitting title for a show that has more veils than Salome’s dance.
ZAUN LEE Borders
By Jonathan GoodmanZaun Lee is a young, New York-based abstract painter who comes from Seoul, South Korea.
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN Paintings 1947 – 1974
By Robert C. MorganJohn McLaughlin was a highly influential hard-edge painter who worked in Southern California from the late 1940s through the early ’70s.
THOMAS NOZKOWSKI Recent Work
By Robert BerlindDutch historian Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens argued that play is antecedent to and a key element of culture and is therefore a defining term of our species.
JINDRICH STYRSKY Dreams
By Valery OisteanuIn less than two decades Jindřich Štyrský (1899 – 1942) influenced surrealist artists and poets in his native Czechoslovakia, Paris, and around the world. A painter, poet, photographer, editor, and collagist, Štyrský was an innovator of arts on both a spiritual and experimental level.
![Jindřich Štyrský, “Alabastrová ručička [Little Alabaster Hand]” 1940. Pencil frottage & collage on paper 8 5/8 x 11 3/4”. Courtesy of Ubu Gallery.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/10911/oisteanu-web1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Get Off the Lawn
By Matthew Shen GoodmanThere is refreshingly little curatorial handholding in Get Off the Lawn, a wonderfully haphazard group show at the young gallery, Parade Ground. The exhibition’s press release is the Irish folksong “The Ballad of Arthur McBride,” in which the narrator rejects the efforts of British military recruiters, and instead beats them up and steals their money.
GIANNI COLOMBO
(or, “Greene Naftali or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery”)
By Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata
Kinetic art icon Gianni Colombo’s first solo exhibition in the United States has landed at Greene Naftali, 20 years after the artist’s death. The show focuses on Colombo’s production between 1953 and 1975, tactile and participatory works that the gallery kindly but sternly reminds us “NOT TO TOUCH” (in spite of the original intention of each piece).
AL HELD Alphabet Paintings
By David RhodesThis exhibition, comprising ten paintings and two works on paper culled from several private collections, affords viewers the rare, if not unique, opportunity to apprise Al Held’s Alphabet paintings, made between 1961 and 1967 andthought by many in this city to be his finest work.
JOEL SHAPIRO Sculpture and Drawings 1969 – 1972
By Phong BuiDuring an artist’s journey, when he or she leaves home decisively, they’re usually gone for good—but they will always have their roots.
JOE ZUCKER Empire Descending a Staircase
By Alex BaconFor his most recent series of paintings, Joe Zucker scored gypsum board, commonly known as plaster or wallboard, into a grid of quarter inch squares.
MARA HELD
By Phong BuiOne comes away from the exhibition with a Neruda-esque sense of absence, desire, and hope.
