The Brooklyn Rail

Pierogi Gallery is best known for showing conceptual artists, renowned and unknown, emerging and mid-career. This thirty-year anniversary exhibition demonstrates that this is just one facet amongst many that give shape to Pierogi’s multitudinous ambit. Founded in 1994 by Susan Swenson and Joe Amrhein, the artist-run gallery, originally “Pierogi 2000,” was initially located in a loft on Williamsburg’s N. 9th Street, where, during the mid-1990s, it supported a coterie of local Brooklyn-based artists. Here burgeoned an insular pocket of the artworld suffused with folk artists, conceptual artists, installation artists, and painters. Despite running orthogonal to the artistic goings-on in Manhattan, this retinue was mostly content with its relative parochiality.

The “Thirtieth Anniversary Exhibition” at Pierogi’s new Tribeca location, is an homage to its eclectic history, substituting reception history with works created by the constitutive artists. It offers viewers who might not be familiar with Pierogi an illuminating chronicle of its history and those of the participant artists. The show includes one hundred and thirty-two artists and one hundred and sixty-four artworks. Each work is, pars pro toto, a surrogate for a particular exhibition, fair, or story in Pierogi’s internal history. The earliest work is from 1989 and the most recent from 2024. The exhibition includes artists who are relatively unknown alongside conceptual art bastions like Lawrence Weiner and Stephen Kaltenbach. The exhibition is nothing if not catholic, with no particular aesthetic sensibility domineering (although one wall is flanked by mostly representational works). The paintings, sculptures, and installations are mounted salon-style. This galvanizes a kind of democratizing-effect. Tony Fitzpatrick’s Crucifiction of the Tyrant (2024)—which collects variegated folk images of crosses, wolves, fossils, and gyrating skeletal women on a flat pictureplane—is posited in continuity with Tavares Strachan’s encyclopedia of his local Bahamian culture, Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide) (Edition #51/250) (2024).

To do justice to the expansive scope of the exhibition here is impossible, but a few works immediately stand out. One is Roxy Paine’s Dip painting (#184802022000C) (EG) (2000). The piece is an acrylic canvas, dipped in alabaster paint by a mechanical arm that is timed to progressively submerge the canvas at deeper measured intervals—each baptism advancing the thickness of the lower paint-coated portions. The arm is also timed to halt, allowing the canvas to dry before re-dipping, thereby producing striated horizontal lines that mark each plunge’s depths. The top of the canvas, which has been submerged the least, has, in coeval fashion, the least amount of hardened paint. The lower portions of the support are layered in numerous coats, furnishing the canvas with slight bell shape. Hardened milky stalactite drips hang from the canvas’ bottom edge, indicating gravity’s draw. The work not only marks each processual descent—cleverly indexing the process of turning a canvas into a sculptural object—but shows that renders the artistic ambit is never entirely mechanically determined.

Another stand-out is Andrew Ohanesian’s Mandies (2010)—a provisional bar room equipped with a beer keg and no bartender. Visitors take up the bartender role as they please, serving and drinking alongside gallery-goers-cum-barflies. Two doors incised in the back hallway indicate the opening to the seating area and the barman’s chamber. Inside, a flickering neon light reads “MANDIES.” The work recalls the food-based relational aesthetics of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Jennifer Rubell, as well as Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin’s Conflict Kitchen (2010–17). Mandies yellow Budweiser stench is an all-American waft, in keeping with Andy Warhol’s interest in Campbell’s and Coca-Cola as a democratized American good.

Joyce Pensato's two charcoal on paper works, Untitled Felix and Untitled Mickey (both 2005), are quite intriguing. Pensato's figures are scrawled in adumbration, like Bill Traylor and James Castle’s portraits. One expects an artist whose source material includes Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse to hew towards Ronnie Cutrone’s “post-Pop” vernacular, flatly delineating the cartoon icons. But Pensato renders them in a ghostly, expressionistic craze. Her clouded griffonage outlines invoke Franz Kline’s late 1940s line- and plane-based portraits.

Another interesting work is Kim Jones’s plastic, acrylic, ink, wire, and wood construction, Little Marine (1989-1999-2005). At first gloss, the work appears to consist of two protracted, sinewy wooden makeshift legs, nailed into an axis above. The towering legs, in fact, dangle from a toy soldier inhumed within a lattice, effectively making the soldier unusable. The work is in keeping with Jones’s “Mudman” character and Jones’s interest in war drawings.

There are a multitude of works with stories looming large behind them. These stories risk being overshadowed by the sheer comprehensiveness of the show. Yet this amalgamation-based approach allots fruitful connective threads. Gary Panter and Dan Davidson both traffic in the lowbrow movement's aesthetics; their inclusion must be informed by the object-historical value of the works, as they do not prompt much thinking (particularly in comparison to the Conceptual artworks).

For instance, Meredith Allen’s photograph, Kiddie Ride, Alligator, Ed. #1/6 (n.d.), captures the eponymous plastic alligator in a blurry portrait. The alligator’s hazy patina is akin to the glow of Bradford’s tan lifeguard, painted in thick chestnut-peach brushstrokes. Bradford’s hollow facture closely resembles that of Ken Weathersby's Interiority (2022), which depicts three paintings—each of a silhouette rendered in side-profile—posited within the recesses of a pallid room. Jonathan Schipper’s To Dust (c. 2005) makes use of an electric motor that, every few minutes, loudly clangs two marble busts against one another; the glower of their faces will, presumably, eventually leaven into smoothed-over, and thus anonymized, visages. The mechanical leitmotif brings us back to Paine’s dip painting. The exhibition collates the ardent efforts of various artists figuring in Pierogi’s thirty-year history. This anniversary show also serves as an important primer for viewers who may not be familiar with this art historical modality, anchored in Williamsburg’s recent past and Pierogi’s ongoing present.