The Brooklyn Rail

“Wonderful things,” is what Howard Carter said when asked if he could see anything when looking for the first time through a hole in the door of King Tut’s tomb. Truly mystical, enigmatic, and wonderful things are what is on display on the four floors of Sperone Westwater in celebration of fifty years of presenting progressive European Art and its correlate on the American scene. The founders’ (Angela Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone, and Konrad Fischer) dedication to an abstract, conceptual, and diagrammatic position is firmly established by the initial gauntlet of five seemingly modest and simple, but landmark, works on paper: A tight and cubicular embroidered cloth syllabary (1990) in black, blue, red, and white by Alighiero e Boetti; an untitled 1975 work by Hanne Darboven, which uses the matrix of a daily planner as fertile ground for repetitive, undulating ink squiggles undermining the notion of time, activity, and planning. These are followed by Sol LeWitt’s Blue Grid, Black Circles, Red and Yellow Arcs From Sides & Corners Opposite (1972), Carl Andre’s Untitled (Concrete Uncarved Blocks) (1976), and Otto Piene’s Untitled (Black and Red Raster Painting) (1957); all three, like the first two, offering something of a user’s guide to the arcane and inscrutable inner workings of conceptual art.

After the initial conceptual bottleneck at the entrance to the gallery, the breadth of the work expands, but even with the penetration of imagery into the gallery’s program, the recognizability of the forms is always in the service of metaphor—realism has never had a comfortable home at Sperone Westwater! If one needed some themes to follow, the animal as metaphor is one of its richest veins. Susan Rothenberg’s X’d-out schematic horse skeleton in brushy white and gray, Untitled Drawing #48 (1977), asks more questions than it answers, while Bruce Nauman’s extraordinary Two Leaping Foxes (2018), situated in the gallery’s signature elevator gallery, is an inverted predator/prey food pyramid of ghostly polyurethane stags dwindling down to lithe greyhounds at bottom. David Lynch perhaps touches on narrative with a horrifying harpy-like apparition in low-relief on canvas in Flower (2020), and Shaunté Gates engages with the mythological, narrative intersected with metaphor, with his photo-collaged female centaur in The Four Huntresses II (2023). Mario Merz is represented by a heraldic tent of bamboo and vellum, decorated with spray-painted crouching felines and a galactic swirl having a humble snail glued to its center in Noi giriamo intorno alle case o le case girano intorno a noi? (1982).

I will be just forty-nine years of age when this review sees print, and it takes me a substantial effort to contextualize most images from the past, so imagine an institution with dozens of artists and curators: in the context of a span of fifty years, it becomes impossible to focus on specific series or moments in each of the constituent artists’ practices, but several of the works do briefly open wide a whole swath of memory. On Kawara’s “I Got Up…” (1977) is a series of daily postcards covering about a month, sent to Angela Westwater, stating when the artist arose from bed. And so, we wonder: what did the artist do, or eat, or think after getting up at 8:47 AM on February 23, 1977, at the Hotel La Louisiane in Paris? What a wonderful way to get lost in thought. Or staring into either of Katy Moran’s lugubrious swirling miasmas of pooled acrylic paint, Sophia or More Time (both 2023), enigmatic aesthetic parasites that the painter applies to pre-existing paintings. Wolfgang Laib’s three morose, oblong, granite forms, Brahmanda (2016), sit pensively on the outdoor terrace of the second floor of the gallery, casting very pale shadows in the diffuse light. Amongst the other miraculous and unexpected forms on the four floors of the exhibition, the goal of Sperone Westwater is clearly defined by the notion of what art can be, not what we already think it is.