Jan Avgikos

JAN AVGIKOS is a critic and historian who lives and works in NYC and the Hudson Valley.

A new exhibition at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents a rare opportunity to revisit Christopher Wilmarth's serene glass and steel sculptures of the 1970s. No drama, no mess, no rough edges, nothing but the Apollonian perfection of flawless, hydrofluoric acid-etched translucent glass surfaces that attract and hold the light, reflecting in their layered depths tonal ranges from frosty white to pure aqua.
Christopher Wilmarth, Half Open Drawing, 1971. Etched glass and steel cable, 24 1/2 x 17 x 1 inches.
Sometimes it takes years to fully appreciate the importance of a work of art, to evaluate what impact it might induce, and to see it in the context of a legacy that has yet to be realized. So it is with Renée Cox’s monumental black and white photo diptych, Origin, created in 1993. Initially only the left half, a towering nude full-length self-portrait entitled Yo Mama, was exhibited.
Installation view: Renée Cox: Roots Returned, Cathouse Proper, New York, 2019. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Sarah Sze beguiles us with two new spectacularly wrought installations teeming with meticulously arranged objects, contraptions, photographs, plants, projectors that beam moving images, sound, and much more, all disposed in and around her signature scaffolding, itself a tour de force of improvisation and precarity.
Installation view: Sarah Sze, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
It’s debatable if walking, in and of itself, is art. But the “idea” of walking as art has a pedigree that stretches back to the heyday of Conceptual art.
Yuji Agematsu, ziploc: 12.01.95 . . . 12.31.95, 1995. Mixed media in Ziploc bags (31 units), magnets, oil pen, on steel. Ziplocs, 3 3/4 x 4 x 1/2 inches each, steel backing: 29 1/2 x 31 x 1 3/8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Photo: Stephen Faught.
Derrick Adams's critical commentaries on Black identity are stylized in idioms of pop culture.
Derrick Adams, Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2018. Oil on canvas, 60 by 84 inches. © Derrick Adams, Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
Lyle Ashton Harris has channeled many memorable personas over the course of his thirty year practice.
Lyle Ashton Harris, Flash of the Spirit, 2018. Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 48 x 64 inches. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York.
August through September is Wojnarowicz’s season here in New York
David Wojnarowicz, Wind (For Peter Hujar), 1987. Acrylic and collaged paper on composition board, two panels, 72 x 96 inches. Collection of the Second Ward Foundation. Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York.
The history of art is written, first, by organizing the chaos of myriad forms of artistic practice into neat parcels, and then, policing those territories forever more.
Moyra Davey, 1943 (detail), 2018. 108 C-prints on fuji chrystal archive paper, tape, postage, ink, each print 18 x 12 inches, dimensions variable.
There is lots of empty space in Isa Genzken’s art, which is odd given her propensity to create visual mayhem and to coax an overflow of detritus into messy collages that describe all manner of ruination.
Installation view, Isa Genzken: Sky Energy, David Zwirner, New York, 2018 © Isa Genzken Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.
We need this work now! We need to live with it, to see it more fully, and to understand more deeply what Golub discovered and never lost sight of: the power of representation to arrest the uninterrupted flow of the present, to interrogate the human condition, and to produce art as a lifelong act of resistance.
Leon Golub, Interrogation, 1992. Screenprint, 26 × 26 in. (66 × 66 cm) image: 17 × 22 in. (43.2 × 55.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Intended Gift of Jon Bird, 2017. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
It’s amazing what a complete game-change results when the stretcher bars for painting go missing.
Howardena Pindell, Night Flight, 2015-2016. Mixed media on canvas, 63 x 77 inches. Courtesy Garth Greenan.
The viewer has a lot of heavy lifting to do in Chris Ofili’s new installation, enigmatically entitled Paradise Lost. Whose “paradise” is a matter of conjecture, but the experience of loss is triggered by our inability to fully see the four paintings and wrap-around wall mural that are the show’s star attractions.
Installation view, Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost at David Zwirner New York, September 14 – October 21, 2017. Photo: EPW Studio/Maris Hutchinson. © Chris Ofili. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
A funny coincidence happened on my way to see Cheyney Thompson’s exhibition of new Quantity Paintings, entitled Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes. First I stopped in at David Zwirner’s to see all the blue paintings that Ad Reinhardt ever painted.
Installation view of Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes, 2017, courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery.
The exhibition of new paintings by Louise Fishman sent me looking back through her previous catalogues. She’s been painting for more than fifty years. Are the paintings getting even better?
Louise Fishman, MONONGAHELA, 2017. Oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

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