ART – The Chelsea Galleries:
Gagosian Gallery – west 21st Street. At the Gagosian Gallery, on West 21st Street, until July 27 an
exhibition of Richard Avedon’s legendary photographic murals and related
portraits. Against the backdrop of America's social and political
transformation, Avedon began to create four photographic murals between 1969
and 1971, which would be unprecedented in scale and pointed in subject. Between
20 to 35 feet wide and comprising up to five panels, the murals revealed a
striking new format in which subjects were positioned frontally and aligned
against a stark white background.
Above: Richard
Avedon’s Allen Ginsberg's family who’s who - Hannah (Honey) Litzky, aunt; Leo
Litzky, uncle; Abe Ginsberg, uncle; Anna Ginsberg, aunt; Louis Ginsberg,
father; Eugene Brooks, brother; Allen Ginsberg, poet; Anne Brooks, niece; Peter
Brooks, nephew; Connie Brooks, sister-in-law; Lyle Brooks, nephew; Eugene
Brooks; Neal Brooks, nephew; Edith Ginsberg, stepmother; Louis Ginsberg,
Paterson, New Jersey, May 3, 1970, 1970
Gelatin silver print
96 x 240
inches (243.8 x 609.6 cm)
Ed. of 3
© The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Gagosian Gallery – west 21st
Street. Richard Avedon’s The Mission Council who’s who … Hawthorne Q. Mills,
Mission Coordinator; Ernest J. Colantonio, Counselor of Embassy for
Administrative Affairs; Edward J. Nickel, Minister Counselor for Public
Affairs; John E. McGowan, Minister Counselor for Press Affairs; George D.
Jacobson, Assistant Chief of Staff, Civil Operations and Rural Development
Support; General Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., Commander, United States Military
Assistance Command, Vietnam; Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker; Deputy Ambassador
Samuel D. Berger; John R. Mossler, Minister and Director, United States Agency
for International Development; Charles A. Cooper, Minister Counselor for
Economic Affairs; and Laurin B. Askew, Counselor of Embassy for Political
Affairs, Saigon, South Vietnam, April 28, 1971, printed 1975 Silver gelatin
prints, five panels mounted on linen 119 1/2 x 390 1/8 inches (303.5 x 990.9 cm) Edition
2/2 + 1 AP.
Paula Cooper Gallery – Tauba
Auerbach Float exhibition. Until June 9 at the Paula Cooper Gallery Tauba
Auerbach’s Float exhibition. San Francisco-born, New York-based artist Tauba
Auerbach has described her work as an attempt to reveal “new spectral and
dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception.” Engaging
a variety of media, ranging from painting and photography to book design and musical
performance, Auerbach explores the limits of our structures and systems of
logic (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break
down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities.
Above. Untitled Fold 2012. In her acclaimed series of Fold
paintings, first introduced in 2009, Auerbach presents powdery trompe l’oeil
surfaces that register the traces of their former three-dimensionality. Painted
with an industrial sprayer, the works draw attention to the physical properties
of pigment imitating light.
Paula Cooper Gallery – Tauba Auerbach
Float Exhibition. In the exhibition new photographs and sculptural objects,
including Bent Onyx, 2012 a
deconstructed material volume printed and bound in book form. As Auerbach once
observed, “A book is an X-axis. The format is almost always linear; the
content, bound in a prescribed order, marches single file.” Inspired by a
desire to upend this theory, Auerbach resorts to tomography (the method of
producing images of the internal structure of an object), allowing the viewer
to slice through a solid block of onyx layer by layer, revealing the twists and
turns of a mineral narrative.
Gladstone Gallery – Anish
Kapoor. Street Space until June 9, Anish
Kapoor at the Gladstone Gallery on West 21st Street, has created a site-specific monumental Cor-Ten steel sculpture that
assumes a looming circular form. Rising
above and extending around the viewer, the work transforms the environment,
creating an acute awareness of spatial composition and the phenomenological
experience of surface, scale and shape. The sculpture enfolds the viewer into
immersive and heightened encounters that capture the intersecting forces of the
mind, eye and body.
Tanya Bonakdar gallery – Ernesto
Neto – Slow iis Good exhibition. For his
exhibition Slow iis Good at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Ernesto Neto presented
a series of vibrantly colored installations of crocheted polypropylene and
polyester cord that hang from the ceiling, hovering several feet above the
ground. These works continue Neto’s
practice of gravity, weight and tension to dictate form as plastic balls in
different shades provide a counterweight for the crocheted sheets. Stretching the crocheted membranes taught,
the balls form a floor for the labyrinthine, tunnel-like structures of alluring
color and inviting texture that the gallery visitor is meant to enter and
explore.
Metro Pictures – Cindy Sherman.
Until June 9 at Metro Pictures Cindy Sherman exhibits new, large-scale works that depict outsized enigmatic female
figures standing in striking isolation before ominous landscapes. Looking
directly out of the picture in our direction, each character is an eccentric
specter, whose epic scale, vivid Chanel costumes and intense gaze suggests a
sentry standing between the viewer and the distant background.
Sikkema
Jenkins and Co – Sheila Hicks. With a career that spans five
decades, Sheila Hicks’s work traverses the boundaries between painting and sculpture,
design, craft and even architecture with the use of woven forms. Challenging
the hierarchical classification of textiles as a more artisanal design-based
medium, Hicks combines her early training in painting, the interaction of color
with Josef Albers, and art history with George Kubler, with an expert
understanding of the craft of weaving and tapestry-making. The exhibition at the Sikkema Jenkins and Co. Gallery, includes a range of work from
Hicks’s earliest pieces dating from 1958 and composed of both natural fibers
and found materials – such as shirt collars, leather shoelaces, and rubber
bands – to new works of colorful linen stalks, wrapped cotton cords, and steel
fibers. She transforms these materials into discrete two-dimensional objects,
as well as large wall-mounted, free-standing, and suspended sculptures.
Sikkema
Jenkins & Co – Sheila Hicks. Sheila
Hick’s Overflow, 2006 Bathing tub and seagrass.
Gagosian
Gallery – West 24th Street – Lucio Fontana – Ambienti Spaziali
exhibition. Lucio Fontana’s Ambienti
Spaziali exhibition at Gagosian West 24th Street until June
30 showcases six of his groundbreaking environments, known as Ambienti
Spaziali, which have been faithfully
reconstructed, providing a completely new perspective for the rich and varied
retrospective of more than one
hundred major works that surrounds them. Curated by Germano Celant and assisted
by Gagosian director Valentina Castellani in close collaboration with the
Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, the exhibition includes many works that have rarely been seen and
reunites important series from public and private collections.
Gagosian Gallery - Lucio Fontana’s Ambienti Spaziali. Fontana’s 1949 Ambienti Spaziali a Luce Nero
(Spatial Environment in Black Light), which consists of a small black room in
which several large, fossil-like forms made from papier maché hover overhead,
their fluorescent painted surfaces picked out by black light.
photograph and copyright manfredi bellati
Mike Weiss Gallery - Jan De Vliegher Treasury exhibition. For his first
solo exhibition in the United States at the Mike Weiss Gallery, until June 9, Belgian
artist Jan De Vliegher creates a series of monumental paintings which reference
the artist obsessive hunt for otherwise overlooked porcelain plates. United in their ritualistic and repetitive compositions
the series of circular abstractions reveal De Vliegher’s fascination with the
painting experience while also speaking to broader themes of contemporary
collecting. The lush colors, dramatic
brushstrokes and overpowering scale of his work, however, starkly diverge from
the otherwise controlled subject matter.
photograph and copyright manfredi bellati
Mike Weiss Gallery - Jan De Vliegher Treasury exhibition. The title of the show Treasury, calls to mind
currency and precious items, perhaps a play on the over-abundance of
“treasured” objects housed in countless sacrosanct institutions and museums.
Mary Boone Gallery –
Francesco Clemente – Nostalgia/Utopia exhibition. For the
current exhibition, at the Mary Boone Gallery, Until June 30, Francesco Clemente continues his masterful interlacing
of disparate images, materials, and cultures that reflect many locations where
he has lived and worked. The paintings run autonomously through Colonial
Baroque, Afro-Brazilian, Indian, and urban American iconography. Deftly painted
imagined scenes and figures co-exist with real sculptural objects affixed to
the canvas surface. Each work exists outside of specific reference to place or
time.
Above. One of the new series of eighteen gouache and sanguine drawings.
These intimate works function as a source book of ideas expanded upon in the
paintings.