Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at the Whitney through January 24, 2010, doesn’t feel like a museum exhibition. It feels more like several gallery shows in one place at the same time—in a good way. Many solo museum shows can be overwhelming, or hinge around some giant work/s that skew the scale of the rest of the exhibition, often diminishing the intimate stuff. But Horn’s show, on two floors, is delicate, textured, multi-layered, and politely demands that viewers pay very close attention.
That’s not to say that Horn, born in 1955, doesn’t go quietly monumental here, as she does in a set of cast glass geometric shapes whose transparency and glossiness contradict their tonnage. read more
Two of last century’s revered artists are having major shows in New York at the same moment: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at the Whitney, and Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) at the Guggenheim. The coincidence of the two exhibitions offer some interesting parallels and divergences, not to mention a look at a wealth of revolutionary artwork that altered art history’s path.
The O’Keeffe show, through January 17 (score one for O’Keeffe—her show runs four days longer), is subtitled Abstraction, and so excludes the best-known icons of her oeuvre depicting her identifiable New Mexico surrounds. It’s a revelation, like being able to have a meaningful conversation after deafening music stops. Certainly some work is familiar—imagery of crevasses, flowers, skies. But much of it is fresh, permitting an appreciation of O’Keeffe’s talents as an abstract painter. Elegant lines in spare compositions, intriguing hints of source imagery, and a gorgeous, clear palette. Dense shapes reminiscent of storms, waves, and geology mix with lighter ones of skies, clouds, plants. read more
The Guggenheim’s Works & Process series has evolved into a commissioning entity producing some fascinating new work. Until recent years, it was more akin to a lecture/demo format, with a casual atmosphere where the dancers wore rehearsal clothes. It often featured excerpts of works that would be seen elsewhere, on a larger stage; some events still follow this format. But as the fall season’s inaugural show featuring choreography by Peter Quanz and Larry Keigwin demonstrated, it is capable of producing some inspired new choreographic work.
The program last weekend, Steve Reich Interpreted, featured dances set to the same Reich composition, Double Sextet (2007). Peter Quanz, of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, created the ballet In Tandem that seemed to stretch the physical limits of the distinctive, if oddball, theater at the Guggenheim, which is all circles, and quite small at that. read more
If Ron Arad’s name isn’t familiar, then chances are his work is, especially if you’ve ever been in stores such as Moroso or Moss in Soho. Arad specializes in seating, designing the familiar Ripple chair, shaped like an infinity sign, and the stacking Tom Vac, a sort of ribbed oval half cocoon. Arad can clearly design simple, elegant pieces with wide appeal and function. But for every VW, he has designed a Ferrari. In No Discipline, MOMA shows 140 examples of Arad’s work, including some of these Ferrari-type chaises.
The beauty (or curse) of being an industrial designer is that you can create the exhibition environment, in addition to filling it up. The main structure is called Cage sans Frontières, a freestanding unit of cubbies whose walls undulate, ribbon-like. Arad favors organic, flowing lines akin to a skate’s wing, and juxtaposes these soft contours with his materials’ strengths. Although it’s impressive by itself, it makes the exhibition feel like a bit like shopping. read more
In the summer, the art world reverts to a kind of school semester mentality. Galleries shut on Saturdays if they’re even open to the public (and even then, close altogether in August), and often mount group shows based on whimsical themes. Museums, however, are obliged to stay open and service the hordes of visitors, but even they may tend to show art of a less academic nature, such as photography, or graphic or industrial design. With featured installations by two artists, the New Museum has managed to strike a balance between preferred summer art mediums and a historically and politically relevant conscience. David Goldblatt’s photographs of apartheid/post-apartheid South Africa occupy two floors, and Emory Douglas’ graphic designs for the Black Panthers fill another. read more
It seems fitting that an exhibition of Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare’s work is being shown at the Brooklyn Museum, located in a borough where more cultures meet daily in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station than in high season in a trading port of call.
A signature of Shonibare’s work is the use of Dutch wax fabric, African-inspired, vibrantly colored and patterned yardage goods produced in Europe and sold in Africa and elsewhere. The fabric is a rich and effective symbol for the intersection of cultures, from a sociological standpoint and commerce-wise. Shonibare (who, not insignificantly, uses the honorary title MBE after his name) creates elaborate colonial costumes with the prints, boldly mixing them and sparing no detail. read more
James Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those artists whose name is fairly familiar, but whose work hovers in a mental netherworld of art history. So MoMA’s overview of this Belgian artist offers welcome insight into his weird, intriguing oeuvre that overlapped many influential movements and artists before nestling most comfortably with the expressionists of the early 20th century. The show, which runs June 28–Sept 21 and was organized by Anna Swinbourne, the museum’s assistant curator of painting and sculpture, is ordered chronologically and comprises about 120 works. Most were done in the 1880s and 90s, the decades of his richest output that saw the rapid location, refinement, and evolution of his voice.
It’s easy to play the association game while looking at his early stuff in which he honed his technique—streetscapes/Monet; still lifes/Cézanne; full, flattened figure/Manet; interiors bathed with northern European light/Vermeer; and so on. Paintings that showed he had mastered traditional painting technique featured not society types but regular folk, such as in The Oyster Eater (1882) and The Drunkards (1883).
In the mid-1880s, what would become signature motifs began creeping into his sketches and compositions. read more
There’s a lot happening on Museum Mile these days. Among many highlights, the Met just opened their new American Wing, with a cascade of period rooms and galleries of decorative and functional objects orbiting around the huge Charles Engelhard Court, an atrium showcasing sculpture and stained glass. And up the street, the Guggenheim is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an overview of work by its dad, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).
At first glance, the two seemed only tangentially related, tied by opening date and only the broadest of tags. The Met’s new American atrium holds some familiar sculpture and stained glass, but the sparse installation also served as a reminder of how Euro-centric the museum’s holdings are. The many cases of household items—pewter, porcelain, silver—are now sandwiched in a relatively glamourous mezzanine between the court and Central Park. read more
If Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) artwork were a movie, it would no doubt captivate that mythical “ideal” demographic—males 18-49. His work is scary, brutal, graphic, hallucinogenic, and muscular, like so many blockbuster films nowadays. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s partly why the Met’s retrospective of the British artist seems in tune with the moment. The exhibition, on view through August 16, was curated by Gary Tinterow of the Met, and Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens of the Tate Britain, London.
Walking through Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, it’s striking how many of Bacon’s 66 paintings on view seem very familiar already. Perhaps it has something to do with how accurately he portrayed nightmares of the subconscious, or how quickly those images immediately shot into the part of the brain that files fear. read more
This Spring, two museum shows pegged to age groups are facing off from each other across the length of Manhattan. Downtown, through July 5, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting the first in its series of “generationals”—tri-annual surveys of contemporary artists aged 33 and under—titled “Younger Than Jesus.” Uptown, through August 2, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is offering “The Pictures Generation,” a historical look at the artists—most famously Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—who re-introduced representational art to the Conceptualism-heavy New York art world of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The Met round-up takes it name from the seminal 1977 exhibition, “Pictures,” in which some of these artists made their initial splash.) It’s tempting to see the concurrence of these shows as a demographic smackdown—Baby Boomers vs. Millennials—but more relevant, perhaps, is the fact that both shows betray a similar conceit: That artistic expression is inevitably a byproduct of whatever visual technologies are shaping society at the time an artist comes of age. This isn’t a new idea, exactly: It’s easy to see how, in retrospect, Impressionism was sparked by the advent of photography in the mid-19th century. But lately, the role that the media play in shaping aesthetics has become foregrounded as a curatorial conceit. In this sense, “The Pictures Generation” and “Younger Than Jesus” seem to represent art in the ages of television and the internet, respectively. read more
subscribe to RSS feed
find SundayArts on Facebook
