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A good day in Chelsea
November 6, 2006 · 3 Comments
We said it before and we’ll say it again, we had a good trip to Chelsea Friday and saw a lot of great stuff. Much of it is in its last week, so run if you want to catch it.
These guys are fantastic.
Robert Colescott at Kravets-Wehby
We loved Robert Colescott At Kravets-Wehby for his raunchy straight-ahead sex, lies and Minnie Mouse imagery. Great painter, great compositions. He takes Jim Crow and makes it his own. We are reminded of energy and transgressiveness of Jorg Immendorff and his Cafe Deutchland paintings.
Nick Cave at Jack Shainman
Nick Cave‘s fashion runway of beaded and boa-ed manikins at Jack Shainman left us breathless with their energy and style. We also love his embrace of all the bumps and knots of the body and wish that Lisa Yuskavage would get over it already and come see this show.
Peter Saul, Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006. 78×90″ acrylic on canvas. Leo Koenig Gallery
Peter Saul‘s grotesque visions at Leo Koenig mix politics and the personal with fabulous acidic colors, great dry-brush technique. Unafraid to be funny.
These women are fantastic
Jennifer Steinkamp, Formation, 2006. at Lehmann Maupin
Jennifer Steinkamp‘s sublime waterfall of fabric at Lehmann Maupin reminded us of how ephemeral every day experience is. It saved us a trip to Niagara Falls. The story behind her other big piece, a personal story about the shipwreck death of a family member was riveting. The piece was less satisfying.
Melanie Baker, untitled (Indicted), 2006, 91 x 52″, charcoal and pastel on paper
The reason we liked Melanie Baker‘s piece in the group show at Roebling Hall was the surprise of scale, focus and materials. The work — whose meaning puzzles us — puts your eye at crotch level. And the suit is elegant, the image is pasted to the wall and even though it was nothing at all like Steinkamp’s work it had some of the same cloth fluidity thing going on. Like Steinkamp’s work though, it is iconic and ephemeral.
We see reductive abstraction and we like it
Stanley Whitney, Sugar Hill, 2006, oil on linen, 72 x 72″ at Esso
All semester long up at Tyler where we’re co-teaching a class with Frank Bramblett we’ve been hearing the name Stanley Whitney in the same breath as Hans Hoffman. Whitney teaches at Tyler although he’s on sabbatical. We saw his show at Esso and now we want to meet him. We loved the sag in this painting’s grid and his juicy paint and pop-eye colors. Jujubes on the canvas. If Wayne Thiebaud painted abstract he’d make bon bons like this.
Raoul De Keyser at David Zwirner
Also reductive but more of a storyteller than Stanley, Raoul De Keyser at David Zwirner makes word art without the words. His runes suggest a life full of experiences and an eye focused on the world. He’s living proof that bigger is not necessarily better and that small works can hold their own in a Chelsea cavern.
In a category all his own: the spandex king
Ernesto Neto at Tanya Bonakdar
Ernesto Netoat Tanya Bonakdar has built a playroom from a stretchy carnival tent. He’s the soft and squishy Richard Serra putting your body in a space that overwhelms. We liked his Fabric Workshop piece a few years back a lot better.
The Lord of Empathy
Nick Waplington at Roebling Hall.
More from Roebling Hall. (And see Libby’s post for more on that show.) We didn’t see a lot of photographs in Chelsea but we did see a great Nick Waplington at Roebling Hall. It’s a human tableau that we wanted to compare with great religious paintings. The figures in it could have been a set-up except they weren’t. And the parade of human need and dysfunction was heartbreaking as a result. By the way, Empathetic, a show of works on the concept of empathy, is up at Temple Gallery.
No surprise from Lisa Yuskavage and a small surprise from Ann Craven
Lisa Yuskavage, detail, Zwirner and Wirth
Speaking of empathy, it was a little hard to find in Lisa Yuskavage‘s new paintings at Zwirner and Worth. Yuskavage is still painting the same vacant women with grotesque bodies and faces she painted back at the ICA in 2000. The paint on the still life elements was luscious but not so on the faces. We also question the vast vacant areas — as much as a third of the painting at times — that show no attention to paint at all. It’s disappointing that she hasn’t moved on. There’s a joyless productivity and a superficiality –composition, subject matter, affect — that makes for less than satisfying paintings.
The highlight of the Lisa Yuskavage show was the Robert Storr sighting. Storr gave Roberta a smile in response to her smile of recognition. We ended up brooding as much about what Storr was doing there (he was there to take a meeting) as we did about the paintings.
Ann Craven in the show, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, curated by Shinique Smith, at The Proposition
On the other hand, we want to say this work by Ann Craven in an uneven show at The Proposition seemed less pat than the wallpaper decorations she previously put forth. We wondered about the bird hiding her face. Was she rejecting us? Or was she just staring off into space momentarily distracted from the mirror. Either way the painting gave us something to think about other than decoration and fashion. And speaking of fashion, we saw some small Fred Tomaselli works at James Cohan that involved fashion magazine cutouts. They were a low point in an otherwise good — up to his usual tricks — Tomaselli show.
Locals we love
Randall Sellers at Jonathan Levine
Randall Sellers was the star at Jonathan Levine gallery. Once again he drew to the edge of the paper on one beautiful work. Sellers seems to be pushing it, breaking new ground with surreal content. Computers are new, there’s a great one with a skull instead of the Apple logo. He is mining history and bringing it into the contemporary. Deliberate disjunctures of scale seem new, too. All very exciting. And three are sold!!
Other Philadelphia connections include two artists in Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day at the Proposition: Jina Valentine and Sabeen Raja with works in keeping with what we’ve seen before. We also bumped into Dan Byers, previously of the Fab Workshop who is at Bard in the Curatorial Studies Program. He said he was enjoying himself but he misses Philadelphia and may be back.
Chance encounter with Pumpkin and his keeper.
Charles Ray at Matthew Marks
We were expecting a whole show by Charles Ray at Matthew Marks but really it was what it said it was a pumpkin poster and a guy tending the window.
Some disappointments
We were disappointed in Rosemary Fiore‘s show at Winkelman/Plus Ultra and in Christian Marclay‘s prints at Paula Cooper, which, because we were expecting a video was a disappointment. Fiore had some large paintings that just didn’t interest us except for some small unexpected passages here and there. Her fireworks drawings were too much process and not enough there there. The highlight at Marclay’s show was a collection of his photos of signs commanding silence. The big news here is that we overheard the gallery attendant tell someone that all the works were sold. Can this be right?
Tags: ann craven, charles ray, ernesto neto, jennifer steinkamp, lisa yuskavage, melanie baker, nick cave, nick waplington, peter saul, randall sellers, raoul de keyser, robert colescott, stanley whitney
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I liked Fiore’s fireworks drawings and Yuskavage can paint so well, I felt pregnant. Most importantly, where did you eat?
Pepe Giallo on 10th Ave. Good food, ok price, took forever to get in and out. ….as for feeling pregnant, you have too much empathy!
Well, Mark, that’s why there’s vanilla and chocolate! Yum or phooey, it’s all kind of interesting.