The massive Frieze art fair landed on Manhattan’s Randall’s Island and not everyone was happy. Pro-union protestors and members of Occupy Museums showed up to protest but they were pushed so far away that you have to wonder if anyone noticed.
Galleries
Relocating its New York edition from Armory Week to join Frieze Weekend, the 2012 Pulse Art Fair offered itself as an accessible companion to the bigger fair action on Randall’s Island, both in terms of location and the art presented.
The reemergence of Pocket Utopia — not in Bushwick but on the southernmost lip of Manhattan’s Lower East Side — in partnership with the uptown fine prints and drawings dealer C. G. Boerner, might strike some as an offbeat, even aberrant choice. But having gotten to know Austin somewhat after writing about her solo show at Storefront in 2010, it made sense to me that she wouldn’t attempt to repeat herself.
The most galvanizing room, hands down, in the current Whitney Biennial is the Forrest Bess micro-retrospective put together by sculptor Robert Gober. And on Tuesday, in what could be a trend, another museum-quality exhibition opened, organized by another sculptor — Matthew Day Jackson’s “Science on the back end” at Hauser & Wirth.
National Poetry Month reminds us that some words can boogie, and dance they do at two exhibitions on the Lower East Side. A fiery tango between word and image takes place in solo shows by both Natalie Czech and Jeff Gibson. This tango — like when a caption twists an image’s meaning, or an illustration shapes how you picture the words you’re reading — can be tense, competitive and at times even semiotically combative. But just as the tango feeds off of two partners’ intensity, this art benefits from the back and forth.
LOS ANGELES — Everyone’s done it at some point — crank up the water on the hose on a sunny day just to see that wonderful prism of light. Now, Mexican-born artist Gabriel Dawe does us one better by bringing rainbows to life, one thread at a time.
Serban Ionescu was born in Communist Romania and did not speak until he was six. That’s what it says in Dede Young’s essay for Secret History, his solo show at Bridge Gallery on the Lower East Side.
Though Micheal Wenyon and Susan Gamble’s show A Universe held up for Inspection focuses on displays of holograms and other works, the real raison d’ete of this exhibit is to reveal the frisson erupting over the last gasp of the analogue picture.
The recently deceased Thomas Kinkade may have had barely any effect on the contemporary art world (beyond a thoughtful essay or two), but the influence of the artist I’d call the original painter of light, Claude Monet, has waned little over the past century. And currently two Monet-inspired exhibitions are taking up the same subject of artist’s passion: his gardens at Giverny.
Before focusing on Kathy Bradford’s exhibition of new paintings at the Edward Thorp Gallery, I want to mention Eric Fischl’s recent paintings and the second coming of the Titanic, both oddly relevant for their irrelevance.
