A towering nude man greets every visitor to Sperone Westwater gallery on the Lower East Side. This ten foot tall figure, also known as “Jim Revisited”, made in 2011, looks so realistic that it stops nearly everyone dead in their tracks upon entering the gallery. The people-watching is great as viewers trade surprised glances and funny comments, all while staring wide open with disbelieving eyes. This is the type of art that boggles the mind; it provokes the question of how the hell the artist pulled it off. Rattling off the list of banal materials — silicone, pigment, hair, aluminum and fabric — does little to capture the convincing illusion that artist Evan Penny conjures, but it does testify to his deft artistic mind that achieves much more than most with these materials.
Art
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Should We Kill the Traditional Art Review? [UPDATED w tweets]
A few weeks ago, I ran into artist William Powhida who started to tease me that I don’t really write many art reviews anymore. I got a little defensive but after thinking about it, I realized he was right. The reason? I have lost faith in the art review as the best way to communicate ideas in and about art.
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Sculpture Today: A Discussion with Joy Curtis & Rachel Beach
On Wednesday, I wrote about two painting shows (Kristine Moran & Gianna Commito) that I felt shared an aesthetic connection. Today, I wanted to draw your attention to two sculpture shows on Ludlow Street by two artists who I’ve been following for years, Joy Curtis and Rachel Beach. Both artists make sculpture and their shows made me wonder what it must be like to be a sculptor today. I decided to interview them together via email in order to understand their work through their words. The following conversation took place this week.
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The Fragile and Dreamy World of Raphaela Riepl
Walking past Open Space Gallery’s temporary space on Franklin Street I saw several anthropomorphic boxes lined against the walls, their hyper-simplicity too charming to dismiss. I walked inside where, as fortune would have it, artist Raphaela Riepl was manning the show, titled Adorable Steamed Sea Urchin. We spent some time discussing her work and creative process, and then I explored the exhibition’s crew of energetic sculptures. These coy creatures are the results of spontaneous outbursts of creative energy, a haphazard layering of whatever materials are available, laying strewn about her studio.
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Japan Society’s Goodbye to Hello Kitty
Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Japanese Art at Japan Society presents an alternative view of Japanese contemporary art, one separate from that obsession we seem to have with “kawaii” (cute) Japanese art, embodied by the pop culture icon of Hello Kitty, and exemplified in the Superflat work of Takashi Murakami. The artists on display here engage with a different side of Japanese culture, a side more invested in history, medium and prolonged looking. The exhibition is also a rousing, energetic call to action– rethink Japanese contemporary art!
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Jagged Strips of Paint, Two LES Shows
Serendipity often plays a role in gallery going. Occasionally you come across two shows at unrelated galleries that suggest a connection that couldn’t possibly have been planned. You could argue such occurences have the makings of a zeitgeist, but sometimes they are simply coincidences that reveal common interests or goals among a few artists who make work in different places. Kristine Moran’s Protean Slip at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery and Gianna Commito’s self-titled show at the Rachel Uffner Gallery were the source of my latest visual connection making, and both painting shows at Orchard Street galleries are some of the best at the moment.
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Critics Discuss 6 Important Artists at Triangle Benefit, Mon March 21
On Monday, March 21, Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian will join renowned critic and curator Karen Wilkin for a lively conversation about the work of six important artists — Susanna Heller, Ted Partin, William Powhida, Sean Scully, Robert Taplin and Summer Wheat.
The event is a fundraiser for the Triangle Arts Association, which is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support emerging and mid-career international and national visual artists, encouraging dialogue and experimentation through workshops, residencies and exhibition opportunities.
You can RSVP on Facebook and BUY TICKETS HERE.
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Kinetic Street Art Poetry by NohJColey
I encountered a street work by artist NohJColey in Williamsburg last week. Like all strong street art pieces, it forced me to stop and look closely. The attention to detail, its use of diverse textures and materials and its complex method of storytelling, which is more impressionistic than narrative, made me immediately respond to it, similar to poetry. I stopped to visually measure every inch of the object, a figure with puppet-like arms placed low to the ground in a neglected corner of the city frequented by street artists.
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Paris Gets the General Idea
On February 11, the first major retrospective of the work of the world-renowned Canadian art collective General Idea opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris with 300 objects, and I took the opportunity to interview AA Bronson about General Idea and his thoughts on the group.
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Video Art as a Multivalent Medium
Video art is still in the process of establishing itself. Despite the fact that art has been created through the medium over the course of the past century, it’s still hard to pin down what forms video art can take, and what vocabulary we use to talk about it. At New York University’s 80WSE gallery, a current exhibition entitled By Chance, a Video Show, marshals together video art in its multivalent states, from video-as-installation to video-as-flat surface to video-as-collage. Artists including Alejandro Cesarco, Jason Varone and Nayda Collazo-Llorens explore the different possibilities of video art.
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Is a Cease and Desist About Irony, Hypocrisy or Legal Strategy?
Jamie Alexander and Derek Song were surprised in late December of last year when they received a letter from the New York law firm of Jones Day, which represents Jeff Koons, LLC. Their San Francisco retail store and gallery, Park Life, had never attracted the attention of the art world’s big hitters before, but now, one Peter D. Vogl had sent them a cease-and-desist letter calling for the immediate cessation of their sale of balloon dog bookends. Apparently the 10.2” matte plastic pooches were threatening the Koons art empire and potentially confusing customers who are more accustomed to spending a lot more money on ten foot high hi-gloss steel versions of the same species.
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Sculpting with Ruins or Imposing Force on Matter
For her second solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Empty is Run About Freely, Bushwick-based sculptor Joy Curtis has created several large sculptures comprised of casts she made of interior moldings and architectural details of 77 Water Street, an unused downtown Manhattan bank building, which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council employed as studio space during Curtis’ residency in 2009. She has been working with the material collected during this residency almost exclusively for the past year. Speaking to the work on display, Curtis told me, “[As artists] we mine the world for materials, and then we impose a force on that matter. I am interested in showing the evidence of imposing force on matter, and showing the evidence of the passage of time.”