LONDON — Back in the 1970s, England, the home of such pioneering researchers in the outsider art field as Roger Cardinal and the late Victor Musgrave, played a significant role in calling attention to a subfield which, at that time, was still emerging within the art world’s international terrain.
David Zwirner Gallery
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James Bishop’s Incommodious Beauty
I have been waiting to see a large selection of James Bishop’s paintings since the mid-1970s, ever since reading John Ashbery’s appraisal in a secondhand copy of Art News Annual 1966.
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Paintings on Paper, Abstract and Effervescent
For his solo show at Pace Gallery in 2010, Thomas Nozkowski made the decision to hang his work in pairs, with an oil painting on canvas board or panel alongside a related work on paper, setting up a contrast between density and light, slow and fast, rumination and riff. This comparison came to mind repeatedly while wandering through Paintings on Paper, the effervescent summer exhibition at David Zwirner.
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Doug Wheeler Builds a Horizon of Light
Coming from the deserts of New Mexico, where he lives in Sante Fe, Doug Wheeler’s visits to New York, seldom and auspicious, are greeted with the sort of awe usually reserved for mystics.
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Lights On: Doug Wheeler’s Luminous Landscape
The dream of a completely immersive visual experience haunts modern art. The most famous example in painting, Monet’s Waterlilies installation, dedicated in Paris’s Orangerie in 1927, has behind it a rich history of popular entertainment: the panorama, invented in the late eighteenth century and a mass entertainment medium in nineteenth-century Paris; similar productions elsewhere include the immense Civil War cycloramas produced in the U.S. before 1900.
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The Yayoi Kusama Experience at David Zwirner in Emoji
Some things are simply better said in emoji …
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How to Look at Ad Reinhardt’s Cartoons
At David Zwirner gallery right now, you can see an entire room of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. It’s the first chance to do so in New York since 1991. But you can also see work for which the artist is lesser known — in particular, his cartoons.
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One Gallery, Two Very Different Artists
David Zwirner is currently showing solo exhibitions of Raymond Pettibon and Philip-Lorca diCorcia in his West 19th Street galleries. On the surface, Pettibon and diCorcia do not have much in common: the former creates punk noir drawings; the latter makes engaging photographs that dance between fact and fiction. They’re the Felix and Oscar of the art world. Here, Pettibon swings and misses; DiCorcia, by contrast, hits a home run.
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Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was part of the series, Banality, which became a definitive step toward garnering the kind of attention Koons has always craved.
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112 Greene Street: The Soho that Used to Be
“It is rather inspiring,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times, “that in an hour of political crisis this art (despite its makers’ eschewal of revolutionary postures) has arisen to make possible a project like 112 Greene Street.” The year is 1970. The place is Soho, until recently known as the South Houston Industrial District. Here an unemployed artist can buy a six-story cast-iron ex-rag-picking warehouse, and huge chunks of sheet-zinc cornice can lie abandoned on the sidewalk at a demolition site until another artist bribes the garbage men to drive them to his studio.
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A Painterly Odd Couple
Michaël Borremans’s The Devil’s Dress, and Neo Rauch’s Heilstätten grapple with the human figure and landscapes in contemporary painting. Both artists provide inscrutable visions of humanity, but differ in approach and aesthetic. Where Borremans seems to use a scalpel to paint, Rauch uses a shovel. Borreman is Felix to Rauch’s Oscar.
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Two Artists, One Winner: Lisa Yuskavage and Nicola Tyson
Lisa Yuskavage and Nicola Tyson have solo shows three blocks from another in Manhattan’s Chelsea art-borhood. Both focus on the appearance of the figure and how it responds to or appears in certain situations, both real and imagined. The results could not be more different.