Posted inArt

Spinning a Web: When Art Addresses the Infinite

Every so often the idea behind an exhibition comes across as so pertinent and expansive that it makes you wonder why it hasn’t already become part of the conversation.

This appears to be the case with Reticulate, a group show at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, which explores the concept of the network — digital, biological, social, historical — across a range of sensibilities, mostly in the form of abstract painting.

Posted inArt

Map Paintings: An Interview with Loren Munk

I’ve been following the work of Loren Munk for years and had the pleasure of seeing the work currently on display at Lesley Heller in his studio years ago before most people even knew they existed. Today, Munk has been exhibiting regularly and developing a following for his map works that document art world scenes in New York and elsewhere. There is a frenzy of color in his paintings and the choices are obviously subjective (and rife with personal politics) but they are intense explosions of information carefully organized and constructed like a spider web in paint. I spoke to Munk about his latest show, Location, Location, Location, Mapping the New York Art World, on the Lower East Side that continues until this Sunday, October 16.

Posted inOpinion

An 80s East Village Phenomenon Art History (Almost) Forgot

Mark Kostabi is a name I haven’t heard for ages. The man is synonymous with New York’s 1980s East Village scene but he’s disappeared from many recent narratives of the era. Now, our favorite guy on the bike (aka James Kalm) caught up with the artist at his current show in Soho. This short video is a taste of a longer interview James Kalm promises to post in a few days but it’ll give you a good sense of the once ubiquitous artist who art history (almost) forgot.

Posted inArt

Back to the Future, the Williamsburg that Waz

After watching Bushwick’s visual arts scene grow and usurp the energy of Williamsburg’s two decades of dominance as the epicenter of the city’s artistic edge, curator Larry Walczak decided it was time to put together an exhibition that investigates the neighborhood’s recent art heritage. The show, Williamsburg2000, opened on March 12 and includes 68 artists. Taking place at the small artist-run indy space Art101 on Grand Street, the exhibition focuses mostly on Williamsburg’s “second wave” that began in 1998 and continued until 2002, coincidentally its the same time period that Walczak ran the Eyewash gallery space with the late Annie Herron.

Posted inArt

A Populist Attack on the Art World Pulls Punches

According to Eric Doeringer, the artist-curator of I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me, the exhibition’s title—a nod to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me”—is meant to convey the “fraught relationship between emerging artists and the art-world establishment,” one marked by a simultaneous desire to criticize the art world’s excesses and to be recognized by it. Art about the institutions of art, both physical and discursive, is hardly a new phenomenon, but unlike Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, cited by Doeringer as predecessors for the work included in this exhibition, what emerges most clearly here is not “institutional critique” but a sense of anxiety or anger about the artists’ own marginalization and lack of mainstream success.

Posted inArt

Mark Lombardi’s Information Art

A solo exhibition of works by Mark Lombardi at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, feels very timely. Maybe I’m into the paranoia-inducing conspiracy charts because New York’s just-ended art fair week, our own glimpse into the vastness of the international art world, reminded me that there are whole webs of infinite complex connections to the worlds and communities we inhabit. Lombardi’s intricate, highly-researched drawings are clear presentations of information that forces us to rethink how we see ourselves in relation to our political atmosphere.