Posted inArt

The Pursuit of Art, 2013

Memories fade. That’s the one good reason, as far as I can see, to compile an end-of-year list. It’s sometimes startling to retrace what attracted my attention over the course of a year; it is also instructive to determine where such a miscellany of shows fits in with ongoing areas of interest, and which ones, in hindsight, merited the time it took to review them.

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Speaking in Tongues: Art in Moods, Tenses, and Translations

It’s safe to say that Twilit Ensembles, Paul D’Agostino’s solo show at Pocket Utopia, is one of the more disorienting, even vertiginous exhibitions around. There are pairs of process-driven, not-quite-identical abstract paintings; mixed-media collages that evoke the Art informel and Affichiste strains of postwar European art; and groupings of resin sculptures and high-contrast charcoal drawings whose gargoyle-like characters and hallucinatory narratives are derived from the paint stains on D’Agostino’s studio floor.

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A Handstand in Bushwick

Handstand. That is just another of the items on the long list of the things Paul D’Agostino excels at doing. As a Bushwick resident since 2007, D’Agostino has actively worked to shape the art scene in the neighborhood through his countless activities. Bushwick-based nonprofit Norte Maar is currently presenting a solo show of Paul D’Agostino’s work, titled Appearance Adrift in the Garden.

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45 Artists are So Happy Together

Artist Julie Torres hosted two months of collaborative drawing nights at Hyperallergic HQ in February and March of this year. The project generated 100 drawings that are currently on display at Norte Maar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The resulting show, titled So Happy Together: Forty-five Artists and Their One Hundred Collaborative Drawings, opened last night during the first night of the 2011 Bushwick Open Studios.