The two exhibitions currently on view at the Swiss Institute examine the usually hidden infrastructure of architecture, and their consideration of space makes them particularly fitting: they are the gallery’s final shows before it moves from its current building on Wooster Street to a yet-to-be determined premise.
Sam Lewitt
An Early Thanksgiving: The Wagner Gift to the Whitney
Opening in the shadow of the Paris attacks, the exhibition Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner represents — as Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in his remarks at the press preview — “a celebration of what matters in life.”
The Pursuit of Art, 2014
The exhibitions that rippled through our cultural fabric over the past year, at least those occurring in and around New York, have registered the predictable number of highs and lows, though 2014 did manage to plumb one nadir unlikely to be matched for a good long time.
Neo-Conceptual Process-Revival: Sam Lewitt’s ‘Casual Encounters’
Sam Lewitt is a young artist in a hurry. He was barely out of his twenties when he scored the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and right now he is filling both outlets of the Miguel Abreu Gallery — the modest space on Orchard Street and the immodest one on Eldridge.
Down and Out at 75th and Madison
I left the 2012 Whitney Biennial with a feeling of leadenness that no amount of free coffee (available at Monday’s press preview, and many thanks for that) or Werner Herzog’s video ode to beauty (“Hearsay of the Soul,” 2012) could alleviate.