I first encountered Peter Acheson’s table sculpture several years ago. A strange thing that continues to change through the years, the weather and the seasons.
Single Point Perspective
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Single Point Perspective: Regina Bogat’s Earthly Divination
Regina Bogat: Works 1967-1977 at Zürcher Gallery marks another milestone in the rediscovery of an artist who has long been hidden in plain sight. Since her start in the 1950s, in a milieu that included abstract artists like Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and her late husband, Al Jensen, Bogat has always played the subversive.
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Single Point Perspective: An Arcadian Moment in the Heart of New York’s Lower East Side
For anyone interested in poetry (not the same as verse); underknown art and artists; the artists and poets of the New York School after the death of Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara; collaboration; collage; a do-it-yourself spirit; the Lower East Side (particularly from the late 1960s until the late ‘80s, decades before it was gentrified); and the persistence of bohemian life, despite all the efforts to stamp it out, the exhibition A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman, thoughtfully curated by Bill Berkson and Ron Padgett at Poets House, is a must-see.
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Single Point Perspective: Dead Man Rising
Viewing the WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY show currently at the Brooklyn Museum offers a test of emotional restraint as well as the inclination to aestheticize. If the number of images is daunting, the sum of human pain on display registers as a body blow.
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Single Point Perspective: Paweł Althamer’s Grass-Fed Surrealism
Inside the second floor galleries housing the contemporary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture called “Bruno” (1998–2012) stands in quiet command of the room. Made primarily of grass and cow intestines, its materials transform the human body into a mediation on mortality via the digestive tract.
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Single Point Perspective: “The Most Beautiful Drawing in the World”
The centerpiece of the stunning new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, Leonardo da Vinci: Treasures from the Biblioteca Reale, Turin, is “Head of a Young Woman,” which Bernard Berenson, the renowned authority on Italian Renaissance art, called “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship.”
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Single Point Perspective: Munk and Me
In Loren Munk’s painting “An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg, 1981-2008” (2008-2011), I recognized a slice of my own history in a place I had known well. After a lifetime of looking at paintings, this experience was oddly new to me.
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Single Point Perspective: Entropy Now
Last week, as I was clicking through the various gallery listings and websites for something to catch my eye, I chanced upon a summer group exhibition at Lehmann Maupin’s Chrystie Street venue. One of the installation shots showed a flat, white marble relief sculpture by Maya Lin; I made a mental note of it and kept going.
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Single Point Perspective: Dürer’s Doomed Knight
Last week I wrote about several drawings and watercolors from the spectacular exhibition of works on paper by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) at the National Gallery of Art, leaving aside the show’s phenomenal selection of prints. I would like to return, however, to one engraving in particular.
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Single Point Perspective: Catherine Murphy’s Perfect Storm
Stylistically innovative painters outnumber those who have reassessed the accepted conventions of painting. For the most part, artists engaged with issues of style accept certain conventions, particularly regarding spatiality, while those who reevaluate painting find ways to undo assumptions and received tropes. Catherine Murphy belongs in the latter group. Her painting, “Snowflakes (for Joyce Robins)” (2011) is square, a format we associate with high modernist abstraction and artists such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.
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Single Point Perspective: Luigi Ghirri’s Sunsets Stripped
You walk to the end of the pier, drive to the canyon’s edge, or stroll down to the beach. Shading your eyes, you peer out across the water or valley to watch the bright disc slide like a gold coin into the horizon’s slot. Appreciative murmurs are heard as the sky darkens. Another end of day.
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Single Point Perspective: Psychodrama, Duplicity and Other Forms of Beauty
If you’re in the mood for a little hardcore strangeness, head over to the Morgan Library & Museum and check out Rosso Fiorentino’s “Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist,” an unfinished oil on panel currently on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
