Well, painting isn't dead again, and in particular there is some great abstract and minimalist work on view right now. In his most recent survey of Chelsea, Jerry Saltz commented, and I'm paraphrasing, that there was an awful lot of mediocrity in the galleries, especially for this early in the season. True enough. There is an unpleasant trend towards gothic-y horror stuff, creepy but not terribly disturbing, sort of like a Nine Inch Nails video. Lot's of bad illustration as well. Hopefully that will disperse after Halloween. I found that a few more established and mature artists, some well-known and others less so are getting some well-deserved exposure. We say goodbye to Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls (my favorite was the one that with its polluted mist killed all the trees in the river cafe), and to the hanging garden's at PS.1, which I ate part of a week ago at the museum's autumn harvest. You might call it an infusion of hippiness, but there seems to be a willingness to accept the miraculous and the natural back into art. Sticking to the Halloween theme though, I feel, like Linus in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," that I am searching for the more sincere pumpkin patches, amongst a lot of rather dubious ones.
Joanna Pousette-Dart
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Moti Hasson
Until 1 November
www.motihassan.com
Pousette-Dart's shaped canvases are wonderful from a palette point-of-view. Layered over these decisive color compositions are brushstrokes reminiscent of primal designs and markings - think Olmec or Tlingit. The works on paper are particularly powerful in their monochromatic simplicity.
Lisa Anne Auerbach
Lisa Anne Auerbach at Printed Matter
Until 1 November
http://printedmatter.org
Tucked in the back of this magnificent art bookshop are a couple of glass cases that sort of prove that you don't necessarily have to bring all your work to the gallery on ten flatbed trucks in order to have an impressive show. In the cases one finds a selection of 'zines that Auerbach has created over the years, and her knitted posters and sweaters hang on the walls. This little exhibit has an enjoyable archival quality that seems more at home at the Morgan Library in the strange intensity and variety of visual information it conveys.
Cecily Brown , installation view
Cecily Brown at Gagosian (555 W 24th st)
Until 25 October
www.gagosian.com
There seems to be so little pretense in Cecily Brown's new series of paintings, and it is very refreshing to look at the almost joyful painterly openness with which she creates what appears to me to be (and perhaps I'm just totally failing my Rorshact test here) a scene of cunnilingus in the outdoors, and abstractions based thereon. The profound verdant color and the levels of sheen, shadow, and reflection are dazzling, and the eroticism, rather than the distractive tool it usually is, flows naturally out of the brushstrokes.
Installation view at Andreas Grimm
Disentangle at Andreas Grimm
Until 30 October
www.andreasgrimmgallery.com
I like shows that don't give you the milk for free without forcing you to buy the cow, so to speak. 'Disentangle' is an exhibit of work about hair, but the work isn't only about hair, and it's mostly very good. What grabbed me was the Vito Acconci, "Hair/Mouth" video piece in which Acconci eats a woman's hair until choking. Nayland Blake and A A Bronson's video of two bearded fellows covered in chocolate and whipped cream making out is weirdly mesmerizing. The exhibit also includes work by Stefan Wissel, Cornelius Voelker, Seekung Kim, Slawomir Elsner, Chris Doyle, Damien Cardio and Andreas Chwatal.
Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Peyton at The New Museum
Until 11 January
http://www.newmuseum.org
I remember seeing Liz Peyton's work for the first time in a very small group show with John Currin at the Museum of Modern Art, oh it must have been ten or twelve years ago. Now they're both very famous. Her portraits are luminous and jewel-like. Though in a retrospective show like this, the sheer volume of heroine-chic can be daunting, Peyton's gorgeous color and surfaces are like a perfect reduction of all that is seductive and beautiful about the imagined life of rock stars and other assorted celebrities.
John McCracken, installation view
John McCracken at David Zwirner
Until 18 October
www.davidzwirner.com
Fulfilling Frank Stella's saying about the paint looking as good on the canvas as it does in the can, John McCracken's glossy verticals have that pure delicious quality of a just unwrapped Good Humor ice cream bar. Stand back from the individual objects, and from the center of the gallery, surrounded by the soft modulations of color, you feel like you might be in the zen living room of superman, on krypton.
Tadasky Kuwayama
Tadasky Kuwayama at Sideshow Gallery
Until 19 October
http://www.sideshowgallery.com
There's that scene in Art School Confidential where John Malkovich says "Do you know how long it took me to get to these triangles?" Luckily Kuwayama is a bright exception to the pitfalls of focussing on just one shape/symbol. He is one of the founders of Op art and this retrospective of his work at Williamsburg's Sideshow Gallery highlights the radiant quality that he achieves wih a very simple idea.
Louise Bourgeois, installation view
Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read
Until 1 November
www.cheimread.com
Bourgeois doesn't pull any punches, and her series of sculptures which are cast in bronze from various articles of clothing are intimidating and roughly beautiful, and look exactly like what they're supposed to be - breasts and genitals. She appropriates the male-dominated genre of bronze sculpture and recasts it into monumental feminist statements. Her series of breast gouaches are fantastic as well, and everything is from 2007; 97 years old and still kicking some ass.
Chris Johanson
Chris Johanson: Totalities at Deitch Projects
Until 18 October
www.deitch.com
Chris Johanson is very very cool, I have to gush a bit. His work leaves you with the liberated and enlightened feeling of having just consumed an eigth of an ounce of mushrooms, with the knowledge that you also survived the really bad nauseating part. The blunt statements scrawled across his constructions about being overwhelmed by life's twists and turns are deeply affecting and come across as remarkably sincere. He has created a funhouse exhibition space that makes his show a singular experience as well.
Installation view at Andrea Rosen
Rita Ackerman, Sarah Braman and Joel Shapiro at Andrea Rosen
Until 18 October
www.andrearosengallery.com
Rita Ackerman's paintings/multi-media assemblages have an eerie sweetness to them. Her doleful disembodied portraits are just intriguing enough to be edgy rather than kitsch, but with the comforting reassurance of kitsch cast in a different and beguiling light. The back room has a sculptural face-off between the classical minimalism of Joel Shapiro (with some of his recent forays into colored sculpture) and the rough-around-the-edges work of Sarah Braman.
Will Corwin is an artist and curator from New York City, recently based in Beijing doing a residency with the Red Gate Gallery. He has curated visual art exhibitions for the AugustArt art festival in New York and the Flushing Town Hall in Queens, a Smithsonian Affiliate. He has shown at the LaMama Gallery in NYC, Gallery Aferro in Newark, and has done site-specific projects with chashama and the Theater for the New City in New York, The Taipei Artists Village, Taipei, and Red Gate Gallery and the Pickled Art Center in Beijing. He is also involved with Smartspace NYC. He currently teaches with the Meet the Met program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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