Art News - Reports from New York

Reports from New York

JERRY SALTZ: MONEY, INSULARITY AND A HUGE CONTROVERSY FOR THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK

When it was announced back in October that the New Museum would showcase billionaire mega-collector Dakis Joannou's collection of contemporary art--which includes Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Terence Koh, and Urs Fischer--and that it would be curated by Koons (who has 40 works in the collection), the art world cringed at the insiderness of it all. Bloggers, particularly Modern Art Notes's Tyler Green, harped on its ethics.

WILLIAM CORWIN'S TOP 10 SHOWS IN NEW YORK

The concensus seems to be that the knock-out show of the season in New York is Paul McCarthy's colourful reworking of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (below), but also not to be missed are: Tracey Emin's solo show at Lehmann Maupin, a major survey of Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, and an exhibition of photographs by Susan Silas that trace the 225 mile-long forced march of 500 Jewish women at the end of WWII.

DOUG MCCLEMONT ON SOTHEBY'S CONTEMPORARY EVENING SALE, NEW YORK

Andy Warhol is dead. Long live Andy Warhol. The Pop master is still making headlines more than 20 years after being buried in Pittsburgh. We witnessed the TunaFish Disaster disaster the previous night at Christie's, with the early silver painting becoming a high-profile, high-priced dud. So it was particularly thrilling for fans of Warhol, as well as those who profit from the sale of his work, to see Sotheby's blowout sale of 200 One Dollar Bills (1962) for a hammer price of $39 million.

DOUG MCCLEMONT ON CHRISTIE'S POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY EVENING SALE, NEW YORK

The collective sigh of relief was almost audible last night at Christie's as its Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale came to a close. Despite the current atmosphere and fewer star lots on offer, the sale managed an 85% sell through rate, with 39 of the 46 lots on offer finding new homes. Overall the evening brought $74,151,500 in total sales, an admirable result that was within the expected range, and 21 lots brought prices in excess of one million dollars.

DOUG MCCLEMONT INTERVIEWS PAUL McCARTHY ABOUT HIS LATEST SHOW "WHITE SNOW" AT HAUSER & WIRTH, NEW YORK

Paul McCarthy (below) is not your typical Dirty Old Artist. Even while baring his own psyche and, in the process, our collective angst, McCarthy can make the transgressive seem almost sweet. In his hands, beloved fairy tales are inverted and examined for all of their base undercurrents and retold in performance, sculpture or two-dimensional works. For "White Snow," McCarthy tackles the narrative of Snow White through drawings and collages, in both the old German and Disney versions.

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT AT PRISKA C JUSCHKA, NEW YORK

Emily Noelle Lambert's new paintings and mixed media sculptures intuitively explore her personal experiences by extracting them, both consciously and subconsciously, from a visual language of impressions, recollections and desires experienced during a recent visit to Rome.

JERRY SALTZ ON URS FISCHER AT THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It's set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he's working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and closed off doors, trying to get the effects he wants in this cold, almost soulless exhibition space. So much so that the curator Massimiliano Gioni mused to one writer, "I have thought a couple of times of killing him."

BOB NICKAS ON BERND RIBBECK AT HARRIS LIEBERMANN, NEW YORK

Bernd Ribbeck's small paintings and works on paper build intricate geometric structures with nods to Modernist and ornamental design. Pairing non-traditional artistic mediums like ballpoint pen and marker with acrylic and varnish, Ribbeck introduces a bold, gestural energy to his paintings on MDF. This is the first solo show in the US for the German artist.

EMILY JACIR AT ALEXANDER AND BONIN, NEW YORK

In her exhibition at Alexander and Bonin Emily Jacir presents works from two recent projects, 'Lydda Airport' and 'stazione'. 'Lydda Airport' is a short film which takes place at the eponymous location sometime in the mid- to late 1930s. 'stazione' (below) is a public intervention, which was slated to take place at the 53rd Venice Biennale but was abruptly cancelled by Venetian municipal authorities.

DOUG MCCLEMONT ON URS FISCHER AT THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK

Urs Fischer got tongues wagging last week in New York. The 38-year-old, Swiss-born New Yorker has, with the encouragement of curator Massimiliano Gioni invaded The New Museum with his provocative and spectacular sculptural notions. Fischer, for anyone who hasn't heard, is the artist who in 2007 transformed Gavin Brown's gallery into what amounted to a giant grave by having the entire gallery floor bulldozed. Visitors were invited to descend into the institution's hole at their own risk.

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST ON THIS YEAR'S PERFORMA BIENNIAL

Well, it's back and it's big. A couple of years ago, New York's Second Biennial of the performance arts, featured a hundred artists. Performa 09, which opens on November 1 with a Futurist dinner organized by Jennifer Rubell, will feature about 170 artists over its three-week run. "We have 11 commissions. We have 40 curators, working on different parts of the show. We have many more venues. But it's not just the festival, it's what we're producing," says Performa's director RoseLee Goldberg.

RADHIKA KHIMJI AT BOSE PACIA, NEW YORK

'Density and the Shifting Plane' is London and Muscat-based, Radhika Khimji's first solo exhibition in New York. It is also the inaugural exhibition at Bose Pacia's new location in DUMBO. The exhibition is comprised of mixed-media, collage and painting on paper, plywood, plexiglass, and metal. Khimji's penchant for amorphous human figures transforms the gallery space into an active panorama of destabilized assemblages.

SIMON STARLING AT CASEY KAPLAN, NEW YORK

Simon Starling's work unfolds as a rich, web-like narrative through means of intensive research, process, performance, and production. Initially prompted by an invitation to mount a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Art Museum for 2010, Starling's show in New York consists of a large-scale mobile entitled, "Project for a Temporary Sculpture (Hiroshima)". The installation continues his research into the history of art institutions, and more specifically the work of British sculptor Henry Moore.

ROBIN RHODE AND LEIF OVE ANDSNES AT THE LINCOLN CENTER, NEW YORK

South African artist Robin Rhode and internationally acclaimed pianist Leif Ove Andsnes have created a major new project that marks a departure for each artist. Together they have created a special programme entitled Pictures Reframed, which combines music, video and still imagery, and centers around Mussorgsky's epic piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition. It will premiere at the Lincoln Center in New York in November.

DEBUT: ALEXANDRE SINGH AT HARRIS LIEBERMANN, NEW YORK

A skilled storyteller, Alexandre Singh delivers wry archaeologies of spiritual, intellectual and consumer cultures through narrative forms as eclectic as the academic lecture and Gothic horror novel. The resulting works - spanning sculpture, collage, video, installation and performance - reveal an outsize vision to match the dizzying array of anecdotes and characters that populate Singh's tales.

JANINE ARMIN ON REBECCA WARREN AT MATTHEW MARKS, NEW YORK

In her third one-person show at Matthew Marks, 2006 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rebecca Warren throws us a curve ball presenting her erotic sculptures in bronze and unfired clay alongside new and more abstract welded steel pieces. The divisive interplay of extremely sensuous clay and brittle steel succeeds in electrifying the room, where estrogen and testosterone are magnetically opposed.

JERRY SALTZ: A NEW KIND OF BOOM

The demise of the art world has been greatly exaggerated, including by me. It's as if a bunch of spotlights went out when the market crashed last October, and now, as they flicker back on, we're able to see new green shoots busting out of the establishment's cracks. The plug was pulled, but life went on--invigorating life. There might not be a new movement, per se, but there are radically adjusted mind-sets. Fear of form, color, and physicality are diminishing. Previously forbidden methodologies are reemerging.

JERRY SALTZ ON OBAMA'S WHITE HOUSE ART

This week we got our first look at the Obamas' White House art, and it contained a few surprises. The 45 works the First Family chose to display, borrowed from various government institutions, range from simmering meditations on geometry and color by the great and under-appreciated Josef Albers to depictions of Native Americans by the ever-mysterious George Catlin to a glowing abstract Zen TV screen by Mark Rothko to otherworldly still lifes by the minor modern master Giorgio Morandi.

NEW PHOTOGRAPHY AT MOMA, NEW YORK

'New Photography 2009' is a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. The six artists in the exhibition - Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek - represent diverse points of view, working methods, and pictorial modes ranging from abstract to representational.

JERRY SALTZ: SEVEN VISIONARY FEMALE ARTISTS

One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women. Given this season's abundance of female gallery shows (36 percent, up from 17 percent in 2005), I'll go with the former. Seven of the most exciting are pictured here, and one of them, Roni Horn, is deservedly having her first full-scale museum show.

ELLEN BERKOVITCH ON GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AT THE WHITNEY, NEW YORK

I can't help but find this an interesting coincidence. September 18, the same day that Huffington Post led its living page with a story about the declining happiness of women (Part 1 of more parts to come, according to Arianna), the capital A art story that has again put starry skied west Texas and New Mexico into the national beam hinges on the Whitney's opening of Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum in New York. Running from now into January the show includes 130 works, most by the artist, along with some of the vaunted erotic photographs of O'Keeffe by her lover, Alfred Stieglitz.

JERRY SALTZ ON GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AT THE WHITNEY, NEW YORK

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. Twenty-three years later, many continue to dismiss her as a prissy painter of pretty pictures--or, I should say, pretty genitalia. Even when hailed for being "the most famous and highly paid woman artist in America," she gets saddled with a qualifier.

DOUG MCCLEMONT ON THE NEW YORK AUCTIONS

Christie's and Sotheby's kicked off the season with smaller Contemporary Sales this week. Neither auction was what one would call a bell-ringer, but both sales saw admirable results and few disasters. Many in attendance at Christie's were there to witness the sale of the cover lot, an Andy Warhol flower painting created in 1964. An almost comical exodus occurred just after the hammer came down and a third of the people briskly left the room - so many, in fact, that the auctioneer could be heard to say, "Don't all go please!"

JANINE ANTONI AT LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK

'Up Against' is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni that continues the artist's exploration of the body as measure. Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist's own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy. In Antoni's words, "For me, the body becomes a funnel through which the world has been poured."

JUSTINE KURLAND AT MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NEW YORK

This October Mitchell-Innes & Nash will present Justine Kurland: This Train is Bound for Glory. In this series, photographed over two years of travel, Kurland focuses on the distinct, nomadic subculture of the hobo. Her images of trains, train-hoppers, and the American West allude to a hobo mythology developed in folk songs and literature. Kurland's method combines a documentary process with romantic idealism, giving her images a naturalism inflected by utopian fantasy.

RON ARAD AT MOMA, NEW YORK

Among the most influential designers of our time, Ron Arad stands out for his daredevil curiosity about technology and materials and for the versatile nature of his work. Trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and at London's Architectural Association, Arad has produced an outstanding array of innovative objects over the past 25 years, many of which are on view in this exhibition, the first major retrospective for Arad in the US.

WILL CORWIN'S TOP 10 SHOWS IN NEW YORK

The rainy grayness of Thursday September 10th didn't stop droves of art-worshippers from crowding the streets of Chelsea to check out the offerings of the first night of opening of the fall. There was a morbid curiousity here as well - what sort of rabbit were the dealers and curators (and artists) going to pull out of their hats - would there even be any rabbits, as there are a lot less hats around these days.

CARTER AT SALON 94 FREEMANS, NEW YORK

Salon 94 is showing new work by Carter including new large-scale paintings continuing the artist's exploration of film sets, interiors, and display. In his largest paintings to date, Carter has created complex and ornate surfaces comprised of digitally altered and collaged photographs, Roy Lichtenstein-influenced collaged brushstrokes, lyrical passages of ink drawing, collaged paper forms, and acrylic paint.

JERRY SALTZ CHALLENGES GLENN BECK TO CURATE EXHIBITION

Last week, Fox News' harebrained commentator Glenn Beck took up the role of extreme right-wing art critic. He did a batty eight-minute paranoid rant tying together Obama, communism, NBC, the Soviet Union, Mussolini, Standard Oil, syphilis, fascism, the U.N., architecture, and public art in New York. New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz challenges him to put his taste where his mouth is.

ROBERT KINMONT AT ALEXANDER AND BONIN, NEW YORK

From his early days in the high desert near the small town of Bishop in southern California to his present location in Sonoma in northern California, Robert Kinmont has been inspired in his work by the surrounding landscapes and ecosystems. Utilizing an amateur and handmade approach to both photography and sculpture, Kinmont illustrates the human scale and its relationship to one's surroundings.

ALIX SMITH AT MORGAN LEHMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Acutely aware of being different in a world of New York society, Alix Smith struggled for years with her identity as a lesbian and an artist. For that reason, a common thread in much of Smith's work has been the theme of identity: her subjects' perceived and expected identity versus their true selves. For the project Constructed Identities, Smith asked friends from privileged backgrounds to dress as if they were going to work or dinner. The result was a series of portraits revealing what The New York Times called, "a triumph of custom over self expression."

JOAO RIBAS ON LISA OPPENHEIM AT HARRIS LIEBERMAN, NEW YORK

Working predominantly in photography and film, Lisa Oppenheim investigates the ways pictures are archived, historicized, and remembered. Through the appropriation and systematic processing of culturally resonant images, she suggests alternative readings of visual culture from the very margins of legibility.

JERRY SALTZ'S WANT-TO-SEES

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back. Even the stately Met has cut staff; no one knows if the Whitney is going ahead with its new downtown building; it's anyone's guess when Dia will finally open a permanent space in the city. Yet the fall season of shows in New York's galleries, museums, and alternative spaces should quell some of the skittishness and titillate our senses.

DASHA SHISHKIN AT ZACH FEUER, NEW YORK

Dasha Shishkin's economy of line, coupled with her use of bright blocks of colour, create intricate compositions that vary from complex scenes of human interaction to patterning and design void of human figures. This is the first solo show at Zach Feuer for the Russian-born artist.

JERRY SALTZ ON DUKE RILEY'S LIVE ROMAN NAVAL BATTLE IN QUEENS, NY

There were tossed tomatoes aplenty, although the one that smashed me in the shoulder within minutes of the event's commencement I never saw coming. As I wiped off the runny residue, togas and robes fluttered, dancers dressed as Roman vixens writhed on floating platforms, Black Sabbath's "War Pig" blasted over loudspeakers, passenger jets roared overhead, and spectators jeered and cheered as leaky boats made of what looked like reeds and junk foundered in shallow water, rammed one another, and fired watermelon cannonballs in every direction.

PAULINA OLOWSKA IN NEW YORK AND LONDON

Catch up with artist Paulina Olowska's recent work this September. 5 of her large-scale collages will be included in a show at Metro Pictures in New York, and she will be curating an exhibition at London's Camden Arts Centre.

THE THIRD ICP TRIENNIAL, NEW YORK

The Triennial is ICP's signature exhibition: a global survey of the most exciting and challenging new work in photography and video. The only recurring U.S. exhibition specializing in international contemporary photography and video, the Third Triennial will mark the closing cycle of ICP's 2009 Year of Fashion, a series of projects that critically examine fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena.

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN AND FRIENDS CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF DASH SNOW

The artist Dash Snow's death at age 27 from a drug overdose has sparked a firestorm of schadenfreude, snide criticism and bile from bloggers and genuine uncompromised grief from the people who knew him. Here, some of Snow's friends have assembled material in the hope that describing their own feelings and pain over the loss of a warm, bright and beautiful young artist, father and inspiring figure will serve as a counterpoint to comments made by people who never knew Snow and tragically never will.

LAST CHANCE: KRISTINE MORAN AT NICELLE BEAUCHENE, NEW YORK

For this exhibition, Kristine Moran expands her dialogue between abstraction and representation through ebullient depictions of carnivals, weddings, fairs and other fantasy-laden venues.

WILL CORWIN'S TOP 10 SUMMER SHOWS IN NEW YORK

Summer gives galleries the chance to show some off the wall work that might not have a broad appeal, but just might take off. There are a whole lot of historic shows on display - mini-retrospectives and the life's work of some academic who probably isn't a hit at dinner parties. I had never heard of the Tbilisi Avant-Garde, but there it is at Casey Kaplan. Also, start listening to Art International Radio, Alanna Heiss's new station on the internet that streams music and conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.

REMEMBERING DASH SNOW BY RYAN MCGINLEY

The artist Ryan McGinley pays homage to his friend Dash Snow who died this week aged 27: 'He was one of my first muses. He embodied everything that I wanted to photograph and everything that I wanted to be. Irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich. One of my favorite things about Dash was always his unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air without being aware of it. I would just smile and watch the smoke twirl into the letters S A C E.

DASH SNOW 1981 - 2009

The young American artist Dash Snow has died in New York at the age of 27. His death was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil, who said he had died of a drug overdose. A statement by Peres Projects said: "Dash was the gentlest of souls and one of the most sensitive artists of his time. He found beauty where most would not know to look. We will treasure his life always."

SCOTT REEDER AT DANIEL REICH, NEW YORK

Scott Reeder's virtuoso mixture of functional humor, painterly skeins and readily encyclopedic vocabulary gleans from art history to articulate something resolute and wonderfully "out-of-style" in this exhibition. While his work still expresses a deep social ambivalence completely at home in our recessionary time, 'Cubist Cokehead' is so stuffed with immediate painterly pleasures, mad-passages, tropical insouciance and economy of gesture, that it is an indulgent pleasure to behold.

JERRY SALTZ ON JAMES ENSOR AT MOMA, NEW YORK

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter's decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called "the Twenty," living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat's epic, world-changing 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte'.

RICHARD WOODS, CITY HALL PARK, NEW YORK

This summer, the gateway to City Hall has been whimsically transformed by British artist Richard Woods. Cladding the property's two security booths with a printed facade of cartoon-like red bricks, Woods draws on his native vernacular which identifies this design as an inexpensive structural style. The visually dynamic work dramatically juxtaposes the historic architecture of City Hall, an early expression of the City's cosmopolitanism, with ordinary building materials.

JERRY SALTZ ON NO SOUL FOR SALE, NEW YORK

This week at No Soul for Sale, a makeshift four-day art fair, I caught an enticing, exciting glimpse of one of the ways the near future may look. The intrepid X-initiative, housed for the next nine months in the former Dia building on West 22nd Street, is staging what it calls an exercise in "radical hospitality," inviting more than 30 respected not-for-profit centers, alternative institutions, artist collectives, and independent enterprises from New York, the U.S., and around the world to exhibit whatever they want in blocks of space that have been marked out on the floor, spread out over three floors and the roof.

SHANE HOPE AT WINKLEMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

For his first solo show, entitled 'Your Mom Is Open Source', New York-based artist Shane Hope presents his latest suite of Molecular Modeling prints ("Mol Mods") and "Compile-a-Child" drawings in which he collapses possible futures like technoprogressive child's play.

JERRY SALTZ REPORTS ON A MEETING WITH MOMA'S CHIEF CURATOR ANN TEMKIN

Last week I met with MoMA's Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Ann Temkin. We talked about the two-week discussion (that took place on my Facebook Page) about the lack of representation of women artists on the fourth and fifth floors of the museum's permanent collection (of work completed before 1970). Of the 135 artists installed on these floors only 19 are women, 6%. Temkin asked that this meeting be "off the record" but agreed that I would report on its perimeters and my impressions.

VIOLET HOPKINS AT FOXY PRODUCTION, NEW YORK

In Violet Hopkins' second solo exhibition at Foxy Production, the artist appropriates images from the 1977 Voyager space mission's Golden Record, its catalogue of photographs, diagrams and sounds designed to communicate life on Earth to any aliens who may be encountered en-route. Hopkins reproduces a number of these images in ink on paper, and then anchors the exhibition with two large paintings: one of the record's instructional cover, and the other of an eye reflecting a solar eclipse.

JERRY SALTZ ON CHARLES RAY AT MATTHEW MARKS, NEW YORK

The three Charles Ray installations at Matthew Marks right now, all brilliant examples of post-minimalist/conceptual sculpture, each created in the late 80s and new to New York, rattled my perceptions, jangled my faculties, and made me go "Wow!" They exemplify a drug-addled view of the world. Ray's sculptures, part of a long tradition of minimal installations, are also forerunners to much of the theatrical Festivalism of recent times such as Maurizio Cattelan and Olafur Eliasson.