Artists Unite Issue

The new season is upon us, and the weather is beautiful. What better time to get out and visit some galleries? Group shows are not typically reviewed by the major art magazines and papers. Galleries tend to offer them up right before the summer, and use that time as an opportunity to introduce new talent when people are leaving town and the stakes are less high. Therefore, it was a bit surprising to see several of the galleries we visited on 57th Street were starting the season with group shows.

We started at Edward Tyler Nahem, under the mistaken notion that the space designed by Michael Gabellini was still Anthony Grant Gallery. The architectural design features very nifty “floating planes and a pivoting wall that allows the gallery to adapt to various exhibitions.” The current gallery specializes in the kind of blue-chip secondary market works that one would expect to find on 57th Street, but this well-designed, intimate space makes it all about the art and not the price tags or celebrity status. Nahem presented a small and colorful group show with pieces by a lot of big fish like De Kooning, Lee Krasner, James Rosenquist, Sigmar Polke, and some less frequently viewed artists like Mimmo Rotella (above). The works were of surprisingly high quality, and felt like a preview of the ADAA’s annual exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, where one gets the chance to see unusual pieces that have been hidden away in private collections.

Next, we stopped at Galerie St. Etienne, where until Sept 28th, one had the chance to take in an impressive array of recent acquisitions, focused on Austrian & German Expressionism, and self-taught & outsider art. It’s not as unlikely a combination as it may sound at first.

This gallery stands out not only for its distinct identity and mission, but also for its contribution to the scholarly, historical discourse of the works they present. In a thoughtful essay on their site, they consider recent trends in the art market in depth. Here are a couple short excerpts:

“Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge……Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues over the course of generations.”

“If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgments.”

Lush and mysterious prints by Kathe Kollwitz and Leonard Baskin, drawings by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gustav Klimt, paintings by Henry Darger, Grandma Moses and Bill Traylor and more rounded out this staggering collection of thought-provoking, singular works.

If the show at St. Etienne was something of an art historical survey, so too was the show at Marian Goodman, but of a very different nature. On view until October 13th is Part I of the show “30/40: A Selection of Forty Artists from Thirty Years at Marian Goodman Gallery.” Coincidentally, this beautiful, well-proportioned 8,000 square foot exhibition space was also designed by Gabellini Associates. An internationalist, Goodman is also a dealer with a clear mission. In 30 years, she has realized and continues to expand on her goals of playing “an important role in introducing European artists to American audiences and helping to establish a vital dialogue among artists and institutions working internationally…”

One of the things that set Goodman’s gallery apart from St. Etienne is that much of what St. Etienne presents is an important look and critical understanding of now-deceased artists from the early to mid 20th century, whereas Goodman’s vision was formed primarily by working directly with living, contemporary artists. In her own words, from the exhibition’s press release, “…My thoughts were somehow about the perspective of time, about enduring values or conditions, and about society’s and the individual’s struggle throughout time to find them and express them. And it is still a source of amazement to me - what a human being is capable of creating and how art can move people. It is what draws me to work with artists and to respect them so deeply. Art is a human need, an expression of one’s soul and intellect, and one of the very last moral positions in our society - an affirmation of the highest in the human spirit.”

This show is as important an historical view of the past 30 years in contemporary art as you’d be likely to see at any museum or top-tier nonprofit institution like The Drawing Center. The show itself is impressive, but even more so is the 30 year history behind it, that makes Marian Goodman’s probably the only space in town that has the capability of presenting something like this. Fantastic pieces by Fred Sandback and Dan Graham (don’t forget to step inside the sculpture!) are only the tip of the iceberg here (and that’s one mighty, massive iceberg that includes work by Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, John Baldessari, Tacita Dean, Sol Lewitt, and many others). We’ll be back for more, and can’t wait for Part II.

DC Moore Gallery offered a solo exhibition of mixed-media work and prints by Joyce Kozloff (up until October 6th). In the exhibition catalog, Lucy Lippard observes, “One theme leads to another and then another geographical site — a world cut and pasted and reinvented. Kozloff’s work is about as visually and narratively complex as art can be…But to get it, the viewer needs to spend time, enter the images and stay a while…Overlays and interceptions transform anything like a straightforward picture into a swirling, not-quite-chaos of references offering first once meaning, then another, undermining both truth and lies…This is what history really looks like.” The painted masks, tondos, collages, and prints are intricately detailed and present an overwhelming amount of work, but one might leave this gallery feeling more overrun by the imagery than drawn into it.

A sparsely hung group exhibition at McKee Gallery offered a terrific selection of gallery artists including Martin Puryear, Philip Guston, Daisy Youngblood, and Leonid Lerman. On one wall, a large Guston canvas seemed to converse with a Puryear sculpture and print hung on either side of it, their comic-like imagery imbued with melancholy that spoke a shared and sympathetic language. On the facing wall, a huge 4-panel painting by Kit Rank was the centerpiece of the show. Like Kozloff, Rank doesn’t stint on the symbolic imagery. Painted in an idiosyncratic style and confined to just four canvases, it engaged the viewer absolutely, rather than causing sensory overload.

Mary Boone’s group show, titled “View (Thirteen): Practical F/X” was guest curated by Kevin Zucker, and is on view until October 27th. The most immediately engaging of the works on view are Hilary Berseth’s “programmed hives” and his two intricately and finely drawn graphite pieces. For his sculptures, Berseth has subtly manipulated the bees building process (some bees may have been hurt…). his drawings depict “digitally-rendered models of information originating from numbers or data sets.” While nothing could seem more dry, the resulting drawings are intensely dynamic. The treatment of the gallery’s interior is also worth noting in this case. The soft dove-gray of the skim-coated walls against the polished cement floor seem to set off and heighten the colors and textures of the art.

In Chelsea: A few goodies definitely worth seeing in the gallery mall at 529 W 20th St: Daniel Rozin at Bitforms. His pegboard mirror is wonderful. He’s a notable artist in the digital realm, using technology as a tool in much the same way others would use a brush or a chisel. And quirky new ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (’til October 6th–last week for Shechet, who just got noted in the NY Times).

Information about our upcoming October gallery crawl will be posted here soon, so check back, and feel free to join us!

[Image info, from top to bottom: Mimmo Rotella, Untitled, 1959, collage on canvas, 105 1/8" x 101 3/8" at Edward Tyler Nahem; at Galerie St. Etienne: Käthe Kollwitz, Conspiracy, 1893-97, Etching on cream wove paper, 11 5/8" x 7"; Henry Darger "General Concentinian Aronburg (Father of Annie Aronburg), General Nero and Francis Viviananna", 1915-25?, Watercolor and pencil on halftone illustration or paper, mounted on cardboard, 13 1/2" x 15"; Bill Traylor, See'd One in a Show Once, Circa 1939-42, Poster paint and pencil on cardboard, 9 1/2" x 12"; Tacita Dean, Yardarm, 1997, chalk on blackboard, 70 7/8" x 79 15/16" at Marian Goodman; Joyce Kozloff, installation view at DC Moore; Kit Rank, Dopo Pranzo (two details), 2002, oil on canvas, 72 5/8 x 47 5/8 each of 4 panels, at McKee Gallery; Hilary Berseth, Programmed Hive #5, 48" x 22" x 22", wax, paint, UV laquer, wood, metal; Hilary Berseth, Tetrahedrons Instanced to the Stars of the Milky Way (detail), 22" x 30", graphite/paper, 2007, at Mary Boone.]