March 11, 2003
Armory Show roundup
This is a long post about contemporary art. Read on if such things interest you.
Thousands of people visited the Armory Show, and hundreds stopped by my gallery's booth to ask questions about Cornelia Parker's sculpture. I caught up with friends from other parts of the globe and even managed to make a few new ones. Williamsburg galleries extended their hours to midnight on Saturday; consequently, I attended about twenty-two openings in the six hours after my eight hour work day. Others guessed there were ten thousand works of art on view along the Armory's two westside piers. I don't wish to hazard my own guess, but I don't think everyone else is too far off. And this doesn't even account for the Scope Art Fair, which I managed to attend late yesterday afternoon. Given the plethora of visual stimuli, here's what made an impression:
First and foremost is Mamma Andersson, a Swedish painter whose work was first pointed out to me by my employers. There were five paintings at Galleri Magnus Karlsson and a sixth at Stephen Friedman, who presented a solo exhibition in October-November 2002. She's married to Jockum Nordstrum, and I can only hope that their personalities are as well-matched as their painting styles. His spring 2002 exhibition at David Zwirner typifies his folksy, faux-naive rendering of ambiguous narratives that seem culled from an international set of fairytales. Her work is slightly harsher in its edges, trading the approachability of his scenes for an approachability based on her magnificent handling of paint. Layers build up without really accumulating density, allowing ghost-like forms, often of children, to inhabit space on the picture plane without seeming to inhabit the world depicted therein. Check Touched by Gods (2002) to see what I mean. Andersson currently does not have New York representation, but I would not be surprised if a show of new paintings crops up in a prominent gallery's autumn 2003 or spring 2004 exhibition schedule.
As long as I'm talking about Stephen Friedman--who possesses one of the sharpest eyes in London for new talent--I should mention my rediscovery of Rivane Neuenschwander. I've known her sculptures and installations since seeing her paired with Iran do EspirÃto Santo, another young Brazilian 'organic minimalist,' in an exhibition at the Americas Society approximately two years ago. I had only seen her sculptures and experienced her installations, so the presentation on the gallery's booth of photographs, collages, and two videos was quite interesting. The four photographs, all part of a series titled 'Conversations,' managed to escape critique as juvenile snapshots by virtue of intimate beauty. The video I saw, Inventory of Small Deaths (Blow), created in collaboration with her husband, exudes a similar delicate grace that borders on the saccharine without quite crossing that line. The collage, titled Deadline Calendar (2002) is simple conceptually yet pregnant with the past lives of the collected sell-by dates. With solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center and the ArtPace residency program, as well as gallery representation by Camargo Vilaca in Sao Paulo and Stephen Friedman in London, it's surprising I have yet to see her work in a New York gallery. I nonetheless look forward to the day it arrives.
Neighbors and friends 303 Gallery exhibited a new painting and drawing by Sue Williams that renewed my appreciation. Her last solo show at the gallery left me wanting more: it was technically stupendous yet intellectually empty, and suffered in comparison to the Brice Marden exhibition then on view across the street at Matthew Marks' 22nd St. space. At the fair she reintroduced the (ambiguously) sexual and (barely) figurative elements that had slipped out of the paintings (but not the drawings) in the gallery show. The large canvas was painted bright orange on pink, making it a partner-in-crime with Sea Life, another recent canvas. Her ink on vellum drawings are still some of the smoothest objects being made by contemporary artists working today.
The Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama had an impressive showing, with a solo exhibition at the booth of Taka Ishii Gallery and a few more photographs at the booth of Frankfurt's L.A. Galerie. His photographs seem engrossed with the concept of rendering time visually: the 'Slow Glass' pictures at L.A. Galerie contrasting the frozen dynamism (no pun intended) of the 'Blast' pictiures. Add to this the saturated-color panoramas depicting remote lime works or buildings under construction in big cities and Hatakeyama seems an amped-up version of Ryuji Miyamoto. Miyamoto's depiction of contemporary ruins, best showcased in his book Architectural Apocalypse, are more formally composed and contemplative than Hatakeyama's work, and I feel will have more staying power, but I like the younger artist's take on the current vogue for photographing buildings.
Jack Hanley Gallery brought more graffiti- and street culture-inspired work by his gallery artists. Chris Johanson stole the show--it was his for the taking, with his work filling eighty percent of the booth--with his large, colorful pinwheel painting on paper. Berkeley's Paulson Press brought a similar sugarlift aquatint to their room at the Scope fair, this one coming across as a psychedelic rock and bearing the best title of the weekend: Two dimensional print of casual post-post-modern sculpture (2002). Other artists of note in the booth were Shaun O'Dell, whose medium-sized mixed media drawing of birds caught up in a bevy of decorative ink patterning floated comfortably against a large white background, and Simon Evans, whose humorously conceptual works on paper included a Traveler's Map of Heaven (2003).
Euan Macdonald is also represented by Jack Hanley, but I came across his work at Cohan, Leslie, and Browne's booth. CLB is another gallery with a seemingly unerring eye; Macdonald's works on paper were complemented by delicate drawings with ink and acrylic paint by the collaborative team of Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg. Their current group sculpture-and-video exhibition, Little Triggers, is also well worth seeing.
David Korty's watercolors captured my eye at China Art Objects; had it not already sold, I would have immediately put more money than I could afford toward a small rendering of rainbow-colored fireworks splattered against a purple evening sky. I have heard his name in the past, but never seen his work: I was surprised to learn that he is represented in London by heavy-hitter Sadie Coles HQ and in New York by Greene Naftali, another local favorite. Here is a good selection of his work.
Richard Telles Fine Art, a Los Angeles-based gallery that seemed to be prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s--I see the gallery name deep in the exhibition history of many artists whose work I like--yet under the current radar, brought a beautiful photo collage by Jenny Bishton. The words 'photo collage' give an inaccurate mental picture of her art. Her photographic sources are atomized into tiny pieces, circular and smaller than a hole-punch, then arrayed across medium-sized pieces of paper according to color in abstract waves. It took me a second to remember where I had seen the work: a 'gallery swap'-type exhibition where Telles' artists presented works at Marianne Boesky gallery early last year. He said "You probably haven't seen much of her work around, as it's very time-consuming." That was the one thing he probably didn't need to tell me.
As long as I'm broadly outlining my tastes by naming favorite New York galleries, I'll mention that Murray Guy brought along a beautiful new painting by Munro Galloway depicting a bunch of white roses wrapped in paper. His pale purple and white palette suits the subject matter wonderfully, and the painting is a good counterpoint (since I gave a Sue Williams counterpoint earlier) to Cherry Blossoms and Plum Rain (2002).
I'm tiring of typing more than I tired of looking at art, so I will only mention briefly a few more artists whose work will stick with me: Victoria Miro brought three lovely gouaches of exotic birds by Chris Ofili; New York-based Jenny Perlin, whose work I haven't seen since the 2001 Animations exhibition I worked on at PS1, impressed with a small black-and-white looped 16mm film of an unidentified hand washing a window that looked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge (curiously at Annet Gelinks, Amsterdam); Willie Doherty's extracts from a file was as beautiful in its partial presentation at Kerlin Gallery's booth as I'd ever seen; last but not least, Ewan Gibbs' delicately cross-hatched window view onto a townscape dominated by a church was very impressive at Maureen Paley Interim Art. Those of you in London can go see his work this spring as he is their next exhibition.
I hope that the links provided lead some of you to discover new artists to like and support, even if it is not one of the ones mentioned above. I have another two or three pages of notes that I have not transcribed.. perhaps another day?