January 31, 2004
Exhibitions I am glad to have seen
Prompted by my inclusion of Mary Heilman's London show, I realized, given that the web often acts as an archive, it may also be worth pointing viewers to exhibitions I've enjoyed in the past. I suspect that these posts will be very occasional. Nonetheless, here goes:
One of the best exhibitions I saw in Europe this summer was a small thirty-year survey of New York painter Mary Heilman's work at the Vienna Secession. I became particularly enamored of Black Door, 1972, the vertically oriented all-black painting seen in one of the exhibition views toward the bottom of that page. Her playful use of color and mastery of composition is a bit critically disarming; all I wanted to do was roll around in her specially-constructed wooden chairs and gaze happily at the works on view.
The Metropolitan's survey of Vija Celmins's prints (and five drawings) was one of the best shows I saw in 2002. At the time, I was proposing shows for my first-ever review (in Flash Art), and I desperately wanted to write about this one. I lobbied hard, only to be dismissed with the comment: "her work isn't modern enough." I couldn't have disagreed more, and I still regularly look through my Celmins catalogues and delight whenever I come across her work in galleries or museums.
The full-page Artforum ad for Zwirner & Wirth's upcoming Juan Munoz exhibition reminds me how much I enjoyed the traveling museum show organized two years ago by the Art Institute of Chicago, where I saw it, and the Hirshhorn Museum in DC. The placement of his Conversation Piece, 2001, at the southeast entrance to Central Park was a stroke of genius by the Public Art Fund, who normally place relatively innocuous works at that busy site.
Chrissie Iles's splashy Whitney Museum debut was Into the Light, an exhibition about which there is little online information. It was a wonderful show and the book is well worth looking into. Here's the review published in Artforum.