Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Gesture, Color, Cartoon in Bushwick and Chelsea (Long Post)

Peter Williams in As Carriers of Flesh at Schweitzer and David. Gallery Link 

Figures in a Landscape of Stippled Flesh 
Some people eat others for breakfast

Teeth! with graphite incisions - the wonderful logic of an artist
Gorgeous detail from a Heather Morgan painting
Brenda Goodman -the space incarnates the figure
Shelves and piles of paint
Peter Williams, portrait on paper
Brenda Goodman, portrait on paper.  
David Brody in a two-person with Elliot Green at Studio 10. I have been eager to see these Chinese-influenced  painters shown together. Brody's paintings swoop through architectural space with sometimes blurred edges, collapsing distinctions between paint and screen, image and space. Gallery Link

Elliot Green. Landscapes comprised of gestures.



Brody. Deeply worked spaces with chromatic surprises. One can stay in these paintings a while.

A simplified Green, almost harking back to American landscape.

A larger Green that drags and stutters the brush. Thank you, Bushwick.

From a crazy group show at Anton Kern, Implosion (a celebration of twenty years), a Jonas Wood watercolor.
Gallery Link

More wonderful juxtapositions.




Shio Kusaka ceramic pots, T-shirts made of paper pulp by Richard Hughes

Large, skeletal images with scarred and chipped surfaces.

At Zwirner 22nd St.: Josef Albers. What a lovely mediation on surface and value!
Gallery Link





So appreciated the way he swung toward green then back again in the grey scale. Why not augment it? 


Later, at the Rothko show, there would be a blue this brilliant, though not the shrill Maganese seen here.  Every colorist has a wild side.

Josef Albers: resonant, sonorous color, scales of light and dark, sometimes with canvas showing through adding color and tone. 

What a pairing! Rita Ackermann (seen here) and Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth!
Ackermann downstairs, inviting us in with somewhat classical looking abstractions - how is it even possible? Her paintings combined signature motifs with exuberant swipes of color. Gallery Link


Gene Moreno writes, "Ackermann’s KLINERAPE paintings merge the masculinity of Franz Kline’s iconic expressionism with provocatively sensual lines that signal the universal feminine. Suggesting concurrent discord and reconciliation, the artist’s sinuous colors and expansive brushstrokes envelope an engagement of both form and allusion."


Upstairs, the wonderful Laughter in the Dark, drawings and some paintings by the great Philip Guston.
Gallery Link

Scale view for depth and breadth of drawings on view
Themes in the drawing: Nixon, Key Biscayne (where he often repaired during the Presidency)...

Landscape, in the most amazing ways - the train runs through many of the drawings


This wonderful foot...

rare graphite drawing



Trip to China

Double-headed Klan addled golf trip with cars




Hippies!

Televised religion!




Love seeing Guston address Estern forms

Crossed, upright chopsticks represent the worst of luck~

The past, the temptations, the future...our protagonist pauses;






Thank you to Hauser and Wirth for such a monumental, historically resonant show.
Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore. Gallery Link

The show represents a significant amount of time, and reveals a lot of the artist's working process. Seen here, drawn areas contrasted with painted areas. Earlier on, Jacquette uses a knitting-like technique of dry color.

Later, the silhouettes flatten, the color fleshes them out, and later still, the color moistens.

They allude to early Modernists like Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis.







At first the dry brushiness yields a patterning that knits the forms together, 

Later, line work takes over.

Even in a waterscape, line prevails.

It was very exciting to see the shifts toward the artist's improvised geometries and simplified paint applications.

Terry Winters at Matthew Marks. Gallery Link

Strange paintings! Raw canvas, smeared with a knife, then lavish,  impasto marks are applied.  

One system, atop another, yields space that can be topographical or diagram.



Mysterious spae, s if hovering over a large shower stall that suddenly becomes a building. But Winters' emphasis remains on scientific and data systems?

Detail, actual painting below






Palettes recalling Matisse
and Charlene von Heyl




This painting opened the show and closed it, hung on the first wall walking in. Turns out to be a brilliant thesis for the remainder, in its simplified form promising complex structures to come that continue to inspire and baffle the eye.
Rothko's dark paintings at Pace. What a lovely rejoinder to the Josef Albers exhibition at Zwirner 22nd Street!
Gallery Link 
Like Albers, Rothko played with the chromatic brilliance of blues.
Many of the works in this show were acrylic on paper. The experimentation within his focused oeuvre surprised. It is a beautiful show. Photography not allowed.

Ending the day with Joan Mitchell at Cheim & Reid. Gallery Link
Wonderful to think about in tandem with Terry Winters.

Both working lavishly, thickly with rhythm. The differences clear as well: Mitchell's exuberant gestures are informed by nature: Monet's distinct, twirling marks and the landscape where he painted; Winters a studio painter, concerned with artificial patterns yet with a similar passion for material.

Pastels, surprisingly fluid despite the dryness


One of my favorite things about Joan Mitchell is the way she uses white to edit.
What a wonderful day - so many great shows on now.