Chelsea Run: Bechtle, Humphrey, Frankenthaler, Oehlen, and Spero

California, 1960s and 70s in Robert Bechtle's posthumous exhibition at Gladstone. Portraits and landscapes recall suspended moments as California light saturates the air. They record the taste and smell of the light, the reflections, the shadows of that time.  https://www.gladstonegallery.com/

Detail

 Los Angeles vignettes that despite the stylization are eerily accurate. My grandfather drove a Thunderbird just like that, with red leather seats...the lawns did look just like that in LA's flat suburban sprawl...

Presence pierces the surface of reflections. 

Beautifully painted and realized. 

David Humphrey's exhibition Ass Backward at Fredericks Freiser bestows Goya's Forgers with new meaning.

Half-portrait, half-doodles moving paint to reframe vision, 

Teenager doodles, abstract landscapes, juxtapositions

We are slightly uneasy.

Internalized assasins behind the happy face

Helen Frankenthaler (1990-1992) at Gagosian

Some selections from the 2022 Palm Springs Museum exhibition that first revealed HF's forays into heavier paint textures.

Sometimes the orientation of the paintings feels altered.

Another orientation as surprising decision.

The qualities in her woodcut prints, and afterimages in large, flat pours find form and texture in these late works.

Albert Oehlen at Gagosian, juxtaposing large, cartoony-type shapes with a multitiude of paint applications.

Detail

These are boistrous paintings, with very thin insertions of painting details within the painting surface.

Big lumpy shapes like these prove counterpoint to the flinging and dripping otherwise.

What I'm reading as Francis Bacon-like bodies distorted and simplified.  The yellow spray paint has a sweaty feel.

The body parts anchor more abstracted paint applications. 

A film shows Oelen painting (or jousting with the painting surface), 

and musing on the nature of making.

His compositions relate to Tom Burkhardt's paintings somehow--fracturing of pictorial space and genre into shards of color and shape.

Scale comparisons in the second room with Paul McCarthy's work

Nancy Spero's Woman as Protagonist at Galerie Lelong. 

The ground shifts while historical figures hold their own--her gift to us, an instruction manual for keeping on going.

Sheela-na-gigs hung out to dry.

Humor and bite.