Silver City: Kyle Staver, Eileen Quinlan and Ursula Morley Price Kyle(11.23.13)

Kyle Staver at Tibor de Nagy. I got lucky--dashed uptown with minutes to spare, guard not at post for a minute, caught the freight and walked into the gallery at closing time. Luckily they let me stay. For gallery images, check here: Kyle Staver images at Tibor de Nagy

Mashups of color and texture!

Edges! So free and interestingly treated. Detail, Daphne, 2013, 70 x 50.

Staver articulates shadowed form with slivers of reflected light. These function as drawn marks that activate the surface and color in the work. She is such a visual gamester: see hands and teeth gnashing diagonals, color at low heat. The human drama continues in her epic, archetypical forms. I love the circularity of her compositions.

Really bad color on this one in this photo, but check out that horse!

A sense of infinity - the feeling of being alone in a large universe

The horse is an image mover, a shape, a volume...its hoof, a miniature galaxy.

Detail from Groupers, 2013, 70 x 50

Also from Groupers, large to minute.

Circles, flat and spatial. Cold white functions as a color.

The entire painting was too hard to capture, but in this detail the telltale slivers of light in the signature contre jour illuminate the animal smashed in a corner but totally believable.

Out on the street, the light and mood of the paintings continued--moments of visual elegance with life swirling around them.

Continuing silver, Eileen Quinlan's silver gelatin photographs at Miguel Abreu.

Eileen Quinlan at Miguel Abreu

The emulsifier is peeled away or abraded with steel wool.

Surprisingly beautiful and reminiscent of Christopher Wool, in terms of process.

Ursula Morley Price at Valerie McKenzie. These images are yellow, but the true sense of the show is black, and white.  Ursula Morley Price Exhibition

Hand-built vessels with hand-pinched flanges that turn form this way and that.

Evoking figures, specifically Victorian blouses with their shapely silhouettes and fluted collars.

The artist is British and resides in France. Her work is the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Musee Moderne de Troye in France this year.

Interior handling.

Installation with hand-built shelves. This is a truer color sense of the show: silvery with hints of dark and light.

Surface Treatment (11.22.13)

Dennis Hollingsworth at Sargent's Daughter

Detail of Hollingsworth's exuberant facture.

Gallery Directors Allegra LaViola and Meredith Rosen, in a Blouin Art Info interview, say, "We’re very excited about our first show, which will include Francesca DiMattio, Dennis Hollingsworth, Jonathan Lasker, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, and Sandi Slone. It is an abstract painting show that connects artists in different stages of their careers, but who have the same vocabulary of gesture, and relationship to paint and color. In many ways, it is an exhibition about paint itself: what it can do, how it reacts and reflects and how these artists submit to, master, and employ it"

Daniel Rios Rodriguez - I loved this work. Intimacy of portraiture with ambitious, idiosyncratic facture.

Sandi Slone

Slone

Rios Rodriguez

Incised paint lapping up against stars both over and under a pitch black sky. These paintings had their own logic, and were beautifully made.

View from the desk, showing Hollingsworth's paint sculptures in bell jars

At the new LES (33 Orchard St.) Gasser and Grunert--Tiffany Pollock's silk painting in the back room. Jane Kim will show Daniel Domig at this same address (but same gallery space?) opening January 23, 2014. 33 Orchard

In the front room - a detail by Klemens Gasser, artist, and of the gallery. Gasser works with the medium of body paint from horror and/or porn films, giving the works a ravished, bas relief surface, as if clawed or groped.  I photographed more images and thought they had uploaded--see the show here: Klemens Gasser exhibition image link

Sadie Laska debuting at Kerry Schuss. Beach towels, detritus, paint. This is a really strange and wonderful painting.

Plastic street bags become part of the surface. Unfortunately I loaded extra images of the paintings swaddled in Tshirts and stacked on each other (or thought I did?) and they are not here. Check them here: Sadie Laska at Kerry Schuss - link

Amy Casey in her first show with Foley Gallery, "Balancing New Growth."

Construction boom! Paintings on clayboard and paper.

Is it sustainable?

Obsessive technique, great color, how far can they go?!

A series of holes in the ground by Kristin Calibrese at Brennan and Griffen

A detail of LA by Calibrese

Sheila Gallagher at Dodge

Detail of the imbedded surface

Katherine Bernhardt and Youssef Jdia at the Hole

They made the entire space into a visual bazaar

Paintings, labels, and carpets.

Jdia is a rug manufacturer.

Blurry context shot for below detail

Paint and rug cuttings paired with objects and the space itself.

Agnes Martin

8 minute exerpt from a 1997 interview on Brainpickings.org