April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh, Black Bottom, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

James Walsh, Colorbook: Paularry, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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February 8 to May 18, 2013
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City

In a variation within our series, A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES, David Cohen offers his thoughts on a survey of the artist’s cutaway painting on top of his reviews on the same body of work on three previous occasions (the latter originally published in the New York Sun).  Readers new to Harkness will want to read the reviews in order of publication.

Hilary Harkness, Red Sky in the Morning, 2010-11. Oil on panel, 37 x 42 inches.
Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation. Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2013
The other day I was musing on a profound subject: who will star in the first movie made of a Hilary Harkness painting?

The obvious casting choices for the party-girl warriors who populate, in miniature, her dense, chirpy yet  grotesque scenes are those acrobatically proven in the action movie genre—Angelina Jolie, say, whose assassin or tomb-raiding getup recalls the bikini-booted scanty efficiency of the Harkness babe.

But why would anyone turn an artwork into a movie, you might be asking?  The traffic in contemporary culture is entirely the other way around, with artists raiding cinema.  Hollywood – adapting novels and historic events, regurgitating TV shows, and Broadway musicals, remaking other, old or not so old Hollywood movies – has surely never, in similar fashion, made a film of a painting.  Art history-savvy directors make compositional sense of them in individual shots, but that is a different matter.  There was “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” (2003) but that’s from a novel that spins a yarn around a painting, and is thus at several stages removed.  What I have in mind for Harkness is something more like director Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” (2011) but even there the narrative arc takes in Brueghel the Elder, author of the 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary,” that is the movie’s painterly progenitor.

This is all a rather discursive way of saying two things about Harkness.  First, that there is a narrative logic in her work that compares to literature or movies more than to the static medium of easel painting, at least at the pace that form has demanded of viewers for the last few centuries.  In Harkness, local incident unfolds over time as the eye is obliged to read accumulative detail.  And secondly, “bad girl” transgressive as they remain, these sado-masochistic scenarios warrant big audience attention rather than art world connoisseurship. The ingenuity of Hilary Harkness has (or ought to have) blockbuster appeal.

The Flag Art Foundation has brought together fifteen, which is to say almost all of these labor-intensive and thus rare works from Harkness’s signature idiom, the cutaway babe-infested setting, whether terrestrial or nautical .  As the artist has begun to move decisively in the direction of more traditional, single-scene images staffed by dramatis personae of legible individuality (her Gertrude Stein series), the Flag show affords that first chapter in her work a retrospective sense of closure.  Her newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture.  Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view.

Later paintings within the Flag group witness odd shifts in scale and the introduction of male and animal characters, but still, you might wonder, what would there be for an actress to do, to say, to emote in such emotionally vacuous situations as Harkness offers? Angelina will require adversaries, of course, so step up Milla Jovovich and Charlize Theron.  But how would these players “co star” when casts of thousands are actually rendered equals, each with their deadpan walk-on macabre moment?  I guess it will have to be one of those movies where the star mutates, like the namesake lead in “Being John Malkovich” (1999), and like a comic book-derived action movie all the while regaining pristine calm as they are choreographed from one act of chilled meanness to the next.

In a way the Surrealists would have loved, where one message in my inbox this morning reminded me that the Flag Foundation show is about to close, the next message put Ms. Jolie herself in a headline with news that the actress has undergone a double mastectomy to diminish her odds of cancer. Life is never the jolly game that art can be, snipping the wires between violence, beauty and pain.  If there can possibly be meaning in this bizarre juxtaposition of data (not to force equivalence) it will have to do with second chapters, courage and sparky women.

Hilary Harkness, Pearl Trader, 2006. Oil on linen, 30 x 33 inches. Courtesy the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

2008
Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

Hilary Harkness, Matterhorn, 2003-04. Oil on linen, 20 x 27 inches. Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation.
Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2005
The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in [Elizabeth] Huey [discussed earlier in the same review]: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be old masterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveals the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

2004
Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of [Cindy] Sherman and the crowd addiction of [Spencer] Tunick [discussed earlier in the same review]. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

April 11 – May 12, 2013
83 Grand Street
New York City, 212 279 9219

Installation shot of Stanley Whitney: Other Colors I Forget at Team Gallery, New York, April 11 to May 12, 2013

Stanley Whitney has over five decades painting behind him.  The seven large luscious paintings currently on view at Team Gallery constitute his 28th solo exhibition, so it is maybe little wonder that, at this point, his technique appears effortless.   Indeed, the work displays a beguiling simplicity. There are sixteen or twenty rectangles in each square painting and they are, more or less, evenly apportioned four down and four, or five, across – not by ruled measurement but an equally exact though ineffable idea of rightness. These are formal paintings, grids of quadrilaterals, but casual and unpretentious, like a conversation one might have about the checkered tablecloths at your favorite trattoria.  The same sense of ease holds true for the paint application, and for a few moments one might get an impression that the brushwork is almost careless.  This is, however, a manifestly false reading and it quickly transmutes into an awareness of acute fastidiousness.

Take the largest work, for instance, the eight-foot square Bodyheat, (2012).  Hanging solo in the rear gallery, where it can enjoy the most controlled lighting, it dominates the small room with a quiet authority and grace.  The rectangles, arrayed in this particular piece five across and four down, are topped and separated on the horizontal by thick stripes that simultaneously delineate and activate the grid.  For the most part the colors directly abut, shoulder to shoulder, but in a few cases an additional fat stroke puts in extra duty.  In the top row a slash of salmon keeps the orange square from combining with the orange line just below, while in the second row from the top, a scumble of slightly darker blue achieves the same end between the blue rectangle and all but identically-colored line below.

Stanley Whitney, Bodyheat, 2012. Oil on linen, 96 x 96 inches. Courtesy of Team Gallery, New York

Conversely, the unusual blended stroke dividing the yellow from the green serves to modulate and mellow what would otherwise be a potentially harsh juxtaposition. And in the same vein, a wash of blue at the top of the pale yellow/green square in the bottom row eases the dialogue between it and the dark blue stripe above it.  Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner the paint in the lower half of the black square dissolves in drips, a permanent history of its interaction with the wet medium.

The cumulative effect of these additional strokes and wet drips is to highlight their outlier nature: there is not a single unintentional mark in any of these paintings.  Echoing this low key but firm control are the colors themselves: blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown, black and white.  Such a simple list brings to mind the basic box of 8 Crayola Crayons.  As elsewhere, sustained looking quickly alters this perception, each mottled or extenuated color being an overlay of another, the palette expanding to six variations of green, five of red, and so forth.  We are made aware that individual colors mean naught, while the syntax and syncopation of the colors are everything.

Whitney nonchalantly weaves together nearly invisible yet precise technique, lightly imposed yet persistent structure, and a simple yet sophisticated use of color. The resulting works are as playful as they are powerful as they flutter and wave against the cool white walls whose flatness they eviscerate with hardly a sigh.

April 25, to May 25, 2013
138 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street
New York City, 212 7500949

Elena Sisto, Green Brush, 2011. Oil on linen, 25½ x 36½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York

Sentimentality, nostalgia, and illustration are the common pitfalls for a figurative painter undertaking to represent feeling and emotion — particularly when the imagery is invented and not photo derived. There is a huge payoff, however, for facing those risks head on. In her first New York show since 2004 and her debut with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Elena Sisto takes as her subject the predicaments of young women painters as they embark on their calling. In images that Sisto, in the tradition of Philip Guston, originates from pure acts of painting, her self-critical perseverance has produced work that is unique, psychologically complex, and moving.

Elena Sisto, like all serious painters, is a formalist. Behind her subject matter, part of the content of her work is the structure of the decisions that constitute painting. To emphasize this, about seven of the twenty paintings in this show are close-up details of her young painter subjects: blouses and patterns and fragments of hands and arms and necks. Each of these paintings becomes a mini universe of inventive facture as pigment turns into light and flesh, and patterns turn into fabric and paintings of paintings, but always revealing the mechanics of their construction from paint.

These “cropped in” paintings (as the artist calls them), deft and colorful, are almost abstract in their formalism. Paintings like Frogs, 2013, where negative spaces between elbows and torso become patterned triangles, may assuage viewers not willing to see the abstraction in the formal structures of the other, more psychological paintings. These are the ones that depict various young women struggling with the act of painting. The “cropped-in” paintings, amusing and exhilarating in their invention, gain in complexity through their context with what has remained “uncropped.”

And it is these paintings of young women wrestling with their intentions, which comprise the soul of this show. Because of the added implications in the way faces can signify feelings, the range of emotions is broader, the ambiguities more enticing, and the questions to be asked more probing.

In the masterful Self-Portrait (with Van Dongen), (2011) a painting filled with faces, the convergence of all Sisto’s painterly knowledge produces a heady concoction of formal, psychological, gender, and sexual issues. It may be a commonplace notion that a painter, especially a young one, is surrounded by a host of voices that she must listen to, battle with, ignore, or embrace, but this painting elucidates the idea in such a charmingly complex manner that it seems a revelation.

Elena Sisto, Self-Portrait (with Van Dongen), 2011. Oil on linen, 33 x 40 inches. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York

The picture depicts a white smocked young woman, right hand holding brushes, in the act of painting a self-portrait. Her smock is delineated with a few deft lines from a white wall tacked with painting reproductions, and the back of a canvas, as well as her ostensible reflection in a mirror bookends her. The eponymous Van Dongen of the title, a flame-hued and bare chested Jeune Arabe, 1910, peers haughtily at the painter over her shoulder and practically jumps off the canvas. Van Dongen is an apt choice for Sisto as the Dutchman’s paint handling and use of patterns clearly inform Sisto’s own work.

Head and body tilted in contrapusto to the Van Dongen, the young painter herself, with an expression of intense concentration, dominates the painting. Her face in shadow, her mouth forms a little brown hyphen, and in a supremely subtle painterly invention, Sisto lightens the shadow just above her mouth, to create the impression of her tongue pressing there intently.

The four dark brushes that our young heroine grasps form a Maltese cross  of vectors, which, along with her index and forefingers, extended Guston-style, point to the various voices/influences in the painting. Alongside the lithe Van Dongen Arab, a chunky, neo-classical Picasso maiden gazes earnestly at her. And up in the left corner, constituted by the merest blobs of color, are two women obliviously kissing in a passionate embrace. At the bottom, its little phallic head lasciviously poking into the picture is a tube of paint with the tiniest squirt of turquoise protruding from the tip. It is the same color and size as the tiny dot representing a fragment of blouse that appears behind — and defines the edge of — the girl’s right wrist.

But most importantly, occupying a gray trapezoid that cuts into the left fifth of the composition floats the spectral reflection of this artist herself, seemingly older, as if wonderingly peering at her younger self from the future. This little sleight of hand elucidates the irony of the “self-portrait” of the title. The painting depicts a young woman painting an image of her self. But like Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the only painting we actually see the front of is this very painting, which becomes Sisto’s own Joycean “portrait of the artist as a young woman.”

In what could be called the Bildungsmalen genre of painting, it is unique to see a female painter as protagonist. But aside from this feminist act of rectification, what makes these paintings unprecedented is that Sisto constructs a gaze for us that somehow becomes parental.

We regard these young women, not as the next hot young artists, but sympathetically, as daughters and students in the process of becoming. Though the art that Sisto has them making is usually abstract and a bit callow, she doesn’t mock them.  The very sympathy that these paintings elicit is what makes them so fresh. Youth becomes not a threat or admonition to the older viewers that are Sisto’s peers, but something to be fondly nurtured and encouraged, not despite but because of its awkwardness and lack of sophistication. And to her younger viewers Sisto offers the hope that painting can become a tool for understanding their relationship to the world, and that sophistication comes not from conforming but daring to be different.

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February 8 to August 4, 2013
The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY, (718) 638-5000

El Anatsui, Gli (Wall), 2010. Aluminum and copper wire, installation at the Brooklyn Museum, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Brooklyn Museum photograph.

El Anatsui’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum begins in the fifth floor rotunda with Gli (2010), a majestic installation comprised of four sheets of delicate metal rings that are suspended at various heights, inhabiting the space from floor to ceiling. Gli is an Ewe word that has multiple meanings: wall, disrupt, or story. An accompanying text elaborates that Anatsui was thinking of walls in Berlin, Jerusalem and Notsie when making this piece. Probably less familiar to many New Yorkers than the other examples, Notsie is a town in modern day Togo, West Africa, where according to oral histories, the Ewe people settled briefly before fleeing an oppressive ruler sometime in the 17th century. Reminiscent of chainmail, these hangings are solemn and haunting, conjuring the memory of powerful walls and ancient sorrows. Gli is torn and crumpled like a curtain in places, but as one moves around the space, the sheets shift and glimmer, becoming more solid and lively.

It is for these elegant and impressive bottle cap tapestries that Anatsui is most well-known and, unsurprisingly, they are the centerpiece of Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, an exhibition which originated at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. The show demonstrates the range of Anatsui’s aesthetic—from the dense painterly abstraction of Black Block and Red Block (both 2010), to the gentle humor of Ink Splash (2010), and the seemingly precarious structure of Ozone Layer (2010) which flutters in an artificial breeze provided by fans hidden in the gallery wall, rattling like the gentle wheeze of an old smoker.

El Anatsui was born in Anyako, Ghana in 1944 and is a member of the Ewe ethnic group. In 1975 he moved to Nigeria to teach at the University of Nsukka, where he has resided ever since. After studying western sculptural traditions and methods at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, Anatsui became interested in the indigenous forms and materials of his home country. He began to look at adinkra symbols and kente cloth–a weaving style practiced by members of his family–and one of his earliest pieces experimented with the wooden trays used to display food in the marketplace. From there he moved into other wooden, ceramic and recycled forms, often choosing materials associated with consumption, before discovering a bag of discarded bottle caps outside a local distillery and starting upon the explorations that led to his current work.

El Anatsui, Waste Paper Bags, 2003-2010, aluminum printing plates, paint and copper wire, seven pieces, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Brooklyn Museum photograph.

Earlier artworks such as the painted wood relief Conspirators (1997) allow the viewer a glimpse of how Anatsui’s work has developed and the common themes that run through his practice. The picture that emerges is of an artist who is interested in the mutability of forms, works arduously to explore and reinvent his materials, and transforms personal and historical narratives into form and content. A number of the artworks reference specific stories that warrant a closer look. Waste Paper Bags (2003), an installation consisting of seven grey forms, modeled on the large, red and blue stripped bags that are deceptively strong, and are a ubiquitous sight at a West African bus station or marketplace—the go-to bag for a woman with a heavy load or a long distance to travel. In Nigeria these bags are referred to as Ghana-must-go, harking back to a moment in the 1980s when an influx of Ghanaian refugees into Nigeria caused tension between the two groups. El Anatsui’s versions of the bag are large enough to house or transport a family, but too heavy to move.  They are made of discarded aluminum printing plates that carry the stories of contemporary Nigerian life–newspaper articles celebrating new anti-malarial studies or a local political leader, school textbooks, wedding announcements and church pamphlets. The piece is the most monument-like of these monumental works, commemorating the rootless and sometimes uncomfortable position of an expatriate.

Like the trash that El Anatsui uses as raw materials, the difficult historical relationships associated with Gli, Waste Paper Bags, and the bottlecaps themselves (a token reminder of the Atlantic Slave Trade) are present in the galleries, but do not overwhelm our sensory experience of the work. Instead, memory and history are transformed into a celebratory occasion. The eponymous piece in the show is one of the largest of the tapestries, measuring 145 5/8 x 441 inches.  As with all his work, Anatsui wields his deceptively simple palette masterfully, building blocks of colors with subtle care and changing the direction and rhythm of the weave as a painter would carefully choreograph her brushstrokes. A red form pulsates outward across the space, meeting a cool continent of silver and yellow. Suggestive of a pinwheel, a sunset, or a flower, the energy is vibrant and expansive. It is not a finished statement, but a ball of potential energy thrown up against a wall, continually growing and shifting, adjusting to circumstances with gravity and grace.

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David Diao, Double Rejection 1 (MOMA Boardroom), 2012. Acrylic, paper and silkscreen on canvas, 36 x 78 inches. Courtesy of Postmasters

If ever the timing of a show was pitch perfect with the circumstances of its venue, it is David Diao: TMI.  This at once ironic and plaintive show, delving into the cruel vagaries of the art market, is the set-striking event at Postmasters, drawing a close to their fifteen years tenancy at 459 West 19th Street—because their rent is being doubled.

The last day of show and space alike is Saturday, April 27.

TMI is an artist’s considered revenge on the perceived slights of the system.  Diao has made paintings that document the derisory results of an embarrassing dumping of his work in an inappropriate auction house.  One image, for instance, consists of the fateful auction catalog pages, replete with circled,  hand-written under-selling hammer prices.  In another painting he fantasizes a result in the opposite direction, inflating his actual auction record even more dramatically than their landlords did his gallerists’ rent.  High up on a ledge are duplicates in miniature of the devalued works,  for sale at a “correct,” (IE non-market) price in a gesture of what the Chinese call “chutzpah.”  But he doesn’t stop with auction injustice.  Other paintings adapt the graphics of a MoMA Picasso retrospective for an announcement of a fictional retrospective for himself at the same institution.  Another drops one of his own pictures into a painted rendering of a photograph of the old trustees’ dining room to memorialize the moment when curator John Elderfield presented the work to the board for consideration, only for it to be declined.

Installation shot of small paintings in David Diao: TMI at Postmasters, the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Postmasters

A master of “conceptual abstraction,” Diao is no stranger to the theme of indignant loss.  His previous, 2009 outing at Postmasters, titled “I lived there until I was 6…,” delved into family history.  His grandfather had been a well-off official in Sichuan before the revolution when their estate – tennis court and all – was confiscated by the communists.  Diao ingeniously melded architectural plans and state and party emblems into a faux-Suprematist iconography that both told an old tale and affirmed his current artistic values.  But this new body of work has a very different spirit as the focus shifts from family to career, and the foe from party state to art world.

Self-pity, of course, is a familiar theme among artists, but le peintre maudit usually gravitates towards an appropriately romantic style: something fey or expressionist, perhaps.  The jarring peculiarity here is between Diao’s intellectually aloof-seeming, coolly meticulous painting craft, on the one hand, and his only half-self-mocking sense of ruffled entitlement, on the other.  The MoMA announcement, for instance: is it saying that he was due a retrospective there? Is it goading institution and viewer alike to take action or to expect one some day?  Diao may well be forging a novel hybrid aesthetic with this show: Hard-Edge Patheticism.

While other Chelsea galleries, including the old Peter Blum and Sean Kelly spaces, are giving way to condos and boutiques in the High Line-propelled anti-art boom, the fine space that Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich built in Chelsea will actually not be lost to art: it will soon serve as a new home for Leo Koenig Gallery. Postmasters, meanwhile, are retracing their steps downtown as they are set to reopen in Tribeca.  Not the worst place, as it happens, to experience downward mobility.

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April 5 to May 10, 2013
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, 215-629-1000

Jane Irish, Yellow Room, 2012. Egg tempera on linen, 48 x 54 inches. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Decoration provides an occasion for superimposing one reality on another. Unlike paintings, wall hangings or vases don’t attract notice when they carry images that disagree in scale, viewpoint and level of completion. Jane Irish’s paintings, drawings and ceramic vases on view in Sông H’u’ong: Withdrawing Room at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery take advantage of decorative tropes to boomerang the viewer from pastoral pleasantries to the horrors of war.

The images, colors, and materials with which we surround ourselves express beauty, but also power, as they allow us to order space according to our wishes. Irish’s works draw their inspiration from the chateaux of the corsairs of St. Malo from France’s colonial era, who incorporated loot from the world over into their rococo interiors. Irish has spent ample time studying the hôtels particuliers of this quiet Breton town, and her beautifully colored works would serve as a tourist guide to this regional style—except that her own decorating choices are different from the seafaring oligarchs’.

A typical strategy for the muralist is to bring the outside in. A series of ceiling height egg-tempera panoramas in the exhibition’s namesake, Sông H’u’ong (2013) fill the gallery with sky, and seem to invite the viewer to step into another reality. Vignettes of temples and picturesque cityscapes from Vietnam’s Sông H’u’ong, or Perfume River, crowd each panel. Although its colors beckon, the painted egg-and-dart molding at the mural’s base reminds you that you are looking at wallpaper. This tension between encompassing and repelling the viewer is evident throughout Irish’s work.

Irish’s St. Malo interiors lead us, Alice in Wonderland fashion, from genteel interior straight to the conquered lands. In her tempera painting Yellow Room (2012), for example, a doorway on the left opens into another Asian panorama with river, temple and brilliant-hued sky. The painting veers from strict two-point perspective to collection of vignettes, with no clear dividing line between rational and irrational space. The right side opens into a completely different Far East exterior space, and a third opening is visible through a window in the room’s distant corner. It’s as if the chinoiserie jumped off the walls and ambushed the home from three different angles.

Jane Irish, Thousand Yard Stare Urn, 2012. Low fire whiteware, china paint, luster and underglaze, 15½ x 8 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Vietnam in particular has been a concern of Irish since she organized the Operation Rapid American Withdrawal show in 2005 at Philadelphia’s Crane Arts Building. The exhibition united artists, Vietnam veterans and antiwar activists in a multimedia event that commemorated a 1970 protest march through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Since that time Irish has often made the veterans’ poetry a part of her work

Irish’s ceramic pieces, modeled after Asian pottery, flank Yellow Room. The vignettes on these pots are less than benign. Amidst the brilliant red hues of Thousand Yard Stare Urn (2012) are black and white images of men who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of their service in the war. On display in the upstairs portion of the gallery is a drawing, also titled Thousand Yard Stare (2013) that combines ornate interiors with the writings and faces of activist Vietnam veterans.

As a point of comparison, David Salle’s work from the 1980s also juxtaposed flat patterns, interior views, linear illustration, and objets d’art from colonized lands. Whereas Salle’s combinations had the randomness of a Mad Libs game, Irish’s seem to have point. The Vietnam War was a Franco-American collaboration, started as the War in French Indochina.  Some would argue that American war profiteers have plundered just as eagerly as their French predecessors. Rapid withdrawal from violent conquest everywhere can release us from the miasma of bloody vignettes that fill our minds and living rooms.

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April 7 to May 4, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (646) 559-5906

Ariane Lopez-Huici, Priscille, 2009. Silver gelatin print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Hionas Gallery

The tiny, birdlike French photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici is always drawn to marginal human subjects—amazingly obese women, a mother-son nude couple, a dancer on crutches. Now, in a one-woman show of black-and-white photographs at Hionas Gallery she has turned to Priscille, a beautiful blonde French model who threw herself under a subway in an attempt to commit suicide and emerged without her limbs. Priscille’s father has disowned her for destroying the body “he gave her,” but she soldiers on.  She is even pregnant now and is amazed to think she will give birth to a creature with all its limbs.

Lopez-Huici is the opposite of, say, a Diane Arbus. She is not picturing freaks in their eccentric habitats and exaggerating their peculiarities but rather placing her odd subjects outside time and place in a noble, seamless black setting, often lit beautifully.  She has found the Venus of Willendorf in her obese women, turned them into fertility goddesses, and she has discovered what is demure or seductive in Priscille.  Many male viewers are disturbed to discover they are turned on by her mutilated body.  If she is mutilated, she is no more so than the fragments of ancient classical sculpture we know so well and admire.

From an ethical point of view it is important to remark that Priscille sought out Lopez-Huici and was disappointed that she did not photograph her right away.  Because of Lopez-Huici’s previous work, which has been widely shown (including in a big museum show in Spain), Priscille contacted her.  We are so used to privileged, intact photographers stealing the souls of the unfortunate, it’s crucial to underline that Lopez-Huici offers her people sympathy and respect.  She makes the mutilated whole.

Her affection recalls that of George Dureau, the New Orleans photographer, who pictured his limbless and homeless subjects, sometimes propelling themselves about on a skateboard, in heroic, tenderly lit poses.  Dureau’s extremely original work of the 1970s inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, who himself often found the humanity in his sado-masochistic subjects.

Ariane Lopez-Huici, Priscille, 2009. Silver gelatin print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Hionas Gallery

But Lopez-Huici photographs mostly women, bathes them in a charisma of light, banishes any lingering sense of shame and discovers, for instance, what a different culture or epoch might have admired in female obesity.  Priscille posed for Lopez-Huici over several years and we can see her gradually relaxing and becoming more secure and, finally, confronting the camera directly if timidly when her pregnancy has become evident.

It is a curiosity of photography as an art that it deals with both subjectivity and objectivity.  The model is called “the subject,” though he or she is what is looked at through the objectif, the French word for “lens.” In the early days of political correctness, critics used to complain that photographers were “objectifying” their subjects; I remember Mapplethorpe especially was attacked for objectifying black men.  But the very nature of photographing is objectifying; I can’t think how a photographer could avoid it, unless the model took a simultaneous picture of the artist, or unless the model appended, say, a long written response  to the picture.

If sympathy and obvious respect and affection count for something, however, Lopez-Huici can be said to eschew exploitation, lavishing Priscille in abundant aesthetic kindness.

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March 28 to April 27, 2013
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212-268-6699

Judith Belzer, Through Lines #20, 2011. Oil on canvas, 34 x 74 inches. Courtesy of Morgan Lehman Gallery

Judith Belzer’s recent paintings careen between the vertiginous grandeur of her larger, blueprint-like compositions and the close-up, increasingly flat and microscopic intimacy of her smaller canvases. The cellular, gridded patterns of these latter paintings (each only 10 by 10 inches), derive from birds-eye views of fuel storage tanks and industrial sites that flank the freeways, often alongside the compromised wetlands of San Francisco Bay: those eight-lane highways packed with perpetually congested or rushing traffic that snakes far below the precipitous Berkeley highlands.

The artist’s move to the West Coast a decade ago had a liberating effect on her work, enlarging her painterly vocabulary and opening up her style. After living in Manhattan and Connecticut she found her visual thinking astonished and transformed by the fierce scale, sweep, and sprawl of this new and unfamiliar urbanized landscape.

While it is heady with visual drama, her newest work embodies growing disquiet at the relentless industrial invasion of the natural environment. Belzer’s previous series of paintings, in which she discovered within the internal patterning of wood grain and tree bark a mysterious, undulating abstraction, were uncanny, analytical, close-up compositions. Her “Edgelands” series expands to probe contemporary culture’s uneasy relationship with the natural landscape through sweeping graphic patterning and design rendered as a kind of cartographical shorthand. Line, rather than any overwhelming color, dominates these pictures, while a radiant sense of encompassing light is transmitted through Belzer’s use of a rich variety of whites. ( A passionate relationship with nature has underlain her art throughout her career. Belzer’s early work, first shown in 1996 at Berry Hill Galleries in New York, were realistically observed, yet quite expressionistically rendered studies of the forms of different flowers, fruits and foliage.)

Judith Belzer, Edgelands #30, 2013. Oil on canvas, 56 x 56 inches. Courtesy of Morgan Lehman Gallery

These newest paintings are deliriously complex. The artist’s use of dizzying perspective may recall Wayne Thiebaud’s joyfully vertical San Francisco streetscapes and checkerboard constellations of fields, but Belzer’s tenser vision is distinctly more dystopian than his, breathless with speed rather than serenely static.  And though there is some romanticism about painting itself in her works, an emphasis on recording the impact of modern industrial realities represents an affinity with Rackstraw Downes’ scrupulous, reportorial realism.

Her Olympian, aerial perspective maps shifting layers of urbanized landscape where planners, with a heavy hand, have superimposed factories, storage tanks, warehouses and superhighways on the spectacular coastline. Alarm at this ruthless environmental damage finds an echo, in Belzer’s aesthetically compelling recent work, in her over-the-speed-limit trajectories of agitated line.  Belzer is an artist whose work grows ever more ambitious and distinctive.

This spring, concurrent with the gallery exhibition, Belzer’s work will be included in two museum group shows in New York: Against the Grain at the Museum of Arts and Design and Drawn to Nature at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York.

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February 8 to May 8, 2013

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street at Lexington Avenue
New York City, 212-772-4991

Víctor Grippo, Analogía IV (III) [Analogy IV (III)], 1972, Wood table, ceramic and acrylic dishes, metal silverware, cotton and velvet tablecloths, natural and acrylic potatoes; installation dimensions 29 3/4 x 37 1/8 x 23 3/16 in. (75.6 x 94.3 x 58.9 cm). Edition 3/5, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

This exchange took place well before the advent of the digital age, at a time when artists were still writing postcards, sending faxes, telegrams, and actually speaking on the phone. Open workalso makes clear the variety of ephemeral media being employed by Latin American artists, such as inexpensive chapbooks, Xeroxed papers, black and white video, documentary photographs, and diagrammatic drawings. Conceptual Art was proto-digital in that the ideas (software) for digital transmission were being disseminated before the hardware became available and the electronics became miniaturized. But herein lies an important caveat: that decade’s best work was much more complex and ambiguous than our contemporary digital reproductions and sound bites have led us believe. The fact is that many small publications and critical surveys on the subject, in one form or another, may not exist on-line, including out-of-print publications, carbon-copied essays, important letters, manifestos, symposia transcripts, audiotaped interviews, and videotaped panel discussions, events, and lectures. Just because Conceptual Art is about “ideas” does not mean that all the significant work exists in digital form, just as not everything digital even begins to approach the complexities of Conceptual Art.

Similar ground to this exhibition was covered in Global Conceptualism (1999) at the Queens Museum of Art, and Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited), edited by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Jose Miguel Cortes (Universidad Politechnica de Valencia, 1990), which proved an invaluable resource in Spanish for artists in Europe and the Americas.  Open Work also establishes an important connection with the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion in Buenos Aires, founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg, in which New York conceptualists were often invited to work in Latin America. Each of these events occurred outside the mainstream of activity in northern Europe and the United States, and thus, preceded the more recent interest in researching conceptualism in various regions of Latin America as seen in this exhibition.

Luis Camnitzer, Sentence Reflecting the Sentence That States the Reflection, 1975, Wood, brass, and glass, 13 7/8 x 9 3/4 x 2 in. (35.2 x 24.8 x 5.1 cm), Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The exhibition title’s Open Work is taken from a term first used by Umberto Eco in 1962, in which he identifies a revisionist aesthetic based on ambiguity, participation, and information in contrast to Benedetto Croce’s insistence on intuition and expression introduced in his book, Aesthetic (1908). The curator Harper Montgomery cites Eco as a source for the exhibition given the semiologist’s interest in allowing viewers, listeners, and readers to complete the work. Sometimes participation is an explicitly political component of the artwork. A good example would be Victor Grippo’s installation Analogia IV (1972), a modest table with two settings, separated in black and white, in which the viewer may presumably share a lunch with a peasant worker. The Brazilian artist Antonio Dias’s taped grid with open spaces on the floor is more concrete. Titled Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968), the grid designates a space without authority or control from the outside, obviously in reference to repressive political regimes in his country’s past.

Another Brazilian, Hélio Oiticica, presented his relaxation installation, Nests, at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.  We learn, however, in Jeremiah W. McCarthy’s essay in the exhibition catalog for Open Work that this work was, in fact, a last minute replacement for another film projection installation that he called an “Intentional opened visual-spectator act.” According to the essayist, Oiticica’s proposal was rejected because “the medium possessed subversive potential,” less in relation to the content of the film than in the artist’s rejection of using Olivetti’s formidable Information Machine. In addition to the actions of Cildo Meireles and Rafael Ferrer who questioned the relationship of high modernist art to late capitalism, the graphic works of Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter also embodied a strong opposition to the restrictive entitlements and alienating effects of the New York art scene.

The influence of North American artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, and Donald Burgy, is present in a manner that offers a kind of necessary tension, while contributing an important advance to some of the more indigenous aspects present in the work of their South American counterparts. Here I am thinking of the time pieces and performances of David Lamelas, Eduardo Costa, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujin, all fascinating artists. In the context of this relationship between artists working in the two Americas, Open Work makes virtually everything—no matter what the work’s original intention – a series of stains by Ed Ruscha, for example – appear as a political statement. This is most likely how the artists included in this provocative and curiously intimate exhibition understood their work at the time – forty years ago– that, indeed, context is what determines content.

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Editor’s Note: Robert C. Morgan, who is a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of several significant studies in the area of global conceptual art, including Del Arte a La Idea: Ensayos sobre Arte Conceptual (Madrid: Akal, 2003); El Fin del Mundo del Arte y Otros Ensayos (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2000); and  El Artista en el Siglo XXI: La era de la Globalizacion (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2012).