Tracey Emin: Roman Standard
Installation in Petrosino Square, New York City
May 10 to September 8, 2013

Tracey Emin, I Followed You to The Sun, 2013, neon, 22.4 x 72 inches 5, edition of 3 © Tracey Emin. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

I’ve often thought that what Anne Sexton is to poetry, Tracey Emin is to art: both lance their blisters publicly with the sincere belief that there is no other way. This is a compliment. It is easy to assume that the sort of reckless confession Sexton and Emin are prone to is somehow cheap. Perhaps this is because it makes the audience not simply readers or viewers but judge, jury, and executioner. At least Sexton had metaphor to distract from her abortions and affairs and suicide attempts. Emin’s admissions are literal, naked, and often involve images of the artist literally naked. But, to paraphrase Dolly Parton, it takes a lot of care to look this careless.

In her fifth solo exhibition in New York, at Lehmann Maupin, spanning both the gallery’s Chelsea and Lower East Side spaces, Emin continues to work her calling-card themes. The show is entitled I Followed You To The Sun, after one of the artist’s neon installations, which proclaims as much in a yellow that stops just short of sunny. (Trust Emin to one-up those lovers who would not go farther than the moon.) Featuring over one hundred works, the exhibition reflects Emin’s signature medley of media; besides neon, there are drawings, embroideries, sculptures, and a film titled Love Never Wanted Me, which consists of images of a frolicking fox accompanied by Emin’s plaintive narration, a lament for a lover gone. The installation of the works in relation to each other becomes an important element in making sense of Emin’s narrative. For instance, her film is projected perpendicularly to the neon piece, a juxtaposition that emphasizes how much the artist will do for love and how little it has done for her.

The Chrystie Street gallery is devoted to a series of works on paper (gouaches and monoprints) based on photos Emin took of herself sitting naked on a chair, her legs spread, her face obscured. The blunt titles—“Lonely Chair drawing V,” “She kept crying,” “a Feeling of Past”—contribute to the voyeuristic, confessional mood. In the prints, handwritten text around the image makes the work even more intimate. Sample lines include, “That’s how you make me Feel” and “I fucked up I failed—it was my disaster—my choice—I just didn’t expect to feel so bad.” And here’s literal for you: the first attempt at “failed” is misspelled and crossed out.

Tracey Emin, a Feeling of Past, 2012, gouache on paper 9.84 x 9.84 inches © Tracey Emin. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

If the images and allusions to personal melodrama sound familiar, that’s because they are. Emin has been working with these motifs since the beginning of her career. Her sexual brazenness, self-destructive need to be loved, and constant disappointment in matters of the heart are her great subject. From this place of high-pitch emotion she has produced work that is stunning in its simplicity and its conceit. This is an artist, after all, who made her bed into the artwork My Bed (1998) and received a Turner Prize nomination.

The key to Emin’s work is how surprising it can be even when it repeats itself. It asks of us nothing and everything. Because, the thing is, Emin will follow you to the sun, but you have to be willing to go to the sun first. In her guilelessness, she exposes our guile, our need to look and look and look. She keeps expanding her forms, changing her paces ever so slightly, which in turn keeps her theme of self-involvement compelling to both the new viewer and the veteran. For this exhibition she has created neat little bronze block sculptures painted all-over white with a small animal or bird perched atop. One ostensibly interesting thing about these works is that they were cast at the Long Island foundry Louise Bourgeois used to make her own sculptures. Emin and Bourgeois famously collaborated on a series of drawings shortly before the older artist’s death in 2010, and the origin story for these statuaries solidifies the connection between the two women.

But to really understand the pull of Emin’s work, you have to visit Petrosino Square on the border of SoHo and Little Italy, where she has installed Roman Standard, a 13-foot pole with a single bronze bird balanced on top. (The artwork will remain in the park through September 8, 2013.) That bird, its wings at rest, its little head held proudly, speaks to the fundamental hope of Emin’s otherwise melancholic vision. What she has been confessing all along is an innocence, an optimism that cannot be undone no matter how many times she is hurt, by herself and by others: she would go to the sun, and it would burn, but it would also be beautiful.

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May 3 to June 15, 2013
Johannes Vogt Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 205
New York City, 212-255-2671

Installation view of Hansjoerg Dobliar: “Hysterie und Abstraktion.” Courtesy of Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York.

In Untitled (2012) the folds of a striped circus tent are pulled aside to reveal the howling mouths of a thousand crazed clowns. Just beyond the “tent”, decadence and jubilee unfurl from abstract forms in golden yellow, magenta and quinacridone red. The clamor of searing hue and jagged geometry is tempered and pressed in upon by the sagging navy folds which dominate the upper third of the canvas. A strong central image recurs in Circus II (tête de femme) (2012) in which a diamond form dominates the shallow space of the canvas. The geometries in Dobliar’s work are precarious: triangles, diamonds and rhomboids become animate as they careen through space. The tent form is both spectacle and shelter.

Hansjoerg Dobliar, Tête, 2013, acrylic, oil, lacquer on nettle, 51 1/8 x 47 1/4 inches. Unique. Courtesy of Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York.

Dobliar begins each painting with a dirty brush which he moves from one canvas to the next.  Evidence of this base materiality is seen in Tête (2013) the most open and air filled composition on view. The quartered canvas evokes Alexej von Jawlensky’s “T-faced” portraits from the 20’s and 30’s. The edges of the painting are stained maroon, yellow and grey green while cylinders (cigarettes, reeds, a pan pipe) radiate from the paintings center. Five discrete forms are placed within the grid like totemic objects or indecipherable occult symbols.

In the rear gallery an array of small works on aluminum are hung against Dobliar’s custom-made wallpaper. Lopsided triangles in a murky blue tumble about through strange shimmering fields. Diffuse permutations of rose, lavender and mauve are pierced through by myriad shades of gold. The lighting has a German Expressionist quality, and the point of departure for the wallpaper was in fact a photograph of an opera backdrop designed by Kirchner.

While Dobliar’s paintings make striking use of speed and movement as their medium ­– an underlying order is present just below the expressionist surfaces of his work. With color, geometry and surface colliding and, at times, vying for attention, each element threatening to supersede the other – there is such a wealth of personally symbolic forms and formal rigor in this work to make one realize that there is much more to them than slapdash and quick thrills.

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May 10 to June 22, 2013
526 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, (212) 463-7777

Gedi Sibony, All Her Teeth Are Made of Slate, 2013, wood paint and screws, 96 x40 3/4 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

Greene Naftali’s presentation at the Frieze Art Fair in May featured a new sculpture by Gedi Sibony that exhibits all the quint  essential traits of the artist’s work. Humorously and enigmatically titled, The Sleeve Lifter (2013) is a free- standing wood plank roughly the size of a narrow door, pinned to a curl of brown paper. In this simple construction, Sibony makes the plank and the paper seem serendipitously coupled, their respective curvature and rigidity becoming illuminated in the presence of the other. In works such as this Sibony shows himself to be a master formalist in three dimensions, one that regards chaos as coincidence. In speaking about his working process in a 2005 interview, he explained how he “liked having an object that was incomplete or broken, because it relieved me of having to succeed with an object. So, I could play, look at relationships, and orchestrate something more broadly, concentrated in the spaces between objects.”

Sibony has established a distinctive oeuvre of lyrical and plaintive objects assembled from typically utilitarian or industrial materials. Recurring members of this unassuming cast include insulation board, carpeting, garbage bags, sticks, MDF, packing tape, and plywood. In the hands of Sibony, raw materials become earnest protagonists not quite forceful enough to be heroic, but with a specific gravity and elegance. For these reasons, critics and curators have discussed his work in relation to Minimalism, Arte Povera, and process art. In his current solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, however, Sibony moves into an unfamiliar visual arena. The 21 new works feature representational imagery and often a painterly sensibility not present in his previous iconic bodies of work.  My efforts to retrace his mental steps only became fruitful once I remembered that Sibony was an abstract painter before he was a sculptor, and that as an undergraduate, studied semiotics with a particular fondness for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Armed with this knowledge, the cryptic epithet atop the exhibition’s press release, an excerpt from a Beatrix Potter nursery rhyme about a mole, becomes a keyhole through which to see these new works: “He digs and he delves. You can see for yourselves. The mounds dug by Diggory Delvet.” In this exhibition, digging is Sibony’s act of revealing semiotic and linguistic structures, and their foils.

Gedi Sibony, Eight More Petals, 2013, wood, foam core, cardboard, paper, tape, 97 x 44 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

Through this lens, the centerpiece of the exhibition starts to cohere. Ceaseless Episodes of Blossom (2013) is a monumental triptych suspended on the backsides of dark, dully gray carpet, on which Sibony painted a non-sequential pattern of five white icons signifying the seasons.  This work embodies both order (in the uniform semiotic system, performed in a grid) and anarchy (in the arbitrary correlation between five signifiers and four signified concepts, in unpredictable repetition) with impressive succinctness and simplicity. The same could be said of a slightly earlier work All Ants Live in the Wild (2011), a swath of carpet containing the alphabet scrawled out of order, with the first 13 letters in white paint and the last 13 in red marker.  Both Ceaseless Episodes and All Ants corrupt autonomous systems, and in doing so, reveal their construction while opening them to alternative applications.

Much of the exhibition thereafter unfolds in word play. In spite of the gravity of his preoccupations, Sibony has always had a wry sense of humor that is most evident in his peculiar title choices.  I chuckled at First There Was This (2013), a freestanding light box with an abstract cutout that, during my two visits, was not illuminated, and is thus poised forever in that biblical moment just before light was cleaved from darkness. Sibony makes a cheeky pun in Migratorius (2013), a framed Audobon-style print of two birds that have been uprooted from elsewhere and settled now in Sibony’s visual landscape. By drawing a line between appropriation and migration, Sibony not only pokes fun at his own action, but also delivers a light jab at the conceptual practice of re-appropriation.

The works making the most powerful implications about the limits of language in my opinion were, ironically but not surprisingly, those in which Sibony performed the simplest intervention. In a small room near the gallery entrance hangs a suite of nine framed works on paper (all 2013), which we assume were once prints or drawings. We cannot be sure because Sibony has reversed the paper, revealing sun-bleached outlines, glue-stains, tape scabs, cardboard and mats. These hidden marks made visible are beautiful in a shy and haphazard way. As we come to understand more sides of the object, as it were, we simultaneously experience a slippage in distinctions of front and back, finished and unfinished—By what name do we call the side we are looking at, and can these works still be classified as “drawings” or “prints”?

That I experienced difficulty writing about and ascribing language to Sibony’s work proves to me the success of his undertaking (and of taking us underneath, that Diggory Delvet!). Even as he robs us of our immediate descriptive powers, Gedi Sibony offers us glimpses of the sinews of our vocabularies, and proffers poetic examples of its potential.

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September 16, 2012 to January 6, 2013
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California, (323) 857-6000

February 9 to May 12, 2013
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas,  (214) 242-5100

June 18 to September 22, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York City, (212) 535-7710

Ken Price, Zizi, 2011, acrylic on fired ceramic, 16 1/2 x 24 x 17 inches. Los Angeles Country Museum of Art purchased with funds by the Modern and Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund and gift of Matthew Marks. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen.

Upon entering this visually stunning retrospective of Ken Price’s ceramic sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) visitors were captivated by a profusion of colors beckoning one into Price’s surreal world of quirky shapes, forms, and surfaces. (Following a three-month stay at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the exhibition completes its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening June 18.)  Frank Gehry, a long-time friend of Price, created a sensitive exhibition design that transformed the cavernous museum space into intimate areas.  It is easy to see why Gehry, in his catalogue essay, speculates how difficult it would be for him to live without works of such enigmatic beauty. The first object one encounters is Zizi (2011), a seductively iridescent turquoise clay sculpture existing on the border between figuration and abstraction. On closer inspection, the work’s apparently monochromatic surface dissolves into green-centered islands of different shapes surrounded by successive rings of yellow, red and purple, a visual experience reminiscent of 19th century Pointillism or a Chuck Close portrait.

By both beginning and ending with Price’s last works and moving backward in time in the middle galleries, the exhibition’s installation enables us to appreciate Price’s remarkable allegiance to dualities in form and sensibility: A shifting back and forth between the architectural and the biomorphic, the geometric and the sensual, the majestic and the humble, the tiny and the grand, the humorous and the serious. There’s a corresponding variety in Price’s surfaces, alternating between the smooth and the rough, the flat and the ridged, the straight edged and the craggy, the glazed and the painted.  In crafting these unpredictable combinations of form, color and surface, Price sought to motivate us to examine more closely the manifold worlds around us.

Price’s work offers as many challenges as pleasures.  While, as an individual, he did not explicitly follow Zen practices, his search for beauty in dissonance and imperfection is consistent with a Zen sensibility. The sculptures offer a rough beauty that defies facile labeling, an aesthetic that seems rooted at a pre-verbal level, where the emotional outweighs the conceptual.  Another aspect of Price’s rough beauty is its “primordial freshness,” a term coined by the poet John Crowe Ransom in 1938.  Price’s engagement with the primal informs his persistent and evolving exploration of the void—those openings that live between the inside and the outside. The “Eggs and Specimens” series from the early 1960s, such as L. Blue (1961), are interrupted by slits and voids that reveal a variety of primitive shapes such as slithering worm-like creatures, phallic protrusions, and gooey globs.

Ken Price, Arctic, 1998, fired and painted clay, 22 x 16 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward R. Broida. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Price’s forms become increasingly architectural in the early 1980s. The void-like openings now function as portals or windows evoking, in their uncanny simplicity, the architecture of ancient cliff dwellings and the spirit of minimalist design, as in Hawaiian (1980).  Beginning with the so-called “Rocks” series of the late ‘80s, there is greater complexity at a number of levels.  In works like Big Load (1988), the enigmatic void is in the form of a black cube that is set against a smoothly painted yellow slice that appears to be cut out of a solid orb with a veiny blue surface.  Price’s illusionistic cubes, while reminiscent of James Turrell’s corner installations of projected light, are even more mysterious.  Whereas the ambiguity in Turrell’s projected cubes can be resolved visually, with Price’s three-dimensional voids, it is not possible to determine solely by looking whether it is an extruded cube or a deep hole.  You want to put your finger into it to find out, an impulse not present in a Turrell.  In the next group of works from the 1990s, the voids become more explicitly sensual, with a touch of violence.  The erotic white Arctic (1998) exhibits a painted-red vaginal-like opening or deep wound.

In 2000 Price’s quest for a rough beauty takes on a new focus.  The voids disappear, the forms become larger and more intertwined, and surface color becomes his main concern.  What occurred in Zizi holds true for the majority of these late works.  Upon close viewing, seemingly uniform surfaces morph into innumerable brilliantly colored paisley patterns with dozens of nested color combinations.  Price achieved these effects by way of a multi-part technique. Following his shaping and firing of the clay, he would apply up to a hundred thin layers of acrylic paint on the sculpted form before using sandpaper to painstakingly remove some of the layers, differentially exposing the colors underneath.  In these last works, Price is the consummate painter, transforming fired clay surfaces into dense, yet delicate fields of color.

There’s a Thoreau-like sensitivity to nature in Price’s most successful late work. The structures of the natural world—with its mountains, deserts, tide-pools, beehives, snake skins, etc. — are the touchstones for his non-literal fusion of color, surface, and shape.  As Price’s work matured, color changed from a substance to be applied ‘top down’ to a more organic process that appears to evolve ‘bottom up’ to satisfy the needs of form. That is, Price’s ability to map certain colors onto certain forms (as opposed to others) projects a certain inevitability that simulates nature’s functional imperatives, as when the feather color of a Blue Jay or a peacock is determined by natural selection to improve mating capability. Price’s structures embody a Zen orientation to nature that values aging and its concomitant limitations.  Certain Price forms can be interpreted as capturing the ravages of time.  One can perceive the frailty and vulnerability of the human condition in his early “Eggs and Specimens” series and especially in the veiny surfaces of his later works like Big Load (1988).  Price’s empathy for the human condition can also be experienced in his slumping, teetering, and sometimes wounded forms, as well as in some of his last more anthropomorphic sculptures that resemble strange, sometimes vulnerable creatures lying on their backs with their limbs flailing in the air or sitting upright to beckon you.  These works harbor a pathos and poignancy that sneaks up on you.

From the perspective of recent art history, Ken Price has turned on its head Donald Judd’s argument that specific objects should replace painting.  In creating paintings that are essentially three-dimensional fields of color, Price re-invigorates the exploration of color as an aesthetic force across mediums.  In effect, not only did Price blur the boundary between craft and sculpture, but also, in contradistinction to Clement Greenberg’s theory of the singular medium, he blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture.  For his first forty years, Price made painted sculptures, and for the last twelve, until his death in 2012, he made sculpted paintings—all the while defying art historical categories in the name of a visual pleasure principle leavened by an essential humanity.

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May 9 to June 15, 2013
520 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-966-6676

Installation shot of Robert Zakanitch: Hanging Gardens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery showing Wisteria II and (distance) Fireglow from the series. Courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Gallery

“Glorious” was a word heard frequently at Robert Zakanitch’s opening in response to his unexpectedly large (eight by five feet) gouaches on paper hangings that suit his imagery so magnificently: great expanses of often small budding blossoms, curtains of pale wisterias in full bloom, bittersweet, and glowing dandelion puffs–or maybe fireflies, willfully indeterminate in bursts of light.  If Beauty (with an upper case `B’) has gone out of style, no one told this artist, a longtime proponent of such traditionally and immediately appealing subjects — lace, jewels, cherubs, sunset landscapes, and now gardens — bypassed, if not scoffed at, in recent decades. But John DeFazio, in a fine catalogue essay, actually thanks Zakanitch for “daring” to be gentle, sweet, and pretty.   Perhaps we’ve come around to understanding that beauty is no longer déclassé.

The series, named after the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, wonder of the Ancient World, exudes a mythic quality in the evocative and irreal proliferation of plants removed from materiality by his blanched colors, flattening of form, and wonderfully rhythmic and decorative flowery festoons.  The delicacy of his petalled plants answer to the matte, chalky colors that serve them.  Their fragility is enhanced by the painting technique and the medium itself, with luminosity glanced in the interstices among the abundant blooms.  While entirely authentic and superbly observed, not for a moment are these florid items realistic.

Robert Zakanitch, Hanging Gardens Series (Wisteria II), 2011-12. Gouache and colored pencil on paper, 96 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Gallery

These exhilarating compositions are often topped by decorative grids or by ornamental arabesques of bordering trellises, with the lower portions left contrastingly unfinished.  Drips of paint accentuate the lusciousness of these images.  Though the artist is in absolute command of his medium, there is an insistent lack of pretentiousness, most obvious, perhaps, in the almost offhand, contour-lined lattices or the occasional bit of writing, as in his simple, slanting signature.  That the viewer is allowed to see the transformation as strokes and dribbles of paint metamorphose into ravishing flora imagery seems like one more gift from this generous artist.

The overall rhythmic patterns of the lush carpets of flowers give way to enormous variety when further examined.  Buds are at different stages of opening, their sizes and tonalities varying.  Some petals are flush with pale pinks or lilacs while others are awash with transparency.  One flower droops or is somewhat turned, clusters are more or less tight. Zakanitch was one of the founders of Pattern and Decoration in the 1970s which accounts perhaps  for the importance of repeated flat design to his work.  But P&D is a reductive and therefore not very astute term in relation to Zakanitch, failing to take into account just how painterly his surfaces are, and never simply homogenized.  The tender, sometimes impish wit presented in his variations recall Dutch seventeenth-century still life painting: careful looking is rewarded by the discovery that the cascades of flowers are very much alive, abuzz with small insects, tiny lady bugs among them.  Meanwhile there may be a silhouetted misty bird hovering nearby. The work holds attention and is sumptuously satisfying at differing viewing distances.  This is true, as well, of the small gouaches also included in the show that yield their own extravagant pleasure.   Happily, the commendable exhibition catalogue acknowledges the importance of seeing works both as a whole and in detail by reproducing close-ups at several different degrees.

Robert Zakanitch, without pretentiousness or folderol, truly goes to bat for beauty.

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April 25 to June 22, 2013
20 West 57th St, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 244 6055

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”

And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, , Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches.  What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.

The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.

Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.

John Zurier, A spring a thousand years ago, 2012. Oil on linen, 72 x 44 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.

A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles resembling bits of electrical tape which in turn align in an upward-curving sweep as if caught in a current of wind or water. Nothing about the painting feels arbitrary. The very fact that, when working small, Zurier apparently avoids standard formats supports the impression that their every detail is the more considered.

The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.

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May 5 to June 16, 2013
133 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Delancey
New York City, 212 598 3012

Maria Petschnig, Petschsniggle, 2013. HD Video (color, sound), 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

Winding through the airtight spaces of Maria Petschnig’s video installation gives you a sense that you’re entering the artist’s body. Multiple close-up views over her shoulder or hip, expanses of soft-flesh-colored material and self-referential subject matter create an engulfing interiority that is both disturbing and funny.

The fake paneling and drop ceilings that greet you at the door make you think you’re visiting a plumbing supplier rather than a gallery. Tawdry images in the exhibition’s first video, Vasistas (2013) adds to that sense. A suited, mustachioed man sits behind a desk, while in the foreground a trench coat-wearing Petschnig performs an exhibitionistic dance. Figures in another scene lie on gray shag carpeting, and in a third, the artist stands in front of stacked boxes, her body wrapped in packing tape.

The artist’s back is almost always turned toward the viewer while the material she is facing is blurred. What you see, in fact, is not full-fledged video but footage of the artist superimposed on still photosby green screen. It’s as if you are tagging along on Petschnig’s daily routine, but instead of seeing the world through her eyes, you view a parade of backdrops she has assembled for her own amusement.

Maria Petschnig, Holdmetight, 2012. Wood, polyester, pantyhose, padding, 11 x 8 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

As you proceed through a labyrinth of paneled corridors, the feeling of being absorbed into the artists’ physical being becomes palpable. Light levels decrease toward the interior of the building and colors are rendered more uniform. The tan sheets of Mycroft (2013), a mattress plastered on one wall, cover bulging forms that vaguely resemble body parts. Holdmetight (2012) has more bulging forms made of stuffed pantyhose that hang at waist level through the ring of a towel rack. The bulbous material resembles insect larva although thanks to the stockings’ flesh tones it is also penis-like.

Nowhere is flesh more abundant—and more uncomfortably close—than in the final chamber of the exhibition. Here the video Petschniggle (2013) shows figures in various states of undress and of interlock. Two women lather each other up in a tiny tub, their bodies partly sheathed in plastic. The same pair appear later in a tiny shed whose wooden walls resemble the paneling from the gallery walls. With bodies partly cropped it is not clear exactly what the couple is doing but their position is suggestive of “69-ing”

It is shocking but strangely fitting to learn that Petschniggle stars the artist and her twin sister. The installation coalesces as Petschnig’s personal echo chamber. She casts herself in dramas whose other actors are either still photos that she selected or persons whose DNA matches her own. She even titles the work using made-up, self-referential language. What is a Petschniggle, if not a dance done by people named Petschnig? After wandering through this flesh-colored universe of a gallery of ultra-close-up bodies shot in closet-like spaces, you emerge as if ejected from someone’s insides. Fortunately Petschnig’s humor—from the choice of déclassé materials to the Seussian terminology—saves this installation from being angst-ridden, pornographic, or simply grotesque.

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April 5 to June 2, 2013
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
New York City,  (212) 219-2166

Giosetta Fioroni, Bambino solo (Lone Child), 1968, pencil, white aluminum enamel on canvas, 39 3/8 x 78 11/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Giuseppe Schiavinotto.

A lightbulb, a heart, a bed. The first three recognizable images in the Italian artist Giosetta Fioroni’s mini retrospective at the Drawing Center exude simplicity and lightness. Rendered in silver aluminum paint and graphite pencil, her paintings on paper are like evocative cover songs in which a new personality is encoded onto a popular tune. In contrast to Jasper Johns’ bronze Light Bulb I (1958), Jim Dine’s 1960s heart paintings or Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Fioroni suspends her images within expansive space, creating a context for them that feels emotional and quiet. Like much of the work on view, these paintings, made in 1959-60, have a diagrammatic quality, like theater props or designs for a larger, unseen ensemble.

The Drawing Center has become the go-to venue for re-contextualizing artists within a historical continuum of Modernism and cross-media experimentation. (Remarkable exhibitions of Frederick Kiesler, Ree Morton, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn fit this bill). L’Argento is notable for being Fioroni’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which is surprising for an artist who achieved a high level of critical attention in her native country in the 1960s. Giosetta Fioroni, born in Rome in 1932 to artist parents, was the only woman member of the Piazza del Popolo group of Roman artists that included Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi, artists who were, in Fioroni’s words, “interested in pictorial reality after ‘Art’ Informel.” The group was also closely aligned with the eurocentric, cerebral version of abstract expressionism practiced by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (a close friend of Fioroni’s), who were both highly visible in Rome in the late ‘50s. The earliest work in the show, a series of untitled drawings from her Parisian Journal (1958-62), made in “a tiny room that Tristan Tzara offered me” are a storyboard of abstract thoughts. They provide a glimpse into a young artist’s private world, her preoccupations with language, automatic writing, childhood, and theater that would provide the basis for her mature body of work.

Silver, commonly associated with Andy Warhol’s factory and the silver clouds and studio décor of high Pop, is for Fioroni a craftsman’s substance, a way to imprint memory in space.  Her three all-over silver canvases suggest a pile-up of celluloid. In Lagoon (1960) and The Secret in Action (1959-60), there is an opulence and variety to the marks; the stenciled word “LAGUNA,” appears underneath a graphite rectangle shape. Fioroni is effectively naming the painting within the painting, framing space for the art object in a similar manner to Jasper Johns’ Tennyson (1958). The paintings are nearly monochrome, but they read more as open-ended experiments than the contemporaneous blue paintings of Yves Klein. Here silver does not embody a jewel-like commodity (recently evidenced in Jacob Kassay’s highly prized silver-oxidized canvases), but signifies what Fioroni describes as a “non-color,” an emulsion layer that can absorb and reflect light.

Giosetta Fioroni, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1961, oil and enamel on canvas, 45 3/16 x 35 inches. Collection Jacorossi, Rome.

Fioroni’s paintings of archetypal ‘60s models’ faces, unsmiling and vague, framed by the semi-oval of a camera lens, dominate the show. Double Liberty and Liberty (both 1965) feature an image of the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli’s blankly staring face. The two-toned reductive image has a strong graphic quality that resembles silkscreen. The multiple borders, edges, drips and scratchy note-like pencil marks around the faces are the personalized touch that stops the work from being read as either pure idolatry or cultural critique. Less overtly dated as “Pop” painting and more purely imaginative are Lone Child (1967-68) and Self-portrait at Seven (1971-72), figures of children seen from behind and gazing into space. They carry the patina of time that the decades have bestowed on them with greater assurance than contemporaneous works; the browning edges of the cream paper and canvas come across as purposeful and true, mimicking the old photographs that the paintings themselves are presumably based on.

The conceptual and visual aspect of Fioroni’s art is further reduced in the 1970 Laguna series of silver paint and pencil drawings of the villas and vistas of Venice’s Grand Canal. In one drawing the stenciled words “San Marco” at the bottom of an empty trapezoidal shape are the only indication of the famed piazza. The potential of photography to contain all information about a given place, especially a postcard-perfect location, is inverted in this work. In conversation with the critic Alberto Boatto (in conjunction with a 1990 monograph on her work) Fioroni draws a connection between her imagery of landscapes, ruins, and solitary figures and a “sweet, rural Italy that no longer exists, replaced nowadays by a telegenic one.” Mixed in with this sentiment, however, is the spectral presence of war and politics: A painting from 1969, Obedience shows a woman giving the fascist salute, and The Mountain Tomb (1971) depicts a mountain in the Alps that was the infamous site of a battle between Italian and Austrian troops in the first world war.

Fioroni’s art is that tricky to define thing: tasteful radicalism.  Her 1960s paintings of “It girls” and lost children could as easily adorn the living rooms of Italian intellectuals as Morandi paintings did in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1963). I can see how her art’s meaning could expand through its proximity to the culture of a household, a city, or a country. Politely installed in the institutional cool of the freshly renovated Drawing Center it becomes a challenge to grasp the work’s full spectrum of content, the host of political and social implications that a contemporary Italian viewer would have picked up in Fioroni’s subject matter. What does come across is a devotion to theatre as the silver lining of all visual experience—from her early drawings of costumes, to the doll’s house sized sculpture, Home: Domestic Interior (1969), to the illustrated script for Countryside Spirits (early 1970s), a play loosely based on the village she lived in. Giosetta Fioroni’s work from the 1960s resonates today as an artifact of singular affection and ambivalence towards her country’s (and indeed the western world’s) new culture of spectatorship with its mediated relationship to personal and historical images.

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April 18th to June 1st, 2013
535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 627 3930

Keith Smith’s small, mostly monochrome images at Bruce Silverstein trigger a refreshing, animal sensation of quiet intrigue that’s rarely experienced in art nowadays—something that neither requires critical context nor resort to shock for immediate engagement.

Keith Smith, Alan Undressing, 1978. Gelatin silver print with sheet film and stitching, printed c. 1978, 7-1/8 x 4-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein

The show of brings together, for the first time, a large group of works from Smith’s earliest years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with photographs that combine sewing, drawing and painting from 1960 to 1980. In 1978 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of American Photography since 1960 alongside William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander; although his mixed-media, irreverent approach to photography does not follow the path of his then peers, his works maintains what the press release for that exhibition had exalted as the “pursuit of beauty, that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of meaningful life”.

Smith is also known for over 200 artist’s books (one of which is on display in this exhibition) that employ the three-dimensionality of the book and a meticulously guided reading experience to incorporate the dimension of time. The individuality of each page competes with the book’s overall progression.  A comparable energy is found in this show of photographs. Smith works from highly selective source images, consisting mostly of ears, eyes, his home and men he loved but could not express his affection towards. Continuity zigzags through each image’s mixed media surface and throughout the show as the motifs are explored repeatedly over 40 years, each time in a different medium and under new circumstances.

Repetition, for Smith, is a tool for revelation rather than desensitization. In addition to illustrating a surge of movement, his gelatin prints of 8mm film expose a kinetic materiality that only becomes salient whilst their subjects are in motion: when isolated from the rest of the body, the hand in “Untitled” (1966) becomes a simple glove that encloses the human touch, a shifting outline activated by the detection of its surroundings. The unique hand drawn elements add urgency and scarcity, counteracting the comfort of print reproductions and establishing a permanent, conscious attachment between the image as a concept and its physical manifestation. The matrix of 30 pans with fried eggs in Bicycle Seats (1967) is created with print emulsion and subsequently colored by hand. The shadows and shifting handlebars almost form a rhythmic pattern which does not diminish the  sovereignty of each pan.

The most arresting works from the show are probably his depictions of men. Hand coloring, stitching and various printing techniques that supplement conventional photography extend the perceptual depth and presence of the dimension of time demonstrated by his book projects, allowing Smith to convey an incredibly intense, nuanced and ordered collection of sensations. A haunting negative (the chemical opposite of reality captured by photographs) of a man removing his shirt, Alan Undressing, (1978), arises through an image of a toned torso whose hand is halfway inserted behind his belt. Fantasy and reality intersect as Alan’s piercing white eyes and a rim of stitches reinforce the image’s tangibility. Another standout picture is 1971 for Book 22, (1971) a collage of a nude young man with surprised eyes curled up in bed. The right side of his body is a darker exposure of the overall image, furiously sewn on with bits of thread that resemble sharp spikes. They are like stitches that close up a rugged surgery wound, needle by needle, uniting Smith’s desires and the young man’s flesh as if they had always belonged together.

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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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