Joan Linder, Counter, sink, 2013. Ink on paper, accordion book, 31 x 156-1/2 inches (open). Courtesy of the Artist and Mixed Greens.

Joan Linder draws with meticulous, methodical obsession.  You can read every word of the label on a near-life-sized organic milk carton, one among a hundred minutely observed everyday objects forming a panoramic chronicle of domestic bliss and chaos, amplitude and guilt – the kitchen countertop.  Linder hatches and crosshatches black and colored inks without inflection to achieve vivid saturations of “cheerful” color against the white of the paper, an effect of forensic clarity.  (Linder has drawn research and pathology labs with similar comprehensiveness.)  Despite their commanding rigor, Linder’s drawings never feel dry, clearly proceeding from internal geometries wobbling with curiosity and willfulness.  The press release is at pains to offer that Linder’s husband shares in domestic chores, so a knee-jerk feminist reading is too easy: the double basin sink here, with dirty dishes on one side, rinsed ones on the other, might be a quotidian reminder of sin and redemption, or the bicameral nature of an artist’s life.

Joan Linder: Sink on view through May 24, 531 West 26th Street, 1st Fl, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 331 8888

Ugo Rondinone, Human Nature, 2013. Rockefeller Center, New York, April 23 to June 7. Photos: Luigi Cazzaniga

Rockefeller Center is set to receive shamanic spirit this spring. Human Nature is a group of nine monumental stone figures by Ugo Rondinone.  This powerful sculptural tribe, each member of which is between 16 and 20 foot tall, will populate the New York City plaza from April 23 to June 7.

Swiss-born New York resident Rondinone has hewn his totemic personages from massive slabs of bluestone.  These, roughly cut blocks are replete with drill holes and splits from the quarry.

Organized by the Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, Human Nature is supported by Nespresso.   The fund’s director Nicholas Baume describes Rondinone’s colossi as “mythical in scale and imagery, visceral in character and impact.”  The series “reconnects the contemporary world with our most ancient origins.”

Complementing his Rockefeller Center installation, Gladstone will present “soul” on May 10, a series of small-scale bluestone figures, a show that promises an intimate yet equally potent sculptural experience.

Sanford Wurmfeld, II-15 (R-G/=V), 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 180 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Sanford Wurmfeld is quite simply one of the most informed and articulate painters working with color today. It is not only a matter of what he knows and says, but of the chromatic clarity of his large-scale optical paintings. One of the most important, yet understated aspects of his unforgettable series of perennial grid-based patterns, currently on view at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, is their complex integration of primary and secondary hues and values. (Wurmfeld taught at Hunter from 1967 until his retirement in 2006, from 1978 as chair of the art department.) What Wurmfeld reveals is a sequential modulation of color that ultimately staggers the eye/brain mechanism—and let’s include the emotional charge as well. With color theories informed by such luminaries as Leo Hurvich, Josef Albers, and Dorothea Jameson, Wurmfeld has evolved his own profoundly investigative manner of working as one of our leading geometric abstract painters. His indefatigable visual articulation of color and light derives from a process of sheer focus and assiduity that inform numerous magnificently executed, large-scale paintings in this first-rate exhibition. Missing are the full-scale circular dioramas that embrace the viewer with a saturation of color on all sides. Three major installations of these have been executed and shown elsewhere, but they have yet to be seen in New York.

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013, February 15 to April 20, 2013, Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 450 West 41st Street (between Dyer and 10th Avenue), New York City, 212-772-4000

January 17 to February 9, 2013
37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 593 3757

Katherine Mangiardi, Lace Tapestry (16th – 18th Century), 2013. Acrylic on panel, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery.

In terms of artistic medium, Katherine Mangiardi is a polyglot equally at ease, expressively and conceptually, in the languages of painting, assemblage, photography and installation.  One thing she is not, however, for all the exquisite and penetrating acuity of her perceptual gaze, is a photorealist.  It therefore comes as a surprise that the recent (2008) RISD/Skowhegan graduate enjoys her New York debut solo spot at Bernarducci Meisel, a gallery hitherto (and everywhere else in its sprawling showroom) fixated upon the hyper mimetic. Mangiardi’s focus in this current show is lace, exploring that wondrous material in myriad historic, aesthetic and social complexities.  She “sews” her own (in fact, cuts out, paints and reconfigures) in plaster and canvas; she hides her visage behind imagined identities of anonymous workers of the material in a Cindy Sherman meets Yinka Shonibare-worthy photographic masquerade; and she deconstructs the decorative syntax of lace – its curlicuing back and forth between complexity and restraint, upfrontness and veiling – in an eerily elegiac, painterly tour de force that somehow manages, in the process of fastidious rendering, to also seem like action painting.

Katherine Mangiardi at Bernarducci Meisel was an ARTCRITICAL PICK in February 2013

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January 11 to February 10, 2013
101 Grand Street, between Wythe Avenue and Berry Street,
Brooklyn, 718 302 2242

Elizabeth Riggle, Overture (for Bob and Ray), 2013. Oil on Canvas, 99 x 54 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Surrounded by Elizabeth Riggle’s lithe paintings of vertebrae, constructed with anatomical know-how, it may strike you that the artist’s very name suggests a limber spine.  And indeed, in Riggle’s show at Art 101 spinal structure sets the agenda, but painterly wriggle room keeps things flexible.  Working in oil in a range of sizes and surfaces, with brushwork splitting the difference between firm modeling and springy graphics, the artist remains faithful to the particularity of bones, each with its ordained role in what she calls the “vertebral opera.”  The two most impressive paint-dramas are a small, monochrome vanitas on wood, Dens Attentive, with vertebra standing in for skull; and Overture (For Bob and Ray), a large canvas in which Riggle riffs on boniness with flamboyant erudition, reimagining the sacral, the lumbar, and the cranial as levitating bulges of fresh, buoyant color.

Gallery open Friday through Sunday, 1 to 6 PM

Jill Nathanson, Bowtie, 2012. Synthetic Polymer and Acrylic on Panel, 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Messineo Art Projects/Wyman Contemporary

You can get lost in the mind of Jill Nathanson. In her captivating seven-piece series, the air we swim in, overlapping planes of translucent color generate expansive surfaces rich with free-form shapes.  These ethereal paintings seem weightless in the way they evoke slow, sliding movement.  She paints “the world of things,” in her own words, but her abstraction is assuredly non-objective.  Bowtie (2012) has the closest visual connection between an object’s tangibility and Nathanson’s depiction of it.  Two triangular orange planes converge at a minute point.  She is fond of such compositional devices, allowing a mixture of soft and energetic colors to develop into a heightened moment of alluring tension.  Just when we’re immersed in the deep layers of polymer resin, patches of acrylic bring us back to reality.

Jill Nathanson, Bowtie, 2012. Synthetic Polymer and Acrylic on Panel, 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Messineo Art Projects/Wyman Contemporary

Remains on view through December 20 at  511 West 25th Street, Suite 504, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212-414-0827

October 5 to 28, 2012
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn (718) 852-4396

Mary Carlson, Four Part Snake, 2010. Glazed ceramic, 41 x 12 x 14 inches. Courtesy of Studio 10

Slaying dragons is messy work, usually reserved for saints and heros, but Mary Carlson takes on a few at her Studio 10 exhibition.  Her weapon of choice is a delightfully brittle sword, the medium of glazed ceramics.  Ceramicists have been baking the hallucinatory and the terrifying into grotesque ornament since antiquity. Carlson, though, is after more than decorum.  Using clay with searching sculptural ingenuity, she defies the tendency of ceramics to prettify, and thus succeeds in killing her beasts and having them too.  Viewers may smile at her delicately clunky monsters, but their unwieldy, segmented bodies, stricken eyes, and elaborate snarls and teeth can leave bite marks of genuine pathos on the soul.

Besides large-scale dragons, Carlson includes a gathering of tiny figurines of dragon-slaying saints inspired by Renaissance depictions, their features and attributes nervously indicated without being overworked, and a pair of toddler-sized fists in glazed porcelain whose exquisite breakaway wrists resemble hatched eggshells.  The mastery of craft in these smaller works contrasts with her cloddish dragons, which flaunt clay’s almost comedic inaptness for hazardous duty.  (Equally outlandish weapons for dragon slaying, a plastic cocktail sword and a tinfoil spear, are wielded by a couple of the saintly figurines.)  The humor in Carlson’s choice of materials cuts both ways, not only against the grandiose tenets of monumental sculpture, but against the cuteness of artisanship; and by the same token her dragons resist pervasive clichés, whether Wagnerian or Potteresque.

Big Blue, a misshapen, 13-foot-long serpent laid out on a feasting table, is all the more hideous a monster, and all the more compelling a sculpture, for abusing teacup materials.  As if digesting a kill in one place while pinching to nothing in another, the dragon’s body – assembled from separately-fired stoneware elements drizzled with blue crackle glaze – swells in a way that makes one think queasily of a blocked intestine, or of an enormous tapeworm crashing a dinner party.

Mary Carlson, Catherine of Alexandria (after Pintorichhio), 2012. Glazed porcelain and plastic sword, 7 x 3 x 3 inches. Courtesy of Studio 10

Carlson’s no-nonsense tabletops, custom fitted to her dragons, can also suggest pathology slabs or fish market counters.  Four Part Snake (2010), though, is not quite ready for filleting: its googly, doglike eyes flicker with the last light of fateful recognition, perhaps of betrayal, while its gaping, floundering head tips the balance of its useless coil of a body like a spent cornucopia.  On the floor below we find a separately titled piece, Pool, which, given its placement, reads as the pitiable creature’s blood.  Yet this shiny pink, plate-sized lump looks more like fake vomit –– it’s as comical as it is tragic.  Is this wounded Goofy dying for our ridiculous, insatiable sins?

However you read Pool, there is blood everywhere in this show, and it creeps up on you. The most carefully modeled and most fearsome of Carlson’s dragons, the fully decapitated Head (2012), rests fang-first on a crimson stain of such direct address –– a spill of watercolor on paper ­­–– that the theme of blood begins, likewise, to soak in.  Meanwhile, Head’s upturned, severed neck reveals Carlson’s expertise in managing folds of interior and exterior, while displaying architectural scale and trim; no fragile table ornament, this bloodthirsty fragment might have fallen from the cornice of a sacrificial altar.  Here and there on the gallery walls, meanwhile, red-beaded embroidery takes the macabre form of enlarged bloodstain splatters and forensic drips.  Even those white porcelain child’s fists can be seen to be tinted red at the thumbnails –– nail polish, perhaps, as applied by Lady Macbeth.

Dragon’s blood in pre-Christian legend could be lethal or magical –– a drop of it scalded Siegfried, yet empowered him with the comprehension of bird talk, thus saving his life.  Carlson’s subversive mastery of different craft traditions (previous work has included a crocheted giant squid, cast brass chicken feet, and vivisected upholstery) always seems aimed at some down-to-earth enactment of ambivalence between death and transfiguration.  She succeeds best of all when indulging a gruesome sense of humor.  If her inner demons tend to resemble slavering, woeful-eyed dogs as much as Renaissance dragons, it only enhances our appreciation of their double nature.  Like the brilliant, curlicued monsters of Raphael and Pinturicchio, Carlson’s, in their own vivacious way, are not quite despicable enough.

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Carla Gannis, RobbieCarni, 2012. Digital drawing, 15 x 2.75 feet. Courtesy of Pablo’s Birthday

It may seem, just from a sampling of current shows, as if everyone is in on the cybernetic act: there is Stephen Ellis adopting the computer screen as a conceptual frame for a new painterly metaphor in his current show at Von Lintel Gallery, and Gerhard Richter, at Marian Goodman, scrambling an old stripe painting to generate an endless loop of digital variations, spawning a new extreme of Op Art with the scale of his printing. These are painters turning to the computer; artists like Cory Arcangel, whose genre is hacking, and Man Bartlett, whose medium is social media, are instances of artists coming at technology from the opposite direction.

Amidst the ubiquity and seeming inevitability of the fusions and collisions of high art and hi tech, Carla Gannis retains the honor (or handicap) of true hybrid status. A student of neo-romantic painter John Walker in the 1990s and now assistant chair of digital arts at Pratt Institute, Gannis is a geek pioneer of manifest painterly sensibility, an artist – in an appropriately but still unforgivably awful mix of metaphors – who gets her digital hands dirty.

Her gallery, Pablo’s Birthday, terms her a “transmedia” artist, a designation that sounds less like an artistic vocation than a sexual preference—fittingly no doubt for someone whose themes and means alike explore bodily and identity transformation under the pressures of hyper-mediation, technologization and social-networking.

And erotic mutation is the order of the day in the futuristic frieze, “Robbi Carni,” that dominates the show. This presents a wondrous array of fantastical characters, avatars each caught in his or her own solipsistic headspace and yet joining a carnival – the operative word for avatars run amok in the absence of their corollary “meat.” Working with Twitter feeds to spin non-connecting narratives, twisting face recognition software to scramble Facebook IDs, and all the while channeling such icons of the analog imaginary as Poussin’s Garden of Flora and Cranach’s Fountain of Youth (Breughel and Bosch also coming to mind), Gannis, it can be said, occupies a mutated working space.

On view through October 13 at 526 Canal Street

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Robert Bordo, Yankee Dollar, 2011. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Alexander & Bonin, New York and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York © Robert Bordo

Somewhere in Paint Heaven there are adjacent walls of Robert Bordo and Merlin James.  This alone makes Sikkema Jenkins’ group exhibition, The Big Picture, a blessed place to be this summer.  They hang gorgeously together despite strikingly contrastive approaches.  James typically distresses his slow-won, acrylic canvases with a dry brush that often exposes a raw, even punctured support, his forms managing to impart contradictory vibes of perfunctory and agonized delivery. Bordo, on the other hand, seals his surfaces in oily brushstrokes that are lush to the point of glutinous in a way that betokens swift, decisive execution—unless, like Yankee Dollar, 2011, it manifests fastidious labor in which case it remains decisive in its nutty all-overness.  What has Bordo and James singing in harmony is a common attitude that balances the cerebral and the visceral; as I’ve said elsewhere, they both epitomize the slogan of Robert Storr’s 2007 Venice Biennale, “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind.”

They are brought together in this eight-person group that also includes John Dilg, Jeronimo Elespe, Josephine Halvorson (her obsessive realist empiricism the perfect complement to Bordo’s obsessive abstract empiricism), Ryan McLaughlin, Ann Pibal and David Schutter, because of another shared proclivity: working within modest dimensions. “Big” can thus be construed as ironic, but – these being earnest workers, despite a high quota of savvy humor amongst them – I prefer to think that the show title is making a distinction between picture and painting that pertinently matches that between scale and size.

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Michelle Segre, installation view of Lost Songs of the Filament at Derek Eller Gallery, 2012.

Cross-breeding the Pop gigantism of Claes Oldenburg and the oozing precionism of Paul Thek, Michelle Segre was at the forefront of a 1990s “return to order,” sculpting imposingly meticulous wax enlargements of natural vanitases—fungal, moldy, and crepuscular.  For all their prescient affinity with the ecological critiques of Roxy Paine, Keith Edmier, Alexis Rockman, et al., Segre’s works seemed to be more interested in channeling the traditional gravitas of Henry Moore.  The new body of work on view at Derek Eller, however, building on several years of funkier, more fantastic surrealism, constitutes a glittering rebirth into the wild.  These colorful improvisations of twisting metals, tensioned fibers, found objects and eccentric plops of plaster electrify the air around them with slightly dangerous charm and something of the ingenuous resourcefulness of toddlers’ drawings, without sacrificing an ounce of Segre’s crisp sculptural command. In some works literal bones of earlier sculptures have been delicately encrusted as relics, their fastidious density tuned like crystal receivers to the play of alien transmissions.

June 1 to June 30, 2012 at 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues, New York City, 212-206-6411

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