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art reviews from around new york

To pick up from last time on the fate of abstract art, sixty years ago two views of painting faced off. You know them well. Art had to be big, bold, and new, the mark of the artist on a scale that no one gesture could ever comprehend. Or art had to be rigor, geometry, and object, where, people said, what you see is what you get.

Of course, the second is the point of view of Minimalism and post-painterly abstraction, the first of color-field painting, but the argument and the tension go back further still, to Abstract Expressionism itself. And then, too, there was a third point of view. Who needs all that anyway, when pop culture, political action, and sexual politics could see right through them all? You can take sides and choose your champions—Jackson Pollock or Lee Krasner, Frank Stella or Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol or Philip Guston, physical art or conceptual art, or the women and blacks they so often forgot, and this Web site has covered them and many more. Were the first two points of view all that different anyway? Both call for retaining the artist’s signature while effacing the artist, and both call for paint.

Now, though, artists can have it all. They can run through geometry and gesture, like a catalogue of painting in a single work. They can merge and disturb “pure painting” and figuration. A woman’s body reappears, but this time in the hands of women. Can anything still stand out? Consider some who still try—like Trudy Benson, Michael Reafsnyder, Andrea Belag, and, in a separate post, Grace Carney (and I bring this together with that separate post as a longer review in my latest upload.

Trudy Benson could figure in anyone’s tour of the possibilities, with her own expanding catalogue. She has turned to mixed media and offered up her Computer Painting before AI art threatened to take away her job—and here she is again with her own hand, at Miles McEnery through May 11. Thin curves of thick paint weave across the surface, atop brightly colored rectangles. Frank Stella quipped that he only wanted to make his paints look as good as when just squeezed from the tube, and Benson may have taken him up on the squeeze. Beneath them all, tight arrays of rectangles define and distort the grid—like curved sheets in space or curved space itself. The successive layers pop right out of the picture plane, float within it, and undermine it.

At the same gallery a few doors down, Michael Reafsnyder has his own shifting foundations, but right up on the surface. He also has no need for a catalogue in order to say it all. Like David Reed, he can make a brushstroke look like a brushstroke. White mixes into black in shifting proportions, like highlight and shadow. Acrylic has changed a great deal in fifty years, and one no longer needs oil to capture the light. It can reflect light as well, like resin, in more polished black.

Intermixing adds raw color as well, seeming to emerge from blackness and a greater depth. Whether you call this illusion is up to you. The layers of paint are real. These are large, tall paintings in the manner of art from the 1950s, with the focus on paint as both physical and visual. There is no one motif apart from the entire surface. If artists once left their signature, in floating rectangles and drips, Reafsnyder effaces it.

Is he still trying to say it all, without an index or catalogue? A third artist has no need to try, and her work is all more impressive for that, just last month at Steven Harvey through April 13. Andrea Belag does have her signature motif—and, as with the older generation, it arises from painting broadly and paring back. Arcs in simple, bright colors capture the eye and center a painting. They could even stand for the eye, from their shape and their access to the artist’s vision. She has her focus, and that will have to do.

Belag works just larger than many an easel painting, but that, too, is part of her focus. In fact, she shares her scale with target paintings by Kenneth Noland and recalls his signature. She makes direct reference to another painter with a fondness for curves as well. This show is “Twombly’s Green,” after Cy Twombly. She does not, though, restrict her choices to green and she is not doodling. Rather, she is mixing and layering curves the width of a brushstroke, leaving plenty of off-white ground.

Additional paint in the space beneath the arc has a layer to itself below and beneath, like a solid plate. It could be what the eye sees. Regardless, color and focus still matters: maybe the first generation of postwar abstraction was not so bad or so dogmatic after all. At the very least, its turn to color-field painting came about from women like Helen Frankenthaler. Whether the present generation of “anything goes,” dogma, and diversity can have the same impact remains to be seen.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Grace Carney cannot get enough of women. Her show’s title insists on it, thrice over, with “girlgirlgirl.” You just may not notice them right away or see them all at once, at P.P.O.W. through February 24, and excuse me for another late post. She deserved your and my fuller attention.

Her stained colors command attention all by themselves, at least for a moment, and continue to reward attention after that. They recall an era when color-field painting alone sufficed to go big. Still, they temper their breathless good cheer with female bodies in the present. They invite one to ask when drawing becomes painting and flowing paint becomes drawing once again.

More and more galleries have been pursuing diversity by looking back. They keep returning to postwar abstraction and the women who made it, all the more so if those women suffered neglect along the way. Just this year, a gallery called its winter group exhibition “Perseverance.” What sets these artists apart, and can gender alone explain their neglect? After all, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler made history while inventing color-field painting, taking Abstract Expressionism to a new level, and historians have taken note just fine. After all, too, trends do become stale, so why look back?

A little skepticism is all the more important when the artist is not neglected but just breaking through. Carney, now at a Tribeca gallery with a history of its own, received her MFA as recently as 2022. One could almost read the show’s title as “You Go Girl.” Is the going now easy? At what point does the back and forth between realism and abstraction become itself a cliché, a means of mythmaking twice over? Carney, though, sees them as far more than myths.

The artist combines lots of color with ample white space, giving her shapes room to expand. Pours and brushwork themselves expand outward in translucent swirls. They suggest Morris Louis, but the light colors never run together to the point that they become his darker veils, and symmetry is out of the question. Carney is asking not for late Modernism’s rigor but only its paint. Her overlapping marks violate an older generation’s demands for both flatness and space. They have to do so, to let the images emerge as women.

She is just as serious about the body. She treats big girls not, as so often in painting now, as characters in a mythic narrative, but rather as figure studies. They twist and turn freely, as if to hide, although faces appear as well. Their closeness to the picture plane may come closest of all to Joan Semmel in her nineties. Maybe Carney is not satisfied with the appeal of the emerging artist after all. I look forward to what comes next, after the good cheer is gone.

Eddie Martinez masks everything about his figures but their faces, as “Wavelengths,” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through March 9. His Whiteouts start with group portraits in the Brooklyn community he knows best, much like Henry Taylor. Then he paints over them, like his Flower Pots, with plenty of white. White can surround a face like a halo. Black and color still peek through, in a contrast that recalls the youngest of the old Abstract Expressionists, Richard Pousette-Dart, as much as acts of erasure. They express the effacement of people of color, but also their pleasure in just hanging out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Judy Chicago ends her retrospective with other women. It could hardly be otherwise, when her best-known work, The Dinner Party, relied on the assistance of four hundred. With its place settings for thirty-nine more, it sought to span recorded history as well.

No surprise, then, if she devotes a full floor of her retrospective to women across the centuries and across the arts, at the New Museum. It could hardly be otherwise, when she titles it “Herstory,” through March 3. And yes, it is shameful that I am posting this late, but at least the review in full was always online.

For her, a women’s history is not just recovered but created again each time, and so is art—not as a male saga of lone genius, but as a collaboration. She reserves a place for goddesses as well as humans as well. She keeps coming back, too, to acts of birth. Will women still recognize it as their own? I have my doubts. If you ask me, art and activism need not more primordial women, but fewer male gods.

New York was not new to her in 1980, when The Dinner Party reached the Brooklyn Museum. (It later found a permanent home at the museum, as anchor to its Sackler Center for Feminist Art.) She and her first husband had hitchhiked to New York in the 1960s, living briefly in Greenwich Village. Still, she felt new to New York. She left a personal stamp on feminism, one that not everyone could accept but many have loved—one rooted in primordial beings and present-day sex organs. For a fuller answer, I work a longer version of this review together with a recent earlier report on Shahzia Sikander as my latest upload.

I have my qualms about questioning either one. It aligns me with conservative critics like Hilton Kramer of The New York Times, who trashed her back then along with pretty much all postwar American art. It puts me, a white male, in the position of speaking for feminism when I hope to support it. And Chicago’s retrospective does offer a greater diversity, including the glassware, ceramics, and embroidery of those place settings. She deserves credit, too, for founding the Feminist Art Project at Cal State Fresno and later, with Miriam Schapiro, at Cal Arts. Still, whatever her history or herstory, she is always at its center.

Banners hang over The City of Women, that floor-scale installation, with one in particular flying high, What If Women Ruled the World? And here they do rule, but at a cost. You will spot paintings by Hilma af Klint, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Georgia O’Keeffe, amid less-compelling models for Symbolism and Abstraction. You will spot those who refuse to be reduced to “significant others,” like Dora Maar (for Pablo Picasso), Frida Kahlo (for Diego Rivera), Leonora Carrington (for Max Ernst). You will spot Käthe Kollwitz next to Martha Graham, with an eye to how women pose, and painters near books and photographs of writers, with labels you may never find. For all its wonders, it eradicates differences and reduces everyone.

Even so, Chicago keeps demanding more. She took the Feminist Art Project seriously. Her classes became Womanhouse—collaborations with her chosen students, with their everyday lives as performance art, and she credits the resulting film and photographs to them and not to herself. She does not abandon spray paint and lacquer, now on vinyl on canvas. Still, in adopting a radial motif and at times ceramics, she is well on her way to the strengths and weaknesses of The Dinner Party. I may not like it, but it anchors the Sackler Center and the feminist revolution to this day.

Embroidery and collaboration carry over to the Birth Project of the early 1980s, with at least one hundred fifty women to execute the needlepoint. Colors darken, but not for long. Men get their project, too, but with articulated musculature and grimaces that had me grimacing as well. Still, she adopts the translucency of stained glass for her Rainbow Shabbat of 1992. She also collaborates with her present husband, Donald Woodman, on a larger Holocaust project and, in New Mexico, a co-ed follow-up to Womanhouse. Women’s roles have become gender roles in a racially torn America.

Chicago gets all three principal floors, including the last for her city of art and women. If you happen to begin there, so much the better. It makes clear how much her hopes do not depend on birthing. She herself never bothered with motherhood. As she told The Guardian, “There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.” Her work is still tacky, sentimental, and reductive, but she gave it her all.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Cauleen Smith could have even a New Yorker nostalgic for Southern California. That may sound like a tall order, although the sensation may last all of fifteen minutes, but Smith will make you feel right at home, recently at 52 Walker. And I work this together with a recent report on immersive video by Mary Lucier as a longer review and my latest upload. Smith, too, shows how a multichannel video can and cannot encompass a life, but will one fall for the illusion or pierce it? Is this really the video of a lifetime?

Smith sets out plush sofas—so comfortable that you may get up only to be sure that you have caught all four of the installation’s projections. Throw rugs can hardly cover the upscale Tribeca gallery (aka David Zwirner), but then what could? Besides, you know what people say: everyone out there is famous for fifteen minutes.

That includes Wanda Coleman, and Smith, who appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is out to extend the late poet’s moments of fame. The filmmaker is nostalgic not just for the city of her childhood, to which she has at long last returned, but also for a black woman who loved music almost as much as words. This is The Wanda Coleman Songbook, through March 16 (and apologieas for the late post while I catch up a bit), and you get to play DJ. You will just have to trust the gallery that Coleman, who died in 2013, earned a reputation as the poet laureate of Los Angeles. Her name may not mean much to a New Yorker, but then neither might this view of the great city without a city. This is LA as itself poetry but oddly remote from life.

Smith, who is African American, does not quite efface the urban core that many blacks call home, but she does relax and enjoy it. She treats the film’s multiple channels as an immersive experience. Two projections cover the facing long walls, the other two the alcoves to either side. Besides the sofas and rugs, she includes a coffee table for Coleman’s books and a quaint countertop with a good old turntable, where the songbook in question plays along. Smith commissioned music for the five tracks of an EP. Now she invites visitors to place the needle and to listen.

An EP may seem like a letdown or a rarity for those nostalgic for LPs, but this one is itself art. It comes in pink vinyl with splotches of bright red. I am tempted to say blood red, but in the installation’s spirit it might be better to think of candy canes and melted strawberry ice cream. Coleman also went by the name LA Blueswoman, but only some of the tracks are bluesy. All are as close to background music as the projection. It could be a direct retort to the California of Ed Ruscha.

Where Ruscha goes heavy on irony and detachment, Smith is sincere and totally involved. Where he photographed Every Building on the Sunset Strip, she is seemingly random but also selective. She cuts among sunsets, palms, utility poles and a railroad crossing, where she waits like anyone else for a train to pass before she can move on. The building on the far side has its share of graffiti, but she does not see it as defacement. Even the region’s bane, traffic, looks charming from overhead on a highway at night. Segments may rush past, but they feel slower and longer, like those proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. Poverty and luxury alike are nowhere in sight.

So much else is surely missing, not least the poetry. Coleman’s words appear on-screen now and then, but difficult to read, and aloud on vinyl, but just as difficult to hear. Is there a dark side? Three cut-outs leave their silhouettes on the walls, as more utilities and a creepy mask. Still, in a fourth projection, outstretched fingers like an ILY (I Love You) sign spell LA. As you head off to the gallery scene, downtown restaurants, and an overcrowded Canal Street, that sign-off, too, will soon be gone.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

It was never easy to take in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo himself labored beneath the ceiling on scaffolding of his own design, while struggling to reach the figures still taking shape overhead.

“Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel” in 2017 brought thirty-four photographs to the World Trade Center PATH station—on their way to a second showing at the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey. Maybe, just maybe, it brought with it a closer approach to the art. Still not close enough? Andrew Witkin lines a wall with images, so that there is no craning your head, but also no dispelling the mystery. On August 14, 1511, as the Sistine Chapel once again welcomed congregants to Mass, the ancestors of Jesus were conspicuously absent. So they are again with Witkin, just recently at Theodore through April 6, but you may think you see them in their silvery shadows, and I work this together with an earlier report on “Up Close” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Even now, with so much else to see, visitors to the Sistine Chapel might never notice the ancestors. As Howard Hibbard notes, they are also among the hardest spots to see. They are missing once again today in etched magnesium. Witkin wanted to remove distractions, whether visual or in the ceiling’s details and history. Perhaps he hesitated to compete with Michelangelo as well. Yet their majesty and motion shine through in their absence—in the depicted stone on which they sat and in their silhouettes.

Michelangelo had kept a remarkable pace nearing the end of what is still the most celebrated project in western art—not just the scenes like the creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling, but also the prophets and nudes bridging the ceiling, the windows, and the walls. He had been laboring for five years, but more work lay ahead. He took down his scaffolding at last, so that Pope Julius could celebrate Mass and the Assumption of the Virgin. The rites completed, he set up lighter, more movable scaffolding to wrap up the lunettes, that awkward space above the windows. The familiar architectural element takes its name from their shape, like the crescent of the moon. Additional ancestors turn up elsewhere on the ceiling as well, with a lonely virtue prefiguring their absence.

The ancestors may get passed over often as not, but Michelangelo did not lack for fame in his lifetime. His David alone assured that, as a standing nude and as a symbol of Florence’s independence. The ancestors, too, found a ready audience, in thirty-two prints from around the time of his death in 1564. Adamo Scultori, the printmaker, had the added cachet of working not from the frescoes one sees today but from drawings, by Michelangelo or a follower. I shall guess the former, given an artist who did not work well with others. He did fire his assistants, lock the doors, and start over with the Sistine Ceiling, with Raphael working and waiting just outside.

Still, you never know, for the drawings have not survived. In any case, Witkin’s plates are copies after copies—and they omit their very subject. The burnished metal surfaces in their place could be what Jacques Derrida lauded as marks of erasure. Andrew Witkin, also a dealer, must know well the postmodern vocabulary. He calls the show “After (After Ancestors).” So much for the originality of the avant-garde.

Got all that? Nor does he proceed as an engraver would, from the plates to prints on paper. Still, mind games may not be so bad after all, not in trying to pin down a long-dead, troubled artist’s mind. Besides, the metal shines. Scultori worked in dense parallel incisions, the cross-hatching of a trained draftsman—but not, as it happens, like Michelangelo drawings. Scultori’s technique may count as mechanical compared to his and already dated, but Witkin turns vice into virtue.

Make that competing virtues. With magnesium rather than an engraver’s copper, the shine ranges from dark gray to near white, while the visible cuts add to its energy and instability. And then come an uncut metal frame, its shadow on the wall, and the burnished omissions. Twenty-seven plates hang in three tight rows, unlike Michelangelo’s spandrels and lunettes. The unseen figures seem to struggle against the original curved framing, much like the originals. They call attention to Michelangelo’s musculature and motion in stillness.

Michelangelo did not play well with others either, and he may have counted the pope as his only male friend. Julius may increasingly have felt the same way. Hibbard, in his book on Michelangelo, attributes the languor of the ancestors, verging on sadness, to their role as precursors, neither here nor there. In 1511, though, as textbooks explain, the Vatican was losing its wars and bracing for an invasion. Dismiss the Sistine program as baggage, better off under erasure, but Michelangelo could not. One cannot separate its ambition from fears for what might survive.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

“Sex and Death” may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of certainty and irony. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work’s title puts it, is Space for Thought, at Signs and Symbols through April 13.

She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery’s own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die.

Anderson has done her level best to kill things off, in the very the act of construction. Somehow, though, they are still standing. Scissors have just cut off a fig leaf, which balances nonetheless, its stem on a narrow table or ledge. It might be leaning against the back wall or standing in front with no visible means of support. Light pours directly down, to judge by its tiny shadow, illuminating every vein of its surface. Yet it leaves the wall in darkness.

She loves the fragility of things about to die. Plums lie still uneaten, while bare twigs grow into intricate constructions. Most have no obvious source of light, but enough to multiply the shadows. This could be artificial light, like that of the gallery, which draws shades over its windows. It could also be Winter Light, as the tallest and most delicate work has it, for a time of encroaching darkness. Sharon Louden, in the gallery’s previous show (through March 2) used her colorful installation to mirror and to dismember visitors, but here everything is intact, for now.

A painting’s shape and illumination recall light boxes by such artists as Joseph Cornell, a born collector, which makes it the space of memory. It is an enclosure that no human touch can shatter. The scissors, their task done, lie on the ledge, cut off at front by the picture plane but no closer to you for that. Most of all, this is a space for thought. Anderson speaks of the “pensive image,” quoting Hanneke Grootenboer, a writer new to me. The latter, in turn, sees “art as a form of thinking.”

Sex and Death 101 really is a film, but a sci-fi film—with, as far as I can determine, no particular concern for thought. Yet sex and death are also the theme of still life in Dutch and Flemish painting. Cecily Brown makes a point of the tradition in her own painting. Things are sexy for her because they are alive and dying. At the same time, they defy death, in showing off the artist’s virtuosity and art’s ability to last. She paints big, bright and “all over,” refusing the very stillness of still life.

Anderson is not half so as confident. She quotes Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, in 1670. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Maybe so, but the paintings also allay fears, with the solidity of subdued color, painted ceramics, and marble dust in oil. My favorites, though, are the branching vegetation and its wispy shadows. Things do not look particularly sexy, much less dead, and a good thing, too.