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art reviews from around new york

Elizabeth Schwaiger paints and paints again an interior teeming with art and, just maybe, life. To be sure, she hardly has room left for people. Paintings cover the walls and spill out into the entirety of the space, where they compete with sculpture. Furniture itself seems a mere luxury—or an additional work of art.

Still, she attests to the thoughts of a living artist—and the importance of art to her life. It has, as the show’s title has it, the urgency of “Now & Now & Now,” at Nicola Vassell through February 24—and I work this together with other recent reports on keeping painting busy as a longer review and my latest upload.

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of “the fierce urgency of now,” and Schwaiger knows its fierceness. She knows, too, that what is fierce is not always comforting. One can hear the repetition of her title pounding in her ear. If the title seems at all superfluous, everything for her is more than halfway out of control. Oversized sheets of paper spread out on the floor. They could be sketches toward painting, but they have pushed her finished work aside, and they appear as nearly blank sheets.

Their white stands out all the more because art has taken over in another way, too. Schwaiger overlays each painting with color, almost always a single color. She quotes “Diving into the Wreck,” the poem by Adrienne Rich, and the monochrome ripples and obscures like ocean deeps. You might well be underwater, and the artist is in way over her head. So is the sole human presence that I could make out with certainty, a gaunt white silhouette. It could be her or yet another work of art.

Art appears, too, as a living tradition, that of the artist in her studio and of layered color. Henri Matisse and “The Red Studio” epitomize both, but examples are easy enough to find. The Met sets aside a large room for the genre in its new galleries for European art. (It displays Kerry James Marshall, the contemporary black artist, and Schwaiger, still in her thirties, has her show a black-owned gallery, although she is white.) It can serve as a statement of identity or a celebration of art, and she may use a second color for highlights on sculpture. She has also used the studio, in an earlier painting, as a meeting place for many more.

Diving into the wreck sounds grim, but it has its attractions. Think of the appeal for divers of the Titanic. She also proclaims her love of childbirth and scuba diving, as inspirations for her art. Both recall her joys, her pain, and her fears. Mostly, though, she misses the fierce urgency. Like Rich, “she came for the wreck and not the story of the wreck.” It is the age-old appeal, again quoting Rich, of “the thing itself.” It sounds ever so Romantic (or Kantian), but it survives in late Modernism’s plea for “art as object.”

It also sounds ever so important, and Schwaiger also quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, in case you missed the point. She is not, though, pedantic. She really is painting art as the thing itself, to the point that its subjects within her paintings are left unseen. She may speak of the wreck of her art and perhaps her life, but her studio looks great. It has the ornate mirrors and transom windows of a European palace or museum. For all her preliminary smaller paintings, she needs the overflow of art and color.

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

Summer is a time for getting out and doing things, when warmth welcomes you outdoors and sunlight tempts you to explore. So they tell you, but my most cherished memory of summer is lying on my back.

I remember myself as a child, my arms spread as if I could float or fly. Maybe you had those moments, too, when the grass to every side reaches up to the sun and the music in your head slows time. Call it dreamlike if you like, but everything in nature and in memory feels that much more real and observed. So it is, too, with Alexis Rockman in a cold New York winter, at Magenta Plains through February 24.

Rockman works in watercolor, a medium long used for precise observation, especially of flowers. As with Charles Burchfield or J. M. W. Turner, it also suits those moments when an observation is also a vision. Rockman relishes the paradox, and the gallery stresses his interest in nature while calling his work dreamlike. I vote for the first. Even in sleep, he could name the flowers to every side and the butterflies above. I took the first at times for mushrooms, from their shape, and the latter for birds, but then I could as well have been tripping or flying.

Rockman takes the perspective of someone looking up to the sky. It places the unseen observer at the center of the work. Not that such an observer lacks in feeling. Flowers seem to lean in, even as the eye insists that they are leaning away. The gallery calls the show “The Toxic Sublime,” but it seems healthy enough to me, and it stays close to the earth. It does not need an ode to a Grecian urn to evoke quiet and slow time.

For all that, everything is in motion, because flowers and insects have work to do. Again the medium helps, fluid and fast drying. So does the necessity of work to all sides without a narrative progression. Tiril Hasselknippe, too, invites one into his art, with sculpture as installation, but he means it as an entryway to a state of mind. He calls the sculpture Hyperstate and the show, which also includes a sketch, Portals. It brings light to a dark room, like the nightmare counterpart to Rockman’s sunlit daydream.

The gallery has settled into an entire building by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, like Pace gallery in Chelsea but with less arty neighbors and less costly architecture. On the ground floor, Jane Swavely sets painted verticals into slow motion. Rockman has the floor above, Hasselknippe, who appeared in the 2008 New Museum Triennial, the basement. He could be giving Rockman’s insects new life and translating Swavely’s deep red “zips” into tubes of light. They take the shape of arches or paired legs from a long, thin creature that I would rather not imagine. Either way, they serve as architecture, as company, and as a dream.

Hasselknippe updates light sculpture since Dan Flavin and James Turrell—in LED rather than neon and in PVC sheathed in black mesh. That makes it more flexible and contemporary but also more textured and physical. The arches hang at all heights and no particular intervals. They cluster where they will. They could be a maze without a beginning or end. If this is a nightmare, I am not trying to awake.

In “Love Songs” (at the International Center of Photography this past fall), photography was not just an expression of love or a record of love. It was an act of love itself. For Iiu Susiraja (at MoMA PS1), that love seems directed mostly at her.

Not for the photographers in “Trust Me,” who reach out to family, friends, romantic partners, and (lest that leave out anyone) “other networks.” It is about “forging connections,” but connections may prove fragile or elusive. It requires trust in others, at the Whitney through February 25, but can you look at a photograph and trust in what you see?

To Moyra Davey, reaching out is an ongoing project, and it keeps circling back to her. For the show’s title work, as curated by Kelly Long, she mailed identical envelopes to everyone she could trust, who handed them right back. Perhaps the differences never mattered much in the first place. Davey has taped a photo to each one, the tape as prominent as any connection. The subjects, from meds (lots of them) to trees, can seem revealing or remote. As she writes in black pen, “most people will divulge more than you would wish,” and that may or may not include her.

As Bob Dylan sang, “I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and the ones I love.” Barbara Hammer presents Barbara & Terry, in the grass and in one another’s arms. A couple of mixed race, for D’Angelo Lovell Williams, reaches out across still taller and paler vegetation. It might almost be shredded paper from Davey’s envelopes. Mary Manning photographs friends just milling around, but also flowers, almost like a silkscreen for Andy Warhol. Jenny Calivas herself sinks into water or mud, perhaps never to return.

Shadow and light, too, provide a cover. Subjects for Muriel Hasbun hide not just in the reeds, but in a ghostly overexposure. Genesis Báez turns herself and her mother into multiple silhouettes and their shadows. Elsewhere she stays out the picture, connected to her mother by a thread. It might be all that remains of their love. Lola Flash settles for a single face lost in a glare, perhaps her own.

Maybe they are all simply overexposed, under photography’s harsh gaze. Still, they share strong feelings and a sense, however elusive, of place. It could be the return address on Davey’s envelope. It could be the sea off the coast of Florida, where Williams goes for a swim. Is that a wheelchair on the moon for Flash? No, it is a beach in Provincetown, on a sandy hill beneath a blistering sky.

Place may refer to ancestors, much as for Hasbun—who adds the words “all the saints,” both in Arabic and in the Spanish of her native El Salvador. Williams reenacts the final stage in a tortured African American journey from Nigeria to George. Place may also refer to gender and the body. After all, who can imagine connections apart from desire? Alvin Baltrop is once again cruising the Hudson River piers, like gay men in a time of Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. Dakota Mace makes her prints from chemicals on paper exposed to light, because her own body cannot tolerate photographic silver, and calls them Bonds.

Susan Sontag saw photography as, inevitably, exploiting what it claims to lament or to love. Not in this show, so modest that its eleven photographers (from the Whitney’s collection) could almost be one. Not when the self depends on others for its very identity and existence—and not when trust is so hard to sustain. Laura Aguilar poses with a cardboard sign, “Will Work for Axcess.” For Franz Kafka, “A book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Here art knows best the frozen sea.

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

What do you do as a follow-up after inventing modern art? Do you take the summer off or reinvent yourself?

Pablo Picasso pulled off both. He and his young family rented a villa in Fontainebleau, a privileged Parisian’s weekend or summer getaway. Kings had stayed at a palace still worth seeing and hunted in the forest nearby. This artist, though, never could stop working, and he turned out two of his most ambitious paintings, each in two remarkably different versions. Just to focus on them with a bit of context would be an excellent excuse for a show, and “Picasso in Fontainebleau” supplies it, at the Museum of Modern Art through February 17. It also offers the occasion to ask what had changed since Cubism and whether he was still breaking ground in 1921. Meanwhile the Met sees his breakthrough work not quite making it to Brooklyn, and I work an earlier report on that together with a longer and fuller version of this one as a longer review and my latest upload.

A lot had changed in ten years, since those designs for Brooklyn failed to cross the Atlantic. The artist whose shows had looked revolutionary but sold almost nothing now had a prestigious dealer, Paul Rosenberg. He had a young wife, Olga, who was nursing his first child, Paul (bottle fed, by the way). He had a summer rental in the land of kings. Paintings and drawings of home were a celebration. Compulsive sketches attest to a love of drawing and close observation, but surely they were a celebration, too.

And then there were the big paintings, nearly eight feet tall and six feet wide. MoMA does its best to recreate the space in which he worked, a garage, where the two versions of Three Musicians face each other down from opposite walls. They seem more playful and deadly serious every day. The three figures share flat, broken fields of color, like playing cards, and one shuffles the musical score like cards, too. They could be staring out from behind masks, except that they are too polite and too absorbed to stare. They are too busy playing music and at play.

Or are they empty masks? The threat of emptiness looms over them all, especially with the darker version in the museum’s own collection. Art, it suggests, is role play with no one left to play the roles, and these are old roles indeed. The three musicians are a Pierrot out of the Italian commedia dell’arte, a harlequin, and a monk. A fourth character lurks all the more in shadow, the silhouette of a dog. The second version, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum, is lighter in color and maybe in feeling, and the figures sport comic mustaches, but Pablo Picasso developed them together.

A third work should be familiar from MoMA, too, its version of Three Women at the Spring. Picasso was thinking in threes, for a binary choice was never enough. He has set the women at ease, standing, kneeling, and seated—if only you could altogether reconstruct their pose. They have all the space they need, but barely, for their rounded forms need plenty. Their six hands talk to each other as well, in a wild conversation. Their bodies have an earthy dignity, but their emotions do not so easily break through.

So where was Picasso headed, to a Cubism on overdrive or to a Neo-Classicism? As with Henri Matisse and his Red Studio last year, MoMA places an early modern artist in a new studio and watches the sparks fly. Both artists were looking back at their own work in new surroundings. Picasso knew that the collaborative spirit of Cubism was over, and he must have wondered if Cubism’s experimental spirit was behind him as well. Should he lend it a greater stability, mystery, and color or ditch it entirely—and could he reimagine the heavyset women of his Pink Period, too? Two pairs of two multiply the possibilities.

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

Stéphane Mandelbaum died at just twenty-five, in 1986, of a hit job. Yet his life was only as messy as his art, at the Drawing Center through February 18.

If his retrospective were a crime novel, there would be all too many suspects. The curators, Laura Hoptman and Susanne Pfeffer, speak discretely of a criminal syndicate, but he himself barely skirted the law. He trafficked in the black market for art and got caught trying to steal a work by Alberto Giacometti. He hung out in all the wrong places, only starting with clubs and cafés in Brussels. The dark night scene in Montmartre for Pablo Picasso seems tame by comparison. His drawings themselves bear damaging testimony.

They start with fellow denizens of that scene, with unfailing sympathy. It extends to young white men and black women in racially charged surroundings. Titles identify them by first name, because his art was on a first-name basis with everyone. He calls them collectively Lolitas, with the humor turned at least partly on himself. His pencil swoops casually across the page, staking out faces and poses alike in its long traces. He works fast, and there is no going back.

Mandelbaum drew what haunted him. That, at least, is a given for a compulsive artist, but it raises more questions than it answers. He drew what he loved, in faces out of his favorite haunts and dearest imagination. He drew, too, what he hated and feared. But which was which? What were his nightmares, and what were his dreams? An artist who blended self-portraits with Nazi imagery may not himself have known.

Who can say what he left to his fevered imagination? Raised as a Jew, Mandelbaum heard of the Holocaust from a grandfather who survived it in Poland and whose brothers did not. A book, a gift from his father, helped him follow that family history, but in reverse, like a personal journey into the past. Its title says it all—Souvenirs Obscurs d’un Juif Polonais Né en France, or “Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France.” A series of drawings takes off from the book, by Pierre Goldman, but with embellishments. He cannot disentangle observation from confession and confessions from nightmares.

He draws Nazis like Ernst Rohm and Joseph Goebbels, the latter in the midst of a terrifying speech that Mandelbaum could never have heard. He draws the filmmakers he admired most, including those he could never have met. Naturally they, too, made their name with subject matter on the edge, like Pier Paolo Pasolino, Luis Buñuel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He draws Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, dressed for a rendezvous in cold weather. He sketches Francis Bacon, whose insistence on finding character in the cut of a face anticipates his own. He leaves open, though, what counts as realism and what as distortion, as Bacon never could.

A solo show extends from the main gallery to the smaller one behind it, and the ample space only raises more questions. Just what kind of artist was he—an outsider before outsider art entered the mainstream, the graduate of a proper arts education, or a willful heir to Bacon? After the café drawings, he crowds more and more onto a sheet. That includes text fragments that are all but illegible, collage like the face of a Nazi on a porn star, a self-portrait as Geule Casée (or “Broken Face,” only more vulgar in French) and swarms of pen marks like armies on the march. He may never earn a greater reputation outside Belgium, but he provides testimony to a fatefully short life. The real killer may have been the twentieth century.

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

Life would be tough going, even if people did not put so many obstacles in their own way. One could try to clear them out by, say, spending less time alone with devices, viewing nonsense like mine. Sandi Haber Fifield delights in them—the ones she observes and the ones she creates in photocollage.

A barrier for her can stand in the way of knowing others, like the shadowy figures in her work. Yet it is simply part of life. It is the visual equivalent of memory, at Yancey Richardson through February 17.

Nature presents obstacles enough, from stony landscapes to dense undergrowth, and Haber Fifield brings them into sharp focus. The accumulated fragments in her collage create their own depth of field as well, layer upon layer. Her point of view shifts easily between face down and face front. One can feel oneself approaching things to push them aside. One can feel oneself, too, stepping back to find one’s footing. Her considerable white space may or may not help.

That is not to mention the built environment. Not that she necessarily distinguishes it from nature, no more than James Welling or John Houck—and I work this together with last week’s report on Welling and an upcoming one on Houck as a longer review and my latest upload. Potted plants with bare branches stand just outside a garage because her cuts place them there, but they could just as easily have grown there or landed there as home decor. A work crew must have piled those irregular gray stones. A man stands face to face with an entire wall of vegetation. Like the plants and stones, he may never find his way inside.

Much else, too, has no sense of home, only of barriers. That includes the one-piece plastic fencing that people love to hate—on top of her own thin strips of wood. A police cone has acquired colorful stripes and presides over torn branches in full leaf, like a memorial or celebration. If that suggests a death or absence, so do the silhouettes of boys at the beach. Do not, though, lose hope, for they are taking a break from exertion, and flowers, too, appear in silhouette. They are, the show’s title has it, “The Thing in Front of You,” and that is not the same as the thing in itself.

Mark Alice Durant, in the show’s catalogue, compares her attention to that of a well-known painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the epitome of Northern Romanticism. A man stands on a rock, back to the viewer, looking out on distant mountains and foggy seas. Still, Haber Fifield (no relation to me) is not so much commanding as creating, and the layers keep coming, defying distance. Brutalist architecture comes at you corner on, one side in shadow. Her angled cuts echo the building’s edge and her edge-on point of view. Once again, obstacles are just another word for experience.

Covid-19 brought its share of barriers to entry, but it gave her time, she says, to think. For the rest of us, what was there to do but take up knitting? And what was there to do after the lockdown but pick up the camera and get going? It may sound like a cliché, but Rachel Perry, at the same gallery, did both. She has not fallen for female stereotypes, but she makes the most of them. They become a window onto her studio.

Knitting for her is not folk art but Minimalism. And Minimalism, in turn, takes shape from the business of art in the present. Perry broke down cardboard boxes, delighting in the odd shapes that others would take to the trash. She also photographs herself with her work, in a floor-length dress of many colors, in diagonal stripes. She also keeps finding ways to hide her face, with her back to the camera or a mirror between her and you. Barriers take many forms, and they belong to artists that you may never see.

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