Chelsea

Ryan McNamara at Elizabeth Dee (not just because I am a part of it but because you can be too)

"A Long Night" by Ryan McNamara

Walking into the gallery I had no idea what I was getting into. Ryan McNamara’s current show at Elizabeth Dee involves visitors, six different canvas backdrops, two large mirrors, costumes galore and is extremely participatory. An ebullient Ryan asked me and Tony, my boss, if we would mind being photographed. We replied no, but timidly moved into position in front of the colorful backdrop. Ryan was immediately taken by my strand of pearls and he knew just what he wanted me to do with them. Unfortunately Tony didn’t make it in the final photo. All of the pictures he takes during his three week stay in the gallery make it up on the Elizabeth Dee website. They will then be used as elements of a collage in other works. It was a very fun way to experience art and now I have my own portrait by an artist, as odd as it may be.

Donald Moffett at Marianne Boesky

Installation view

The Radiant Future exhibition is just that–radiant. Moving away from the walls that confine him on some level, Moffett has created paintings that almost exist as sculptures. He calls the structures that hold the paintings (with oval and circular holes cut in them), “contraptions.” To see the paintings nailed to wooden boards that are taped to concrete blocks or suspended in space from wires, gives them a freshness that his work has not had in awhile.

Paul Graham at Pace

Paul Graham

My favorite show I saw in Chelsea was “Paul Graham: The Present” at The Pace Gallery. Graham’s new work is the third part of a trilogy that includes earlier series: a shimmer of possibility (2004-2006) and American Night (1998-2002). Included in this show are 16 diptychs and 2 triptychs whose subject matter is life on the streets of Manhattan. Shots appear to be taken just seconds apart causing the viewer to look carefully to see the subtle changes in the urban landscape that Graham so thoughtfully captures. The photographs remind of us how things can change in an instant. One woman walks down the street only to trip in the next frame. The energy of the city, but also its palpable loneliness fill the compositions. Hanging the works very low to the ground gives them a real intensity and power. We, the viewers, feel as though we are there acting as voyeur.

Corinne Wasmuht at Friedrich Petzel

Installation view Corinne Wasmuht

I immediately recognized this artist’s work from the last Venice Biennale. In fact, if you watch my video coverage of the Biennale, I mention that this was one of my favorite works in the Arsenale section. It mixes the squeegee-like abstraction of Richter with figuration. The artist are “generated from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that Wasmuht sources form a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographs.” The layers of paint on boards that have been whitewashed and polished give her works a luster and glow. I was immediately drawn to her large-scale paintings and was thrilled to see and recognize her work.

Polly Apfelbaum at D’Amelio Gallery and Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden

Polly Apfelbaum

Titled, Flatterland Funkytown, Apfelbaum’s show is the first at the new D’Amelio Gallery though she has shown often when the gallery was D’Amelio Terras. The press release states it so much more eloquently than I could, “The installation consists of hundreds of crushed synthetic velvet pieces, all hand-cut, dyed, and laid out across the gallery floor. Always situational, Apfelbaum’s intentional arrangements expose the temporal and improvisational currents running through her abstractions. The flatness that characterizes Apfelbaum’s installation is less about form than it is about horizontality, a structural flattening of hierarchy that can be found in musical forms such as funk and punk rock.”

Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden

Contemporaneously, Apfelbaum is showing Flatland: Color Revolt at the fantastic new space Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden. They are doing some of the most innovative shows in Chelsea. If  you are not familiar with their gallery, you need to check it out. It’s right next to Jack Shainman’s space on West 20th.

Alec Soth at Sean Kelly Gallery

Soth, Installation view

At Sean Kelly (who if you have not already heard is moving from his 29th Street space to a 22,000 square foot space that Exit Art used to inhabit on 36th and 10th), Alec Soth’s Broken Manual is getting great reviews and is his first show with the gallery. The work is influenced by the artist’s obsession with the reclusive Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. While researching for this body of work, Soth created an alter ego, Lester B. Morrison. Morrison has written a manual for living a life of seclusion, hence the title of the show. This Broken Manual makes up the installation in one of the galleries. Placed inside found books to hide the secret life these introverts take on, the manual is created as a special edition. Also on view in the first gallery is a documentary, Somewhere to Disappear, which follows Soth in his travels while working on this project.

Zak Prekop at Harris Lieberman

Prekop

I am a huge fan of Zak Prekop’s work. The works on view in this show were Ad Reinhardt-like with subtle taped off sections in grids. Some have an almost a Rorschach Warhol feel to them. There was one work with a great deal of raw canvas and two shades of striated blue giving the work an amazing texture. HIs works are really so beautiful. So many are so subtle in color palette and then you turn the corner and there is a bright blue work. In the work viewed here, I didn’t even notice that the black marks had a maroon diamond pattern until I got close up and looked carefully. His work is full of pleasant surprises.

UES

Bharti Kher at Hauser and Wirth

Kher

Kher

Kher installation view

The Bharti Kher show at Hauser and Wirth titled, “The hot winds that blow from the West,” includes pieces unlike the work I have previously seen by Kher which have all consisted of thousands of bindis on objects. The bindi is a signature material for Kher and it is a “loaded symbol.” Not a symbol of marriage or fashion, it actually represents the “third eye” linking the spiritual and real world. Though the staircase on the first level is covered in bindis, the next gallery has a room full or stacked radiators whose function is removed to create something totally new– a beautiful work of art. The second floor includes “Reveal the secrets that you seek.” Made up of 27 shattered found mirrors with bindis in grid formations, it reminded me of Pistoletto where the viewer’s reflection becomes an important element of the work.

Albert Oehlen at Gagosian

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2009-2011, Oil and paper on canvas, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

In his first show with Gagosian, Oehlen has created new large-scale works. He uses paint and collage to create his pieces. Now with computer-aided design, he makes the viewer question what has been made by the artist’s hand, and what has been computer generated and altered.

LES

Ellen Harvey at Dodge Gallery

Upstairs installation view

Downstairs installation view

Kristen Dodge is not only a fantastic gallerist with great knowledge of her artists, she is also a crime fighter. When someone came into her gallery and stole paintings from her current show, she chased them down and retrieved the works. You go girl! Harvey’s first show at the gallery includes explorations of the nude that make up part of her ongoing series Museum of Failure.

Harvey seems fascinated with the draw of the artistic nude as well as its lack of ability to satisfy and pay dividends. In Nudist Museum Gift Shop Harvey displays ebay and junk shop nude paintings and tchcokes she has accumulated. These banal objects become fine art. And in some cases, fine art is appropriated in the making of everyday objects such as Venus de Milo salt and pepper shakers. The show “makes explicit both the gallery’s function as a shop and as a creator of museum-like value.”

Henry Taylor at Untitled

Installation view

Henry Taylor worked as a psychiatric nurse for ten years and during this time he began painting. Based in LA he paints friends, as well as strangers who visit his studio. In this show, March Forth, an African hut (made of scraps from his studio as well as a trip he took to Ethiopia) is the centerpiece. The thread that links the hut and his paintings is the spontaneity of its creation.

Sam Moyer at Rachel Uffner

installation view Moyer show

Sam Moyer

Moyer attempts to “explore the liminal space between the two and three-dimensional” worlds. These are gorgeous works with a great deal of depth that images cannot accurately capture. Unlike Tauba Auerbach’s work which I was initially reminded of, this is not trompe l’oeil but a multi-stepped process. The process involves dying the canvas in India ink and folding it to dry with creases. She then draws on it with a bleach pen, ultimately ironing it and gluing it to wood panels.

Franklin Evans at Sue Scott Gallery

Franklin Evans

Frnaklin Evans floor

Franklin Evans creates an environment in every show I have seen his work in. You step into his world and in this case, on his world as the floor very much becomes part of the work.