“The Art World Game Changers of 2012” @adamlindemann - George Lindemann

Zwirner and Koons. (PMC)

Zwirner and Koons. (PMC)

Bogie knew, “you must remember this …” Here are a few art world surprises to remember, and some we’d rather forget.

The Chelsea Flood: Who could ever have imagined that a silly old hurricane would sink the entire Chelsea art district and parts of Red Hook? Sandy not only inundated basement storages; first-floor galleries had their key November exhibitions floating in six feet of dirty seawater. I walked through the tragic scene the morning after, and saw trashed galleries with dirty art dripping and salty. It’s amazing how fast many of Chelsea’s galleries reopened, some acting as if nothing had happened. What’s next, a tsunami?

A Big Top on Randall’s Island: Who needs another art fair … Rio? Istanbul? Phnom Penh? Anywhere but New York, right? How could a city that is filled with galleries and that already hosts the Armory Show (which just sold to the eccentric art magazine publisher Louise Blouin) and the ADAA Art Show possibly handle another fair? Turned out it could—and then some. In May, London’s successful Frieze franchise opened a game-changing new fair housed in a big top tent on Randall’s Island with over 170 international galleries, and thousands of shoppers flocked in. It seems like most buyers today can’t be bothered to take in a gallery show; they want their art product sliced, diced and hung side-by-side in tidy cubicles, so they got what they were looking for. It was a huge success, and confirmed that the fairs—art’s shopping malls—are where it’s at. They’re like the World Series and the Super Bowl of art combined. All that’s missing is stadium vendors selling peanuts and Cracker Jack, and one that yells: “Bee-ah Heeyah!”

Schimmel-Gate in Los Angeles: Nearly three years ago, one of New York’s most beloved impresarios, the inimitable Jeffrey Deitch, gave up his gallery when tapped by his friends on the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) to run their troubled museum. Mr. Deitch was known for discovering new talent and putting on art spectacles that attracted a large and youthful downtown following. When he arrived in L.A., rumors spread that veteran MoCA curator Paul Schimmel was not pleased. Under Mr. Deitch’s direction, a worthy Jack Goldstein retrospective was canceled in favor of a timely Dennis Hopper retrospective. This was only the beginning of bitter infighting between curator and director, infighting that this past summer led to Mr. Schimmel’s departure and prompted all the artists to resign from the museum board, including hometown heroes John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. The L.A. press was all over it, as were several in the New York art community who had once lauded Mr. Deitch; in lockstep, they all turned on him. Will he remain in L.A. after the museum’s Urs Fischer retrospective this spring? In hindsight, mistakes were made all around; let’s hope the museum and everyone involved looks at the bigger picture.

Christie’s Record-Breaking Contemporary Art Sale: In November, Christie’s Contemporary Art Auction tallied a sale of historic proportions, totaling a whopping $412.2 million. This type of result creates a myopic view that, despite the bad economy, art is selling like hotcakes. Though big numbers were achieved for blue-chip names like Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, the theater of it all helps keep all the smaller boats afloat—and disguises the reality that, outside the tippy-toppy-type “trophy” auction results, the rest of the art market has slowed down.

Red Hot Richter: German artist Gerhard Richter’s greatest contributions to painting are his photography-based figurative works, especially those relating to Germany’s Nazi past. But his color abstraction paintings, of which he has made many over the years, have recently hypnotized the art market. A large one sold for $21 million a year ago, and soon after that, this past October, came an inexplicable price of $34 million for a particularly luscious picture. Only a month later, a painting of a similar size hammered for only $17.5 million. Go figure. Sure, each one is different, but the prices for pictures of equal size and comparable quality are bouncing between $15 million and $35 million like a dented Ping-Pong ball. It just goes to show how irrational today’s art market can be. As my grandfather always used to say, it’s “Easy come, easy go!”

Koons Flies the Coop: All over Miami earlier this month, rumors were flying that mega-star Jeff Koons was leaving his roost at Gagosian Gallery to have his next show hosted at the new Chelsea digs of the David Zwirner Gallery. Many felt this just couldn’t happen, and then it did. At the highest level, star artists have more power than they seem to realize—perhaps now they’ll start to use it. Fast on the heels of the Koons news came the announcement that Damien Hirst would split from Gagosian. But Mr. Hirst, who had been showing with Gagosian for 17 years, was never really “represented” by any gallery, since he’s always done as he’s seen fit, even when that meant putting his own work up for auction and thereby trashing his market and the collectors who supported it. Then the mysteriously mad Yayoi Kusama, as if she were psychically tuned in to Messrs. Koons and Hirst, announced that she too will leave the Gagosian Gallery. Through “loyalty,” lethargy, apathy or fear, the biggest-name artists have been willingly shackled to their heritage galleries—now that may be changing. I don’t believe this trend is specific to Gagosian. The very foundations of the “artist representation” model are crumbling. Maybe all the top-selling artists will fire their galleries and form one big collective, then they can just set prices and cut out the dealers. I’d prefer it if they charged one price at the door and then a bingo machine randomly chose which artwork you got; that would make it fun again.

Tate Talent to the Met: By hiring Tate Modern’s dynamic curator Sheena Wagstaff, Tom Campbell, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s youthful director, is reinvigorating the Met’s stodgy contemporary program; he’s got the space, too, having rented out the Marcel Breuer building, which the Whitney Museum will soon move out of.

Dishonorable Mention: Venus Over Manhattan, my uptown gallery, opened in May with a theme show titled “À Rebours,” inspired by the story of the Duc Jean des Esseintes, the debauched 19th-century art collector. One day, a thief walked into the gallery and plucked a fine Dalí off the wall, right under the nose of a gallery guard and smack in the crosshairs of a well-focused security camera. After the heist generated over 500 news stories around the world, the culprit shockingly mailed the piece back to the gallery in a poster tube. Was it a take from the old Thomas Crown Affair or some dangerous and delinquent art performance? No doubt it was a wacky prank—don’t get me wrong, we love when people enjoy the show, but kleptomaniacs are no longer welcome.

"Like Watching Paint Thrive: In Five Chelsea Galleries, the State of Painting" in @nytimes

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday Shinique Smith’s “Bale Variant No. 0022,” in this show at the James Cohan gallery, one of five Chelsea shows of contemporary painting. More Photos »
June 28, 2012
By

Painting is a lot of things: resilient, vampiric, perverse, increasingly elastic, infinitely absorptive and, in one form or another, nearly as old as humankind. One thing it is not, it still seems necessary to say, is dead.

Maybe it appears that way if you spend much time in New York City’s major museums, where large group shows of contemporary painting are breathtakingly rare, given how many curators are besotted with Conceptual Art and its many often-vibrant derivatives. These form a hegemony as dominant and one-sided as formalist abstraction ever was.

But that’s another reason we have art galleries. Not just to sell art, but also to give alternate, less rigid and blinkered, less institutionally sanctioned views of what’s going on.

Evidence of painting’s lively persistence is on view in Chelsea in five ambitious group exhibitions organized by a range of people: art dealers, independent curators and art historians. Together these shows feature the work of more than 120 artists and indicate some of what is going on in and around the medium. Some are more coherent than others, and what they collectively reveal is hardly the whole story, not even close. (For one thing there’s little attention to figuration; the prevailing tilt is toward abstraction of one sort or another.) A few of the shows take a diffuse approach, examining the ways painting can merge with sculpture or Conceptual Art and yield pictorial hybrids that may not even involve paint; others are more focused on the medium’s traditional forms.

All told, these efforts release a lot of raw information into the Chelsea air, creating a messy conversation, a succession of curatorial arguments whose proximity makes it easy to move back and forth among them, sizing up the contributions of individual artists as well as the larger ethos.

Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday

A good place to start thinking about the expansive possibilities of painting is this show at the James Cohan Gallery, one that is not explicitly about painting but that nonetheless includes a lot of works of a definite pictorial nature. Organized by Matthew Higgs, director of the alternative space White Columns, it charts a literal-minded kind of abstraction that uses common materials and, often, painting as a jumping-off point.

Representing 37 artists, the show reaches into the past for Hannah Wilke’s small, delicate chewing-gum reliefs from 1975 that are evocative of female genitalia, and for an Andy Warhol 1978 “Oxidation Painting,” its gaudy green-gold splatters achieved by having his assistants urinate on canvasses covered with copper paint.

Recent efforts include paintinglike wall pieces like Alexander Bircken’s striped rectangles of crocheted yarn (a skeletal homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed”?) and Bill Jenkins’s wire bed frame threaded through with short snakes of rope (Jackson Pollock?). There are works that suggest three-dimensional paintings, including a thick pylon of bright bundled fabric by Shinique Smith and a free-standing sheaf of painted fabric and paper by Nancy Shaver.

Other standouts include Udomsak Krisanamis’s 1996 “Acid Rain,” a swirling painting-collage of black and white; Gedi Sibony’s “The Two Simple Green Threes,” whose stenciled motif suggests a rehearsal for a quilt; and a painting on paper by David Hammons in which splashes of pink Kool-Aid evoke the nearby Warhol. There are lots of illuminating connections to be drawn among the works here.

Context Message

The robust, even wholesome physicality of Mr. Higgs’s show finds its complement in “Context Message,” at Zach Feuer, a rather more barbed presentation of what I would call painting, quasi-painting and anti-painting. With works by about 40 artists (including some collectives and collaborations), the show has been organized by Tyler Dobson and Ben Morgan-Cleveland, two young artists who run the small, forward-looking gallery Real Fine Arts in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

It starts off winningly. At its center hang two beautiful quilts, one by Lola Pettway, the other by Mary Lee Bendolph and Ruth P. Mosely, all from the acclaimed quilters’ collective of Gee’s Bend, Ala. The works surrounding these two amazing pictorial objects oscillate erratically among the ironic, the sincere, the subversive and the snarky.

R. H. Quaytman, known for cool photo-based works, contributes a small, sweet but rather generic oil portrait of her husband. The great blues guitarist and self-taught painter John Fahey (1939-2001) is represented by a lively gestural abstraction.

The canvasses of Merlin Carpenter, Bjarne Melgaard and Michael Krebber all add fairly obvious twists to ironic art-world self-reference with images and texts copied from the Internet. In between, paintings by Alistair Frost, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, David Diao and Martin Kippenberger all reward attention.

This show never quite comes together, but that may be its point. Its scrappy waywardness gives a vivid picture of the general unruliness in and around painting right now.

Painting in Space

A similar lack of focus afflicts this show at Luhring Augustine, but not quite so fruitfully. Packed with well-known names, it is a benefit exhibition for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and has been organized by Tom Eccles, the center’s executive director, and Johanna Burton, director of its graduate program. Among the 26 artists here the three who explore the show’s titular theme most actively are Martin Creed, represented by a big latticelike red wall painting; Rachel Harrison, whose bright, patchily painted plastic-foam sculpture comes with a length of searing orange carpet; and Liam Gillick, the subject of a show that opened at Bard last weekend, whose spare painted metal sculptures suggest geometric paintings extruded into space.

Otherwise, videos and sculptures by Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Haim Steinbach, Mark di Suvero, John Handforth and others mainly squander an interesting concept: Just about anything seems to qualify as “painting in space.” Paintings of a more wall-bound, canvas-based sort, by artists like Josh Smith, Amy Sillman, Glenn Ligon and Sarah Morris, range through current abstraction, but that’s not the same.

Stretching Painting

The 10 artists in “Stretching Painting” at Galerie Lelong don’t so much push the medium into space as meddle with its physical properties at close quarters, on the wall.

Sometimes the exercise is disarmingly simple, as with the magnified brushwork and pale colors (diluted with plaster) of Alex Kwartler’s two large paintings on plywood. Sometimes it is startlingly obsessive, as with the work of Gabriel Pionkowski, a young artist who unravels canvas, colors the individual threads and partly reweaves then into stripes or jacquardlike patterns; or Donald Moffett’s wildly suggestive combinations of furlike paint surfaces on emphatically perforated wood.

Kate Shepherd and Jim Lee indicate new possibilities for the modernist monochrome. Assembled by Veronica Roberts, a New York-based curator and scholar, the works here can sometimes feel a bit small-bore. This is relieved by Patrick Brennan’s “Boomtown (A long road home),” a big, bristling collage festooned with small paintings, and Lauren Luloff’s “Flame Violent and Golden,” which seems pieced together from textile remnants that are actually hand-painted on different scraps of cloth, using bleach. It has some of the scenery-chewing exuberance of Julian Schnabel, which is quite refreshing.

The Big Picture

A penchant for small, modestly-scaled works that is often evident in these shows is at its most extreme at Sikkema Jenkins in “The Big Picture,” a slyly titled show of works by eight artists whose efforts rarely exceed 20 inches on a side.

An implication here is that small is not only beautiful but also might actually be radical, or at least anti-establishment, in a time of immense, often spectacular artworks. Another suggestion is that there remains plenty to be done with paint applied to small, flat rectangular surfaces.

These arguments are made effectively and repeatedly, whether by Jeronimo Elespe’s “Segundo T,” whose scratched patterns suggest a text or a textile as much as a painting; Merlin James’s resplendent “Yellow,” which simply pulses with small, well-placed blooms of color; or Ann Pibal’s latest, more forthright collusions of brushy and hard-edged abstraction. Through quietly inspired brushwork alone, David Schutter breathes his own kind of life into landscape-suggestive monochromes, while John Dilg brings the canvas weave to bear, almost pixelatedly, on his cartoon-visionary landscapes.

Robert Bordo, Josephine Halvorson and Ryan McLaughlin all make the case that art exists foremost for close looking and internalized experience and nothing does this better than painting. Other mediums can do it just as well, if we’re lucky, but not better.

For the moment three solo exhibitions supplement the conversation among these group shows in nearly mutually exclusive ways. In Cheyney Thompson’s installation (through Saturday) at Andrew Kreps (525 West 22nd Street) postwar gestural abstraction and Conceptual Art collide to bracing effect in a series of gaudy but weirdly methodical canvasses of identical height whose widths are proportioned to the walls on which they are displayed; never has Mr. Thompson’s sardonic skepticism about painting and its processes looked so fierce or decorative.

At Derek Eller (615 West 27th Street) André Ethier’s small canvasses (also through Saturday) mine the overlap between modernist and folk painting with a vibrant insouciance and could easily have been included in the Sikkema Jenkins show. And in her Manhattan gallery debut at Thomas Erben (526 West 26th Street) Whitney Claflin presents, through July 28, busily painted, also small canvasses enhanced by collage-poems, jewelry, sewn patches and feathers; they announce painting’s ability to absorb all comers in a whisper that is also a joyful shout.

Canvas Is Optional

THE BIG PICTURE Through July 27. Sikkema Jenkins, 530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 929-2262.

CONTEXT MESSAGE Through Aug. 3. Zach Feuer, 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 989-7700.

EVERYDAY ABSTRACT — ABSTRACT EVERYDAY Through July 27. James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 714-9500.

PAINTING IN SPACE Through Aug. 17. Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9100.

STRETCHING PAINTING Through Aug. 3. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 315-0470.

 

via nytimes.com

 

"ZWIRNER GALLERIES HERE AND THERE" in @nytimes #art #contemporaryart

Some would say that David Zwirner’s rapid gallery expansion is Gagosian envy. Others would simply call it a way to serve better a growing roster of artists, which includes Doug Wheeler, Marlene Dumas, Jason Rhoades and Neo Rauch.

Mr. Zwirner is poised to open a second space in New York, just a block from his West 19th Street gallery in Chelsea. And by October he will have a major presence in London. “I have many careers to worry about,” Mr. Zwirner said.

The superdealer Larry Gagosian runs 11 galleries around the world, and Mr. Zwirner said that “Larry has a global model that seems to work.”

In Chelsea, Mr. Zwirner is building a gallery at 537 West 20th Street on the site of what was a three-story parking garage. Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect, is designing the building, which will have about 30,000 square feet on five floors, with natural light. It will include a 6,000-square-foot column-free space with 18-foot-high ceilings.

If all goes as planned, this second Chelsea gallery will open in November with an exhibition of work from two of the artist estates Mr. Zwirner represents: Dan Flavin’s and Donald Judd’s.

“With this Minimalist art we need better space to show the material,” Mr. Zwirner said. The London gallery, in an 18th-century Georgian town house at 24 Grafton Street, in the heart of Mayfair, will be his first overseas. Ms. Selldorf will design that space too, which will open with new works by Luc Tuymans.

By opening in London, Mr. Zwirner is joining a growing group of New York galleries there. Last month Eykyn Maclean opened a space on St. George Street; Pace is soon to announce a gallery location there; and Michael Werner Gallery, which already has spaces in New York and Berlin, has just signed a lease on a space on Upper Brook Street in Mayfair.

“One has to accept the fact that the art world is international,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner at Michael Werner. “There are collectors from all over the world who come to London but don’t go to New York.”