David Adamo at Untitled
Through June 19th
www.nyuntitled.com
Certainly one of the breakout talents of this past Whitney Biennial, Adamo has been whittling and carving wood in ways that simultaneously illuminates the material’s strengths and vulnerability. The Lower East Side’s Untitled gallery is currently home to “the first major solo show in New York” of works by the sculptor. The gallery is crowded with chopped structures and (their accompanying pile of wood chips) that evoke Brancusi, Giacometti and Samuel Beckett in equal measure. At once forlorn and proud, an Adamo sculpture is like a totem to mortality.
Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures
Through June 11th
www.metropictures.com
The artist continues her practice of photographing artworks after they leave the artists’ studios—in the homes of collectors, in museums, at auction houses. For the current exhibition Lawler presents details of artworks from a Degas sculpture to a stack of Warhol boxes, this time in billboard size. These photographs, we’re told, are distorted to conform to the size of the gallery’s walls. The results are poetic musings on art making and the act of looking. In certain instances, encountering a Lawler image is like seeing a well-known artwork anew.
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception at MOMA
Through August 1st, 2011
www.moma.org
several of the artist’s videos can be viewed on his website:
The Belgian-born artist and long term resident of Mexico City is known for his drawings, conceptual walks and deadly serious pranks. MOMA’s exhibition focuses on the artist’s videos and specifically his urban social actions. Watching the incredibly tall artist bend to push an ice block through the city until it disappears is a treat on several levels, from the visceral Chaplin-esque situation to the art historical commentary. His singular methods are compelling for their politics as much as theatrics.
Michael Williams at CANADA
For his exhibition entitled “Straightforward as a Noodle,” Williams has created several very large artfully messy canvases from air brush and oil. The works are made from figurative and realistic doodles covered by abstract elements in unlikely colors. Scrawls, smudges and squiggles come together to create a strangely absorbing cacophonies. With titles like Everything Bagel and Who’s That Barking in the Shadows? (both 2011) we realize that despite his skills as a colorist and provocateur, Williams’s tongue is firmly in his cheek.
Cory Arcangel at The Whitney Museum of American Art
Through September 11th
www.whitney.org
Arcangel has been called a transitional artist. His work with technology—obsolete and state-of-the-art—is singularly clever and by turns hilarious. By hacking into primitive video games and writing or eliminating code to make his works, as in his early work, Clouds, in which everything but the pixilated moving clouds and blue background were erased from a Mario Bros. Game, Arcangel deconstructs a graphic world. The Whitney has chosen to feature the artist’s new variant of a previous work, Various Self Playing Bowling Games, (2011), consisting of projections of altered video bowling games throw gutter ball after gutter ball–and we instantly connect with the Sisyphean existential dilemma depicted. It’s always rewarding to witness the latest idea from the mind of Arcangel brought to fruition. Not yet 35, he is the youngest artist to have an entire floor devoted to his work at the museum.
Cao Fei at Lombard Freid Projects
Through June 25th
www.lombard-freid.com
Chinese art star Fei has appropriated characters call CBeebies from the BBC show for kids. The artist places the creepy but lovable fabric doll-like actors in an array of harsh or surreal situations, then repeats the image with variations meant to be discovered by any game viewer. An elaborate and affecting video created in shadows made by human hands and other forms is on display in the rear gallery. The piece is a dark fairy tale told to the children we used to be.
Zap: Masters of Psychedelic Art, 1965-1974 at Andrew Edlin
Through June 25th
www.edlingallery.com
While the mostly black-and-white ink drawings on display certainly constitute “Psychedelia” one might have expected a more color-filled show from the exhibition’s title. What Edlin gallery has compiled, however, is a rare look at original drug and sex comic book art made by the titans of the craft. R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and Spain Rodriguez are on display here with their raucous, critical and unforgettable outsider creations. The cartooning of these artists set the bar for the hippie era and beyond, with social commentary butting up against unapologetically explicit sexual acts. Robert Williams, arguably the most talented draftsman of the lot, is represented by comic panels so flawless and intricate in their execution that they must be seen up close to be fully appreciated.
Sally Smart at Postmasters Gallery
Through July 2nd
www.postmastersart.com
Smart’s collage of puppet-like creatures is a memorable assemblage of photographic reproductions, fabrics and drawings affixed to the gallery wall. The overall effect of the wall installation, in conjunction with the smaller collages in the gallery, is as charming as it is theatrical. While referencing Flaubert and feminism, the artist makes her characters heroic as they seem to walk, crawl and dance.
Louise Bourgeois at Cheim & Read
Through June 25th
www.cheimread.com
For this exhibition entitled “The Fabric Works,” the gallery has assembled several sewn paintings and collages by the late great artist, each one more lovely than the next. Many display concentric circles or spirals in varying weaves, created from scraps that themselves are triangular or square. The handsome, humble and feminine small works feel as if they might be diaries of the artist’s twilight years. A life in which everything held some sort of magic, pointed out by Bourgeois and passed along to us. Shortly before she died, I asked Louise Bourgeois if she had ever seen anything that she considered truly ugly. With typical class and confidence, she replied, “I find it ugly—and frightening—when people are yelling and screaming at each other.” For this quiet, moving show, we get another welcome glimpse into a beautiful life.
Mark Grotjahn at Anton Kern
Through June 25th
www.antonkerngallery.com
The painter’s newest works are large colorful abstracts that he has collectively titled, “Nine Faces.” Each oil on cardboard creation is thick with striated bands of paint in deliberate, if mysterious, patterns. Standing in front of one of these tall works is disorienting but somehow irresistible. If you notice, say, a peacock feather in one part of a canvas, your eyes are quickly forced to move elsewhere, and when you return to that spot to look for that pattern again, it may or may not be there. Perhaps what is most striking about the new works is the manner in which the paint is repeated lifted off the canvas, giving each work a kind of multi-hued fur coating. That, along with the fact that the paintings look back at us.
