Art Review | A Young Colorist, Antennas Aquiver — Helen Frankenthaler, at the Gagosian Gallery

Painted on 21st Street “Untitled” (1951), in a show at Gagosian on Helen Frankenthaler’s early period

Article: The New York Times - A Young Colorist, Antennas Aquiver
Author: Roberta Smith 
Photo: Richard Perry
Published: March 21, 2013 

On Oct. 26, 1952, a 23-year-old artist named Helen Frankenthaler made a painting on unstretched, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, using a freehand stain technique that owed a great deal to Jackson Pollock but was less systematic. She called it “Mountains and Sea,” and it became her best-known, most influential work. Its bounding scale, skirmish of pastel colors and charcoal lines, and mixture of landscape, still life and abstraction were distinctive. But most important was the way it fused color and canvas into a new, streamlined unity. Frankenthaler’s stain painting method, as it was sometimes called, was considered a breakthrough in many circles, the gateway to what would become Color Field abstraction.

Art historically, “Mountains and Sea” was something like Frankenthaler’s 15 minutes of fame, but generally almost nothing is known about where it came from. “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler From 1950 to 1959,” at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, performs the useful service of setting it firmly in the context of the 1950s, the best decade of the artist’s career. Here “Mountains” becomes the pivot between the all-but-unknown work that preceded it and a lavish, refreshing display of the various if more familiar kinds of wild beauty that it unleashed in subsequent paintings.

Fabulously enlightening and unruly, this show of 29 paintings is the latest example of the historical excavations with which Larry Gagosian, the art dealer everyone loves to hate, regularly redeems himself. He may have a deleterious inflationary effect on the art market and the careers of younger talents and nontalents, but his shows of older, often nonliving artists would do any museum proud. This one has been organized in cooperation with Frankenthaler’s estate by John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. (Its richly illustrated catalog is distinguished by Mr. Elderfield’s thoughtful essay and Lauren Mahony’s wonderfully detailed chronology of Frankenthaler’s passage through the 1950s, built around her letters, exhibitions and reviews.)

Frankenthaler was Color Field’s prodigy and its single-minded glamour girl. Born into a wealthy family in Manhattan, she grew up cosseted, cultured and bent on painting. She attended the Dalton School, where her art teacher was the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and went on to Bennington College in Vermont, studying with the painter Paul Feeley.

Graduating in 1949, Frankenthaler returned to New York and set up her first studio on East 21st Street. She soon began an affair with the esteemed art critic Clement Greenberg, nearly 20 years her senior, with whom she frequented galleries and museums, visited artists’ studios and traveled abroad. It is a tribute to Frankenthaler’s intelligence and ambition that she was soon up to speed on the latest innovations of the New York School, in addition to becoming friendly with many of its leading lights, including Pollock and David Smith.

Sometime in 1953 Greenberg brought Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington, to Frankenthaler’s studio, to show them “Mountains and Sea” — in all likelihood when Frankenthaler was not there. (Anyone irked by the presumption of this, raise your hand.) The Washington visitors immediately grasped the implications of Frankenthaler’s singing, thinned-down colors and the way they sank into the unprimed canvas. Louis later described “Mountains and Sea” as “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

The rest, you could say, is mystery. Frankenthaler’s stained-color technique has often been treated like a bit of precocious luck that Morris and Louis adapted and developed. Besides, Color Field’s critical prestige, if not its market share, began to contract after 1960, the year Frankenthaler was given a survey at the Jewish Museum. Frank Stella, a young artist fresh out of Princeton, had already emerged as the next hot thing, and Minimalism was on the horizon.

Frankenthaler’s path to “Mountains and Sea” deserves to be an immutable part of postwar history, and this show should make it so. It conjures a vivid portrait of the artist as a fearless young woman, unencumbered by rules or ideology, who had a remarkable ability to bend other artists’ styles and motifs to her own expressive needs. One advantage was her restless attention to the methods and materials of both painting and drawing, which she tended to combine.

This is evinced by the works in the show’s revelatory opening gallery, starting with the caked, episodic surface of “Painted on 21st Street” (1950), a smeary white-on-white mixture of paint, plaster, sand and scribbled fragments that suggests a pristine cave painting.

Another surprise is “The Sightseers,” a youthful masterpiece from 1951 in enamel and crayon on paper mounted on Masonite. After establishing an open fretwork of looping black lines, Frankenthaler fills the interstices with bright crayon, applied in broad areas accented with sharp scribbles and all kinds of marks and signs. There are periodic glimpses of “sights”: seascapes, mountains, possible figures, a crown. “The Sightseers” evokes precedents including Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning’s great “Excavation” and maybe a little Jean Dubuffet, yet it radiates an assured independence, partly because of the eccentric way it is made.

The same goes for the “Untitled” from 1951, a kind of landscape of tan ground and turquoise sky populated by a screenlike parade of who knows what — multicolored aircraft? sea creatures? plants? — accented once more with the fragmented black lines. Look closely, and you’ll see early signs of the stain technique among several other manipulations of paint. Here Miró and Gorky join the list of possible inspirations. Around the corner, the raucously exuberant “Ed Winston’s Tropical Gardens,” with its bright yellow ground and intimations of plants, trees and fruits, might be a billboard honoring Gorky’s “Garden in Sochi.”

Mr. Elderfield argues that Frankenthaler was more a second-generation Abstract Expressionist than a Color Field painter, especially in the 1950s, and this show bears him out. He also rightly contends that subject matter was essential to her art. It helped that she was as acutely attuned to the natural landscape as she was to the culture of painting. And while most members of the second generation cleaved to de Kooning, Frankenthaler concentrated on Pollock, combining aspects of his early and late phases, when he was most involved with imagery and myth.

Her best works are a kind of swirling, centrifugal mix of form, process, possible meaning and gorgeous, unpredictable colors, shot through with joie de vivre and wit. She wanted her paintings to seem quickly made and to be seen all at once. Yet they sustain concentrated looking, and reward time spent taking them apart and putting them back together, as they slip between legibility and abstraction, control and abandon, lines and seeping forms.

Frankenthaler gave herself a tremendous amount of permission. In “Western Dream,” of 1957, you can almost hear her naming the various motifs as her hand produces them: red insect, black idol, blue vortex, desert sand. In “Europa” she reiterates Titian’s straining goddess as a remarkably accurate blob of bright pink and then crosses it out, as if dissatisfied. In “Before the Caves,” she festoons an orange foot-shaped peninsula with lavender, gray and red and squeezes it between feathery curving lines that whip in from the sides.

Frankenthaler refused to see herself as a “woman painter,” although feminist art historians would later draw parallels between her staining technique and menstrual flow. (The insouciant, almost mocking 1952 “Scene With Nude” — with its tiny splatters of red paint between the outlines of female legs — provides some reason for doing so.) But her sense of freedom is to some extent implicitly female. Any woman making art at Frankenthaler’s level in the 1950s did so, at least in part, from a necessary sense of defiance. It burns bright in these canvases.

“The Sightseers” (1951), one of the works in “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959” at the Gagosian Gallery.

From left, “Shatter” (1953), and “Mountains and Sea” and “10/29/52,” both from 1952.

An untitled work from 1951.

“Ed Winston’s Tropical Gardens” (1951)

“Western Dream” (1957)

“Europa” (1957)

“Abstract Landscape” (1951), left, and “Open Wall” (1953).

“Painted on 21st Street” (1950)

Art Review | A Suspension of Willful Disbelief (Maurizio Cattelan)

"Maurizio Cattelan: All" A retrospective of the Italian artist at the Guggenheim Museum has a display of 128 works that hang from the rotunda.

Article: The New York Times - A Suspension of Willful Disbelief 
Author: Roberta Smith 
Photo: Chang W. Lee
Published: November 3, 2011

Is Maurizio Cattelan quitting while he’s ahead or before he lags too far behind? The question hangs over that Italian artist’s much anticipated 21-year retrospective at the Guggenheim, where, as is widely known by now, all the art is up in the air, too.

This unusual show has been described by Mr. Cattelan as his swan song. Although only 51, which is young in artist years, he has announced that he is retiring from the job of making art. Perhaps to celebrate, he has turned his retrospective into something of a final blowout artwork, one made of earlier pieces — 128 of them to be precise — and involving some delicate engineering. Mr. Cattelan’s entire artistic output, excepting two works whose owners declined to lend them, hangs in a gigantic distended mass from cables connected to an aluminum truss near the top of the museum’s rotunda. Titled “All,” it fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art.

It’s an impressive feat, Mr. Cattelan’s seeming evasion of the stultifying grip of the retrospective by “stringing up” his art — to use the words of Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim curator who organized the show, in its catalog. The effect is initially startling, but ultimately disrespectful and perverse. In some ways it may be just the thing for our attention-deficient times. You can zip up and down the ramp seeing everything and nothing at top speed. Yet its entertaining conceit aside, the show suggests that Mr. Cattelan knows what he’s about: he’s always been uneven and now he is running out of ideas. It may indeed be time for him to quit, and his previous, consistently subversive forays into gallery-running, exhibition-making and magazine publishing give him plenty of options.

The self-abnegating spectacle of “All” is completely in character with Mr. Cattelan’s well-known ambivalence about himself, his talent and his art, and his oft-cited fascination with failure. He grew up in Padua, the son of a truck driver and a cleaning woman. He worked from an early age; the biggest impression was made by a stint in a local morgue, an experience that Ms. Spector cites as a source of the continuing fascination with death most evident in his recurring use of taxidermied animals. He backed into art with little formal training after working briefly as a furniture designer.

Viewed from below especially, “All” is a full-bodied catalogue raisonné in the form of an exploding piñata of Cattelania, frozen in midair. As you ascend the ramp, the chaos continues: everything seems to be coming at you all at once. Displayed helter-skelter, for instance, are Conceptual pieces from his early “relational aesthetics” years, when he subverted various social transactions and art-world conventions, yielding works that often make sense only if you know the back story. “Tarzan and Jane,” a large color photograph of two people in lion costumes peering through a door, turns out to be an image of art dealers who gamely wore these suits for the duration of Mr. Cattelan’s show in their gallery in 1993. Equally opaque, if more typically sculptural, is “Lullaby,” from 1994, an oversized blue bag full of something that the catalog tells us is rubble from one of the Mafia-related bombings that swept Italy in the mid-1990s.

Another early work is simply a small plastic sign on a cheap brass chain that says “Torno Subito” — basically, “Be Back Soon.” When Mr. Cattelan failed to come up with satisfactory artwork for an exhibition scheduled with an Italian art dealer in 1989, he purchased the sign and hung it on the door of the gallery, which remained closed for the show’s run, adding another footnote to the long history of the empty gallery as art exhibition. The little sign is at the Guggenheim, but is so hard to find that it amounts to another failure.

One of the first works by Mr. Cattelan that speaks clearly for itself is a large black-and-white photograph of the artist from 1995. Dressed in jeans, a sweater and sneakers, he rolls on his back with his tongue hanging out and his hands and feet raised like paws. The image is comic perfection: a portrait of the artist as an obsequious canine, embarrassingly eager to please. In 1995 he also began his line of taxidermied horses, donkeys, mice and too many cutely curled-up dogs. Dead or alive? You decide. (Very close scrutiny reveals the “Torno Subito” sign hanging from the neck of a golden retriever that is also not going to be back any time soon.) In 1999 Mr. Cattelan began making exquisite life-size wax effigies of various people, including himself, looking young and cherubic; Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor; Hitler as a kneeling schoolboy possibly asking forgiveness; and a little old lady smiling out at us from a half-open refrigerator.

Whatever their strengths, the individual works are radically decontextualized and diminished in this arrangement. For example, Mr. Cattelan’s best-known, most controversial work, “La Nona Ora,” the life-size wax effigy of the downed pope, is usually installed on an immense expanse of red carpet amid shattered glass. It is as if an act of God (who else?) had just plunged the rock through the rose window of a large cathedral during high Mass. (The work’s title, which translates as “The Ninth Hour,” refers to the time that Christ died on the cross.) But at the Guggenheim the carpet has shrunk to a raft-size pallet not much larger than the pope, who now seems not so much a powerful target of heavenly wrath — and a work whose display in a Warsaw museum eventually cost its director her job — as a bit of cargo on the verge of being hoisted into a ship’s hold.

Throughout, there are pieces that never make it beyond the one-liner stage. Nearly a dozen paintings parody the frequent hokeyness of the Argentine-Italian modernist Lucio Fontana’s sliced-canvas monochromes by rearranging his cuts to form Z’s, for Zorro, but two wrongs don’t make a right. An enormous taxidermied white cow with scooter handles where horns might be is merely a bulky reiteration of one of the oldest Surrealist tricks in the book, descended from Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup. Most recent are nine shrouded, horizontal human forms carved from Carrara marble, an evocation of death as obvious as it is opulent.

But other pieces are richly enigmatic. An olive tree planted in a large Minimalist cube of dirt looks great, as if it floated out of a Magritte. As does the ostensibly touching but in fact typically ambiguous “Not Afraid of Love,” which is a very lifelike sculpture of an incredibly cute elephant beneath a sheet (with holes for the eyes) that conjures shyness, Halloween and also the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Cattelan’s exhibition is in many ways the exact opposite of the funhouse of participatory claptrap that Carsten Höller, his fellow traveler in relational aesthetics, has mounted at the New Museum. “All” is a funhouse that keeps the viewer at arm’s length while greatly compromising the art. Ms. Spector writes that it is “a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work within the context of a conventional retrospective.” But the show nonetheless does its job, tracing the trajectory of Mr. Cattelan’s career from the obscure to the overly clear, with some memorably resonant moments along the way. Still thumbing his nose at all concerned, Mr. Cattelan has taken himself to task.

A retrospective of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has a display of 128 works that hang from the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibition mixes works like “Betsy” (2002), featuring a mannequin in a refrigerator, with taxidermied animals.

Roberta Smith writes: “Mr. Cattelan’s entire artistic output, excepting two works whose owners declined to lend them, hangs in a gigantic distended mass from cables connected to an aluminum truss near the top of the museum’s rotunda.”

An untitled work from 2007, center.

The exhibition, writes Ms. Smith, “fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art.”

“Frau C.” (2007), center.

“Yet its entertaining conceit aside, the show suggests that Mr. Cattelan knows what he’s about: he’s always been uneven and now he is running out of ideas. It may indeed be time for him to quit, and his previous, consistently subversive forays into gallery-running, exhibition-making and magazine publishing give him plenty of options.”

“Love Saves Life” (1995)

In 1999 Mr. Cattelan began making life-size wax effigies of various people, including Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor.

“Him” (2001) is a wax figure of Hitler as a kneeling schoolboy.

This figure from Mr. Cattelan’s “Daddy Daddy” was previously displayed at the museum floating face down in the rotunda’s fountain.

“Novecentro” (1997), a figure of a horse.

Art Review | Marlene Dumas - The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque

Self Portrait at Noon, Marlene Dumas

From: The New York Times
Author: Roberta Smith
Published: December 11, 2008

The figurative painter Marlene Dumas has been characterized as an artist who leaves you either hot or cold, but that’s not necessarily so. “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, cuts right down the middle. It left me warm.

Measuring Your Own Grave, Marlene Dumas

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism

Ms. Dumas’s stained and brush-worked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; rather monstrous-looking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Dead Marilyn, Marlene Dumas

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

The Painter, Marlene Dumas

Other paintings go for point-blank sensationalism. “Dead Girl” shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms. Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Moshekwa, Marlene Dumas

Sometimes the paintings convey a raw, existential force, like the shadowed and piercing, slightly animalistic face of an enormously pregnant and mostly naked woman, defiant yet posing on her knees. Yet, lest we forget that meaning is ambiguous, and that the work is a painting, Ms. Dumas has titled it “Pregnant Image.”

Pregnant Image, Marlene Dumas

Born in South Africa in 1953, Ms. Dumas has lived in the Netherlands since 1976. Although a regular on the must-buy lists of collectors everywhere and the subject of an exhibition at the New Museum in 2002, she is more widely known in Europe than in the United States. This show is her largest in this country and only her fifth solo show in New York. It was organized by Connie Butler, the Modern’s chief curator of drawings and an Ahmanson Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it opened last summer.

One thing is certain: Ms. Butler has done Ms. Dumas no favors by installing her work thematically instead of chronologically. The arrangement creates the impression of an overlarge gallery show of works done over a few years. It is as if the museum didn’t want its stately sixth-floor galleries to feature anything but the mature, finished recognizable product.

The public could be confused by the messiness of early work. So instead the art seems to have sprung from the forehead of Zeus or Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans (or Ida Applebroog). Not until reaching the back of the drawing galleries on the third floor do you absorb any idea of development.

Waiting (For Meaning), Marlene Dumas

Here, in a single vitrine, you’ll encounter a very young artist moving very fast out of the gate on her own steam, starting with a brusque crayon drawing of beauty contestants. Ms. Dumas made it at age 10 while growing up on a farm near Cape Town. The earliest pieces broadcast a gift for drawing and caricature; a fierce, inborn focus on women; and a precocious interest in the physical side of life and art.

Close-ups of breasts and the female pudenda from 1972 bring to mind both Eva Hesse’s sexually charged abstractions and Joan Semmel’s monumental views of entwined naked couples. They could also be simply a young artist’s record of her changing body.

The standout is a small, oatmealish oval of canvas, cotton wool and paint on paper titled “Breakfast for Claes Oldenburg.” Made in 1975 when Ms. Dumas was in art school in Cape Town, it is an apt hommage whose gouges and fluttering marks also suggest a Cubist relief, complete with Pointillist dots, and a natural pictorial intelligence.

A page from Vogue magazine with the fashion model erased in a series of black, smeary strokes dates from 1977, just as young female artists in the United States were beginning to combine feminism and photography; it rawly indicates a refusal to leave painting behind. Then a sudden growth spurt: nearby, a large collage combines scaled-up drawings based on newspaper clippings of Winnie Mandela; Patrice Lumumba’s widow, Pauline Opango; and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X. The piece dates from 1982. The first paintings on view date from 1984, and show Ms. Dumas working very much as she does today.

The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount.

The Kiss, Marlene Dumas

At times her career — including her work and her voluble persona — seems like an extended Conceptual Art project intended to turn painting and its maleness on its head. Yet it is framed in a familiar artistic ego and bluster.

“I paint because I’m a woman,” she has said, in a tone that echoes the macho claims of male painters. And in quotations and poems in the catalog she seems just as self-involved and even pompous as many of her male counterparts. Sometimes she can be articulate about painting’s physicality and its psychological effects, yet saying it doesn’t make it so. Sometimes, when she talks about the viewer completing the art and the ambiguity of interpretation, she fetishizes ideas implicit in all art at least since Duchamp.

Remember Robert Longo’s twisting figures and the endless conjecture of whether they were dancing or being shot? The text panel at the front of the show invites viewers to participate in the process of constructing meaning. I thought that’s what we always do.

Still, one viewer’s stasis could be another’s relentless perseverance. Ms. Dumas’s emphasis on the naked or otherwise vulnerable bodies of women can read as retribution for centuries of less attuned representations by men and also for the supposed neutrality of abstraction.

Glass Tears (for Man Ray), Marlene Dumas

Some of her works protect women by making them disembodied, cloaking them in abstraction. The abject female of “Magdalena (Out of Eggs, Out of Business)” is little more than a few cursory features and two knee-length strands of hair enveloped in a Rothko-like field of dark red. Yet she doesn’t convince that this approach is all that different from that of Munch.

Ms. Dumas’s best work may lie ahead, and in the direction of greater variety. A model is Louise Bourgeois, whose recurring feminist themes have been presented in a succession of markedly different forms. There are hopeful signs in recent works like the “Moshekwa” portrait (2006); the frowsy, Nan Goldin-ish “Self-Portrait at Noon” from this year; and “Immaculate” (2003).

This last, a compact and foreshortened image of a woman’s genitalia and torso, goes beyond stain painting and allows for a more textured, controlled buildup of paint. To our benefit, Ms. Dumas has made several major themes her own, but she has yet to do the same with her beloved métier, painting.


Related Links:
- Wikipedia: Marlene Dumas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlene_Dumas
- Death Becomes Her (Slide Show) http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/12/arts/1212-DUMA_index.html
- Bromirski’s Flickr: Marlene Dumas (set)

Art Review | Piecing Things Together

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE
Jonathan Talbot’s collage titled “The Bachelors Visit New York.”

From: The New York Times
Author: Benjamin Genocchio
Published: October 19, 2008

In Newburgh, art galleries are few and far between. Though there is some noticeable upscale development along the river, much of the city, with its blocks of rundown working-class homes and storefronts, remains a far cry from its 19th-century status as “the gem of the Hudson.” The architecture here dates back to the 1600s; this was once a beautiful place.

Ann Street Gallery is the city’s only nonprofit art space. Two years old, it occupies a portion of the basement of a 19th-century hotel recently renovated by a local nonprofit group, Safe Harbors of the Hudson, which is devoted to providing affordable housing for the indigent, veterans and artists. Safe Harbors also sponsors the gallery.

The gallery is small but nicely fitted-out, with polished concrete floors and crisp white walls. There is a main gallery and a back room used for video and sound art. The emphasis is on emerging and midcareer artists from the Hudson River Valley, but works by artists from New York and further afield are also shown here.

The current exhibition at the gallery is “Collage Logic,” a group show of 13 artists from New York and the wider region. It explores “the use of collage techniques and methodologies in contemporary art,” according to Virginia Walsh, the exhibition’s curator and gallery director. This is a rich and fertile area of artistic expression.

What is so interesting about this show is that few of the artists selected by Ms. Walsh make conventional collages. John Morton, for instance, has made an arresting sound installation using appropriated sounds from along the Hudson River. You hear fishermen talking, pipes clanging, water lapping, even a train speeding by.

Joel Carreiro appropriates images from art history and medieval manuscripts to create pastiche paintings. The source material is printed on heat-transfer paper, which he cuts into little strips and squares and then recombines to form interesting patterns. I like these works a lot, as much for their formal ingenuity as for their obvious beauty.

Joel Carreiro, The God of Complexity

Thomas Weaver presents a terrific conceptual collage made of paintings, stencils, drawings, watercolors and writing, mostly on paper, bunched together on a wall. Across them, he has painted the outline of the frame of a house, suggesting a collection of ideas and thoughts gathered together under one roof, a metaphor for the artist’s mind.

Other artists work with found materials. Jackie Shatz fuses together ceramics, paint, cloth and other found materials to make colorful, abstract wall sculptures. Imelda Cajipe Endaya collages together maps, candy wrappers and a variety of textiles to create works that reflect on childhood and, somewhat more obliquely, feminist issues.

Jackie Shatz, Beowulf

The term collage comes from the French word coller, which means to glue. Not surprisingly, the show includes work by some artists who affix paper or other objects to a two-dimensional surface — the traditional form of collage. Among them are Jonathan Talbot and Vivien Collens, both of whom have clearly mastered the technique.

Mr. Talbot appropriates mostly black and white imagery from old books and magazines which he pastes together to create scenes that look like historical photographs. “The Stationmaster” and “The Bachelors Visit New York” depict arrangements of people against hybrid architectural structures. They are about dreams as much as memories.

Pablo Picasso probably produced the first modern collage, “Still Life With Chair Caning” (1912), consisting of a piece of oilcloth printed with a caning pattern and glued onto a canvas. By incorporating real objects into his picture, he blurred the distinction between painting and sculpture and opened up a whole new area for art making.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life With Chair Caning

Collage has been put to many uses since then, as this show testifies. Perhaps the most ambitious use of it is Yeon Jin Kim’s video “Dreams,” which might be described as a travelogue of the subconscious. Much of the imagery was taken with a spy camera inserted inside an elaborate paper model of a city, also on display.

All told, this show contains a remarkably diverse and thoughtful group of works by artists who, though not household names, probably deserve to be better known. Collage may be a century old, but this show suggests that it will be around for a lot longer.


Related Links:
- Ann Street Gallery
- Joel Carreiro Official Web Site
- Jonathan Talbot Official Web Site

Art Review | A Panoramic Backdrop for Meaning and Mischief

A balloon dog. A chocolate heart wrapped in shiny red. A silhouette of Piglet from a “Winnie the Pooh” coloring book. These are the subjects of three glossily lacquered, stainless steel works — all previously unexhibited — by the Pop artist Jeff Koons now on view in the Cantor Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Librado Romero

From: The New York Times
Author: Ken Johnson
Published: April 22, 2008

With its breathtaking, panoramic views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, the Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art may strike you as an excellent place to mount a seasonal outdoor sculpture show, which it does every year. In truth, it is an inhospitable site for sculpture, as demonstrated by the 2008 display that opens on Tuesday: three wonderful, previously unexhibited works by the celebrated Pop artist Jeff Koons. Each of these sculptures is a greatly enlarged, glossily lacquered, stainless-steel representation of something small: a toy dog made of twisted-together balloons; a chocolate valentine heart wrapped in red foil, standing en pointe; and a silhouette of Piglet from a “Winnie the Pooh” coloring book, randomly colored as if by a small child.

They are mischievously meaningful works. With its pneumatic, sausagelike parts, “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” is a sly Trojan Horse: it seems innocent but is loaded with aesthetic and erotic perversity. “Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)” acidly comments on the commercial debasement of emotional and religious experience. “Coloring Book” reflects the youth-obsessed infantilism of modern culture and society.

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog.

But placed on the architecturally nondescript patio, where there are also shaded areas for patrons of the Roof Garden Cafe, the sculptures too easily turn into benign, decorative accessories.

The biggest problem is scale. Seen in an indoor gallery, the elephantine, shiny metallic “Balloon Dog (Yellow),” which rises to 10 feet at its highest point, would have a weirdly imposing, slightly menacing presence. On the roof it appears dwarfed by the vast sky and by the open expanses of space to the south and west of the museum.

The intimacy of Mr. Koons’s sculpture is also diminished. Perfectionist attention to detail is one of his work’s most compelling aspects: note the exactingly formed knot that serves as the balloon dog’s nose, or the folds, pleats and stretch marks in the heart’s wrapper. The distracting outdoor environment, though, discourages careful, contemplative looking.

Jeff Koons, Sacred Heart.

Because it is both the biggest and the simplest, the 18 ½-foot-tall “Coloring Book” is the least undermined by its environment. But it is also the least interesting formally, being little more than a flat, irregularly contoured slab whose colors are thin and watery.

Jeff Koons, Coloring Book.

Their setting aside, Mr. Koons’s sculptures remain intellectually and sensuously exciting — “Balloon Dog” is a masterpiece — and they are worth visiting under any circumstances.


Related Links:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Jeff Koons Official Web Site
- Interview With Jeff Koons (Journal of Contemporary Art)
- Jeff Koons's Biography (Gagosian Gallery)