Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden

11/16/2013

This gallery is crazy. The first time I went here it was located on 20th Street in a really odd, long space that sort of felt like a garage. It was during a show by Polly Apfelbaum, who's an amazing feminist artist, and I had seen the review in the New York Times. There were literally loose piles of glitter all over the gallery. People were pretending to snort them up like technicolor heroine!

So I was walking down 22nd Street the other day and I saw a new gallery--it was Hansel and Gretel. They have moved to a really nice space now, with crazy high ceilings. It's still a small gallery in Chelsea, and it's still rough inside (there's a huge hole in part of the ceiling!). The same two young people from before were there and I heard them talking to someone so I think they own the gallery, which I also think is cool. Anyways the artist was Tatiana Berg, who I hadn't heard of, but I loved the work. They were paintings just as colorful as Apfelbaum's glitter piles. There was also a huge upside down triangle painting of a face in the back. I thought it was really funny and crazy!

Bottom line: this gallery is crazy! But I find that very refreshing.

9/29/2013

Paintings by Tatiana Berg at this gallery looked as if they were painted on a whiteboard--actually on a Japanese paper that's "basically plastic" according to the guy at the reception desk, but the end result was that the surface doesn't really soak in the paint, so the trick of painting them, I would imagine, is to get the paint to lie on the surface and dry there without just rolling of. The strokes therefore look quite forcefully and dramatically applied, yet nevertheless not that interesting, and the images that they're combined to make aren't memorable--some female figures, maybe a still life, I can't say what else. A couple of sculptural paintings were scattered across the floor--these were big buoys of raw canvas with paint applied in broad messy stripes. A pretty obvious way of stressing the strangeness of how the paint relates to the plasticky surface in the works on the wall, and it didn't make it any more compelling for me. I learned from reading the press release that this artist belongs to a "New Casualist" movement... but if you have an -ism, if you have all these blunt tricks, can you truly call yourself "casual"?

Also I really don't like the name of this gallery. When I saw it on the window I assumed it was the name of Tatiana Berg's exhibition (which is actually called "Bill Murray") and thought it was a bad name for a show. But for a gallery, even worse.