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102 Reviews

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  • 5.0 star rating
    2/27/2012
    1 check-in

    I saw a delightful little Terry Winters show here last week--all small works, pages torn from textbooks or other informational text materials with colorful charts and diagrams printed on transparencies and laid over the top. Very nice to look it. I hadn't even been planning to come to this show but the gallery is on street level and has all glass on the front wall, which is a great way to welcome visitors.

    This review refers to the gallery at 502 W 22nd St. but I couldn't find a Yelp entry for that location so I'm putting my review here. Matthew Marks has several locations all over Chelsea and I'd say that the quality is pretty consistent among them.

  • 5.0 star rating
    6/18/2012
    2 check-ins

    My parents are not big art lovers but they have a poster on their mantle that reproduces a painting of a fisherman on a beach, and the poster has a weird finish on it that imitates the surface texture of brushstrokes. They become visible when the light catches them, and their direction and length have nothing to do with the image underneath it. It is supposed to make the poster look fancier or more expensive but if you're paying attention it's just weird and fake.

    You will not find anything like this poster at Metro Pictures but nevertheless I couldn't help thinking about when I saw Cindy Sherman's exhibition here. The backgrounds in the photos are dramatic landscapes, with forests, mountains, and volcanoes, and they have been treated to have a feathered, brushy look that reminded me of my parents' poster. Cindy Sherman stands in the foreground of each image wearing fancy dresses that have elaborate textures of their own, but they are photographed normally (I mean, the quality of the photography is obviously very high but the dresses don't look like they have been altered). The way the dresses look against the backgrounds is out of control! I loved it!

    In the Cindy Sherman retrospective that was at MoMA this spring you could see how she has used digital retouching to put herself in the frame of a single photograph multiple times. But the settings are normal--expensive houses, parties, and so on. The relationship between the figures and the background makes sense in those pictures. In the new ones it doesn't make sense and that is why it's so exciting. I was really happy about this new direction in the artist's work.

    The inside of Metro Pictures is shaped like a horseshoe and visiting the gallery can feel like going to a haunted house or other amusement-park ride: go in one end, follow the path, look at the stuff, go out the other end. When a show is so-so this can make it seem even more trivial than it actually is. But Cindy Sherman's new work was so good that I didn't even think about on that particular visit. I may have felt a little dizzy--but it wasn't from walking in circles!

  • 4.0 star rating
    2/8/2013
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    The name of this gallery is so hard for me to remember! I'm always like "McInnes & Nash... Mitchum & Guinness... what's it called?!" So, too many words in the title but other than that this is a solid gallery. Last time I went they had an exhibition of paintings by Keltie Ferris. There was a lot of buzz around this artist but I had never seen her works in person so I was excited to go. I was not disappointed! They are very vivid abstractions, where layers of color and brush stylings play against each other in an electrifying dance. I thought for sure that the bottom layer of these paintings had been printed on with an inkjet, but when I asked a gallery attendant she said, no, the whole thing was painted by the artist by hand.. if I remember correctly, she used a spray nozzle and/or a sponge, which had the effect of muting the movement of her hand. I totally fell for it! Wonderful.

    The space itself is big, airy, and bright, with lots of room to move around and choose your own path for studying the works on display. One of the women at the front desk is always very friendly and eager to answer whatever questions I might have. The other one is not so gregarious. Fair enough. It's not like I'm actually a client who is there to buy something.

  • 8687 Melrose Ave
    West Hollywood, CA 90069
    3.0 star rating
    1/9/2014

    The MOCA building is squat and yellowish--totally unremarkable, but situated in the plastic RGB monstrosity that is the Pacific Design Center it manages to look stately and dignified. Entrance is free, which is nice.

    The exhibition I went to paired Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland, the post-war purveyors of beefcake and phallus fantasy.  The pairing was not particularly imaginative (Mizer hired Tom of Finland to illustrate the covers of his catalogs, and was actually the one who came up with the "Tom of Finland" nom de plume) nor did it tell any revelatory histories, or situate them in art history in an eye-opening way. A wall text in the Mizer gallery suggested that the way he laid out his catalogues, the grids of beefcake photos labeled with letters and numbers, was interesting in relation to the serial production of minimalist and pop art that would come after it--but if the curators really wanted to make that point, shouldn't they have included some of that art? and wasn't that art just responding to standard commercial practices, of which Mizer was just one example? In relation to modern art trends like appropriation and collage, there was a pair of Tom of Findland's "mood boards," with pictures he'd cut out of magazines and newspapers and porn rags, which were visually interesting, especially ones where he had drawn over the photographs to give the men the cartoonishly large buttocks and pecs that characterize his drawings, or the pic of three policemen where he'd drawn huge cocks coming out of their uniform flies. These details were rather small and easy to miss if you weren't paying attention so I wish the curators had done more to draw attention to these moments.

    In terms of the history not of art but of erotica, you don't get the impression that either Mizer or Tom was influencing the other, they were both doing what they were doing at the same time. That, and the predominance of a handful of masculine archetypes--gladiators, sailors, cowboys, bikers, farmboys, mechanics--inscribed some fairly narrow contours for the mid-century homoerotic imagination. I had to wonder what Bob and Tom would make of mpreg, or furries, or World of Warcraft slash drawings with orcs fucking elves, or whatever else is polluting Tumblr and DeviantArt these days. You've come a long way, baby!  

    I should note that Mizer's imagery came off as slightly more diverse than Tom's, with some skinnier/less worked out bodies, and a couple of odd additions to the aforementioned Pantheon of Masculinity--there were a couple of guys dressed a wizards in capes, thongs, and pointy hats, waving their wands at walls of runes or holding skull-capped staves. I thought those were really funny. I also liked a sequence titled "The Doctor and The Demon"--one guy with a stethoscope was examining another guy with little horns glued to his temples. Hmm.

    Overall it was a fun, light (and, arousing :3) exhibit. But there was an incident that spoiled my impression of MOCA. I was meeting a friend who was running late, and as I lingered there was a shift change for the security guards. The new one was holding a ruler. As she paced the galleries she'd tap it against the walls. FWAP-FWAP-FWAP-FWAP-FWAP. She'd bang it on the metal bars of the stairway's banister. CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG. She would even (and this was what really FLOORED ME) bang it on the display cases that were holding Mizer's photos. DING-DING-DING-DING-DING. What a Racket!! I tried to just ignore her but at one point my friend shot her a Look of Death. You won't believe how she responded...

    "Am I bothering you?"

    Um...

    uh...

    Obviously there was no conceivable way to respond to this outrageous impudence.

    If anyone at the Pacific Design Center is reading this, please Officially Reprimand her noisy rude ass. And confiscate the goddamn ruler

    THANKS

  • 1.0 star rating
    10/15/2012

    Modernbook shares a floor of a building downtown with several other galleries. I was walking down the corridor when I passed it and decided to poke my head in. I didn't stay long--but it was long enough to tell that this gallery was not worth a longer visit. For starters, it was very cluttered. Works by several artists were on display simultaneously, and it looked more like a showroom than a group show, with several works by each artist clustered closely. Apparently because they ran out of wall space, there was one series of four works laid out in a square grid on the floor. The lower parts of the walls were used as a lean-to storage space: wrapped up prints of all sizes were propped up and facing the wall. I'm no construction expert, but I don't think it would be so hard to put up some drywall and make a storage area SEPARATE from the display area. To top it all off, the gallery was playing bad muzak--the sort of saccharine house you hear in Europe's cheesiest cafes. If you're passing through the building and you're in the mood, you might as well pop your head in and see if anything catches your eye. But don't expect much.

  • 22-25 Jackson Ave
    Long Island City, NY 11101
    5.0 star rating
    1/2/2013
    1 check-in
    Listed in Culture Vultures

    Webster's dictionary defines art as "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced." But these days a lot of art isn't about the production of objects, or even the conscious use of skill. It's more about creating an experience for the viewer. (That's what makes it fun to Yelp about!) New York's best museum, the Museum of Modern Art, is built around a history of objects, but fortunately they have the resources to support an outpost in Queens at PS1 where they can showcase performance and sound and other various kinds of experience-oriented art. It's a place for happenings that keep people coming back again and again throughout the year. While PS1 is well known for the summer WarmUp series (and I mostly agree with other reviewers that this used to be a fun party but is now overcrowded--the organizers need to rethink it a bit), there are plenty of other events, including readings and book launches, and they aren't just limited to things of interest to the art world. It seems to me that PS1 is trying to be a hub for contemporary culture, inclusive of music and literature as well as art, and I think they're doing a good job of it. The ambience of the old school building gives it all a sense of humility. There can be some esoteric stuff here, but it's all in the spirit of learning and discovery.

    There tends to be a broad variety of art up at any given time--plenty of objects to anchor the events. Some recent stand-outs for me were Darren Bader's series of rooms with living animals and vegetables, with a pair of burritos basking in the sun at the end, and Janet Cardiff's motet playing from forty speakers. The latter piece was gorgeous and moving and it always had a big audience of people sitting on the benches and walking slowly in circles, listening carefully. It stayed up for so long that I thought PS1 might make it a permanent installation, like James Turrell's skylight. Alas, it had to come down, but other good things will come in its place.

    A final note about the café: The reviews talking about how bad it is are obsolete. In 2012 the M.Wells diner took it over and now the food is amazing. It's not cheap, but it's a decent value, unlike the standard museum café (such as PS1's old one) that charge ridiculous prices for mediocre-to-poor-quality fare.

  • 453 W 17th St Ste 3S
    New York, NY 10011
    5.0 star rating
    8/16/2013 Updated review
    1 check-in
    Listed in My Firsts!

    I wanted to update this review, not to change the star count (this is a solidly good gallery, maybe not every show is five stars but definitely in the upper range) but because the character of the gallery has changed a bit in the last year and a half. It used to focus on conceptual work of mid- or late-career artists but more recently it has been showing a lot of younger artists and become a magnet for smart and cool stuff. So it's a good place to visit if you want to learn about art trends. Recent exhibtions have included a really great installation by Sergei Tcherepnin (sp?) a theatrical sound artist, and a group show called "Screens" that featured different sculptural treatments in monitors, putting them in mannequins or shopping bags or shop vitrines, a 1994 Jon Kessler installation using a motorzied billboard apparatus.. there was even a work in the bathroom, which I didn't realize when I went to use it. Surprise! In one corner there was a video mashup of actors in war movies saying "shit" "shit" "shit" and in the toilet, a laminated postcard with a photo of George W. Bush that circled and bobbed as I urinated on it. When I finished up I checked the date of the work on the checklist and it was from 2006--of course. Political work like that gets so dated so quickly. Couldn't they have at least updated it for the current installation? Bush isn't exactly a controversial figure in the art world anyway. It would be much more interesting to piss on Obama.

    5.0 star rating
    2/5/2012 Previous review
    I went to Murray Guy a few weeks ago and saw an exhibit with works by Dan Graham and Corey McCorkle.… Read more
  • 2.0 star rating
    1/4/2014
    1 check-in

    My first impression of this place was, why so dark? If you hang a right upon first entering and go to the selections from the permanent collection the first gallery you see has no lights, so it's hard to see the work, especially the Jackson Pollock painting from 1947/8 that is all crimson, forest green, black--I think it's those colors, it's really hard to distinguish them with no lighting! As you go on it gets better--the second gallery is all Rothko's and also dim, presumably to help create the "intimacy" that Rothko, in a quote pasted to the wall, says large paintings create by immediately iniviting you into them, which I'm not sure I buy, but anyway. The lighting gets better but that's not to say that ambience issues are not problematic in other ways. A video room featuring recent acquisitions has a few videos on monitors with headphones, and chairs to sit down in and watch, which is nice, but in one of the projected videos with sound on speakers, making background sound for the whole room, there's a guy using a chainsaw, very LOUDLY, so I could hear it through the headphones while trying to watch Mark Leckey's "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" and it was VERY distracting/annoying. Maybe noise-cancelling headphones would be worth the investment if that's how you're going to install video. A highlight of that room was Andrea Fraser's "Little Frank and His Magic Carp," in which the artist listens and reacts to the audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao while the voiceover guy on the guide talks about how the curved walls of Frank Gehry's design are so "sensual" (and he's British so he says "sen-soo-al" not "sen-shoo-al" which is gross) and tells people to touch and fondle those undulations. Anyway Andrea Fraser ends up pulling her little green dress up so you can see her buttcheeks and panties as she grinds on a fake stone column. I liked this video because it made me laugh out loud. And clocking in at six minutes, it's a great length for video art.

    I spent some time in the basement reading room, which was nice and quiet and had a lot of comfy modern furniture to relax in while skimming the books from their library. But the books are SO disorganized! some are piled up on tables, the shelves are a mess, with books leaning in diagonal stacks instead of orderly rows, and again--poor lighting!! The lighting in the reading area is fine, but around the shelves it's super dim, so to read the spines you have to bend low and get your nose right up against the shelf. Very poorly conceived in my opinion. But otherwise a nice reading room.

    In summation I'd say my experience here was uneven all around. Even walking through the galleries I got a sense of major inconsistency. Half the museum is a permanent display of works from the collection, the other half is recent acquisitions. The permanent display part was more or less a textbook account of art since 1945, and if you've been to other museums of modern art you won't be surprised by how the galleries are put together, and might I add they are put together quite well, albeit a little lacking in imagination. But the layout of the new acquisitions felt totally random to me. My attempts to discern the reasons why certain works were hung in the same gallery resulted in utter bafflement. Continuity certainly was not helped by so many of the installations in this section being totally over the top. It would be great if the curators who did the permanent collection and the curators who did the new acquisitions could have a pow-wow and share some lessons with each other on structure and spontaneity, respectively.

  • 2.0 star rating
    5/15/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    Art about architecture seems pretty hot right now and Nicelle Beauchene had an exhibition of photographs of buildings by Chris Wiley. The images framed parts of modernist buildings that had become worn down, discolored, covered up with trash. All the images had clear geometric lines of perspective that were disrupted just enough by everyday wear-and-tear. Everything was cool and aloof and depopulated. Overall the show was easy on the eyes but nothing special. Two of the best images were hanging in the office--a bit of an odd choice because a lot of gallery visitors are probably too shy to peek in an office but I guess if that's where the actual clients go you want to impress them.

    On the artist's CV it says that Chris Wiley is an art critic who has published his writing widely. He wrote his own press release and I remember it being more fun to read than the usual press release but it didn't give me a fresh perspective on the work. Still, I think it's a good idea for galleries to have artists write their own press releases--even (or especially) if they aren't critics.

  • 5.0 star rating
    9/29/2013 Updated review
    4 check-ins
    Listed in Culture Vultures

    I was walking down 23rd street thinking about how it's too bad Paula Cooper closed her little space near the corner of 23rd and 10th Ave, because so many galleries are expanding these days, it's a shame Paula Cooper scaled back because it really is the best gallery in Chelsea--and then just an hour later, I was walking up 10th Ave and noticed a new gallery I hadn't seen before, and it's Paula Cooper space that just opened two weeks ago! I didn't even know when I walked in--I just saw on the window that they were showing Alan Shields, whose work I had just read about that morning, without knowing there was a show of it in Chelsea. Serendipity upon serendipity! The show is really amazing--it is some kind of totemic, shamanistic free-spirited assemblages, the best "hippie art" I've ever seen. (Coming to it straight from the Anne Truitt show at Matthew Marks makes poor Anne look so pathetically boring.) One piece I really loved was a huge tapestry, with a fabric that looked like it had been tie-dyed in a rusty blood red, and the color richly saturated the textile and made illusionary folds and fissures all over it--it looked like skin from the inside. Beads and strings were strung across it, in bright and pastel colors and some pieces with a metallic sheen that seemed like a weird combo with this rich crimson cloth but that just makes the throbbing of the surface more magical.

    I read on the web site that this space will be open through January 2014--so catch it while you can!

    5.0 star rating
    5/15/2012 Previous review
    At the moment Paula Cooper has an exhibition up by Sherrie Levine, who I think is just fantastic. A… Read more
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