"My work always exists in an interior space," sculptor Fred Sandback wrote in Notes from 1975. Sandback, who currently has a show at David Zwirner until Valentine's Day, made minimal sculptures with string. Like his teachers Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Sandback can sometimes seem cool, but he is always engaged in something very specific to a material, to a room, to a moment. Sandback uses string to creates imaginary planes. It's so simple. It's a bit like Les Nessman's imaginary office on the sitcom WKRP only, you know, less lame. Sandback takes a simple, playful idea and pushes the tactile and imaginary qualities as far as they will go. The black string seems to float off the floor, while red looks like it's firmly planted. He uses intervals and repetition to give and take solidity of the planes, and shadows to bend space. This is conceptual sculpture anyone can understand and take joy in. Photos don't do justice to the architecture the string makes you start seeing. I love that when I went, Zwirner had run out of press releases but was still giving away copies of Sandback's tips for children to appreciate the sculpture. In that essay, "Children's...
John Newman is a materials guy. His small, quirky sculptures mix different materials in strange ways that create particular little worlds. Things that don't ordinarily go together - like heavy bronze and Japanese paper - somehow play nicely. Over a dozen of Newman's sculptures are on display in a show at the New York Studio School gallery. From a distance the room looks like a high-end toy store, with bold colors and strange forms. Up close, each work reveals itself slowly in the materials. One work, "bamboo from sail to plow," uses bamboo in a way that compliments and supplants nature. We know how bamboo grows, but Newman cuts it and reassembles its sections in a related way to natural bamboo sectioning, as if twisted while growing. It's this eye for the natural behavior of materials that lets Newman pull this kind of cheeky behavior. It's not about accumulation of different objects, or the pastiche of unlikely partners. Newman sees the properties in different forms and materials and respecting them enough to see a conversation with other materials. In the end, there is an organic whole not because of the materials but because of something else that's embedded in them....
Painter Pat Lipsky gave a talk last night at the NY Studio School on "The Right Color." Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, "An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness." "There has been a devaluation of beauty," Lipsky said, referring to a review by art critic Robert Hughes where he asked if creating beautiful objects is enough to make good art. She recalled creating her early color field paintings in 1969, which were made by applying acrylic paint to wet canvas with sponges. These were "one shot" paintings that she would do in one sitting in order to capture a particular spirit (and they were very big, some as long as ten feet or so). If she made one of these paintings and it didn't work, she threw it away. "There was nothing else to do with them," Lipsy said. "Either you hit it or you blew it." A painter to the core, Lipsky gets excited at the technical details. She enthusiastically recalled creating over 100 different tones for her painting "Episcopalian Pandemonium," which is...
I like women, I like art, and I like New York. So of course I'll be seeing Chiara Clemente's portrait of five female artists living and working in NYC. It's showing at Film Forum. Here's their press release: It's an affecting love letter to the city which strings together the self-told narratives of five women artists (ages 30 - 80), each of whom has a passion for art-making inseparable from her devotion to New York . Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would carry a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media -- embroidering with painting -- to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing the New York Dolls in San Francisco , Kiki Smith realized she needed New York 's energy to create her wildly influential paintings and sculptures; Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade , is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman...
A young girl asked this of her father while they looked at Børre Sæthre's "Stealth Distortion (...must have seen it in some teenage wet dream)" at P.S.1 on Sunday. The dad said he thought it was fake, but didn't elaborate. This is what I imagine it would be like to visit Universal Studios Oslo....
Looking at the work of Guy de Cointet is like house-sitting for a stranger. There are suggestions of a complete life and the openness to imagine one's self living it. The empty spaces and incomplete artifacts of foreign ideas encourage flights of fancy. De Cointet, who died in 1983 before reaching his 50th birthday, was born in Paris and worked in Los Angeles. He would overhear bits of conversation or take lines from soap operas and create a graphic space for them to live. He also performed dramatic readings of nonsensical books and staged pseudo-soap operas. A video of some of this work, along with over 20 drawings, is on view at Greene Naftali until Feb. 14. In combining found text with invented geometric shapes, de Cointet is the precursor to an artist like Tucker Nichols. The disjunction of text and image seems related to another California artist, Raymond Pettibon. There's a special appreciation for montage with these artists that may be the influence of movies, although instead of Hollywood it seems more like Godard's experiments with juxtaposing sound and image to create more than the sum of parts. The seduction happens in the viewer's reconciliation of fragments....
I encourage anyone interested in the art of drawing to go see Don Bachardy's show at Cheim and Read, "Christopher Isherwood; Last Drawings" (ending Feb. 7). Bachardy, who was Isherwood's partner for over 30 years, documented the writer's last years with large, quick drawings that are direct, deceptively simple, and quite moving. More pics after the jump....
