We’ve been following his work for a while. His latest work, on view at Pavel Zoubok, is a beautiful evolution of his painting / paper / sculpture work we have seen in the past.
Other highlights today in Chelsea:
Chelsea Now is doing some good art coverage. This week has an interview with Richard Desroche of CRG Gallery.
Tyler Green has a beautiful essay on his love of art and his mother.
I just received a press release from them (at ArtCal) announcing that their store at Broadway and Driggs in South Williamsburg has been converted to an art space, with the first exhibition opening on February 23rd. The show includes video artist Kate Gilmore.
Brooklyn Industries, an artist-owned design and apparel company, will open its first permanent contemporary art exhibition space, Brooklyn Industries Contemporary Art, with the exhibition Out of the Loop. The exhibition will feature video work by Vahap Avsar, Selim Birsel, Lexy Funk, Kate Gilmore, Noritoshi Hirakawa, and Nasan Tur.
Yeah! The Reeler informs us that the newly restored print of Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” is coming to MoMA in April.
James and I visited this exhibition of BFA students’ art at the SVA’s 26th Street gallery on Saturday. My favorite pieces in the show were in the project room with print-related work curated by Gunars Prande, especially those by Matt Lifson and Lauren Baez.
Matt Lifson, Boy and Head, 2006
Silkscreen on paper
22 × 15 inches
Matt Lifson, Old on Boy, 2007
Silkscreen on paper
20 × 17 inches
Lauren Baez’s work consisted of arrangement of small silkscreen and collage works organized with titles for each section of month titles, going from September to January. Here is an example:
And here are some detail shots from various months:
Who knew that Chelsea had a pretty good symphony? James and I attended a concert of the Chelsea Symphony last night and really enjoyed it. The program consisted of a world premiere(!) of a work by Francesco Lecce-Chong, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and Brahms’s Symphony No. 3. We didn’t know what to expect, but the performances were very good, and it’s wonderful to be able to attend a concert a block and a half from our apartment! I also really appreciate the fact that the members play several roles — the composer is a violist, and the two conductors (one for each half of the program) were in the orchestra when they weren’t conducting.
The poster for the current show, and the program, feature a detail of a painting by our good friend and neighbor Louise Fishman.
An AP story from Saturday on Hillary Clinton’s campaign trip to New Hampshire includes these gems (emphasis mine):
Clinton acknowledged “a great deal of frustration and anger and outrage” over the war, and said she was working hard in the Senate to pass legislation capping troop levels in Iraq. She also vowed to try to bring to a vote a resolution disapproving of President Bush’s planned troop increase.
“I’m still in the arena,” she said — an apparent riposte to a Democratic rival, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Like Clinton, Edwards voted to authorize the invasion, but he has become a staunch war critic since leaving the Senate in 2004.
“It’s very easy to go around and say, ’Let’s end the war,’” Clinton added. “If we had a Democratic president we would end the war.”
Her toughest question came in Berlin, a struggling mill town in northern New Hampshire.
Roger Tilton, 46, a financial adviser from Nashua, N.H., told Clinton that unless she recanted her vote, he was not in the mood to listen to her other policy ideas.
“I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake,” Tilton said. “I, and I think a lot of other primary voters — until we hear you say it, we’re not going to hear all the other great things you are saying.”
In response, Clinton repeated her assertion that “knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it,” and said voters would have to decide for themselves whether her position was acceptable.
“The mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress,” Clinton said to loud applause.
Does she really expect us to believe that she was misled by the Bush/Cheney administration, and she actually thought Iraq was a danger to us, with its supposed WMDs?
Also, she says “If we had a Democratic president we would end the war.” I wasn’t aware that the Constitution had been changed so that we now elect a dictator for four years and Congress has no say over any of his decisions. The Democratic party has a slim majority (counting Lieberman) in the Senate, and a larger majority in the House than the GOP had before November. A majority of Americans support a withdrawal from Iraq within the next year. If we’re going to have to wait for a new President to withdraw, what’s the point of pretentding to be a republic? Shouldn’t we use all of the money we spend on the huge Congressional apparatus on some better use?
I rarely make it to midtown, and the excuse last week was a visit to the dentist. I’m certainly glad I did visit a couple of shows. First, the Donald Judd/Joseph Albers show at Pace Wildenstein is the kind of show I would expect from one of our city’s museums, but it seems galleries like Pace, Cheim and Read (with the Soutine show), and even auction houses seem more likely to present them.
installation view at Pace Wildenstein
When the elevator doors opened on the gallery, I actually gasped slightly. It’s that beautiful, feeling a bit like a temple. The contrast with the large windows viewing a busy 57th Street is quite wonderful.
The other show I saw was “The Nightly News” at Luxe Gallery. It is curated by Kathleen Goncharov (whom I met at a Momenta benefit last year) and Stephan Stoyanov. Any show that includes Robert Boyd and Jackie Salloum would attract me, but the new discovery for me was the work of a Turkish artist, Ahmet Öğüt. He was represented by a set of videos, including “Cut it Out”, in which a young man dressed in American flag pants tries to recreate a hostage video in Iraq or Afghanistan, but keeps messing up and laughing. Keep your eye on Mr. Öğüt.
Ahmet Öğüt, Cut it Out, 2004, DVD
There was a surreal moment as I turned to leave Luxe Gallery. With the music from Robert Boyd’s video on the subject of suicide cults playing in the backround, I spotted a sheet of paper from a notepad on the floor, shaped like a yellow star.
[image of Judd/Alberts from the Pace Wildenstein website; “Cut it Out” from the artist’s website]
Now their art blog has video too!
Moti Hasson has a great new ground floor space in Chelsea, with an excellent group show, titled “Beyond the Pale”, as its inaugural exhibition. Now I see Moti’s smiling face on the cover of Chelsea Now. I like the fact that he started as a collector and decided to run a gallery, sort of what I could imagine us doing if we didn’t have to worry about New York real estate prices.