This list isn’t comprehensive or definitively a “best of” (it’s also in completely random order), but these are the shows I’ve found myself thinking about most as I look back at what I saw in 2011. I decided not to include museum exhibitions because who really needs another list with Willem de Kooning on it?
Sam Falls’ sculptures occupied the living room/kitchen of Alex Gartenfeld and Matt Moravec’s gallery in the former's apartment, and his so-called fade canvases hung from the walls. It was one of the best uses of space in any show I saw all year. The sculptures were positioned to take in varying degrees of light coming from the windows that overlook the Hudson River; it was like seeing totally different work depending on what time of day you went. (Photo courtesy West Street Gallery)
This was by far my favorite group show of the year. Bob Nickas brought work by 38 artists to overrun the summer home of dealer Jose Martos in the Hamptons. There was artwork on the lawn, paintings hung on the front porch, and a Jacob Kassay was thrown up on the side of the house, exposed to whatever the elements wanted to throw at it. The art and the house became indistinguishable, adding some character and class to the Hamptons summer art scene. (Photo courtesy Martos Gallery)
The sculptor displayed two massive works that filled Larry Gagosian’s huge warehouse-like space on West 24th Street. The show was impressive enough thanks to the sheer size of Mr. Serra’s sculptures, but a close inspection of the work revealed stylistic intricacies that viewers could get lost in for hours. (Photo courtesy GlenwoodNYC)
The artist’s first New York gallery show in five years was the aftermath of his 2010 performance in Detroit, KHU, in which he poured molten iron into a casting pit that molded into an Egyptian Djed, a symbol associated with Osiris. The cooled-down molten sculptures adorned the two floors of Gladstone Gallery. It had the typical bombast one expects from Mr. Barney, but it was also a way for the artist to get back to his roots as a sculptor. Knowing the backstory behind the pieces was one thing, but they worked as objects on their own as well, demonstrating that even at his most straightforward, Mr. Barney is also impactful. (Photo courtesy Gladstone Gallery)
Staged as part of the Performa 11 performance art biennial, Mr. Kjartansson hired a group of Icelandic opera singers (he was on stage with them) and a 15-piece orchestra, and had them sing the final aria of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro for 12 hours straight. It was about two minutes of music, placed on a loop until the performers looked like they might collapse. Some of them did. (Photo courtesy Artnet)
In David Adamo’s first major solo show in New York, the artist turned the Lower East Side’s Untitled gallery into a bizarre scene, looking alternately like a workshop and a battlefield. Mr. Adamo took simple objects and mutated them beyond recognition. He carved columns of wood into shapes that looked like the remnants of funeral pyres after they’d been burned (there were chips of wood strewn about the floor), and piles of rocks created a maze that blocked the path of people trying to walk around. There was something both violent and funny about the use of space, a rebellion against what one expects from a commercial gallery environment that also felt necessary and appropriate. (Photo Courtesy Untitled)
A brilliant exploration of cinematic history that also made you think about the things you don’t typically think about when you watch movies: the portrayal of time passing—whether compressed or elongated. Mr. Marclay isolated the moments in cinema when people acknowledge the time of day, and he used them to create a film montage in real time that meticulously counts down the hours, minutes and seconds of a 24-hour cycle.
Grotesque and unlike anything else we’ve seen this year, Urs Fischer’s show of tables was as chaotic as the name suggests. Each table was printed with some kind of middlebrow ephemera—the many faces of Ryan Gosling culled from celebrity magazines, a cartoon muscle man ejaculating into his hand, a cheesy portrait of smiling plastic surgeons that looked like it was ripped from some hospital brochure in the Midwest. Mr. Fischer stacked tables atop other tables, cramming them in the space as if he was discarding them. There were almost 200 of them in all—so many that it was difficult to move through the space. (Photo courtesy adamlindemann.com)
Mr. Ford has a very particular thing that he does—anatomically correct, nearly scientific images of animals, like birds and monkeys and monkeys ripping heads off of birds—but his show at Paul Kasmin felt like a progression. You could quite literally get lost in his series of three paintings of King Kong—each executed on a massive nine-foot by 12-foot canvas. The bloodied mouth of the giant gorilla was so large and frightening, and its eyes followed you with such menace wherever you stood in the room, that the paintings overwhelmed; it felt like you were the victim of their creation. (Photo courtesy Paul Kasmin)
A note on that show I didn’t like. I’ll admit I’ve been obsessed with Bob Dylan since I was old enough to care about music, and I wanted to like this show. I gave it about as favorable a review as I could muster up (I said he had improved as a painter, but I also said, as a way of not having to be too terrible to my hero, that quality was not the point of seeing the paintings: “It is a union of two men—roughly the same age—who are at a point in their careers where they can do anything they want with little risk to their reputations. Mr. Dylan can paint scenes, heavily influenced by Gauguin’s Tahiti works, of his misadventures in Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam that cast his subjects as radically other, and Larry Gagosian can show them.”) I had hinted at the dubiousness of the claim that Mr. Dylan, as the press release said, had witnessed the scenes in his paintings firsthand and that the show was “a visual journal of his travels.” The whole thing became worse and more disappointing when it became apparent that Mr. Dylan pretty obviously painted several of these pictures as verbatim depictions of fairly iconic photographs by the likes of Léon Busy and Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Photo courtesy Gagosian)
I wouldn’t rule out that he didn’t even paint these “travel paintings”. Theres a tradition at LGs Gallery of having the photo based work farmed out and thinking of the FARM boy did you buy the whole farm hook line and sinker in your selections