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Will Heinrich

By Will Heinrich 6/11 4:37pm

On View

Kwartler & Solomon, 'untitled,' 2013. (Courtesy the artists and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery)

‘Alex Kwartler & Elke Solomon’ at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

This mother-and-son show plays equally well as a sweet duet or as a passive-aggressive duel. Manhattanite Alex Kwartler made his four untitled paintings by quickly brushing tinted plaster onto door-sized sheets of plywood and then polishing them with floor wax till they gleamed. Blue and pink contend in two grayish panels, more brightly in one than in the other, as if recording the round of day and night in columns of cloud; in another, purple, lavender and oily yellow-green wash in and out under a surface of white scribbles and reflections. Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/11 4:19pm

On View

'Nature' (2013) by Marley Freeman. (Courtesy the artist and Kansas Gallery)

‘Carey Denniston/Marley Freeman’ at Kansas

A large triangle, velvety blue like a midnight Virgin and underlined in reddish orange, dominates the middle of Marley Freeman’s Nature, a 4½-by-5-foot abstract acrylic. To one side is a less intense blue, to the other a dark scarlet, and around the triangle an aura of overlapping lines and swirls in yellow, pink, white and green. Despite the variation of gesture and texture—scaly patterns in one blue corner, translucent pinks overlapping with blue-gray, a syrupy, tacky-looking surface to the scarlet—the whole has a kind of paper-cut flatness. It indicates depth, to the degree that it does at all, like a puppet theater, without trying to fool the eye. And even its central composition is unusual. Most of Ms. Freeman’s paintings are more diffuse, layering stripes and swipes in plaid-like patterns, or setting minimal figures—a couple of red and green bars; two wing-like red brushstrokes—against neutral backgrounds in order to put all the painting’s elements on a par. The result, at its best, is somehow both transparent and opaque, interchangeable and resolutely singular. Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/11 3:05pm

On View

Installation view of works by Safdie. (Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

‘I Am the Magic Hand’ at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Organized by painter Josephine Halvorson and borrowing its title from John Gutmann’s 1937 photograph of the same name, “I Am the Magic Hand” brings together work by six artists who share the same joyful faith in graphic pleasure, unburdened by any false opposition between seriousness and humor or between substance and wit. Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/04 5:31pm

On View

Marcia Kure, 'The Mask and Saint Series IV: (No. 15),' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery)

‘Marcia Kure: Tease’ at Susan Inglett Gallery

Marcia Kure’s sophomore show at Susan Inglett Gallery continues her careful work, using watercolor, acrylic, pencil and elegant collage to reinvent the self as a singular body of overlapping origins. Whether drawn, painted, or cut and pasted, the body Ms. Kure sees is a cross between an icon and a scientific specimen: centered on white paper, widely matted and framed in black, it is lifted out of any ordinary context in a bid to clarify what defines it. The collages, made with faces and body parts cut out of fashion magazines, set up a tension between the legible fragments of specific figures and the more loosely figurative overall shape. Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/04 5:13pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Galerie Lelong)

‘Ana Mendieta: Late Works: 1981-1985’ at Galerie Lelong

Working at the American Academy in Rome in the years just before her untimely death in 1985, Ana Mendieta began trying to realize her ephemeral, body-centered earthworks as enduring (and collectible) objects. She used earth, gunpowder and a variety of binders laid over wooden frames. Some of the resulting pieces crumbled, but some succeeded, and three of those extraordinary and heartbreaking successes will be lying in the front room of Galerie Lelong for another two weeks. Each piece is about six feet long and maybe an inch high. One (Untitled, 1984) is black, and the other two (Untitled, 1983, and Figure with Nganga, 1984) are shades of adobe. Their wooden substrates aren’t visible, so they seem like nothing but carefully ordered, cracked and dried piles of dirt. They ought to appear fragile, but in fact they radiate solidity. This is due in part to Galerie Lelong’s choice of dramatic spot lighting and in part to the pieces’ texture—their cracks are small and evenly spaced, and they look as dense as chocolate cookies. But mostly it’s due to the primordial, overwhelming force of Ms. Mendieta’s recurring formal motif, the teardrop-diamond-vulva-paddle-leaf shape, here doubled and joined at the points, with a raised straight line running through the point of connection, to make an infinity-shaped fertility figure. Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/04 4:54pm

On View

Carolee Schneemann, 'Vulva's Morphia,' 1995. (Courtesy the artist and PPOW)

‘Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6 rpm’ at P.P.O.W.

Carolee Schneemann’s Flange 6 rpm consists of seven motorized steel fixtures protruding from perpendicular walls. Atop each fixture, three cast-aluminum arms wave and rotate. (One fixture has only two.) Cast using a lost-wax process and left unpolished, these arms look like seaweed or badly burnt flippers. They suck at the air like whirlpools and waver like flames made solid. They throw shadows onto the walls, interrupting an otherwise floor-to-ceiling, slightly pixelated orange projection of actual flames shot in the foundry where the arms were cast. All of this makes for a weird kind of transparency, a revelation of process so total that the revelation itself comes to seem like the goal. But then, what is it revealing? Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/21 5:23pm

On View

Still from Maria Petschnig's 'Petschsniggle' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays)

‘Maria Petschnig: Petschnigs’ at On Stellar Rays

Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 5:22pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Audio Visual Arts)

‘Ben Vida: Slipping Control’ at Audio Visual Arts

Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a “score” consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid Read More