Feed

Will Heinrich

By Will Heinrich 4/23 5:55pm

On View

5 Photos

Marisa Merz, Untitled, 2012

Marisa Merz at Gladstone Gallery

A profligate choice of materials takes the weight off their particularity. Marisa Merz uses paint, graphite, gold leaf, cut paper, tacks, copper or nylon mesh, and clay with theatrical precision—each does exactly the job it’s needed for, and then each can be dropped from our thoughts. The job these materials are most often needed for, in the dozen or so recent works at Gladstone, is depicting a thumb-shaped figure that combines the whimsy of a finger puppet, the self-reproving vagueness of a mystical ode to an unnameable deity, and the separately acting, far more self-conscious Arte Povera whimsy of making the choice to affect this particular style. On the left panel of one untitled, eight-foot-high paper-on-plywood double apotheosis, the thumb-faced figure appears, with azure eyes and gilded lips, against a sea of red. The color is more cardinal than Communist, but flame-like motions at the bottom and a long gray form hanging like a banner from a black pole make clear where it’s pointing. A pair of disembodied arms stretch out with flickering fingers. On the right, the thumb face, more masculine and mask-like, is gold. It rises up between red banners into a pale blue dome above a more definite but still disembodied white embrace. Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/23 5:42pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy The Kitchen)

‘Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows’ at The Kitchen

Chantal Akerman’s new three-channel video installation Maniac Shadows is a kaleidoscopic complication of double bluffs and autobiographical preoccupations that hides the artist’s frank, freighted, childishly brazen and innocent gaze in plain sight. But as with Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, you need more than plain sight to catch it. Begin at the middle screen, in the narrow foyer of a New York apartment—like all of Ms. Akerman’s hallways, this one is a toss-up between birth canal and abattoir chute—with the artist herself, ignoring the camera as she gathers up empty electronics packaging into plastic C-Town and B&H Photo bags. On the right screen, a looming toilet behind a brown wicker hamper is the deeply submerged comic impulse, itself nothing but the attempt to encapsulate death. On the left plays a fuzzed-out snippet of President Obama’s election night party, filmed playing on a television screen, with a single hand-held waver to belie the camera’s cold steadiness. Surrounded by fallen balloons and high emotion, the president shakes one hand while looking for the next, his moments of encounter, however genuine, lost in the overriding need for escape. Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/16 6:23pm

On View

YB 13_xxx1L

‘Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned’ at Petzel Gallery

Watching Sławomir Sierakowski walk out of the shadows into Warsaw’s Olympic Stadium, mount a medals platform and exclaim in amplified echo to the weeds growing up through the empty seats, “Żydzi!” (“Jews!”), I felt an immediate, hideously vivid anxiety in the pit of my stomach. This anxiety continued as Mr. Sierakowski, wearing a red necktie, a black leather jacket and an expression of concerned attention, went on to invoke his countrymen and all people generally, and it was sustained through the rest of Yael Bartana’s 2007 video Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) and the other two videos of her trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, and on into the following day. A real activist playing the fictional leader of a semi-fictional group called the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), Mr. Sierakowski wrote his own strange and strangely compelling text, which Ms. Bartana has recorded with unrelenting, Riefenstahl-like beauty. With both utopian sincerity and the sentimental self-pity of a bully imploring his victims to “Come back, all is forgiven,” Mr. Sierakowski appeals to 3.3 million Jews to return to Poland—both for the Poles’ sake and for their own. “With one language,” he says, “we cannot speak. With one religion, we cannot listen … Without you, we cannot even remember.” He is applauded at the end of his speech by a small squad of scouts in red neckerchiefs. As they all walk out together in soft focus, one blond little boy does a brief goose step. The dead constantly poison the living, but this little boy is small enough that he could just be inventing a silly walk of his own, with no idea of its historical resonance.

Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/09 5:31pm

On View

5 Photos

Elizabeth Peyton, Jonas Kaufmann, March 2013, NYC, 2013

Elizabeth Peyton at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

When confronted with a technical difficulty that you don’t know how to handle or faced with a small but black-and-white decision and unable to make up your mind, you can often take refuge in a noncommittal ambiguity. In Elizabeth Peyton’s current show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, this strategy works best in watercolor. Jonas Kaufmann, March 2013, NYC, a watercolor just over letter-paper size, is a close-up of the subject’s face, with paper white for skin, as in a blown-out fashion photo, neat inky strokes for eyebrows, carefully placed stains for under-eye shadow and darker stains for the beard. The inherent looseness of the medium, the supple overlap between a stroke, a stain and a drip, lets Ms. Peyton take full advantage of the viewer’s imagination by working within a similar overlap between constructing a figurative image and simply opening the space to project one. Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/09 5:05pm

On View

5 Photos

Installation view

‘HMV’ at Foxy Production

There’s a thin line between suggestive paradox and resignation, but “HMV” manages to walk it. Organized by independent curator Alexander Shulan, the exhibition is named after the 1968 Stanislaw Lem novel His Master’s Voice, which follows a group of scientists who fail to interpret a signal from outer space because they can’t keep from projecting themselves onto it. Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/09 4:55pm

On View

4 Photos

Peter Piller, Umschläge #4, 2011/2012

‘Peter Piller: Umschläge’ at Andrew Kreps Gallery

The magazine Armeerundschau, published in East Germany for the soldiers of the National People’s Army, used to feature a heavy gun, a couple of Kalashnikov-toting infantrymen slogging through a swamp, or a smoke-spewing rocket on the front cover and a chaste, pathos-filled pinup girl, usually fully clothed but very occasionally bikini-clad, on the back. What Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/02 3:52pm

On View

4 Photos

Robert Bordo, Dial, 2012

‘Robert Bordo: Three Point Turn’ at Alexander and Bonin

Time is a metaphor for driving. Two corners of undifferentiated kelly green poke out at the bottom, but most of Dial, a 3-by-4-foot painting that serves to make this metaphor flat, is covered by an opaque, olive-green fog. From the top floats down a thin gray mist, the kind of hovering rain that erases the structure of a day but not its mass. Eighteen black clouds and six black dots are distributed evenly, as if for wallpaper rather than by gravity. In the middle, two long, gray-green strokes are windshield wipers, or one wiper twice, or the bottom of a gauge at a 130-degree angle; a darker point in the middle is the needle, tracing a soot-colored semicircle beneath the pale blue, cleared-away train of the wiper. Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/02 3:40pm

On View

5 Photos

Andrew Masullo, 5357, 2011

Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone Gallery

Andrew Masullo’s modestly sized but manifold nonobjective paintings use sharp edges, complex combinations of simple forms and bright, unmixed colors carefully chosen to cancel each other out. If they don’t actually harmonize, they contrast in chords as neat as anything in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” so that you see them not as separate colors but as unitary rainbows or highly disciplined chromatic armies. These armies probe, press and try to contain robust white spaces, which are generally pressed over to one side but sometimes take up as much as half the canvas. (Not every canvas uses white, but in light of the prevailing pattern, the ones that don’t simply seem to fight the same battle with the walls.) Read More

By Will Heinrich 4/02 3:23pm

On View

3 Photos

Installation view

‘Larry Bamburg: BurlsHoovesandShells’ at Simone Subal Gallery

On the floor between two tall windows looking out over the Bowery sits a nest of rust-colored volcanic rocks. In the nest sits a 400-pound redwood burl encrusted with pocky bark and a patch of clamshell-shaped white mushrooms. On the flat roof of this burl, unfastened by anything but gravity, sits another burl, and so on, making a slender tower that reaches almost to the ceiling and is ornamented with green moss, seashells, more white mushrooms and tortoise shells. We want to believe that it can’t be turtles all the way down, because each separate turtle is the climax of its own long process of evolution. But despite its earthy esthetic, the dominating sensation of BurlsHoovesandShells on a Pedestal of Lava Rock is transparency, because it lays bare the thin contingency of artistic intention compared with the momentum of the material and social forms through which it’s expressed. It’s all one living system, yellow cabs careening down the street and electric-green copper seashells trimming the roof of the Bowery Savings Bank not excepted. Read More