By Will Heinrich 11/06/12 4:42pm

Review

'Untitled' (2012) by Brinkerhoff. (Courtesy the artist and ZieherSmith)

Distorted Conceptions: ‘Jason Brinkerhoff: Some Women’ at ZieherSmith, ‘The Artists of Gugging’ at Ricco-Maresca, ‘Seth Price: Folklore U.S.’ at Petzel

[Ed. note: When Hurricane Sandy hit the art district in Chelsea, it put the following three exhibitions on pause. All three galleries plan to have the exhibitions open again soon, however, possibly within the week. Please call them for further information.]

Jason Brinkerhoff draws women. In the first small untitled piece in his exhibition “Some Women” he gathers together nine or 10 of them, sitting, kneeling or leaning over, in a tightly chaotic grouping with the accidental elegance of a compositional palimpsest. Rendered in black graphite with the loose, curving line of an academic painter’s first sketch or a fashion designer’s last, the figures are overlaid with pink pencil and partially colored in with wax pastel, spray paint, oil and acrylic, creating a final effect of frantic, unresolved obsession. Read More

By Rozalia Jovanovic, Andrew Russeth and Dan Duray 10/22/12 12:00pm

Happenings

6 Photos

THURSDAY | "Glenn Ligon: Neon" at Luhring Augustine

6 Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before October 29

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24

Talk: Monika Sosnowska’s Public Art Fund Lecture
Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, who’s famed for installations and large-scale sculptures that often take outmoded architectural styles and forms to twisted, unsettling ends, will discuss her work as part of Public Art Fund’s long-running lecture series. These talks have a habit of being intensely engaging. Ms. Sosnowska’s latest project, a public sculpure at the southeast corner of Central Park, also goes on view this day. —Andrew Russeth Read More

By Rachel Corbett 8/20/12 12:22am

galleries

supersizechelsea

Supersize Chelsea!: In New York’s Main Art District, It’s Go Big or Go Home

“Be careful where you step,” shouted Maureen Bray over a percussion of power tools as she maneuvered past the electricians, sheetrockers and HVAC crew members who have two months to transform a 22,000-square-foot construction zone into the new home of Sean Kelly Gallery, which is about to triple in size. “Obviously this giant hole won’t be here,” said Ms. Bray, a director at the gallery, pointing to what will become a stairwell leading to a black-box theater—just one of three exhibition spaces, alongside expanded offices, a “canyon”-sized library and two private viewing rooms (“back where those toilets are now”).

In the early 1990s, most real-estate-seeking New Yorkers overlooked the gray smudge on Manhattan’s West Side known as Chelsea, then still a wasteland of deserted freight tracks, turpentine fumes and auto-body garages. But for the throngs of art galleries being swiftly priced out of Soho by fashion boutiques and Dean & Delucas, it offered cavernous, column-free architecture at bargain-basement prices.

Matthew Marks pioneered the migration on an abandoned stretch of West 22nd Street. Soon after, Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Sean Kelly and hundreds of other galleries followed, and a “new Soho” was born in Chelsea.

Twenty years, two Gagosian Galleries and a Comme des Garçons later, Chelsea art dealers are fretting that the legacy of Soho has come back to haunt them. About a third of the neighborhood’s galleries have been shuttered in the last five years as High Line-inflated real estate prices and an influx of deep-pocketed fashion and design firms have forced out many of the smaller dealers. At its height, Chelsea was home to more than 350 galleries; today only 204 remain, according to Rice & Associates real estate adviser Earl Bateman.

But it would be premature to pronounce the world’s premier gallery district dead. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/08/12 5:29pm

Review

Dana Schutz, "Building the Boat While Sailing," 2012

Salt of the Earth: Dana Schutz at Petzel, Pier Paolo Calzolari at Boesky and Pace

If we ever send out another Voyager probe, and we need a new image that offers up the full range of human experience, with its chaotic complexity of outward expression, its discreet harmonies and its subtle inward pathos plastered directly onto absurdity, an image that can convey to alien eyes the existential truth that we make our own truths here, but don’t quite make them freely, we ought to use Building the Boat While Sailing, the centerpiece of painter Dana Schutz’s show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. Read More

By Will Heinrich 1/31/12 5:52pm

Review

"Batman I" (2011) by Joyce Pensato. (Petzel Gallery)

Black and White in Color: ‘Joyce Pensato: Batman Returns,’ at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

Are zebras black with white stripes, or white with black stripes? Fuggetabout It I, the first installation in Joyce Pensato’s exhibition “Batman Returns,” begins with a black and white photo of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone in a soiled frame, pocked with staples, hanging tilted by the gallery’s front door. Ten more head shots—Eddie Murphy, Joe DiMaggio, Al Jolson in blackface—all splattered with drips of black enamel paint, proceed under the front desk to meet Chris Rock; Minnie Mouse; paper cut-outs of Bart and Maggie Simpson surrounded by serrated lines; an age- and dirt-blackened stuffed Mickey Mouse; a snapshot of a black couple on their wedding day; Brando as Corleone again, with Al Pacino as Michael; Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat posing in boxing gloves; a black collie in a sombrero; Aunt Jemima; a sideways Sopranos poster; a giant foam Mickey head, covered in Christmas lights, missing its eyes and ears, set next to a plastic Santa and Frosty covered in multicolored enamel drips; a stuffed Timmy from South Park; a lenticular postcard of zebras in the wild; and snapshots of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Ali and the artist herself as she poses diagonally across other people’s photos of their children posing with human-size Mickeys at Disney World. Read More