By Will Heinrich 4/29 1:31pm

On View

4 Photos

Installation view

‘Ted Stamm: Paintings’ at Marianne Boesky

Ted Stamm died in 1984, at the age of 39, a victim of congenital heart disease, which had also killed his father. It would be easy to read the three bumpy black monochromes in the recently closed show at Marianne Boesky, each one composed according to decisions made by the artist’s friends rolling dice, as a series of cheery thumbed noses at fate. But behind that innocent schoolboy Satanism was a fascination with black not as a dialectical term but as a color of its own, a fascination equally informed by minimalist idealism and by the relentlessly forward-moving practicality of aircraft and automotive design. Unlike an automaker, though, Stamm wanted his black unreflective, and he mixed graphite powder into oil paint to get it that way; and unlike a minimalist, he worked not by reduction but by extension: He built canvases in idiosyncratic shapes with direction and speed. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 2/12 3:47pm

The Upper East Side

(Illustration by Breet Alfrunti)

Moving on Up: The Avant-Garde Returns to the Upper East Side

It’s possible that the Upper East Side changed the night last September when the fire department broke up the disco party at 980 Madison. The building houses, among other businesses, a luxury spa and Gagosian Gallery. Soon it will have a Gagosian-owned “neighborhood restaurant,” as Larry Gagosian described it in a recent interview with Peter Brant. There will be chili. And waffles.

On the third floor of 980 Madison is Venus Over Manhattan, an art space opened last year by Adam Lindemann, a contributor to this paper and the disco party’s host. The crowd had gathered to celebrate a show by the artist Peter Coffin. Young women carried trays of tequila shots. Around 8 p.m., the festivities moved down the hall to a room dimly lit with red lights. From the street, you could hear DJ Harvey playing records. Professional roller skaters skated around on glowing LED wheels. A cluster of young men and women nonchalantly smoked near the entrance.

When the fire trucks came, part of the crowd decamped across Madison Avenue to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, where a pianist played selections from the Great American Songbook and the martinis cost $21. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 10/09/12 5:08pm

home sweet home

Employees of Lucie Fontaine. (Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery)

Welcome Home! Lucie Fontaine Turns Marianne Boesky Gallery Into a Humble Abode

Since the middle of August, the Upper East Side outpost of Marianne Boesky Gallery has been home to Nicola Trezzi, the U.S. editor at Flash Art, Alice Tomaselli, a young artist, and Elena Tavecchia, a curator who also manages Rudolf Stingel’s studio. Outside of their day jobs, the three identify themselves as  “employees” of Lucie Fontaine, a pseudonymous character created for the purpose of organizing curatorial projects and, if the Lucie Fontaine website is to be believed, cultivating “a concept of self-generated labor similar to the Master-Slave dialectic presented by Hegel in his masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Spirit.” They are all Italian, have apartments and lives of their own, and have been living inside of the townhouse gallery in makeshift bedrooms. 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 3/27/12 5:51pm

Review

6 Photos

Sarah Lucas, Oboddaddy 1, 2010, in "Spirit Level"

Material World: ‘The Spirit Level’ at Gladstone and Donald Moffett at Boesky

“The Spirit Level,” curated by Ugo Rondinone into every last corner of Gladstone Gallery’s two large spaces in Chelsea, unfolds like a Rosicrucian initiation ceremony, beginning with genuine awe framed in circus colors and simulated horror; moving on through celestial allusions, sex magic, decorative symbols and heavy-handed numerology; and ending in a series of archetypal busts with their crown-chakras open and ready for divine wisdom to pour in. Read More