It’s shaping up to be a very fine summer here in New York.
The Mayor’s Office just reported that all eight of the city’s free public beaches will open tomorrow, Sandy be damned, and Zach Feuer and Untitled are showing a bounty of Jewish artists. Read More
“If you really loved me you would be able to admit that you’re ashamed of me” is the American solo debut of the relationship between two male Norwegian artists, Sverre Bjertnes and Bjarne Melgaard, who share a studio in Bushwick. Their relationship is mediated by images of Mr. Bjertnes’s girlfriend, Hanna Maria, who appears in the series of realist oil paintings, all made this year, that constitute Mr. Bjertnes’s American solo gallery debut; Liv Ullmann, as incarnated by Hanna Maria re-enacting a single, painful scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, in Mr. Bjertnes’s six-and-a-half-minute video of the same title; and writer Alissa Bennett, who sits beside Mr. Melgaard in the brilliant interview video If You Really Loved Me You Would Be Able to Admit That You’re Ashamed of Me, answering the questions posed by Mr. Bjertnes to Mr. Melgaard as Mr. Melgaard silently listens. Read More
2012 is over, but “Looking Back,” which opened on Thursday, presents a compelling case for a bit of nostalgia. The exhibition features work shown in New York during the past year. Selecting is curator Richard Birkett of Artists Space, whose recent work includes fall’s fashionable Bernadette Corporation retrospective. Read More
“It’s really just like he jumped in at the deep end and became this painter,” said Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. He was talking about writer Wayne Koestenbaum, who is known for his books on Warhol and Jackie O. On Oct. 27, White Columns will present Mr. Koestenbaum’s first-ever solo show, with about 50 smallish paintings—some brightly colored self-portraits and a smattering of male nudes. Read More
The second show at the new Upper East Side gallery Venus Over Manhattan is filled with bulletin boards. (Disclosure: Venus Over Manhattan is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.) The West Village alternative space White Columns, which has been home to a bulletin-board exhibition space for a number of years, gave bulletin boards to more than 20 artists and art types and asked them to present something with it. Read More
After its dark, moody debut exhibition “À Rebours,” which channeled the feel of a late-19th-century aristocrat’s private chambers, the Venus Over Manhattan gallery is going in a comparatively contemporary and light-hearted direction for its sophomore effort. This outing is titled “Bulletin Boards,” and it’s being organized by West Village alternative space White Columns. (Full disclosure: VoM is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.)
For the show, Matthew Higgs, the director and chief curator of White Columns, has asked more than 20 artists and art types, including Rita Ackermann, Darren Bader, Gavin Brown, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, Bjarne Melgaard, Virginia Overton, Daniel Turner and B. Wurtz, to present work using a bulletin board. The show opens July 19. Read More
It may not be quick, but it’s certain: sometime after the Deluge, fish will learn to walk. At the entrance to the downtown alternative space White Columns, above a glass-covered bulletin board containing a Mary Cassatt reproduction, a handout about Fernand Léger, and Chloe Dzubilo’s 2007 marker-on-canvas announcement There Is a Transolution, hangs Maria Lassnig’s six-and-a-half-foot-tall 2009 painting Die Optimisten. Read More
“There are people who have said to me, ‘They’re not going to swallow you in the art world until you’re dead,’” the musician, poet, novelist and artist Billy Childish said. “The chance that it has been moved forward 20—or 30 years, hopefully—is something that I never expected.”
Mr. Childish, 51, was speaking on the phone from Chatham, England, where he was born and still lives, and he was discussing his upcoming painting show at the Lower East Side branch of the Lehmann Maupin gallery, which opens Nov. 4. He has had a handful of shows in Europe, but this exhibition will be his first at a commercial gallery in New York.
These days, many visual artists are multitaskers. They write, they make clothing, they work in multiple mediums; art’s expanded field has made experimentation and cross-disciplinary practice not just an attractive option, but de rigueur. Which makes Mr. Childish inadvertently prescient: he has been at it for years. Not that it’s been easy.
“Really creative people are not liked in literature, in art or in music,” he said. “They tend to be excluded, and the reason being that they’re not containable and they’re pains in the ass. I’m one of those people—uncontainable and a pain in the ass.” Read More
