Jean’s Vision (2011), one of Ann Toebbe’s works in the Hein Koh–curated group show “Show #7: Sunday Paintings for a Rainy Day” at Field Projects in Chelsea, measures only 12 inches by 16 inches, but it gets plenty done within that tiny space. Her view of a precious little living room is filled with myriad patterns Read More
Last night, amid all of the mayhem of opening night in Chelsea, Matthew Marks’s smallest space on West 22nd Street, right next to 10th Avenue, was an oasis of calm at about a quarter to 8 p.m., perhaps because, looking through the gallery’s windows from the street, the display looked rather modest: just a few small sculptures sitting on podiums. Grander spectacles were on offer elsewhere. Read More
Four of the huge, ridiculous sculptures that John Chamberlain had fabricated out of colored aluminum foil during the last years of his life are on view now outside the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue, between East 52nd and 53rd Streets. They’re a wild sight outside that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s austere and Read More
Most of the current Alighiero Boetti retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is housed in the second-floor atrium and on the sixth floor, but there’s one work tucked away in the sculpture garden, surrounded by a pile of stones and a few warning signs. That’s Boetti’s 1993 Autoritratto (Self-portrait), a bronze sculpture of the artist that is heated with electrical equipment inside his head (“Please do not touch,” those signs state). 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
When the door closed behind me at the Real Fine Arts gallery in Greenpoint last Sunday afternoon, it was completely pitch black—so black, in fact, that it was impossible to see my hand when I waved it in front of my face, much less the two gentlemen I had seen when one opened the door to let me inside. Which was a little unsettling. Read More
Four wires hold this piece by Sean Kennedy high above the floor of the Untitled gallery right now, in a two-person show with Chadwick Rantanen. This photograph looks directly up through the acrylic glass that serves as the base of the work. (For some context, here’s an installation view.) Read More
Seeing this wild little sculpture in Wallspace’s new show, “The Mystery Trend,” last night, I automatically assumed that it was the work of some ambitious young sculptor, the latest in a burgeoning wave of superb and precocious ceramicists to arrive in recent years. But I was wrong. Read More
Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art presented a David Hammons drawing that could be viewed only by appointment for a few moments each week. The rest of the time, a white silk cloth covered the work as it hung inside the museum’s “Printin’” exhibition. Those who scheduled a viewing got to see an effervescent pink piece made with subtle washes of Kool-Aid. It was an absolute stunner. Read More
Back in the mid 1980s, Walter Robinson, the editor of Artnet magazine, made spin paintings using a machine he built from materials he purchased at Canal Street hardware stores. This was a few years before Damien Hirst’s spin works. Walking through Chelsea the other day we were thrilled to see that a three-foot-square Robinson spin from 1985 is on view at the I-20 gallery on West 23rd Street. It’s called Intrigues and Innumerable Jealousies, and is part of “Data Trash,” a group show curated by Chris Dorland. Read More
