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On View

By Andrew Russeth 5/14 6:08pm

On View

'Metallic Venus,' 2010–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

‘Jeff Koons: New Paintings and Sculpture’ at Gagosian Gallery and ‘Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball’ at David Zwirner

Jeff Koons’s two-gallery blowout, his first large-scale appearance in commercial galleries in the city in 10 years and the unrivaled event of the spring art season (barring, perhaps, the Frieze Art Fair), is a roaring success, filled with feats of engineering and artistic choices that are as gleefully peculiar and perverse as any he has ever made. Mr. Koons strives to please, and he delivers. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 5:22pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Audio Visual Arts)

‘Ben Vida: Slipping Control’ at Audio Visual Arts

Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a “score” consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 4:47pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy 303 Gallery)

Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery

Old Punk on Pay Phone, a color transparency mounted on an aluminum lightbox, shows the artist Rodney Graham at almost life size. He’s standing on a sloping wet sidewalk in Vancouver, against a brick wall painted yellow and blue. His black leather jacket is covered in studs and crude lettering, his graying hair is greased up into a faux-hawk, and there’s eyeliner on his eyes. Holding the handset of a much-abused, wall-mounted pay phone to his ear, he looks off in shock—as if he’s just learned, say, that his father has died, and he is realizing for the first time that when it comes right down to it, he’d be glad to put on a necktie for his widowed mother’s sake. Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/14 4:35pm

On View

Facsimile of CBGB bathroom, New York, 1975. (© Metropolitan Museum of Art)

‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

It’s too easy to make fun of the Met’s new “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. There was the chipper press preview at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning bustling with well-groomed junior fashion editors in leather pants and Walter Steiger heels, the facsimile of CBGB’s bathroom circa 1975, complete with graffitied urinals and cigarette butts, and Anne Hathaway and Miley Cyrus playing platinum punk Barbies at the Costume Institute gala—mockable incongruities served up on a silver platter. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 4:26pm

On View

Kiefer's 'der Morgenthau-Plan,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

‘Anselm Kiefer: Morgenthau Plan’ at Gagosian Gallery

“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/07 5:35pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Abrons Arts Center)

‘Harm van den Dorpel: Release Early, Release Often, Delegate Everything You Can, Be Open to the Point of Promiscuity’ at Abrons Arts Center

Untitled (portraits from Deviant Art), 2012, is a spring-loaded misdirection. A dark photo print under beveled matting under hand-etched glass, with the rectangle formed by the bevels overlapping a pale gray cameo-style oval, it’s almost impossible to look at. It’s much easier to see your own reflection. Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/07 5:34pm

On View

Corfu- Lights and Shadows

‘John Singer Sargent Watercolors’ at the Brooklyn Museum

The Elizabeth Peyton of the Palazzo Barbaro set, the painter John Singer Sargent had a way with white. From voluminous Bedouin robes to frothing Alpine streams, the sun-bleached marble steps of Santa Maria della Salute to the spotless cashmere shawl on a bloodless Boston socialite, the painter’s whites are perhaps the most socially nuanced in the history of watercolor. A show of nearly a hundred of his expert late watercolors (and a few middling oil paintings), mostly painted between 1901 and 1912, is well worth a visit. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/07 5:18pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy David Zwirner)

‘Richard Serra: Early Work’ at David Zwirner

Take Richard Serra’s 1967 artwork Verb List, a piece consisting of 108 terms handwritten across four columns on two sheets of letter paper. It’s a kind of index to the 18 titanic formal experiments, borrowed from museums and private collections all over the world, that have been arranged to loosely recreate the feeling of the artist’s 1968 Soho loft inside David Zwirner’s distractingly opulent new building on West 20th Street. Begin with “to roll.” Scavenge an irregular, four-foot-high ingot of black rubber, scraped or torn into a sandy latex color along one corner. Lean it against the wall. The way it lists to the right brings to mind a dancer striking a supple pose, whose shape looks transitional even as it holds steady—a perfect sculptural embodiment of frozen gesture. But then the soft material reminds you that the piece, Chunk (1967) really is bending the way it looks like it’s bending, even though it’s bending too slowly to see. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/07 5:06pm

On View

Michele Abeles, 'Malechutes,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal)

‘Michele Abeles: English for Secretaries’ at 47 Canal

Two years after inaugurating 47 Canal with a barn burner of a solo show, New York-based photographer Michele Abeles is back, and not a moment too soon. Ms. Abeles is, to my mind, the best among a promising pack of young artists, like Travess Smalley, Lucas Blalock and Talia Chetrit, who use both analog and digital means to create still lifes and abstractions that feel bracingly new: deadpan and strange and attuned to the freewheeling networks in which images circulate today. Read More