Thoughts That Cure Radically: February 2012

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Zak Prekop at Harris Lieberman

Zak Prekop’s becoming new abstract painting-collages at Harris Lieberman lists towards the serene. Moderately sized monochrome canvases, painted with cobalt, black, white, napthol and tan, flecked slightly with spots and collaged bas-reliefs, are redolent of Ben Nicholson’s low-rise structures, the chromatically reduced and aleatoric tendencies in the work of Yves Klein as well as the found street- sign collaged work of the French artist Jacques Villeglé. Prekop, a recent graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, proceeds though these influences in a cool and easy stride. Prekop’s exhibition of new paintings and paper work on canvas anticipates his first museum show in Raleigh, North Carolina. Oil paint and pasted paper are disbursed in near chromatic consistency, each painting subsumes into a larger, minutely refined practice. Individually indistinguishable, the practice as a whole concerns itself with patterned silence. Quietly and with a modicum of inflection, Prekop’s paintings creates a procedural presence through their established practices of collage, pattern and chance. Neither too enraptured by their own received beauty nor overly hypnotized with their semantic intelligence, Prekop’s paintings arrive, magically, at a place of personality.

Untitled (Blue and Dark Blue)

2012

Oil on Canvas

84 x 57 inches

Untitled, 2011, Oil on canvas, 35 × 27 inches

Friday, February 24, 2012

Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Gargantua paints in the land of the gnomes. Chris Martin’s humongous and eclectic collage-paintings inhabit the space at Mitchell-Innes & Nash with imposing playfulness. Patched together from New York Post cover-pages, landscape photographs, foil and garden gnome sculptures, Martin’s paintings relax along formally wacky lines. The gnome, a figure from Renaissance English literature, is a small hobbit like creature that lives underground. Martin’s gnomes, some of which are embedded in his hollowed-out canvases, also inhabit the subterranean of his artistic consciousness. Tie-died and spackled, Martin’s basement of ideas emanates from pop culture, including Amy Winehouse and James Brown, as well as Modernist abstraction. Fresh off from his first one-person museum exhibition at the Corcoran last year, these new paintings pair Warhol’s sixty-era glitz Disaster color with the restrained conceptual thinking perfected in Duchamp’s Etants Donnes. Prismatic-psychedelic reds, greens and yellows predominates the pasted photo grids while other paintings are made from pasted foil and a cut up discarded rug. Heirs to Schwitters and funky ‘bad painting’, Martin’s paintings are clean and elegant, spry but not gnomic, gigantic but never lumbering.

Chris Martin, "Gnome" (2012)

Chris Martin, "RIP Amy Winehouse" (2011-12)

Chris Martin, "All Final Prophecies Come True" (2012)

Chris Martin, "Magic Carpet" (2009)

Monday, February 20, 2012

Allison Miller at Susan Inglett Gallery

Allison Miller’s leafy abstract paintings at Susan Inglett Gallery add a bit of color to dowdy February in New York. Trained and based in Los Angeles, Miller’s paintings divide their time between faux naïf and formalist John McLaughlin territory. Lots of squares jostle across the picture plane. Squiggles and cross hatched marks in turn render each grid into a colorful kerchief, playfully abjuring strict seriousness. Slightly rough-hewn surfaces, pinks, fuschias and warm liquin blacks skillfully balances influence and intention into an easy coherence. Partaking of a tradition that stretches back to Diebenkorn’s inhalation of Matisse, Allison Miller, along with other Californians Rebecca Morris and Pamela Jorden, translates European Modernism, in this instance Bauhaus Klee, into Malibu airiness. Allison Miller’s first outing with Inglett Gallery, full of strong painting, establishes a sunny and eclectic presence.

Noren

2011

Acrylic on Canvas

60 x 48 inches

Air and Space

2011

Acrylic on Canvas

48 x 48 inches

Jungle Strip

2011

Acrylic on Canvas

29 ¼ x 25 inches

Expanding Room

2011

Acrylic, Oil and Dirt on Canvas

72 x 54 inches

Monday

2011

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas

48 x 60 inches

Friday, February 17, 2012

Magnus Plessen at Gladstone Gallery

German painting often seems like the only game in town. Magnus Plessen’s fourth exhibition of new paintings at Gladstone Gallery furthers his decade long exploration into the verities of the palette knife as a requisite tool for paint application. Expanding his use of a limited palette, this time with the addition of Prussian blue and Lemon yellow, Plessen’s quasi-figurative and still life paintings waver between indifference and commitment, all spoken through the wipe of a flat blade. Broadly, Plessen was a part of a group of European artists who began exhibiting paintings in the early 2000s that did not discriminate between abstraction and representation. Instead, the ‘Sasnal Effect’ artists as they were dubbed in Artforum in 2004 combined elements of observation, photographic display and abstraction, often with splashy paint handling that eschewed strict allegiance to any limited mode of presentation. Plessen new paintings, grand, slapdash and august, carry on his painterly investigations of forms. Hands, lemons, faces and arms comingle in an amalgam of late Picasso, Raoul Duffy and the Brothers Quay. Noodles and scrawls are a vocabulary of forms that compliments the flatly trawled paint. Spatially shallow through his use of interlocking shapes, Plessen’s paintings amply convince of their pictorial abilities.

Untitled (red)

2011

Oil on Canvas 69 x 53 ¼ inches

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Mary Corse ‘New Work’ Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Sea salt, light and air converge in Mary Corse’s monochromatic white canvases currently on view at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea Gallery. Berkley born and ontologically based in California, Corse’s ivory and pearl paintings are made by embedding micro glass beads, or micro spheres, into the painted surface. Depending on the viewer’s position in regards to the canvas and the overhead passing light conditions, the striped white painting’s composition will subtly shift in perception. Beginning in the late sixties, Corse was a member of the California ‘Light and Space’ group coming out of Southern California’s abundance of both. A phenomenological experience only appreciable after soaking in the light and air of California, Corse’s paintings are a trippy, Los Angeles attitudinal response to Agnes Martin’s arid Taos grids. Digitally, Corse’s paintings appear ho-hum, but in person the work literally sparkles before the viewer’s eyes.

"Untitled (White Inner Band, Beveled)"

(2008) by Mary Corse.

Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas,

96 x 144 inches.

Mary Corse
Untitled, 2011
Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas
102x156x3.75 in

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Terry Winters ‘Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook’ Matthew Marks Gallery

Studio isolation delineates the work of Terry Winters. Eleven large, ambitiously scaled paintings colored Valentine’s Day pink, ice-cold blue, tangerine green and a russet orange stand in sparkling, lonely tension at Matthew Marks Gallery. Heroically measured and reaching upwards of nine feet, Winters work still manages to come across as neither proudly confident nor particularly poised. Based around the compositional strategy of tessellation, or the repeated and non-overlapping form across a two dimensional plane, Winters creates a dynamic but fraught picture structure. Fussy and pinched, each picture is based around a strict but yet still intuitively arrived pictorial arrangement. Freely painted without a clear regard for crisp edges, each segment is all scumbled glazes and erasures, showing clear signs of second thoughts and addendums.

Winters work does not have the arid calm of an Islamic tile or the startling simplicity of an irrefutable mathematical proof. Winters’ venture, instead, is a more subtle, personal assignment. Winters’ studio universe, while grandly painted, remains minute. Partaking of the same atelier vision as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, Winters turns his tessellated and fractal compositional surface into a personal, microscopic vision of an imagined studio. Braque’s Studio X—last seen at Acquevella—shares the same affinity for deep space and scumbled, finicky paint while Matisse’s Red Studio manages—like Winters—to find the iciest frost in the reddest ember. Winters splits the difference between planar and dimensional, creased and delicate, trotted or stumbled. Grasping at clarity, Winters remains alone in a private, tessellated studio.

Cricket Music

2010

Oil on Linen

88 x 112 Inches

Tessellation Figures

2011

Oil on Canvas

88 x 112 inches

Tessellation Figures (1)

2011

Oil on Canvas

80 x 76 inches

Tessellation Figures (2)

2011

Oil on Linen

80 x 76 inches

Tessellation Figures (4)

2011
Oil on Linen

80 x 76 inches

Tessellation Figures (6)

2011

Oil on Linen

80 x 76 inches

Tessellation Figures (7)

2011
Oil on Canvas

80 x 76 inches

Tessellation Figure (11)

2011

Oil on Canvas

80 x 76 inches

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Sergej Jensen at Anton Kern

Utility is inverted in Danish born, Berlin based Sergej Jensen’s art. Stitched, stained, distressed and creased, Sergej Jensen dispels such forcefully inelegant verbs as ‘painted’. Following his one-person survey at PS1 last winter, Sergej Jensen exhibits new examples of his physically reduced, hushed, elegant and nearly monochromatic paintings at Anton Kern. Sparsely applied oil, acrylic and pastel catches each surface—cotton, jute, canvas and linen—unawares. Vulnerable but without falling into preciousness, Jensen’s work quietly polemicizes present-ness as a state for contemporary painting. Jensen’s inverted utility partakes of the same impulses that animated the work Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Joseph Albers and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus artist’s notions of utility expanded outward. Writing in the introduction to ‘Bauhaus: Workshop of Modernity’ Leah Dickerman writes:

The autonomy of the discrete easel picture was challenged from the school’s first years. Over the span of the institution’s life, painting became an element of a fully designed environment, in a modernization of an Arts and Crafts model; its ambitions were appropriated by a large-scale textile wall hanging; it was reconceived as a wall painting, inescapable from the architecture space it defined; and it was dematerialized into mechanically produced light displays.

Jensen re-appropriates the Bauhaus version of utility. His large scale textile wall hangings, inescapable from their defined space, also happen to double as a traditional easel painting. Unlike the Bauhaus artists, who aimed to take the aesthetic and return it out into the world, Jensen consumes ready-made materials. Bedding sheets, scraps of fabric, needle and thread becomes the furniture of his world. By minimizing traditional art material and stepping beyond mere collage, Jensen instead creates a conceptual, abject version of the gesamtkunstwerk. The entirety of the artwork resides not in its creation of a world, but instead its reformation from the world.