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Will Heinrich

By Will Heinrich 9/20/11 7:05pm

Exhibit

DJED (2009-2011) by Matthew Barney.

Richard Serra's Junction/Cycle at Gagosian Gallery and Matthew Barney's DJED at Gladstone Gallery

The materials of Richard Serra’s two enormous new sculptures, currently dominating the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, will be recognizable to anyone who knows Mr. Serra’s work. They’re made from curved, continuous steel plates more than thirteen feet high, rusted into shades from powdery orange to Martian mahogany, and marked with what are or appear to be scales, drips, streaks, stretch marks, shadows, calcium deposits, water stains, and lightning bolts. The rust continues so evenly that it’s only the occasional glint of a silvery, unrusted corner that looks like evidence of the human hand. Seen from above, their shapes are also recognizable: Cycle is a triskelion composed of three floppy, interlocking “S”s, which create three roughly circular clearings and three spiraling corridors. Junction, also made of steel plates doubled into corridors, looks more like a pinched, four-pointed star. Read More

By Will Heinrich 9/13/11 8:12pm

Art

Nicola Tyson. (Photo: Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

A Portrait of the Artist at Work

The characters that Nicola Tyson paints begin as quick sketchbook drawings and look like soap figurines who’ve taken too many baths. Their extremities are reduced to basic indications and look like the ovals from a drawing class. But while drawing-class ovals support the exploration of some particular model’s anatomy, Ms. Tyson’s ovals are bent primarily on exploring themselves, their own curves and crossings. There is an anatomy being portrayed, but it’s the artist’s own, the force of her tendons, her arm’s range of motion. The mystery of cognition takes the place of ex nihilo creation. Read More

By Will Heinrich 9/06/11 9:46pm

Art

Everything is Important and Nothing Really Matters at All (2009), by Mariele Neudecker.

'Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities' are Little Worlds Made Cunningly

The curators of “Otherworldly”—which consists largely of meticulous models and dioramas, some of them artworks themselves, others constructed by artists only to be photographed—trace the diorama back to Louis Daguerre and posit as its animating question, “What is real?” But that’s not really the question anymore, except insofar as Renaissance perspective, like Newtonian physics or the Ten Commandments, continues to dominate the popular imagination. If there is a question, it might be “What is the difference between art and design?” But there’s no particular urgency to that one either, since art and design, like spectacle and pathos, can so happily be concurrent. In fact, you could say that “Otherworldly” consists of two separate, concurrent shows: one for children and other devotees of technology, and one for devotees of art. Read More

By Will Heinrich 8/24/11 8:40am

Art

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Palermo) (1976).

‘Sigmar Polke: Photoworks 1964-2000’ at Leo Koenig Gallery

This modest survey of German painter Sigmar Polke’s photography includes portraits of several Afghan men leaning on a Jeep next to a mud-brick wall; a picture of a teapot pouring crumpled paper into a cup; a picture of Polke’s studio furniture arranged in a sculptural installation; and pictures of Polke’s own collages “Polke’s Whip” and “Menschenkreis.” Read More

By Will Heinrich 8/09/11 8:07pm

Art

Im Schatten der Made (In the Shadow of the Maggot) (2010) by John Bock.

‘In the Shadow of the Maggot’ at Anton Kern Gallery

Everything we do is in the shadow of the maggot—but why the long face? There’s always something newish under the sun. In a season of group shows and greatest hits, John Bock and the Anton Kern Gallery have transformed the usual repackaging into an absorbing entertainment of transformation. In the front room of the gallery, Read More

By Will Heinrich 8/02/11 7:51pm

Art

Desktop (Cave Paintings) by Allyson Vieira.

Image and Illusion at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

The title of this small but powerful exhibition, “Discursive Arrangements, or Stubbornly Persistent Illusions,” is either an ironic feint or it’s begging the question. Centered discreetly but unmistakably around what a Buddhist art critic might call the “emptiness” of images, the show forcefully makes the point that it can’t be quite right, in light of Read More

By Will Heinrich 7/12/11 7:27pm

Art

In a Village Near Paris (Street in Paris, Pink Sky) (1909) by Lyonel Feininger.

Lyonel Feininger is Living On the Edge at the Whitney

Lyonel Feininger was the Zelig of early modernism. Born in Manhattan to a German-American father who fought in the American Civil War, Feininger was sent to study violin in Leipzig when he was 16 but enrolled in art school in Hamburg instead. After an enormously successful career as an illustrator and cartoonist—mostly in Europe but Read More

By Will Heinrich 6/21/11 7:37pm

Galleries

East Wind (video still, 2011) by Cao Fei.

Serious Play: Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid

In the 19th  century, Great Britain used gunboats to address its trade imbalance with China. It must have seemed clear enough who was doing what to whom. But in the 21st century, things are more complicated. The gunboats remain ready, but the more visible weapons—if they are weapons—have so far been children’s television characters. In Read More