"Figure with Tree" (Photo courtesy Petzel gallery)

The artist Nicola Tyson, whose twisted figures are currently on display at Friedrich Petzel were called “Lily Pulitzer meets a concentration camp" by one admirer at the opening, will hold a performance at that gallery on October 6 during which she will read letters to her forebears, among them Francis Bacon, Thomas Gainsborough and James Ensor.

The Observer recently had a chance to peruse two of Ms. Tyson’s letters, to Pablo Picasso and Édouard Manet. Manet is portrayed as someone she likes very much, to the point where she’s self-effacingly worried about his influence, and some of her compliments seem a bit back-handed (“May I congratulate you on pulling off those late flower paintings while dying of syphilis?”) Picasso, though? She’s just tired of him.

Christ.. all those clunky female (..what else?) nudes with as much interiority as a concrete park bench. Weren’t you bored painting or fashioning them - with those priceless hands that nightly fondled real breasts, no doubt, with a real head hovering above them, with real eyes in it, looking down on the shining bald pate of your fucking genius?

The letters have a free-written feel to them and the format feels appropriate — it’s as if she has something to get off her chest, something that she really should have said earlier but some length of time has passed where a letter is really the only appropriate thing. It’ll certainly be something to watch Ms. Tyson, who speaks very quickly and sports frizzy red hair, performing this live on October 6.

“It looks like hair but the intention was not so much hair, it was more about movement,” the artist Zipora Fried told The Observer, adding that she makes the works with a simple pencil like the one we were using to take down her words. Ms. Fried, one of the gallery’s first artists, has worked with pencils before but her earlier works tended to be solid coverings of the canvas, incrementally blotting out everything white, whatever the material.

“There’s always been been this capacity for violence and latent energy in her work, said gallery director Candice Madey. “I really wanted to show that line through all of it.”

The other works in the gallery were black and white photographs of Ms. Fried as a child, all of them featured wool stitching about the face, and Ms. Madey compared these to earlier works that Ms. Fried had done in which she scribbled over the books of George Steiner.

Most of these were in the gallery’s office but one, whose stitching made it look like the young Ms. Fried was wearing a Mardi Gras mask, was out in the gallery with the wavy graphite. A man with eyebrows that curved off his face like devil horns craned his neck to the side of this photo to check for a third dimension, presumably looking for solidarity with the work.

“When I was a child, I didn’t talk,” Ms. Fried said. “I would never smile and you see I would always have this forlorn face. Now I’m relaxing it.”

This didn't seem to fit exactly, in that she’s defaced herself.

“It’s an interesting thing I was talking about the work with a forensic psychologist,” she responded. “He said the step after self-harm or self-destruction is that you step out of yourself, you project.”

There are much more of her work downstairs, she said, and she gestured to a trap door by the Mardi Gras-ed photo.

Before we left, Ms. Madey said we had to see something in her office. Vertically near the door was a smeared work about seven feet tall that looked like a Roschach test. It was behind glass and, in fact, the Vaseline and coffee ground work made by her artist Clifford Owens, a piece whose creation formed the lede of a story in this paper about a Fluxus show at MoMA.

“We took it to a conservationist and said, ‘Okay we’ve got a work make of Vaseline and coffee grounds. What should we do to protect it?’” she said, admiring the work. “He said don’t do anything! Just frame it, it’ll change beautifully over time.”

Photos of Goldye were available in the office.

Some time during Callicoon Fine Art's first Manhattan show last night, the artist Glen Fogel was forced to pop the hood of the Cadillac taking up most of the space in the small gallery. Using the light of an iPhone to poke around, he explained to a bystander that he suspected the battery was dying, or that there was a loose connection. Don’t get him wrong, he said, the car was still moaning “Glen” and “Shit” via hidden speakers just as it was supposed to — it did that very well, actually — but the lights weren’t growing and dimming with the wheeze of the voice quite as he’d like.

The adjustment seemed to help things. After he closed the hood, the headlights got into the action.

“Basically,” Mr. Fogel told The Observer at the front of the gallery, “I witnessed my grandmother being taken off life support.  And she said the word ‘shit,’ over and over for a week afterward. I had never in my life heard her say that before.”

After she died, Mr. Fogel inherited the car from Goldye, for whom the exhibit is named. Its certificate of sale hangs on the wall. Being about the size of one car, the gallery felt a bit like a garage, with no lights except for those originating from the Cadillac. Visitors scooted along the edges of vehicle to make their way to the office, for space and Budweiser, where the work was listed as available for purchase for $34,000.

Mr. Fogel said he actually drove the car for years, and had incorporated its story into his work before, but nothing quite had the same effect as having the actual car here. “It’s this big classic car,” he said. “So the idea was to translate the experience of seeing one into something else.”

“It almost ejects you from the space,” said gallery owner Photios Giovanis, pleased. Mr. Giovanis, a former bookkeeper at Metro Pictures, opened his gallery in the eponymous town upstate in 2009 and didn't seem to mind ejecting people from his new location. “It feels like a sarcophagus in place of a body.”

Because the gallery was a bit cramped, everyone mingled outside on the sidewalk. Mr. Giovanis had to excuse himself from a conversation at one point. A truck was blocking traffic and he had to move his own car so that people could get around it.

The new space, via Google Maps.

Thierry-Goldberg Projects will open its first show of the fall season tomorrow in a new space at 103 Norfolk Street, at the base of the large blue condominium building on that block.

The move represents a space upgrade for the gallery and they seem to be taking advantage of it with this new exhibit, a group show featuring 19 artists.

The gallery left behind its old space at 5 Rivington Street this spring, the same address where Richard Prince exhibited his infamous Spiritual America, which shows an image of a nude Brooke Shields at age 10, in 1983. Bowery Boogie now reports that a women's clothing store is set to open in the space Thierry-Goldberg has left behind. The tenative name for the store? "Spiritual America." Never change, Lower East Side.

A Deitch opening at 18 Wooster, courtesy White Hot Magazine.

Next week, the Swiss Institute contemporary arts center will move from its current location on third-floor space on Broadway to the nearby 18 Wooster, former home to a larger space of Jeffrey Deitch’s Deitch Projects.

“It was a longterm wish to have a storefront,” Swiss Institute director and curator Gianni Jetzer told The Observer. "And it’s a storefront. We’re really looking forward to the exposure and to be much more public because the name ‘Swiss Institute’ sounds a little bit exclusive.”

Mr. Deitch will serve as the Swiss Institute’s landlord, and Mr. Jetzer added that he seemed eager to have a nonprofit in the space. The new Swiss Institute space will open with a joint show by artists Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff on September 14.

124 Forsyth, Courtesy Bowery Boogie

Former Metro Pictures bookkeeper Photios Giovanis will open a new gallery on the Lower East Side next week. Callicoon Fine Arts will open at 124 Forsyth Street with a show by Glen Fogel, called “Goldye" on September 7.

The address, says local blog Bowery Boogie, was recently divided into two storefronts. Callicoon will reportedly take the northerly one.

As for "Goldye"?

Titled after the first name of the artist’s grandmother, the exhibition contains a sculpture incorporating light and sound to invoke Goldye’s near death experience. She ultimately survived the episode, living on for another year with no memory of the event.

The presence of light is commonly reported in such cases. However, the sound, also included as part of the sculpture, is a recording of the artist’s re-enactment of events that surrounded his grandmother’s experience and touches on the inexplicable nature of what occurred. The sculpture itself is a continuation of the artist’s use of personal artifacts to stress the mediated quality of artworks. As in Fogel’s previous works, such as his recent 5 channel video installation of wedding and engagement rings, and his series of love letters fashioned as large oil paintings, Goldye comments on the inherent and acquired value of these artifacts.

The press release is accompanied by a giant photo of this woman.

Mr. Giovanis told The Observer he decided to move his gallery to Manhattan from Callicoon, in upstate New York, to get more viewers for the artists he shows. “I’m here because I wanted to reach a larger audience,” he said.

Being upstate New York – hardly a hotspot for contemporary art galleries – his location became part of the talk around his gallery. He said he looks forward to having that change. “After three years of bringing lots of wonderful artists to Callicoon I wanted to continue the programming in New York, where it could be part of a larger discussion,” he said. “It’s no longer about where the gallery is located. It will become more generally about the work and the artists.”

Mr. Giovanis opened his gallery in Callicoon in May, 2009, and during the three years he ran it there, he had a long commute. He lived a sort of upstate/downstate existence. Weekdays he served as Metro Pictures bookkeeper; on weekends, he and his boyfriend, Stephen Motika, would drive up to Callicoon with their two cats. Mr. Motika runs the nonprofit publishing company Nightboat Books.

Being so far off the gallery map was a risk. A bigger risk was spending money on shipping and booth costs to do the Nada art fair in Miami in December 2009, just six months after he opened. But Callicoon won the best-in-booth prize that year. “Besides the prize money, the recognition was valuable,” said Mr. Giovanis. “I don’t know how it happened but it was a great way to kick off my whole thing.”

In Callicoon, Mr. Giovanis became involved in the area's hot-button issue, the movement against the gas drilling method called fracking. He joined the group Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy. “Whenever anyone would walk into the gallery, they would look around at the work, but the conversation would always turn to what was happening with fracking,” he says. Even with his move to New York, he’s remained involved in the group.

Aside from his continued interest in the anti-fracking cause, Mr. Giovanis hasn’t entirely abandoned Callicoon, where he still has a country house. “I’d like to do a couple of shows a year upstate,” he said. “But it won’t be in my previous space. It will be more ad hoc.”

In Callicoon, Mr. Giovanis was showing artists like Frances Cape who already have galleries in New York. So his New York program will change a bit. It will also feature artists across a wide age range. After Glen Fogel, he will show Thomas Kovachevich, who has been making artworks since the 1960s. After that comes Benjamin Kress, a young artist who hasn’t had a New York show in some five years.

Although he is now on the Lower East Side, far from Callicoon, Mr. Giovanis is keeping the gallery’s name. “That’s important,” he said. “Trying to run a gallery like this in a small town is an unexpected thing to do. It borders on the absurd, and it’s a feeling I want to keep with me. I’m very serious about it, but I also think humor, a sense of displacement, and being a bit awkward and uncomfortable is important.”

"Scarlet" by Hideaki Kawashima

This September, fordProject will host a group exhibition showcasing three young Japanese artists, representatives of what the gallery believes to be an untapped contemporary market from that country. “Reflections” will feature paintings by young artists Hideaki Kawashima, Makiko Kudo and Toru Kuwakubo.

Rachel Vancelette, the director who curated the show, is passionate about the project. In fact, she left the country in April to organize it, after the earthquakes that paralyzed the country and amid fears of nuclear fallout.

“Personally it was a privilege to lend support during these difficult times.” She wrote in an email to The Observer. “It was a reflective moment for the world. I found the younger generation of painters were expressing an inner personal dialogue fused with their overall view of their society.”

From ghostlike portraits to intimate landscapes, the works are meant to illustrate dreamlike examinations of the inner self, a cultural tradition with its roots in Shinto.

Ms. Vancelette had never visited Japan before this trip.

“All of Tokyo was darkened at night, the lights gone due to the power conservation measures, so the beautiful streets seen in films no longer existed during my stay,” she said. “Containers of any kind were in short supply in food chains and water was a big issue, but a stoic resolve was evident.”

“Reflections” will be on view at fordProject from September 14th to October 14^th.

The gallery currently has one location on the Upper East Side. It was founded in 2007. They represent 11 artists including Bill Rice and Anne Harvey and have works by Elaine de Kooning, Fairfield Porter and, of all people, Robert De Niro.

The gallery has yet to break this news on their web site. No word on an opening date.

White Cube is one of London’s most influential galleries. They show Damien Hirst and Gilbert & George, among many other artists on an impressive roster. It is possible that the young Hong Kong art scene is already becoming quite contentious. Mr. Hirst is represented by Gagosian in the US and White Cube in the UK. Gagosian Hong Kong's first show was an exhibition of Mr. Hirst's work. The artist is quite popular there. There is no word yet on White Cube's exhibition schedule, but we'd say, expect to see a lot more of Mr. Hirst, Hong Kong!