It’s fitting that Ellsworth Kelly looks like a mathematician. Poised, appearing younger, easily, than his 87 years, dressed as sharply as the lines that cut his steel and aluminum sculptures, he has a kind of preppie geometry. The black-eyeglass-wearing acolytes who flanked him at his Matthew Marks Gallery opening did a little nerd dance at Read More
Awards were given out at the Americans for the Arts 2007 National Arts Awards last night, and speeches were made. Sitting down for dinner in Cipriani 42nd Street’s massive main hall, guests dressed in black-tie attire-Jeff Koons among them-were surrounded by billboard-sized cloth screens covered with images of Andy Warhol’s iconic poppies. Warhol was the Read More
Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art is asking for trouble. In pairing the paintings and photographs of Claire Seidl, the gallery can’t help but prompt the viewer to compare and contrast the artist’s efforts in both mediums. That’s the point, I know, but it seems risky all the same, particularly for an abstract painter who has Read More
The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey’s paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art into something else-but what that something else Read More
Conduits for Reverie:
Puzzling, Risky Paintings
The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey’s paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art Read More
New Yorkers who enjoyed Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet 1949-1973 , an exhibition last summer at Soho’s Drawing Center, should go see Helmut Federle: Works on Paper from 1969 to 2001 at the Peter Blum Gallery. The pleasure of Tablet stemmed from watching Mr. Kelly think out loud-scribbling ideas for paintings and sculptures, doodling on whatever surface Read More
On a recent visit to California, I had my first look at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-the first, that is, since the museum acquired a building of its own (designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta in 1995) and went on a widely reported spending spree to load up on the work of celebrity Read More
The sculpture of Gillian Jagger, currently the subject of a disquieting exhibition at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, puts me in mind of some wise advice I once received about sausage: Best not to ask how it’s made.
Until now, what little I knew about Ms. Jagger’s work I’d gleaned from gallery listings: brief descriptions of Read More
The Good, the Bad, the Big On West 24th Street
Mark di Suvero has done it. With his exhibition of sculpture at the West 24th Street location of Gagosian Gallery, he has taken the Chelsea paradigm-you know, “My gallery’s bigger than your gallery”-and brought it down to size. Or rather, Mr. di Suvero has brought Read More
The small, boxy and wholly idiosyncratic paintings of Albert York, currently the subject of a 30-year overview at Davis & Langdale Company Inc., have garnered the artist a coterie of admirers so unobtrusive in their fervor as to constitute the most genteel of cults. If “cult” seems too strong (or weird) a word, one might Read More
