| Somebody once said to me: “Anyone who is capable of going through what it takes in order to get elected president should be automatically disqualified.” The same might be said of almost any field of endeavor. Having gotten that tasty bit of cynicism out of the way, there were several exhibitions wrapping up the spring season in NYC worth mentioning: Two of my favorites were side by side at Cynthia Broan and Christopher Henry Galleries, both on 29th Street. |  |
Fall Picks – Christopher Chambers
Somebody once said to me: “Anyone who is capable of going through what it takes in order to get elected president should be automatically disqualified.” The same might be said of almost any field of endeavor. Having gotten that tasty bit of cynicism out of the way, there were several exhibitions wrapping up the spring season in NYC worth mentioning: Two of my favorites were side by side at Cynthia Broan and Christopher Henry Galleries, both on 29th Street. Tall, bald Bodo Korsig showed one of my favorite exhibitions all year—maybe ever—at Cynthia Broan. His doodley iconic motifs are cut out of plywood and painted black or sand-cast in aluminum. A few create illusions of perspective, so the shapes seem to recede in space along a plane, others are frontal abstract squiggles that may individually mean something to the artist, but I don’t care what. The collection makes for a personal iconography that reminds of much yet specifies nothing, like little half-thoughts and notions. It’s really his own thing and doesn’t pertain much to current trends; without looking backwards either.
Next door at Christopher Henry Gallery was “Jesse McCloskey: The Beast in the Beauty,” which was funky gestural figures in landscape paintings. They are populated by cartoon human females and lascivious wolves with hairy testicles hanging low. Other repeated motifs include a bottle with an “X” on the label, a house in the background with a tree and a car in the driveway that looks like it might be Boris Badenuff and Natasha’s (from “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame) hideout and a reappearing silhouetted black birdie.
Lehmann Maupin had large, heavy-duty architectural paintings by Christian Hellmich that could have been painted anytime since 1970. The perspectives sometimes broke down into spatial contradictions; and at Nicole Kalgsbrun meaty, painterly blobs on canvas by Dennis Hollingsworth were particularly appealing. These also weren’t especially current, but so what. It’s good work straight-up.
Another good one was Amanda Church, “Liquid Love”, at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts. Her paintings represent the apex of a current movement in painting that mixes biomorphic ab-x with a pop art aesthetic forming a sort of cartoon abstraction that is rooted in psychedelic underground comics from the early 70s. Other current practitioners include Dominick Lombardi and Giles Lyon.
And the top preview pick for the fall season is Loren Munk, “We are our own Art History,” at Dam Stuhltrager in Williamsburg, opening in early October. Munk plans an installation involving a painted map of greater Williamsburg and lower Manhattan that will record the personalities in the art world. Anyone who wishes to participate is requested to bring materials to add to the historical piece. For a minute during the mid-80s it looked like Loren Munk was going to get Schnabel’s job, but his New York gallery closed and his subsequent European shows weren’t heard about much on this side of the pond. Munk is one of the best painters around and this month he is also having exhibitions in London, Madrid and somewhere in Florida.
