June Picks
Christopher Chambers
Walking past Lehman
Maupin’s stylish new Chelsea space – with its exposed brick and plywood
interior – after attending a few openings the other night, I noticed a particularly
beautiful painting, imbued with angelic light, hanging inside.[By the way, there
was a show of plywood hung as art by I don’t remember who at Paula Cooper.
Please, this wasn’t
a good idea when half a dozen other artists did it.] I recognized the painting
as paint guru Ross Bleckner’s work almost immediately. The next day I made
a point of going back to have a better look. Up close I was disappointed. What
was seductive at night from afar turned out to be a bunch of blurry white birds
on a deep blue background. It seemed trite and merely decorative (which is not
necessarily a bad word in my dictionary). The rest of the solo show consisted
of a wall of smaller bird paintings; a large canvas bedecked with colorful dots
on white that looked like he had laid down blobs of liquidy paint and then blown
them with an airbrush or a dust gun for photography, so that the pigment is dispersed
quasi-illusionistically; a few of his stripe paintings; etcetera. In the back
room, though was a gray abstract that was really special (repeat). But after
the let down up front my most salient thought was, “If a lesser known artist
had painted this it would be collecting dust in his/her studio.” Although
painting is pretty popular these days, for the most part it’s figurative.
Next door at Gorney, Bravin Lee, Bleckner’s ex-employee, Alexis Rockman
made an admirable showing of it with his trademark glossy sci-fi, illustrative
(which is not necessarily a bad word in my dictionary) oil paintings. The Proposition,
however, did display abstracts by quite competent gallery artist Peggy Cyphers.
Hers, in fact was one of the openings we had attended. She has loosened up quite
a bit since her last exhibition a few years ago when the gallery was located
in Soho, and called Donahue/Sosinski. Cyphers adds sand to acrylic paint lending
texture to her attractive, amorphous color fields and biomorphic doodles, which
are vaguely reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaller’s well known body of work.
Ernesto Neto filled Tanya BonakdarGallery up to the ceiling with foam blocks
cut to make caves and chambers. This one gets the “definitely cool”
rating. Out in Queens the Dorsky Gallery (I called first and they guided my craft
in for landing) had a feminist exhibition organized by independent curator Sue
Scott: mostly photographs and videos of women in various states of undress, challenging
traditional notions of beauty, by eleven well known artists both male and female.
Next, I made a valiant effort to see the “Water” show organized by
the mighty Lilly Wei for the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, but, as usual with
my forays into the boroughs, I got lost – first winding up at Roebling Hall,
which was closed, next try I couldn’t find Parker’s Box on Grand Street
either; then we finally settled for some tasty arroz con pollo at the local comidas
criollas joint before heading for the bridge.
And the pick for
this jolly month of June goes to Doreen McCarthy for her exhibition at Universal
Concepts Unlimited. She has had a series of her motifs and personal icons fabricated
in inflatable transparent and translucent plastics and placed them – suspended
from above or free standing – about the gallery. These see-thru sculptures seem
like they could be art from a Star Trek set (the original series with Kirk, Spock,
and the gang had more artwork hanging around the starship Enterprise, and here
and there around the universe, than later incarnations of the show). McCarthy’s
art is futuristic and obscure; it employs simplistic, almost medieval crests
as well as modernistic geometric elements to create her own cryptography, rendered
with an unusual and forward thinking sense of materiality.
-Christopher Chambers
