Spring PICKS – By Christopher Chambers

Sad news to report: Monique Goldstrom lost her long battle with cancer and passed away at age 56 in mid-February.

Spring PICKS

By Christopher Chambers

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Sad news to report: Monique Goldstrom lost her long battle with cancer and passed away at age 56 in mid-February. It’s hard to believe that anything could have slowed her down, no less stopped such a dynamo of energy completely. She was usually carrying on five different conversations at a time in her gallery on Broadway in Soho, which closed a few months ago after some twenty productive years. One conversation would be with some very important curator from out of town; two collectors on different phone lines; a running dialogue with her receptionist of the moment; a couple of artists who were trying to get her to exhibit their works; a word or two with Gianfranco who would appear out of the back now and then; and whatever business it was that brought me in there that day. Oh, and family stuff. Was that more than five? Monique was an incredibly kind and generous woman. I personally saw her giving her respect and money to people that I, frankly, wouldn’t have given the time of day to. She will be missed.

With the new rash of young dealers opening art portals in Chelsea and Billyburgh, there have also been a couple of surprising closings. Daniel Silverstein reported his best year yet in the press release announcing he was closing the gallery in order to pursue art projects privately where he could do the most good. Spin? Who knows. And the last time I was in Cornell DeWitt’s gallery he was smiling and there were red dots on everything, but apparently some fracas with his partner – well, ex-partner – put an end to all that. Bummer.

Legendary, reclusive Environmental artist Alan Sonfist is having his first commercial gallery exhibition in NYC in ten years at Paul Rogers 9W. His theme addresses natural disasters on a monumental level. The majority of his work takes place in the field or in occasional museum shows in Europe, so this is a rare indoor appearance – see other pages in this magazine for an interview with the artist. There is also an exhaustive survey of his life’s work titled The End of Art/Nature being published in conjunction with a traveling retrospective currently being organized by Wolfgang Becker. The book includes essays by Robert Rosenblum, Wolfgang Becker, Johnathan Carpenter, and Uwe R�th.

And for Berlin:

After acting as its director during Galerie Storms’ first year in Duesseldorf, Dr. Andrea Brenner has set off on her own, opening her own eponymous gallery where she will showcase more adventurous/less blue chip artworks than generally seen at her former place of employ. However, gallery goers won’t have to look far to find her; her new establishment is directly next-door in the ground floor space previously occupied by Galerie Conrads. Her inaugural exhibition is a solo effort by New York artist based in Duesseldorf, David Fried. Fried has been a regular of the European art fair circuit for the last several years, and has mounted solo exhibitions during the past year with Galerie Adler and Galerie Thomas Poller, both in Frankfurt. This show is entitled Distribution of Fate, which is in reference to his general theme of influencing natural occurrences. He shows examples from three recent bodies of work: His Rainscapes are mural scaled multiple exposure flash photographs of rainstorms shot in the dark of night; His Lucy and Dolly series features cellular structures reproduced through novel photographic processes, and his Self Organizing Still Life(s), (S.O.S.) are table top items wherein balls roll about amusingly when activated by random acoustical stimuli. Upcoming exhibitions at Galerie Andrea Brenner include photorealistic paintings by Spanish artist Cristina Jiminez; figurative works by Duesseldorfer Ubbo Kuegler, and more paintings by British Martha Parsey.