WINTER PICKS
By Christopher Chambers
Adam Hurwitz, Pack, 2004 Oil on Linen 36"x72"
All in all, the fall season was pretty lackluster this year, but as the weather gets colder the art season seems to be heating up a bit:
Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg started off with DeWitt Godfrey’s two sculpture installations. Sheets of corten steel were bolted together to form clusters of irregular rings squished between the walls – floor to ceiling inside, and between the side walls out in the concrete backyard. Either is worthy of any museum, looking a bit like three-dimensional Brice Marden paintings, only better. The small maquettes on view weren’t as effective, displayed on pedestals without confining walls. You really don’t get the feeling of encountering the work in person from a photograph, but we can’t exactly illustrate this column with the real thing. Richard Deacon’s installation of ribbons of wood which zoom around the Marian Goodman Gallery was in the same vein, but arranged more like a giant sized "Hot Wheels" toy car tracks, and self contained, i.e., not site specific.
Another really great exhibition was Sofi Zezmer at Mike Weiss. She works with multitudes of repeated plastic parts such as funnels, tubes, even badminton birdies, all cleverly attached together to form colorful, weird science constructions.
The fourth exhibition at Tracy William’s gallery, tucked away on a quiet block in the West Village, was Matt Mullican’s cryptic take on cosmology through an assortment of his eccentric collections, archeological slabs of cast pewter, several video monitors playing animated signage, a selection of digital prints, melted telephones; and if that’s not enough, there was also a suite of photographs and videos created by the artist while under hypnosis. Everyone’s favorite Art Brute Ouatarra Watts’ exhibition of new paintings will have opened by the time this column is published, and I am particularly curious to see the exhibition following John Lurie’s show, because although the man is undeniably a world class Lounge Lizard, he is simply not a visual artist — at least not if we judge him by what he exhibited in Chelsea last spring.
It took all of my Art World fortitude not to loose my lunch at Willy Wonka’s show at Mary Boone this autumn. This writer has championed Sweet William’s lovely touch in print numerous times in the past, but this was such a revolting display of saccharine photorealism that I had to leave the neighborhood to regain my composure.
Top Picks for this month are: old school abstract expressionist Wlodek Ksiazek at Kouros Gallery on the Upper East Side. His large canvases of layer upon layer of heavily impastoed oil paint at times approach monochromes of grays and off whites, but usually the tonalities hover in the range of earth tones. His is a pure abstraction: straight edged shapes and delineations with overlapping textures act along similar conceptual frontiers as Ciao Fonseca’s paintings now at Paul Kasmin Gallery, but Wlodek’s got more painterly guts. Michael Steinberg will feature a two-person show at his new space which was previously Caren Golden’s–she moved out in favor of her new street level digs on 23rd. Steinberg is hosting oil paintings based on professional videos of cosmetic surgery interlaid with pornographic images by Adam Hurwitz and Video and sculpture by Daniella Dooling that obliquely relates to her teenage, drug induced nervous breakdown.
