Femme Maison by Louise Bourgeois

Robert Mangold

Ellsworth Kelly | Reliefs 2009 - 2010, Matthew Marks Gallery, LA

Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”  Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”

Matthew Marks Gallery

Wangechi Mutu

 Death by Mariposa, 2006

Ink, acrylic, collage and contact paper on Mylar; 17" x 25 1/4", 20 3/8" x 38" framed

 Cactus Green Nips, 2009

Mixed media on Mylar; 46" x 53", 52 1/2" x 58 1/2" framed

 

Before Punk Came Funk, 2010 

Mixed Media ink, paint, collage on Mylar; 54" x 51"

Spanning a wide range of media, Mutu employs interventionist methods of collage and assemblage to inventively critique the institutions of power and representation that regulate both the aesthetic and symbolic status of the gendered and racialized body. Mining such diverse sources as fashion magazines, pornography, and documentary photographs, Mutu's striking combination of the surreal, grotesque, and seductive reflects the underlying currents of violence and psycho-sexual tension embedded within the legacy of colonial discourse and the American subconscious at large.

Mutu's variegated surfaces move decisively between dense layers of spliced images, glitter, paint, and beads to the swirling calligraphic markings of snakes and hair that give voice to these dystopic scenes of desire, horror, and excess. Mutu’s formal methods of collage and montage allow for a mixing of photographic genres and styles culled from the mass media—a representational strategy that not only resists binary determinations but complicates and disrupts the very terms upon which we read images. Through the often jarring incongruities between her collaged elements, from the performative sexuality of pornographic poses to the ethno-centric bodies captured under the anthropological gaze of National Geographic, Mutu plays with the effects of displacement by constructing images that are always already dysfunctional, disordered and destabilizing. What Mutu brilliantly establishes in her charged environments and fantastical tableau is a framework that challenges the question of difference and its attending modes of address, suggesting that resolving these issues is, to borrow the words of the theorist Barbara Johnson, “always a function of a specific interlocutionary situation—and the answers, matters of strategy rather than truth."

Gladstone Gallery

William Kentridge: Five Themes | Jeu de Paume, Paris

 Dessin pour "II Sole 24 Ore [World Walking]"

[Le Soleil 24 heures (Le Monde en marche)]" 2007, William Kentridge

Fusain, gouache, pastel et crayon de couleur sur papier, 213.5 x 150 cm

Journey to the Moon, 2003

35mm and 16mm film transferred to video (black and white, sound) 7:10 min

 William Kentridge, Five Themes

29 June 2010 until 05 September 2010

Featuring about 40 works in a range of media, including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books, "William Kentridge: Five Themes" brings viewers up to date on the artist’s work over the past decade, exploring how his subject matter has evolved from the specific context of South Africa to more universal stories. In recent years, Kentridge has dramatically expanded both the scope of his projects (such as recent full-scale opera productions) and their thematic concerns, which now include his own studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, and the cultural history of postrevolutionary Russia. His newer work is based on an intensive exploration of themes connected to his own life experience, as well as the political and social issues that most concern him.

South African artist William Kentridge (born 1955) first achieved international recognition in the 1990s with a series of what he called “drawings for projection”: short animated films based on everyday life under apartheid. Since then, Kentridge has widened his thematic range, expanding beyond his immediate environment to examine other political conflicts. His oeuvre charts a universal history of war and revolution, evoking the complexities and tensions of postcolonial memory and imaging the residual traces of devastating policies and regimes.

Unfruchtbare Landschaften | Yvon Lambert, Paris

Unfruchtbare Landschaften, 1969 

Black-and -white photographs, surgical instruments and graphite on bound cardboard
36 x 25 x 4.5 cm, 14 pages

Exhibition View

Anselm Kiefer | Unfruchtbare Landschaften

Yvon Lambert, Paris 19 May –26 June 2010

“Among the works to be exhibited at Galerie Yvon Lambert are a number that were conceived in around 1969, when the artist was 24 years old, including “For Genet,” “The Flooding of Heidelberg” and “Heroic Symbols.” These pieces take the form of strange books on cardboard in which he stuck photographs, watercolours and dried flowers. Even in these early years Kiefer had begun to write down names from his strange, obsessive pantheon. Here, for example, Genet’s name appears with those of Wagner, Beuys and Joan of Arc. These enigmatic clues seem to have been scattered among clichés that are both provocative and disturbing. It is well worth deciphering them and placing them in the context of Kiefer’s art generally, with all its extremes and gigantic scale.

Today, it is indeed important to return to these books which recall some of Kiefer’s very daring interventions. They constitute views or visions, images heavily freighted with memories and symbols, but submerged in blackness, and also self-portraits of the young artist incongruously dressed in a nightshirt or woollen robe, or making the Nazi salute in grandiose or ridiculous settings. At the time, he had taken on the solitary task of what he called the “occupation” of significant spaces – a dark, gratingly ironic gesture that, like the clichés themselves, provoked a scandal. The works were misunderstood, or met with shocked incomprehension, even in the most radical artistic milieus: critics at the time simply could not accept Kiefer’s pathetic and provocative questioning.

Cyril Croucher | Coverack

Cyril Croucher (b.1951), Coverack, Acrylic

Noriwaki Miyamoto | Dream of Blue Houses

Noriwaki Miyamoto (1940), Dream of Blue Houses, Japanese colour etching with aquatint.

David Salle

Private collection, London/Courtesy Haunch of Venison New York
David Salle, “Cold Child (George Trow),” 1986.

Philip Pearlstein and Al Held: Artists obsessed with pictorial space, the visual illusion that could be created on a flat canvas

"Marionettes" 1988, by Philip Pearlstein.

“Echo” 1966 Al Held

“Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” is on view through Saturday at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-2772, bettycuninghamgallery.com.

Sarah McKenzie | Building Code

Interior 2, 2009, oil and acrylic

Interior 3, 2009, oil and acrylic

McKenzie paints buildings in various states of construction, playfully referencing geometric abstraction and twentieth century Modernism. She applies paint to the canvas in ways that often break the unity of the image. The effect is perplexing but informative; her process parallels construction and her surfaces encourage the viewer to compare the structure of the paintings with the frames of the buildings she is painting. The gallery's founder, Jen Bekman, first viewed McKenzie's work at the Walker Museum's opening reception for its traveling exhibition, World's Away: New Suburban Landscapes. About first seeing the work, Ms. Bekman noted:

At first glance it seemed photorealistic, in part because it reminds me of the ground well trod by many of my favorite fine art photographers. But look closely and it's clearly not quite real -there is a flatness in both her paint and perspective that has the primitive feeling of folk art. Take that flatness in and allow yourself to focus on the lines, angles and grids of her work; suddenly you're fully immersed in geometric abstraction, a la the twentieth century Modernists. The familiarity of the subject matter allows me to travel through these genres with ease.

Worlds Away, a traveling exhibition, will open at the Yale School of Architecture in March 2009. Her work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the country, including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bemis Center, the University of Akron, and the Katonah Museum of Art. McKenzie’s paintings have been featured in New York Times articles by Grace Glueck and Allison Arieff, as well as in Art in America, Dwell, The Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Denver Post.
 

Building Code is at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, NY, New York