Corin Hewitt

Corin Hewitt: Seed Stage at the Whitney Museum thru January 4, 2009 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Artist Corin Hewitt takes up occupancy in the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery in this ongoing installation that is part performance art, part live theater, and part meditation on ideas about still life. Redefining the notion of the artist-in-residence, Hewitt physically moves about the space and engages in the manipulation of materials, both homegrown and store-bought, questioning the autonomy of the art object through a process of its constant transmutation. His methods include cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning, eating, and photographing both organic and inorganic materials. The result is an intimate examination of the cycles of transformation and transience.

Installation view from Weavings: Performance #2 (Portland, OR), 2007. Photograph by Dan Kvitk

           

Reviews  “Time Out New York”      “New York Times”      “Artinfo”

Home Delivery…thru October 20th

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling is both a survey of the past, present and future of the prefabricated home and a building project on the Museum’s vacant west lot. Not since the mid-century House in the Garden series has MoMA built occupiable model buildings to demonstrate contemporary issues to the public. The fives homes erected on the vacant west lot are designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates (Philadelphia); Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier (New York); Horden Cherry Lee Architects / Haack + Höpfner Architects (London/Munich); Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass (Cambridge); and Oskar Leo Kaufmann (Dornbirn, Austria).

The exhibition, and its accompanying Web site (www.moma.org/homedelivery), display the process of architectural design and production in equal measure with the actual end result. Within the gallery, eighty-four architectural projects spanning 180 years are presented by means of film, architectural models, original drawings and blueprints, fragments, photographs, patents, games, sales materials and propaganda, toys, and partial reconstructions. This diverse collection of material illustrates how the prefabricated house has been, and continues to be, not only a reflection on the house as a replicable object of design but also a critical agent in the discourse of sustainability, architectural invention, and new material and formal research.

African Textiles

The New York Times reviews two shows:

The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End at the Metropolitan Museum of Art thru 3/22/2009

The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery thru 12/6/2008

“To the casual Western eye “African art” equals “African sculpture” — masks, headdresses and ritual figures. As two new exhibitions make clear, this picture is laughably outdated.

Many contemporary African artists would point to textile, rather than sculpture, as the tradition with the strongest impact on their work. The Nigerian-born, London-based artist Yinka Shonibare, for one, has extrapolated an entire career from the fascinating colonial history of the fabrics known as Dutch wax prints.

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents 19th-century fabrics alongside a few relevant contemporary artworks. Flipping the scales, “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, emphasizes the place of traditional textiles in works by contemporary African artists.

The exhibitions were conceived and organized independently, and there is considerable overlap on the contemporary end. Both, however, are worth a visit.

The older textiles at the Met are rare, exceptional pieces, many on loan from the British Museum. They contain “the DNA,” in the curator Alisa LaGamma’s words, of contemporary works by El Anatsui and others. But the 20th-century textiles and contemporary artworks at the Grey, organized by the gallery’s director, Lynn Gumpert, offer a more generous swath (so to speak) of Africa’s current visual culture.”

New Museum

Two Exhibitions at the New Museum

“Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” (thru 1/11/2009) is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton’s work in an American institution. The survey will include more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years. (New York Times review here)

Peyton’s oeuvre can be read in chapters, each of which feature portraits of friends, family, personal heroes, and fleeting passions. “Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” will offer a visual biography of the artist, and at the same time create a snapshot of the popular culture of the past decade.

From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton’s body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton’s small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

Peyton emerged as a vanguard voice in the return to narrative figuration in contemporary painting in the 1990s, and is among a small group of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism. Although her paintings reference nineteenth-century modernist painting – from Eduard Manet to John Singer Sargent – Peyton processes these masters through an intimate understanding of twentieth-century artists such as David Hockney, Alex Katz, and above all, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Peyton’s art is at the service of the culture it captures. A brilliant colorist with a razor-sharp graphic sense, her paintings are enormously seductive in form and content, celebrating the aesthetics of youth, fame, and creative genius. They are also testaments to Peyton’s deeper passion for beauty in all its forms – from the elevated to the everyday. Ultimately, Peyton’s paintings are evidence of a dedication to the creation of a new kind of popular art. Steeped in history, her work aspires to bridge the gap between art and life.

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” (thru 1/26/2009) will be the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the artist’s work in a New York museum. It will include paintings as well as ceramic sculptures and furniture made by the New York-based artist over the last forty years. (read the New York Times story here)

Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent artists of her generation—a pioneering painter whose work injects abstraction with elements from popular culture and craft traditions. A “painter’s painter,” her straightforward, seemingly loose and casual approach belies a witty dialogue with art historical preconceptions. As Dave Hickey writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: “The canons of geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism are honored in the spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents.”

Heilmann’s work has been deeply influenced by her personal experiences, including a childhood and adolescence split between Los Angeles-area beaches and Bay Area beatnik clubs. The impact of this thoroughly West Coast childhood is seen in the vibrant, lusty color palette, sense of boundless possibility, and experimentation for which Heilmann’s paintings are known. The sense of movement and rhythm evident in the work—as well as many of the paintings’ titles—are connected to Heilmann’s enthusiasm for popular music ranging from Brian Eno to the Sex Pistols, to k.d. lang and beyond. The freedom of abstraction combines with an element of autobiography, making Heilmann’s paintings highly influential to a younger generation of artists. Ultimately, Heilmann’s practice can be seen as an all-encompassing network linking genres, styles, friends, locations, and histories—enabling each individual work to speak. eloquently on its own terms as well as in a larger chorus.

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim thru 1/7/2009

Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black-and-white.

The exhibition gathers works from Opie’s most important series in a major mid-career survey, starting with the series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), which first brought the artist to prominence, that celebrate queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Houses (1995–96) Opie explores her interest in domestic architecture through portraits of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions in which each facade retains as distinct a character. Domestic (1995–98) offers a flip side to these works, moving inside to document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities. Freeways (1994–95), the first of her black-and-white series, offers a richly formal meditation on the Los Angeles highway system. Continuing to document structures as icons and relics of human, and especially Southern Californian, culture, she continued with Mini-malls (1997–98), which focuses on billboards, signs, and architectural elements identifying various ethnic and cultural groups in Los Angeles shopping centers. This series inaugurated the ongoing project American Cities (1997–present), an extended group of panoramic black-and-white series that so far has explored Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and St. Louis. Opie then looked toward more natural settings and the communities that exist there. Icehouses (2001) focuses on the way architectural structures accumulate human history but are at the mercy of the natural landscape on which they depend. Finally in Surfers (2003) the subjects are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, forever suspended on a tranquil sea, primed to catch the perfect ride that may never come. And most recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in In and Around Home (2004–05), Opie’s family becomes a microcosm for political and social issues at play on a wider level, its status as a queer family becoming subtly apparent over the course of the series.”

Reviews: Village Voice, New York Times

Ending Soon

Stan VanDerBeek at Guild & Greyshkul thru 10/18/2008

Begin Again Right Back Here at White Columns thru 10/25/2008 –John Beech, Anna Castelli, Taylor Davis, Vincent Fecteau, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Wayne Koestenbaum and Greenblatt-Wexler, Fawn Krieger, Michael Krumenacker, Sol LeWitt, Gareth Moore, Richard Rezac, Robert Rhee, Sterling Ruby, Nancy Shaver, Diane Simpson, Ceasar Stoffi, Alan Wiener

Sue Williams: Project for the New American Century at David Zwirner thru 10/25/2008 –From the press release “Williams fully merges figurative representation and lyrical abstraction, two distinct styles that have defined her artistic production over the last two decades. The artist first garnered attention in the late 1980s with gritty, provocative canvases that combined figure and text to tackle issues of sexual objectification and abuse. Throughout the 1990s, Williams radically shifted her focus, thrusting formalist concerns and painterly technique to the forefront, allowing form and color to supersede explicit content. In recent years, the artist has embraced the new challenge of uniting these disparate approaches to again enable her canvases as clear vehicles of protest. The resulting works evoke Williams’ early comic book influences with crisp outlines and blocks of brilliant colors. Against raw canvas and transparent acetate, her glaring palette, which includes forceful red, glowing orange, saccharine pink, and neon green, conveys a sense of immediacy, energetic movement, and the artist’s signature wry humor.

Cecily Brown at Gagosian thru 10/25/2008

Sculpting Time at Sperone Westwater thru 11/1/2008 –works by Josef Albers, Andrew Grassie, On Kawara, Giorgio Morandi and Roman Opalka. Each of these artists has dedicated himself to a lifelong practice of art-making that is both serial and bound within very specific and self-imposed limitations. In the catalogue essay that will accompany this exhibition, Steven Holmes discusses Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 film The Sacrifice, in which a monk spends an entire lifetime beginning each day with a walk up the side of a mountain to carry water to a dead tree. At the monk’s death, the tree bursts into life. The moral of the story is not that the water brought the tree to life, but rather it was the faithful day-in, day-out activity of bringing the water. It was not the content of the bucket, but the devotion of the monk.

Stef Driesen at Harris Lieberman thru 11/8/2008 –In this exhibition Driesen continues to fuse abstraction and figuration, using the body as a landscape for the exploration of erotically charged ideas and imagery. While Driesen’s paintings are primarily related to human form, they also suggest fantasy and imaginary space. His color palette is simultaneously fleshy and earth bound, tones that evoke lust, sky, earth and water. His deft use and light application of paint reinforce the inherent sensuality in his work.