We are so proud to say our documentary “The House of Criticism; A Love Story” is premiering at @tribeca on Friday, June 12 at Village East Theater at Second Ave and 12th Street. Directed by @voyeur_films Alison Chernick - who aka directed docs on Itzhak Perlman, Matthew a Barney, Jeff Koons, and others. The link to buy tickets is in my profile. There will be three Q & A sessions.
Art saves lives. At least it saved ours.
Some shows yank you off the sidewalk and into the gallery before you quite know what you’re looking at. This may happen with Camilla Iliefski’s first substantial NEw York exposure at HB381 (at 381 Bwy thru 18 April). Iliefski works in various design mediums but here she operates in the gap between textiles and painting, making amazing pictorial objects in yarn (some of it vintage) using a tufting gun and then shearing the resulting thick pile to different heights. These gloriously multi-hued, subtly multileveled compositions are biomorphic in four directions, intensely tactile and yet softly atmospheric. Burgeoning is a word I would use, although it would have been contested on the NYT copy desk (when it still had them). I don’t know if Iliefski has given much thought to the work of either of the American painters Joanne Carson or Elizabeth Murray but she might have. And of course it helps to have a space whose interior can actually be seen from the street.
RIP Calvin Tomkins - 100 years old.
What a great life, what a great contribution. How lucky are we to have his writings and him living on in them. Thank you Dodie.
One of Penelope Green’s great obits — this one of the ecofeminist Sue Griffin, dead at 82. It encapsulates stunning patchwork about writing, the history of ecofeminism (which she helped found) and Berkeley and its underground publications, not to mention the sorry state of the planet. Definitely a keeper. @penelopegreen1@dhwendygoodman@broadcove@lauriesimmons
If you’re in Chelsea at the moment take in Joanne Carson’s formidably smart, beautiful paintings with their savvy mix of color and scale, geometry and nature, and joy and foreboding — in their last hours of public view @dcmooregallery . Disney meets Burchfield. Especially impressive is Natural Hijinks (last 2 images): set in a pastel winter and nocturnal landscape, a glowing tree harbors shadowy sleeping birds or diseased cocoons that in turn hold radioactive eggs or discs. They’re animated by gold stippling just as the trees’s entire exoskeleton is outlined in gold dots and lines that alternately suggest Christmas tree lights, and things that bite (zippers, tiny teeth.) No stone of detail or suggestion left unturned. Sorry for the lateness of this and also for the unaccompanied detail. Lost track of close date. No
An impeccably selected and placed memorial exhibition for sculptor Joel Shapiro at the Paula Cooper Gallery’s 521 West 21 St. address in Chelsea, summarizes his fast, restless trajectory of the 1970s. The decade finds him fixing on the cusp between abstraction and representation from all angles; the nature of the pedestal and the floor as such; the power of small objects to command big spaces (solid cast iron helps) and the making and confounding of meaning so embedded in our moment. Central to his path was the familiar geometry of the house shape, first set on an aggressive, road-like flange then, doubled, on a rectangle of bronze on a low table-like base. Then halved, then laid horizontal as parts of other works, then insinuated as stumpy, little feet on a beam-like torso. One enormous drawing reiterates the solididty of the cast iron in nearly architectural, yet weightless scale. Another points to the (relative) linearity of the figures ahead by reducing a tree to a wonderful geometry. @paulacoopergallery
Last two days for Rose deSmith Greenman’s superb NY debut at Dutton, 48 Hester, LES, thru Sunday. From Massachusetts, Dutton (1898-1983) worked obsessively during the last decade of her life, seemingly triggered by the onset of Alzheimer’s. Drawing was her medium, profuse linear patterns her means. Alternately coiled and expansive, furled and un, these coalesced into still lifes, jungle-like gardens, sometimes veiling houses and in one case here, trees seen through a screen door (pls excuse the reflection). Pencil, ballpoint, marker and crayon were her preferred instruments. Hail, another jewel in the crown of Outsider art.
For those members of the Last Day (or Hour) Exhibition-Viewing Club who missed the closing of the Drawing Center’s sublime Beauford Delaney survey yesterday, a fairly representative sampling, mostly in pastel, oil, water color or ink on paper. It ranged from his semiabstract Social Realism (including Washington Square and Central Park), calligraphic monochromes and many self-portraits (inclouding one made by pressing paper onto another). His constant stretching and intuitive acceptance of his talent was on full display. The show verged on a full-dress retrospective while leaving plenty of room for future efforts. A succinct display of ephemera and notebooks revealed the challenges that didn’t stop him or his voracious looking. His is one of the most heroic stories in 20th-century American art. A blessing for us all.
There’s plenty to see at “In the Room,” an exhibition at Demisch and Danant, the invaluable design gallery on West 12th. At the core of this series of room-like arrangements of mostly vintage French furniture, runs a precis of the career of the restless often eccentric designer Maria Porgay. Its standout is a pair of her Cabinet Borgia, flamboyant pieces in black and white ebony and oak, bone, forged iron and stainless steel, used to reflective effect. Other Progay works reflect her interests in naturalism and Minimalism and thus her tremendous aesthetic range. Details to follow.
