AC Review #3

Winter 2005, 3
Holly Crawford, Editor and Founder

New York

John Sparagana: “People Everywhere Are Tired”, Modern Culture. 730 Fifth Ave., 9th Floor, Oct. 19 – Nov. 19
John Sparagana lends new meaning to the term “worn out”: he rubs glossy magazine photos until they dissolve into a fine mesh of wrinkles. Illusions undone, the page becomes a worn piece of material, yet the mesh also creates a sensuous screen that lends its own seductive allure to these modified images. –Hearne Pardee

“Their Lives in Art: Robert Henry and Selina Trieff”, Museum of the City of NY, 1220 Fifth Avenue.. Dec. 5
Film premiere of Robert and Marjory Potts tender documentary about the intertwined lives but distinctive figurative paintings of this longtime NY and Cape Cod couple who studied with Hans Hoffman. –Barbara Rosenthal

“65th Anniversary Exhibition, Part I” Galerie St. Etienne, 24 W. 57th St., Oct. 28 – Jan. 8
A generous show of turn-of-the-20th-century Austrian and German Expressionism, represented by Lovis Corinth, Ludwig Jungnickel, Gustav Klimt, Bohuslav Kokoschka, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz, Oskar Laske, Harmann Pechstein, and Egon Schiele. Especially nice:Schile’s “Dead City” Paintings, which are both light and heavy at the same time. Also, several open portfolios of contemporary prints and vintage posters. –Barbara Rosenthal

Sarah Moon “Circus”, Howard Greenberg Gallery, 41 E. 57th St. Dec. 10 – Jan. 22.
Moody, eerie small dark stills with French captions by this intriguing high fashion model-cum-photographer from small-gauge black and white film based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl ring the walls of the gallery Chairs are set up, and the film itself runs on a loop, as well.

“From Fontana to Zauli”, Garth Clark Gallery, 24 W. 57th St. Nov. 9 – Jan. 8
A modest survey of small but striking ceramics from the 1920’s-30’s Italian Futurist movement, including works from the 1950’s by Zauli to coincide with a more extensive survy of his career at the Garth Clark Project Space in Long Island City. –Barbara Rosenthal

Romare Bearden, Bill Hodges Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Nov. 5 – Jan. 5
Six jaunty lithographs and collages of jazzmen to coincide with the large tribute to this master of the African-American cultural experience at The Whitney –Barbara Rosenthal

John Biggers “My America”, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Nov. 5 – Jan. 5
1940’s and 50’s paintings, sculptures and drawings by an indefatigable African-American artist of the down-home style. Especially intriguing: “The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas,” a long scroll-like work from 1955 in conté crayon and gouache on paper. –Barbara Rosenthal

“The French Connection” Mary Ryan Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Dec. 2 – Jan. 22
41 color woodcuts, drawing, watercolors and one woodblock by Ada Gilmore, Edna Boies Hopkins, Blanche Lazzell, Ethel Mars, Mildren McMillen and Maud Hunt Squire, all women born about 1880 who worked in Provincetown after Parisian training a few decades later. Their period’s impressionism via Japan is delightfully in evidence.–Barbara Rosenthal

Gustavo Lopez Armentia “Retrospective” The Reece Galleries, 24 W. 57th St., Nov. 6 – Jan. 5
30 works, mostly impasto mixed media paintings, as well as bas reliefs and sculptures, to coincide with publication of hardbound definitive compendium of his life’s work. –Barbara Rosenthal

California

“In search of Dolly, Biblically.” Victor Hinderson at Simayspace, Arts College International,840 G St, San Diego, Nov. 13- Dec. 23
Painted meditations correspond to a repertoire of introspective states, déjà vu of war and abstraction, cite a spirituality of violence. Homo sapiens botany. Christian tableau: Jesus poised to rescue the cloned sheep Dolly, missing from the precipice, missing into a continuum of simulacra, into a competing version of truth post-natural. --Walter Lab

Stephanie Taylor, Daniel Hug, 510 Bernard St., Oct. 30-Nov. 27
Known for her beguiling intertwining of visual art and music (her own), Taylor kept this exhibition aurally quiet but visually quite busy, and typically complex. Maps, charts, depictions of strange objects and animals – and occasional actual objects, no less strange – conflated into an expertly rendered romp through an infectively cockeyed conceptualism – Peter Frank

8 Artists, Curated by Shane Campbell, acuna-hansen, 427 Bernard St., Nov. 27-Dec. 18
Hailing from Chicago, where he co-runs a suburban outpost of hip, Campbell brought together his hometown people with locals in an uncommonly lively group. Elizabeth Saveri’s multi-segmented travel sequences were the high point among the Angelenos, and Pete Fagundo’s intense geometries and Noah Rorem’s gnarled arboreal abstractions stood out among the Chicagolanders. – PF

Pamela Davis Kivelson, “Experiments in the Art of Perception,” chambersprojects/LA FINESTRA, 240 West 21st St., Nov. 20-Jan. 10
Inaugurating the visual program of this multi-art space, Davis Kivelson created an environment of intellectual-sensual contemplation by sampling various of her recent science-driven works and series. Photographs and projected videos proffered data on the natural world (notably insects) and the world of pure shape, the biological meeting the mathematical on equal footing. – PF

Gimhongsok & Sora Kim, “Cosmo Vitale,” REDCAT, 631 West 2nd St., Nov. 18-Jan. 16
The two Koreans address world politics and culture, language and artifact. Each of their objects, videos, and staged events travels the edge of reality: are the picket signs in various languages real or fabricated? Did the heated discussions happen spontaneously or were they scripted? Does the meaning reside in the staging or in the information? – PF

Ara Oshagan, "Traces of Identity: An Insider's View of the L.A. Armenian Community, 2000-2004, " Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Sept. 24-Dec.31
Orhagan's photographs create a cohesive narrative of Los Angeles'continuously evolving Armenian community. Cropped, partially out of focus, and often employing diagonal framing and close-in shots, Oshagan's photographs draw the viewer into the event on an intimate level. Community and communion are central themes, embodied in public ceremonies, family gatherngs, and daily life.--Anna Meliksetian

Dwora Fried, Boxes and collages, The Advocate and Gochis Galleries, 1125r N. McCadden Place, Nov. 4-Jan. 8
Although her photocollages are formally and subjectively more sophisticated, Fried’s assemblaged boxes are more engaging. Perhaps because their humor depends on clever and unexpected juxtapositions, the boxes have a rhythm – a sense of timing, really – that resembles good stand-up comedy. In this context, their political/social/religious subject matter seems only appropriate. – PF

Kimsooja, Aenout Mik, Paul Pfeiffer, “A City Called Ambition,” The Project, 6086 Comey Ave., Oct. 23-Dec. 4
Three photo-based installations looked at urban space. Kimsooja played a homeless woman in Cairo and New Delhi, attracting large and curious crowds. Aernout Mik’s staged “public event” has the air of something dramatic about to happen, but never coming to fruition. In contrast to the others’, Paul Pfeiffer’s film is bereft of humans; its Londoner protagonist is a housefly. – PF

Mark Dutcher, “After the Fall,” SolwayJones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., Nov. 13-Dec. 18
Dutcher paints large and small still lifes with an uncanny mixture of crudeness and refinement, naivete and worldliness. Rendering everything with a gangly, sketchy gracefulness, Dutcher has sweet, dumb things coexisting perfectly comfortably in his weird spaces with harsh, ominous ones. Vases and drug bottles, kitchenware and sex toys, it’s all part of the mix. – PF

Zhenya Gershman, “Naked,” Jan Baum, 170 S. La Brea Ave., Nov. 5-Dec. 21
Interested in the pathos and vulnerability of the human condition, Gershman’s renditions of the body are at once technically assured and poignantly rough-hewn, even tentative. She paints carefully but not slickly, her brushstrokes assured but knowingly unvirtuosic; as a result, Gershman is as present in her work as are her subjects. – PF

Sam Kirszencwajg, “Japonesque/Icons,” Don O’Melveny, 5472 Wilshire Blvd., Dec. 4-30
The dense, complex, now-it’s-figurative-now-it’s-abstract painting of this veteran L.A. artist displays a dynamic superimposition of superb draughtsmanship, intense color, and crammed, compartmentalized, counter-intuitive composition. Nearly naked ladies abound, but before they emerge as erotic subjects they submerge into the visual turmoil. Still, the best works – and the sexiest – are the most abstract. – PF

“House Bound”, Curated by Mary Lunn McCorkle, Sabina-Lee, 5365 Wilshire Blvd., Dec. 11-Jan. 12
The show keeps homes the evident subject while ranging far and wide through styles and media. The best of a good lot – one that includes Alison Owen, Ann-Marie Manker, Colin Keefe, and Elaine Chow – are Wendy Hirschberg’s twisted-interior metal sculptures and Christina Muraczewski’s flat, stylized approximations of domestic walls. – PF

“Magic Show”, Curated by Brian Bress, Hayworth, 148 N. Hayworth Ave., Dec. 10-Jan. 13
Even gratingly puerile objects and videos make sense in this exhibition. Ten artists from three of our four coasts contribute work in vastly different ways and with vastly different messages, although the angry anomie you’d expect to pervade a group of young folks’ work simply doesn’t work here, except as a dinner topic. – PF

Daniel Zeller, Recent Drawings, Daniel Weinberg, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., Nov. 20-Jan. 15
Maniacally detailed maps or topographies or aerial views of cellular networks, Zeller’s drawings reach hallucinatory levels of obsession. What’s important, however, is not how much Zeller crams into a given space, but what: the imagery hovers magically between the micro and the macro, proposing a sci-fi scenario on the molecular level. – PF

Judy Ledgerwood, “Ugly Beauty,” 1301 PE, 6150 Wilshired Blvd., Nov. 13-Jan.15
An accomplished painter in Chicago, Ledgerwood knowingly recapitulates 1970s pattern painting, at once reviving and critiquing its aesthetic of retinal gratification. Ledgerwood’s patterns, colors, and even renderings are very carefully cruder and less gratifying than those of her predecessors, but not to the point of parody. – PF

Elyn Zimmerman, New Photographs, Gagosian, 456 N. Camden Dr., Beverly Hills, Oct. 23-Nov. 27
In her new work, Zimmerman orders images of natural surfaces into rhythmic grids. The discontinuity between the images enhances their brittle sensuousness. The work returns Zimmerman to formal and perceptual concerns of thirty years ago, when she was responding in Los Angeles to the perceptualist practices of California’s sculptors and photographers. – PF

Shirley Cannon, “Memoirs of a Mine Canary,” Don O’Melveny, 9009 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, Nov. 2-30
The wittily ominous title of Cannon’s show indicates the ecological concerns roiling just below the surface of her glowering abstractions. Indeed, Cannon paints roiling surfaces, the edge of volcanoes, the top of oil-infected waters, or even bespoiled air – natural eruptions on or man-made insults to topography and troposphere. – PF

Maro Gorky, “From Another Place,” SB Fine Art at Christie’s, 360 N. Camden Dr., Bev. Hills, Dec. 1-3
Except for their fluid line, Maro Gorky’s landscapes resist comparison to the abstractions of her famous father. Rather, her style expands upon the agreeable post-Matissean painterliness prevalent among Mediterranean artists. What is distinctive about Gorky’s Sienese countrysides is their tart palette, rhythmic stylizations, and often unpredictable compositional devices. – PF

Francisco Toledo, Recent paintings, Latin American Masters, 264 N. Beverly Dr., Bev. Hills, Oct. 16-Dec. 10
Much of this work was produced during Toledo’s year spent in Los Angeles, but if anything the subjects that have always preoccupied the Mexican painter came into even sharper focus. Toledo exalts humble flora and fauna, turning its motifs into delightfully monstrous caricatures and alluring patterns with feathery brush and earthy palette. – PF

Tim Lowly, “Proximity,” Koplin Del Rio, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, Nov. 6-Dec. 24
The staggering skill Chicago artist Lowly brings to his landscapes and figures would be empty virtuosity if not for the tenderly weather-inflected, and slightly eerie, atmosphere pervading his paintings and drawings. You may or may not recognize where Lowly’s ex-urban woods and streams and backyards are, but you know when they are. – PF

Lucy Hagopian + Narine Isajanyan, “Earth Tones,” Don O’Melveny, 9011 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, Dec. 3-31
Two Armenian-American painters explore similar effects to different ends. Isajanyan covers her surfaces with subtly inflected monotone grit, appreciating the suggestivity of material itself, while Hagopian conjures turbulent landscapes and even geographies out of such harsh material, proposing a world engulfed in strife both geological and social. – PF

Gustavo López Armentia, New Works, Galerie Yoramgil, 462 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, Oct. 14-Dec. 3
Argentine artist Armentia segues between figuration and abstraction, landscape and map, painting and sculpture and even furniture of a sort. What remains constant is Armentia’s suppressed, mineral colors and his stylized rendition of life, one dependent more on the sensibility of the caricaturist or political cartoonist than the naturalist-painter. – PF

Woods Davy, “Tierra Buena,” Craig Krull, 2525 Michigan Ave. #B3, Santa Monica, Oct. 16-Nov. 20
Davy has been aligning rocks into more-or-less vertical structures – faceless totems – for years now. These newest do away with all connecting metal bars. Now, the rough ovals adhere directly one to another, entirely comprising the volume, contour, and heft of each work. The works on paper, including smoke, echo these shapes. – PF

Harry Orlyk, “A Winter Diary,” Terrence Rogers, 1231 5th Street, Santa Monica, Dec. 4-30
Every single day, Orlyk drives somewhere not far from his upstate New York home and paints what he sees. If too cold to paint plein air, he renders bare trees, frozen rivers, and snow-roofed houses while sitting in his car. Orlyk’s coarse, even brushiness is appropriate to his region’s gentle terrain and rough weather. – PF

Ron Reihel, “The Presence and Absence of Light,” Off Main, 2525 Michigan Ave. #A5, Santa Monica, Nov. 7-Dec. 30
Reihel’s geometric formations glow in the dark. But they are as compelling as they are because they glow, figuratively, in the light as well. A third-generation Light & Space sculptor, Reihel symmetrically suspends color in smooth, uninflected material. Composition is thus more or less a given; visual experience is anything but. – PF

Lorraine Lubner, Recent Work, FIG, 2525 Michigan Ave. #G6, Santa Monica, Dec. 1-31
Lubner aligns irregular areas – usually blocks – of color into surprisingly fluid abstractions. Her assured brushwork provide much of this fluidity, as does her vivid color and color contrasts – grass green next to blood red next to flaky cobalt blue. Lubner’s aesthetic dates back half a century, but is free of late abstract expressionism’s affectations. – PF

John White, “Artificial Hatch,” Sylvia White, 1013 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, Nov. 21-Dec. 31
White abandons his landscape suggestions and ordered compositions for cascading details, colorful little curls and swirls and blots spilling down the paper. The natural world is still his source, however. Here, White the fisherman empties out his bait box and/or staring into the rushing streams he fishes. – PF

James Richards, Shoshana Wayne, 2525 Michigan Ave. #B1, Santa Monica, Dec. 15-Jan. 22
Richards’ colorful paintings, all brilliantly colored clots and tendrils and irregular grids, would echo so many other eccentric abstractions if that’s all they were. But they are literally built from such incidents, and from so much string woven amidst and between. There is no “canvas,” there is only the painting and the stretcher. – PF

“Luster: Los Angeles Abstraction”, Curated by Andi Couwenberg and Laura Grigsby, Gensler Gallery, Two Harrison Street, San Francisco, Dec.10 – Feb.18
It’s a formalist fest in this eclectic group show, all over the map but easy on the eyes. Dial in the more energetic, like Michael Salerno’s tangible mark-making or Robert Kingston’s maps of activity, or find repose with Mark Zimmerman’s cool color fields and Jane Park Wells’ shimmering patterns. – Kerry Kugelman

Europe

Germany

“Jetzt und zehn Jahre davor” (Now, and ten years before), Kunst-Werke Berlin e.V., Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststrasse 69, Berlin, Nov. 8- Jan 9
This research project invests in the interrelation of culture production and city development – gentrification is the key issue. Especially original, while interdisciplinary discursive, was the screen project in the catacomb like compartment of the exhibition space. Different voices discuss the place of the museum as a culture-political space.—Lillian Fellmann

“Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof”, Hamburger Bahnhof, Contemporary Museum, Invalidenstrasse 50-51, Berlin Sept. 22 –Jan 23
Art is not connecting people, for that we have telecommunication. But the Christian Flick Collection is a splitting scandal for many. Flick’s grandfather was one of the most important Nazi regime supporters. All art has a history, and as long as it is openly debated, it has nothing to be ashamed of. –LF

Spain

Brian Mackern and Jorge Haro, Centre Civic Convent Sant Agustí. Comerçe 36 Barcelona, Jan. 22
Uruguayan net artist and musician Brian Mackern and composer/sound artist Jorge Haro met in Barcelona to put on a real-time digital audiovisual concert.

Perfectly synchronized synthesised sounds and collaged images filled a small room full of attentive aficionados of technology driven art.—Victoria Perez

Switzerland

“anderswo” (else where), Galerie Commercio, Mühlebachstrasse 2, Zurich, Jan. 14- Feb.19
Nelly Rau-Häring is showing black and white photographs in her show “anderswo”. The images about Berlin in the 80ies are stunning snap shots of the exotic of the everyday life in a rigid regime that is about to loose its power – islets of resistance. –LF