Tag: Willem de Kooning

Solo Shows

Jan Dickey: The art of breakdown

Contributed by Lucas Moran / In art, limitations often define, shape, and mold strengths. We can embrace drawbacks and spin them into gold. An impoverished de Kooning, living off ketchup packets and free coffee, turned to house paint to create some of his most compelling work. A bedridden Matisse cut paper. Scarcity, oppression, impairment – these forces have shaped the course of art history. Rather than relying on convention, Jan Dickey – investigator, tinkerer, and forager as well as painter – has immersed himself in studying how things break down, bond, and hold together. “The High Collapse,” now on view at 5-50 Gallery, is the culmination of that endeavor….

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Museum Exhibitions

Jack Whitten at MoMA: Indelible

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “The Messenger,” Jack Whitten’s momentous and flawlessly curated exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is a signal event not just in American art history but, arguably, in American history simpliciter. To be sure, it showcases an art polymath who broke and cultivated important ground across a broad swath of artistic endeavor. But its timing as a socio-political statement seems perhaps singularly important.

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Solo Shows

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s lost country

Contributed by Theodora Bocanegra Lang / Nearly half the paintings included in Kaiadilt artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s first solo show in New York, at Karma in Chelsea, are titled My Country. A few more are called My Father’s Country, and a few others Dibirdibi Country. Though her works are firmly abstract, it is impossible not to think of landscapes and location when viewing them. The artist, whose name is sometimes shortened to Sally Gabori, was born in 1924 on Bentinck Island in Australia, the ancestral homeland of the Kaiadilt people. In 1948, missionaries forcibly displaced Gabori and her people to nearby Mornington Island, where she lived for the rest of her life. She began painting in 2005, when she was about 81, and died a decade later in 2015. While she had not lived on Bentinck Island for nearly 60 years, her work reflects sharp yearning for, and irreparable separation from, her home.

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Solo Shows

Barbara Friedman’s exquisite grotesquery

Contributed by Adam Simon / The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds.

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Solo Shows

Emily Noelle Lambert: Trapping butterflies, chasing wild birds 

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.

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Solo Shows

Dannielle Hodson’s infectious imagination

Contributed by Margaret McCann / “Chasing Rabbits,” the name of Danielle Hodson’s show at Kravets Wehby Gallery, refers to the cautionary Chinese proverb, “if you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” Hodson accepts that risk, bypassing clear purpose to embrace multiplicity. Impelled by curiosity – as Alice was, and Grace Slick advised – Hodson’s visual gestalts, though far livelier than Cezanne’s, similarly invite the viewer to re-experience their becoming…

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Out of Town

Letter from Venice 

Contributed by Michael Brennan / The 60th Venice Biennale runs through the fall. This storied, much imitated global event, like an Olympics or World’s Fair, consists of individual national pavilions and topical exhibitions. They occupy Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale. The Biennale generates numerous collateral exhibitions in palazzos, churches, and former warehouse spaces citywide. In addition to the officially sanctioned shows, there are a myriad unaffiliated exhibitions that try to pass themselves off as part of the Biennale by insinuation. It’s a lot to take in.

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Solo Shows

Melissa Meyer: Style is the answer

Contributed by Mary Shah / Time is an artist’s friend, muse, and collaborator. An artist’s style develops gradually, and the way to appreciate her work is to look at it over time. Bukowski’s words, which live rent-free in my mind, hypnotically echoed as I took in Melissa Meyer’s absorbing exhibition “Throughlines,” currently on view at Olympia. Comprising ten paintings and an artist book, the show covers the last twenty years and provides a considered, if abridged, look at the evolution of Meyer’s distinctive style up to the present day.

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