Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled shows that felt expansive, engrossing and downright monumental.
Alex Katz, “Homage to Monet 5.” 2009. Oil on board. 22.9 x 30.5 cm.
© Alex Katz. Image courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled shows that felt expansive, engrossing and downright monumental:
Alex Katz: Small Paintings 1987-2013
Peter Blum
20 West 57th Street
19 September – 2 November 2013
…you can approach [these] paintings more casually, with a feeling of ease—with the sense that these are sketches for larger works. There is less to recognize. There is less formality. There is less area to navigate. The less here feels more.
More:
For me, the best works in the show are the landscapes—the expressive marks, the confident use of color, the sense of place. But maybe that’s because I know so well those trees, those lily pads, that light. Or maybe because when I look at Dusk, I can smell the pine.
Katherine Bradford, “Night Divers.” Oil on canvas, 66 x 80 in. 2013.
© Katherine Bradford. Courtesy of the artist and Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick
Painting Impossible
Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick
8 November – 22 December 2013
“The further the painter lets go of everything before they pull it back together, the more expansive the experience; and the more acceptance there is of the concept that we are part of something larger than ourselves that can be known, but not fully understood.”
Robert Motherwell, “Australia II” 1983. Pasted papers and crayon on Tycore panel. 40 x 30 in.
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Image courtesy of Bernard Jacobson Gallery, NY.
Robert Motherwell: Collage (Part I)
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, New York
25th September – 2nd November 2013
Personal narrative figures in big here, told in fragments of salvaged address labels and pieces torn from proofs of his printmaking work, some painted over by hand. But maybe the best hint that Motherwell is purposefully present here comes through in the torn edge, which is pretty hard evidence of his career-long belief in chance and improvisation.
Editor’s Rec: Robert Motherwell: Collage, Part II @Bernard Jacobson (E. 71st St; 17 Jan – 26 Feb.) More here.
Stay tuned: Motherwell at 99, our reappraisal of Robert Motherwell a year before the artist’s centenary.
Stuart Shils, “The Last Days of Summer.”
© Stuart Shils. Image courtesy of the artist and Davis & Langdale Company, Inc.
Stuart Shils: Recent Monotypes
Davis & Langsdale Company
16 November 2013 – 1 February 2014
The twenty-one monotypes Mr. Shils now has on view at Davis & Langdale (all 2013) push the question of “how we see” further. Different from his 2011 show, overt reference to recognizable places (Naples, Padova, Tel Aviv, Union Square) is gone. Instead, layered Charbonnel etching ink, oil pastel and graphite communicate just the essential qualities of place: light, color–and perhaps most, temperature–filtered through Mr. Shils’s dual lenses of memory and time.
Aaron Siskind, ‘Chicago 16.’ 1957. Printed c. 1957.
© Aaron Siskind Foundation, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.
Remnants: Louise Nevelson & Aaron Siskind
Bruce Silverstein, New York
19 September – 2 November 2013
Thirty-two works by Nevelson and Siskind, most of them from early in the artists’ careers, are now on view at Bruce Silverstein’s, in Chelsea, in a museum-scale show that’s part essay, part refresher course on the visual possibilities and pleasures of pure form. The conversation between these artists runs surprisingly deep, touching on the nearly forgotten essentials–especially in photography–of surface, materiality, index and space.
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