Author Archives: Matin Momen

Ryan McLaughlin: Raisins

The biggest of Ryan McLaughlin’s abstract paintings up at Laurel Gitlen in the Lower East Side measures 25 ¾ inches wide by 35 ½ inches long so, properly wrapped, you could probably manage to transport it by bicycle.  In that regard, the show as a whole is imbued with a humanizing scale and pace.  Eight paintings are on view, the biggest noted, the smallest comes in at 10 by 8 inches, all are abstract or, perhaps more accurately, levitating at the edge of the representational.  The palette is toned down, there are instances of color but as if sun-bleached, and a slight tobacco-stained hue hangs over it all.  There is no pictorial depth: all the action is on the surface.  These modest essayistic paintings invite and reward close viewing. From what I can gather, this New York show marks McLaughlin’s solo American debut.

Christopher Wool

As Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim, noted in his introductory remarks to the press, Christopher Wool stands as one of the “last of the non-ironic artists.”  In that regard, what you see in Wool’s work is what you see or, in certain instances, read or, to crib from one of the paintings that closes out the Guggenheim’s survey of his work, The Harder You Look the Harder You Look.

Counter Forms

“Counter Forms,” a beautifully thought out and lovingly installed show curated by Elena Filipovic, Senior Curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, is currently on view in New York at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

The exhibit brings together historically important work, primarily small sculptures, dating to the 1960s and 70s from four artists, Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990), Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973), Paul Thek (1933-1988) and Hannah Wilke (1940-1993).

The tag, “historically important,” typically indicates that to get interpretive mileage out of the show you will need a hefty dose of background — biographical and art historical. What makes this show remarkable is that each artwork on display while indeed historically important is still able to command attention and speak for itself, background knowledge or not. That said, to spend some time and learn about each of the exhibited artists only serves to make the work all the more hard-hitting (Szapocznikow survived Nazi ghettos and concentration camps, being one example).

Fabulousity: a night you’ll never forget… or remember!

Steve Terry, the one-man show behind England’s Wild Life Press, has an uncanny knack for sniffing out and shaping into hard-hitting photobooks material that is not only marginal in its subject matter (portraits of ‘90s NYC tranny street walkers, “the club kids” of the same era) but also marginal in its original production. His books gather up what were labors of love pursued primarily for personal reasons outside any formal art-making avenue. These are photographs that sat in boxes in apartments for decades unknown to but a few.

I first met Terry in person a few weeks ago in New York. Before that we had recently worked together long-distance on a profile of the photographer Katsu Naito (the full profile will appear in volume five of our print magazine) focusing on his and Wild Life Press’ first photobook, West Side Rendezvous (2011), an intimate collection of forty-five black and white portraits of tranny sex workers taken on the streets of New York’s Meatpacking District in the early 90s. Steve was in town ahead of the NYArt Book fair to showcase his second and most recent photobook, a catalogue technically, published to coincide with the London exhibition, “Fabulousity: a night you’ll never forget… or remember!”

John McCracken: Works from 1963-2011

My knowledge of the west coast minimalist sculptor John McCracken prior to entering the museum-grade retrospective at David Zwirner’s 20th street outpost was limited to a handful of reproductions in art history books and the apocryphal story that his work had inspired the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I entered the show wanting to like it, figured I wouldn’t, and left with a renewed sense of what color, form, light and mass could be in the right hands.

SUB ROSA

The Bleeker Street Arts Club is a relatively new gallery tucked on the upper floors of a landmarked art deco West Village building.  The space is well-appointed and well-lit and showing, for a few days longer, a group show titled Sub Rosa that includes collaborative and solo photographs by Los Angeles based Nicholas Alan Cope and Dustin Edward Arnold. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Cope/Arnold on their long running collaborative projects and a chance to catch up with Cope at the opening for this show.  The full profile will appear in volume five of our print magazine.

Francis Cape – We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar

The sculptor Francis Cape begins the introduction to his book We Sit Together thus, “Twenty Benches are gathered in the middle of a room. Each is built from poplar and finished in the same rubbed linseed oil. No two are the same. This is the sculpture Utopian Benches. I made the sculpture as a way of thinking – and talking – about communalism as both a historic and a contemporary alternative to [capitalist-driven] individualism.”

Takuma Nakahira: Circulation: Date, Place, Events

The 80 or so medium-sized, B&W photographs up at Yossi Milo Gallery by Provoke founder Takuma Nakahira in his first solo US show may initially read as street photography but what “Circulation: Date, Place, Events” really amounts to is an exercise in intellectual honesty, and a brutal one at that.

The prints on view were selected from negatives created by Nakahira during the Seventh Paris Biennale held in the autumn of 1971. When Nakahira was invited to participate he was in an intellectual rut after the publication of his classic photo book “For a Language to Come” (a rut documented with Daido Moriyama in his 1972 classic, “Farewell Photography”). As he describes it in “Photography, a Single Day’s Actuality,” one of his essays reprinted in the book “Circulation: Date, Place, Events”

Erin Shirreff: Day is Long

Day is Long, Erin Shirreff’s second solo show of photographs, sculptures and videos at Lisa Cooley is invigorating in that it does so well what good writing is supposed to do, namely, show not tell.  The works in this show and, really, all her shows, for Shirreff’s voice is and has been consistent and steady, unfurl at a stately pace in your mind to slowly reveal that what you see is not necessarily what you see: videos are not quite videos; photographs do not quite depict what you at first thought; and sculptures do (or do not) possess the physicality the eye and mind initially attributed them.  First, you ask yourself what am I looking at, and when the answer comes, the “what” has bent.  As noted by Jan Allen in one of the essays included in the just released and recommended first book on Shirreff, in the end you are looking at looking.

Mike Brodie: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

“I’d say most of my inspiration was drawn from old-school American values mixed with a little punk-rock enthusiasm.” – Mike Brodie in Q&A with The New Yorker I’d say that’s about accurate if by old-school American values one includes the freedom of the open road, the color palette and compositional story-telling sensibility of a Winslow…