February 7, 2019 Look Eleanor Ray’s Minimalist Memories By Kyle Chayka Eleanor Ray, Marfa Window, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. In Marfa, Texas, three hours into the desert from El Paso, the artist Donald Judd installed a hundred geometric sculptures in two disused artillery sheds. Arrayed in a grid are boxes made of milled aluminum, all the same size but each uniquely composed with different patterns of segmented space. Through the sheds’ massive windows, sun and blue sky and yellowed scrub reflect on the aluminum at shifting angles. As you walk through the space, it becomes hard to tell whether you’re looking at a solid sheet of metal or only the illusion of one, created by light. Photography is banned in the Marfa installation; only a few sanctioned images exist. Photos could never capture the experience of being surrounded by the boxes because pictures flatten the experience, turning it into a shallow singular impression—the Instagram version—rather than the active process of perception that Judd sought. Instead of photos, the young Brooklyn-based artist Eleanor Ray has depicted the boxes in a series of hardcover-book-size paintings that preserve the ambiguity. In Ray’s luminous oils, the walls, windows, and metal alike dissolve into thin brushstrokes that hover between landscape and abstraction. It’s up to the viewer to decide what’s what. The Marfa paintings are part of Ray’s exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in SoHo, on view through February 10. Since 2012, Ray has been drawn to this kind of ekphrastic painting, representing works of art while also capturing the peculiar sensation of looking at an art object, part sensory and part intellectual. Over time, she’s gathered a specific canon of artists who have engaged with the act of seeing in space, some of them mid-century Minimalists and others much older. Ray has painted Judd’s loft in SoHo, Agnes Martin’s house in New Mexico, Piet Mondrian’s geometric canvases hanging in a geometric gallery, and the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico’s crisp frescoes in San Marco. Read More
January 23, 2019 Look Nature Redescribed: The Work of Vija Celmins By The Paris Review Although she’s been friendly with artists from both coasts of the United States throughout her five-decade career, Vija Celmins has remained agnostic regarding trends and movements; like nature itself, her discipline operates on its own terms. “When I’m working,” she says in a 1992 interview with Chuck Close, “my instinct is to try to build and to fill. To fill something until it is really full.” She has referred to her meticulous, overflowing portraits of the natural world as “redescriptions,” a word that implies paraphrasing rather than pure invention. But this perhaps minimizes her genius—nearly as expansive and awe inspiring as the night skies and desert floors they depict, Celmins’s works demand to be experienced firsthand. In that setting, they close the distance, enveloping the viewer in gloriously rendered detail. The first major North American exhibition of her work in more than twenty-five years is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 31, after which the show will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario (May 4–August 4) and the Met Breuer (September 23, 2019–January 12, 2020). Below, we present a selection of images from the book Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, which accompanies the show. Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969, graphite and acrylic ground on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968, graphite on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Read More
January 17, 2019 Look Anni Albers’s Many-Threaded Masterpieces By The Paris Review Weaving is a tradition older than the concept of art itself, but in applying the realm of abstraction to a handloom, Anni Albers created thoroughly modern studies in textiles. Although she initially wanted to paint, the nominally egalitarian structure of the Bauhaus, where she studied, pushed her toward more “feminine” forms of expression, and she enrolled in a textiles workshop. She found joy in weaving as a “craft which is many-sided.” “Like any craft,” she writes in a 1937 essay, “it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art.” She often plotted out her designs on paper before turning to the loom. And just like the weavers before her, Albers was committed to passing on her knowledge. She wrote an instructional book, On Weaving, and taught classes at Black Mountain College and Yale University along with her husband, the artist Josef Albers. Her ambitious, carefully woven constructions are feasts for the eyes, though she maintained that they were “only to be looked at”; their lustrous stitches ask to be touched. A major exhibition of Albers’s work is on view at the Tate Modern through January 27. Below, we present a selection of images from the book Anni Albers, which accompanies the show. With Verticals, 1946. Cotton and linen 154.9 x 118.1 cm. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Study for Camino Real, 1967. Gouache on graph paper, 44.4 x 40.6 cm. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Read More
December 12, 2018 Look Castles as Coffins By The Paris Review The artist Paa Joe makes coffins. But these aren’t your standard-issue pine boxes—they are red snappers, Spalding basketballs, giant shoes. In the Ghanaian tradition of abeduu adekai (roughly translated, “receptacles of proverbs”), the dead are honored via figurative coffins that reflect the lives of those interred. A street vendor might be buried in a soda bottle, a gynecologist in a casket shaped like a uterus. In 2004, Joe veered from his typical fare and created thirteen large-scale models of the still-standing slave castles and forts on the coast of Ghana. These buildings served as processing centers for the more than six million people enslaved and sent to the Americas and the Caribbean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seven of Joe’s sculptures are on view until February 24 at the American Folk Art Museum, in New York, for the exhibition “Gates of No Return,” named for the doors through which countless souls passed on their entry into forced servitude. “Nobody would be buried in a slave castle coffin,” Joe has said, but these miniatures signify death just the same, looming as reminders of the millions of lives lost to and the histories decimated by the slave trade. Paa Joe, Fort St. Anthony—Axim. 1515 Portugal, 1642 Netherlands, 1872 Britain, 2004–05 and 2017, emele wood and enamel, 48 1/2″ x 100″ x 84 1/2″. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo © Paa Joe. Read More
December 3, 2018 Look Coveting Cartier Necklaces and Celtic Torques at the Met By Julia Berick View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. When I walk through museum galleries, stocked with the bravest of human efforts suspended luminescent on canvas or rising in harmonious stone, I feel covetous. And though I am awed by the aesthetic achievements before me, I also diminish them to what I would collect. I would hang that Veronese. I would like to wake to that celadon moon jar from the Joseon dynasty. “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” a new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (on view through February 24), indulges this covetousness. After all, every piece of art here is wearable. The exhibition displays more than two hundred pieces of jewelry from the Met’s own collection. The thoughtful curation and liner notes make a point I mused on while uptown: jewelry is as ancient an art form as we have. The metals and stones valued by humans often endure. Diamonds, as we know, are among the hardest substances in nature, and any silver seam is as old as the earth. Their endurance is part of their value, and because they are valued, they have been sacked and stolen again and again but less often destroyed. The serpentine logic spirals like a pair of Hellenistic armbands. I stood beside gold Egyptian sandals meant to be worn to the afterlife, and I admired their “toe stalls,” intricate gold caps intended to preserve digits for use in the next life. Each nail is represented down to cuticles of gold, the simplicity of which is as stunning as the complexity of royal earrings from first-century Andhra Pradesh. Though aesthetics have changed since the first century, I was surprised by how little. Only the fussy parure sets left me cold, while every fiber of my avarice called out for an 1860 Italian diadem from the firm of Castellani, and combs with inlaid flowers from the so-called cemetery at Ur (in modern-day Iraq), circa 2600–2500 B.C. Read More
November 28, 2018 Look Something We All Can Agree On: The Moon By The Paris Review Love fades, everything dies, but the moon looms forever in our imaginations. Organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, a new show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark, examines how the earth’s satellite has served as a point of fascination and inspiration for artists, thinkers, writers, and scientists across human civilization. Below, we present a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through January 20, 2019. The first known photograph of the moon was taken by John W. Draper ca. 1839. The spots in this photo are caused by mold and water damage on the original daguerreotype, which apparently no longer exists. Photography. New York University Archives. Max Ernst, Naissance d’une galaxie (The Birth of a Galaxy), 1969, oil on canvas. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel Beyeler Collection. Read More