March 22, 2017 Look Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales By Dan Piepenbring “Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales,” an exhibition of Kiki Smith’s prints from 1990 to the present, is at Mary Ryan Gallery through April 8. Smith, best known for her sculptures, told BOMB in 1994, “Everyone’s figured out all the technology, how to combine different kinds of material together—you don’t have to make anything up. You just have to pay attention to what’s discarded, or disregarded … I like looking, seeing everything that everybody already knows and using it. Or you start making things, and then they start explaining to you while you’re making them, telling you more and more what it is that you’re doing.” Kiki Smith, Come Away from Her (After Lewis Carroll), 2003, aquatint, drypoint, etching, and sanding with watercolor additions, 50 1/2″ x 74″. Read More
March 14, 2017 Look The Life of Paper By Dan Piepenbring Austin Thomas has an exhibition of new drawings and print work at Morgan Lehman Gallery through March 25. Her work marries layered collage techniques to printmaking processes, making prominent use of found paper: book covers, ledger pages, loose-leaf notebooks. Austin Thomas, Gray Blue Black X, 2016, monoprint with Akua intaglio ink on proofing paper, 37″ x 18″. Read More
March 7, 2017 Look Cows, Clouds, and Apple Trees By Dan Piepenbring Lois Dodd’s early paintings (1958–66) are showing at Alexandre Gallery through March 18. Dodd, who is eighty-nine, helped to found New York’s artist-run Tanager Gallery in the fifties, when it was one of a series of downtown spaces redefining how work was shown and sold. She said of her paintings in 2012, “They could be much more descriptive, but I don’t want to do that. In that sense, one always puts the blame on the abstract painters. That’s what I looked at and loved. I don’t want to get too descriptive. You can go so far and stop. I can just feel when to stop.” Lois Dodd, Cows and Clouds, 1961, oil on linen, 33 1/2″ x 39 1/2″. Read More
March 2, 2017 Look Berlin Living Rooms By Dominique Nabokov & Darryl Pinckney Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berlin apartment had for me two facets, both familiar from literature, film, and art. The working-class apartment was part of the story of suffering in the German capital. “A Berlin apartment can kill,” Heinrich Zille reported in the 1920s. And then there was the apartment of the bourgeoisie, which in art seemed to become immediately a setting, not the subject. But in the divided city, housing was no longer so much a question of whether it was intended for the poor or for the rich as one of whether it was a new building or an old one. We were all young then and wanted romantic spaces—the prewar architecture of the city, a city that in those days still showed blank spaces, areas of the not yet reclaimed. In the time of the Berlin Wall, the city’s medieval remains, its eighteenth-century charms, most of Schinkel’s glorious neoclassicism, and its echoes in Frankfurter Allee were in East Berlin. So, too, were the mistakes, public and domestic, of the Soviet style. West Berlin had its early and late concrete monuments to modernist values. And both sides tried to distract from the wall by constructing city centers some distance from the former center of town. East Berlin had Alexanderplatz; West Berlin had Europa Center—in both cases modernism’s unattractive utilitarian descendants. But the Berlin that the twentieth century would one cold November night come to an end in gave the feeling of being in general a late nineteenth century creation—solid, sturdy, ample. One dominant apartment house-design unified the city. Many addresses were front and rear buildings separated by a cobblestone courtyard. The hinterhof struck me as utterly German. It was what set Berlin apart from the way the British lived in London or the French in their capital. It captured that sense of Berlin as being secretly cozy, in spite of the city’s reputation to the contrary. Read More
February 16, 2017 Look Real Polaroids, Fake People By Dan Piepenbring Duane Hanson, Cowboy, 1984. Everyone makes an occasional jaunt to the uncanny valley, a term connoting the profound, atavistic fear we feel in the presence of robots that look and act like people: of objects flitting around in the vicinity of personhood. Though it’s been around since 1970, when it was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the phrase has seen a noticeable surge in usage since 2000—the natural byproduct of humanity’s deep reckoning with the unstoppable rise of our android overlords. The sculptor Duane Hanson lived deep in the Uncanny Valley. He bought a lot of property there. And he didn’t have to bother with robotics, either; he provoked our disturbed wonderment with earthier stuff: you know, like polyester resin, fiberglass, polychrome, oil paint. Hanson made eerily, maybe even virulently realistic sculptures of American Everymen and Everywomen. When he died, in 1996, he left behind a small army of joggers, tourists, cops, cafeteria-goers, and sunbathers, all seemingly straight out of Disney World in 1985, and daring you to call them fake. Your typical Hanson sculpture is jauntily dressed, with sagging flesh and a pouchy pallor around the eyes not unlike that of our president. As I’ve written before, his blue-collar men and women are often found in repose, loafing or catching their breath, vaguely bruised by the world around them. They’re both delicate and vulgar, walking a fine line between the avuncular and the repellent—tailor-made, it seems, to arouse our deepest class anxieties. Read More
February 15, 2017 Look Rhythmical Lines By Sarah Cowan Working in isolation, Wacław Szpakowski made mazelike drawings from single, continuous lines. Wacław Szpakowski, B9, 1926, ink on tracing paper, 13 3/4″ x 15 3/4″. When he was eighty-five, Wacław Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line. He’d begun these drawings around 1900, when he was just seventeen—what started as sketches he then formalized, compiled, and made ever more intricate over the course of his life. His essay is written from the contrived vantage of the third person, betraying an anxiety about his own artistic validity. The drawings, he explains, “were experiments with the straight line conducted not in research laboratories but produced spontaneously at various places and random moments since all that was needed to make them was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process—how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate—is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks. One drawing reveals two lines bordering the thick final one, a possible clue that Szpakowski may have gone over each design’s path three separate times. These works did not reach an audience until 1978, five years after Szpakowki’s death; today they’re still obscure and easily misunderstood. They’ve crept into exhibitions over the years, but mostly in the artist’s native Poland—there’s a rare opportunity now at New York’s Miguel Abreu Gallery, currently hosting the largest display of Szpakowski’s work ever mounted in the U.S. Read More