January 24, 2017 Look The Fiestas Are Over By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of Beatrice Mandelman’s sixties-era work is showing through April 1 at Rosenberg & Co., in New York. Mandelman, who died in 1998, was among the modernists of Taos, New Mexico, who moved to the city in the forties to found the Taos Valley Art School. Mandelman favored what she called the “calm” of geometry as a reaction to the tumult of the sixties. “The work IS hard edged because the world is hard edged now,” she said. “It’s not a soft feminine period. The fiestas are over. The celebrants have gone home. It is time to face reality.” Beatrice Mandelman, Collage No. 9, 1960s, mixed-media collage on mat board, 15.63″ x 19.63″. Untitled, c. 1960s, acrylic and collage on paper, 24.88″ x 38″. The Man, c. 1965, collage with acrylic on canvas, 19.74″ x 13.75″. Untitled, c. 1960s, acrylic and collage on paper, 25.5″ x 19.63″. Sea Shapes (#2), 1960s, oil on fiberboard, 60″ x 48″. Untitled (Freaks), c. 1960s, mixed-media collage on paper, 19.44″ x 12.19″. Beatrice Mandelman at a swimming pool in Llano, date unknown.
January 19, 2017 Look Ideas and a New Hat By James McWilliams Francesca Woodman’s playful darkness. Francesca Woodman, Space 2, 1976. Francesca Woodman died on this day in 1981. Digital subscribers can see a portfolio of her early work in our Spring 2014 issue. In 1912, the essayist Randolph Bourne wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the ability to think “was given us for use in emergencies, and no man can be justly blamed if he reserves it for emergencies.” If the photography of Francesca Woodman can be reduced to one defining feature, it’s that she provides emergencies. Woodman’s emergencies are not loud or particularly dangerous; they don’t require alarms or intervention. But they do ask us to think, to ponder the urgency of an unorthodox kind of desire—a desire that insists, I am here, naked and soft, on one side of a wall, and I want to be over there, on the other side, where an equally naked and soft orchid flirts with me. This situation is serious. Read More
January 17, 2017 Look Clusterfuck By Dan Piepenbring Ivan Morley’s latest exhibition is at Bortolami Gallery through February 18. A lifelong Californian, Morley partakes of a tradition Jerry Saltz has called “clusterfuck aesthetics,” fusing pop images to emblems of American subcultures. Among the materials he’s used in these works: tooled leather, mother of pearl, and KY jelly. By his own account, the two recurring titles in this series, “Tehachepi” and “A True Tale,” refer to apocryphal stories from the Old West—the former concerns “native family life in a town where the wind was so strong it could alter the trajectory of a bullet,” where the latter involves “an entrepreneur who made a fortune shipping cats to a rat-infested city.” Ivan Morley, Tehachepi (sic), 2003, acrylic, oil, thread, batik and u.v. varnish on denim, 60″ x 45″ Read More
January 12, 2017 Look The Dynamics of the City By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of photographs by Sy Kattelson opens tonight at Howard Greenberg Gallery, where it’s on display through February 11. Featuring work from the forties through the nineties, the show marks the breadth and depth of Kattelson’s contributions to street photography. “I try to be as unobtrusive as possible, looking for those moments when people are focused in on themselves,” Kattelson, now ninety-three, told the gallery. “And I try to find settings where this inwardness is contrasted by the dynamics of the city, by taxi cabs rushing past, by advertisements, the perspective of the street, and by the other people in the same space, everyone in their own thoughts.” Sy Kattelson, Woman Crossing Street, c. 1954, gelatin silver print, 8 1/2″ x 13 1/8″. Read More
January 10, 2017 Look Trestlework By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of Randy Dudley’s photo-realist drawings of Chicago and Brooklyn is on display at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through February. Randy Dudley, CTA Redline on the North Side, 2016, pencil on bristol board, 15″ x 20″. Read More
January 5, 2017 Look All the Kitsch By Dan Piepenbring John Ashbery, A Dream of Heroes, 2015, mixed media collage, 15 3/4 x 20 1/2. John Ashbery is eighty-nine. In the last two months, he’s published a new collection of poems, Commotion of the Birds, and launched an exhibition of his latest collage work, which appears through January 28 at Tibor de Nagy. Read More