February 24, 2015 Look Alice Neel’s Brothers Karamazov By Dan Piepenbring Alice Neel, Untitled (Karamazov, His Three Sons, and the Servant Gregory), ca. 1938, 14 ¼” x 10”. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London. Alice Neel, who died in 1984, is remembered best as a portraitist—her paintings present friends, lovers, and other intimates with an astonishing, often forbidding guilelessness. Your average Neel portrait is penetrating, flip, scary, and more than a little funny, depending on how long you’re willing to hold its subject’s gaze. Neel’s people all look to be plodding through the Stations of the Cross with a kind of decadent resignation—this is the world we live in, and oh well. “Alice loved a wretch,” her daughter-in-law told the Guardian in 2004. “She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think.” When Neel wasn’t painting, she was sketching. Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors, a new book with a corresponding exhibition, collects this interstitial work, some of it polished and some hauntingly restive. “There is an essential melancholy to Neel’s work,” Jeremy Lewison writes in the book’s opening essay. “She presents a world of hardship, of tenement buildings and shared bathing facilities, of underprivileged and underclass immigrants, of humanity weighed down by the burdens of living in the harsh metropolitan environment, of human loss and tragedy.” All of which makes her a natural candidate to reckon with the Russian classics, those icons of gloom. Read More
February 20, 2015 Look More Paintings About Poets and Food By Dan Piepenbring Djordje Ozbolt, Poet Smoking, 2014, acrylic on board, 27 ½” x 23 5/8”. Tomorrow’s the last day to catch Djordje Ozbolt’s show “More paintings about poets and food”—a welcome nod to Talking Heads’ 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food—at Hauser & Wirth. Ozbolt grew up in Belgrade and now works in London, where he’s lived for many years; though he denies any kind of “East-meets-West” tensions in his work, his paintings evoke the kind of rambunctious, vivid satire of Western culture that comes best from outsiders. Ryan Steadman, writing in the New York Observer, calls Ozbolt “a master of the deadpan historical zinger … While an artist like John Currin seems to begin from a kitschified American view of classical painting (think Norman Rockwell), Mr. Ozbolt pointedly razzes the medium’s deeper history (a history that reflects our own) in a way that a New-Worlder never fully could.” It would be easier to shrug off his paintings as jokes if they didn’t reappear, some hours after seeing them, in one’s nightmares. I don’t know how Ozbolt burrows so deep into his subconscious, but I applaud him for it; he’s found a labyrinthine, underground network of our bugbears and bêtes noires. In Delivery, for example, a raven makes a brisk descent with a glazed donut in its beak—it took me a while to make the connection, but eventually I was brought back to the scene in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks wherein Waldo the Myna Bird is executed above a tray of jelly donuts. This is America, people: whenever birds and baked goods meet, suffering is sure to follow. Read More
February 13, 2015 Look The Chinese Photobook By Dan Piepenbring Cover and interior selection from Pictorial Review of the Sino-Japanese Conflict in Shanghai. Shanghai: Wen Hwa Fine Arts Press, Ltd., 1932. From The Chinese Photobook (Aperture, 2015). Even with the advent of digital photography, it’s never been easy to publish a book of photographs: time, labor, and production costs ensure that such projects can’t be undertaken casually, at least not well. There’s something inherently lavish in a book of pictures, something that makes the eyebrows rise. A photobook, with its unwieldy trim size, its color printing, and its demanding design constraints, always answers to a grave question of purpose: What does it do? Why did it need to exist? Does it serve merely to bring prestige to your coffee table, or can it act to didactic, moral, or even geopolitical ends? If some publisher’s going to pony up, those questions are less rhetorical than they might sound. “The Chinese Photobook,” a new exhibition at Aperture Gallery curated by Martin Parr and the Dutch “artist-duo” WassinkLundgren, surveys more than a century of China’s rich photo-book publishing history. It surprises both in its complex portrayal of Chinese history and in the depth it gives to photo-book publishing as an enterprise. Read More
February 11, 2015 Look Erotic City By Dan Piepenbring Aaron Wexler, Erotic City, 2014, acrylic painted paper and print material collaged on paper, 16.5″ x 24″. Aaron Wexler’s new solo show, “The Basket Looked Like an Ocean, And I Was Just Throwing Rocks In It,” opens tomorrow at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Wexler’s work uses elements of collage, printmaking, and painting; these new projects include everything from Audubon illustrations to found photographs of jungle gyms. Shapes are everything in Wexler’s work. He seems consumed by the moment when order becomes chaos, when geometry lapses into anarchy: even when his palette verges on the neon, his great subject is the tangle of nature. “I am in awe of nature every day,” he told BOMB in 2010: I’m a city kid from West Philadelphia; nature is one giant mystery to me. I love the redwoods; I love scary looking tropical flowers; I love how weeds grow out of dirty bricks on nearly deserted streets. I love how innocently sexual nature is and how it surrounds us (if we’re lucky and in the right places). Most of all though, I love how organic objects can seem so foreign, alien, and new—an endless source of forms and imagery. As the name of his show suggests, Wexler has a knack for titles—his best summon a kind of hallucinogenic outlandishness, but you can always sense a raised middle finger hovering somewhere in the background. They sound like the best albums our rock luminaries never recorded: The Love Life of a Leaf, Sure, After the Glitter Is Gone, and—a personal favorite—Erotic City, after the Prince song. (When in doubt, always borrow from Prince.) Read More
February 3, 2015 Look Winter Blossoms By Dan Piepenbring Photographs of the placards at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by Jan Baracz. Read More
January 29, 2015 Look Explorations and Surveys By Dan Piepenbring William Steiger, USPRR Herd of Bison, 2014, gouache, glue, vintage lithograph, paper, 9″ x 11¼”. William Steiger’s collages are wondrous, often humorous refractions of early American landscapes. They traffic in a very particular kind of anachronism, grafting zeppelins, prop planes, gondolas, bridges, and the gleaming apparatus of the steam age onto the vast plains and prairies of the nineteenth-century frontier. The images dare us to reconcile two equally innocent visions of American life. One is taut, sleek, and brimming with technological optimism; the other is lush, free, and unspoiled. Neither, it goes without saying, have quite panned out as our forebears hoped they might. The series, “Explorations & Surveys,” plays with our country’s mythology, conflating more than a century of travel and invention into pale stories of our naïveté—everything in the world of these images is still ours for the taking. Steiger constructed the pieces using a nineteenth-century surveyors’ guide. His gallery, Pace Prints, explains: Steiger borrowed the abbreviated title, Explorations & Surveys, from the title of his source material, Reports of the Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. These accounts were published by the Federal Government in the late 1850s to both document the western regions and to locate the best routes for the forthcoming Pacific Railroad. Disseminated in bound editions, the volumes were essentially the first published images of the American West. These works, and others, are on view at Pace Prints Chelsea through February 21, with an opening reception tonight at six. Read More