Filling Chace Center to the brim, the largest gallery at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum of Art in the City of Providence, Inner City comprised an astonishing array of architectural-scale models and tiny figurines fashioned entirely out of clay. All the little male people—the sculptor’s version of Everyman—strikingly similar in their facial and bodily characteristics, bring to mind countless crowd scenes found in old Depression-ear Hollywood movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man.
Concerned with the notion that the work of art consists of a coalescence of the viewer’s own perception with the object, artists Marcela Cabutti and Mónica Millán—both showing in New York for the first time—create multileveled works in a variety of media that explore the nature of experience. Marcela Cabutti, who was born in La Plata, the capital city of the Buenos Aires Province in Argentina, and currently lives in Buenos Aires, produces an art of fantasy and magical transformation that can be associated with Surrealism.
Man Ray was a major cultural bridge between New York and Paris, between avant-garde painters, photographers, writers, and filmmakers. For two crucial decades (1921-1940) his Paris studio was a meeting place for artists, dealers, models, and even the nobility. Actually, Ray’s main aim was to bridge the absurd reality of pre-World War II culture and romantic anarchy, linking conscious perceptions with subconscious imagery. A multidisciplinary prophet of diversity in art, he excelled in graphics, paintings, film, and sculpture. He also brought innovation to contemporary photography with his rayographs and to assemblage with his assisted ready-mades. Alias Man Ray (he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) is the first retrospective of the artist in a New York City museum in decades. The first two rooms of the exhibit cover his formative years, and include the mysterious painting, Madonna and Child (oil on canvas, 1914), with its minimalistic palette and simplified few lines.
For his first solo exhibition Sterling Ruby & Robert Mapplethorpe at Xavier Hufkens, Sterling Ruby engages with the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. The artist visited the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York to personally select the photographs. Ruby presents a new body of works, including a suite of collages, ceramics, and poured urethane sculptures. In this installation, Ruby uses the Mapplethorpe photographs as another element in his assemblage. Originally attracted to Mapplethorpe’s subject matter, marginal subcultures, the flowers and still lifes, Ruby began to ask a more complicated set of questions. Can one have a conversation with an artist who is no longer living? What are the natures of autobiography and biography? Why is psychoanalyzing Robert Mapplethorpe so compelling? Did he seek to distance himself from his subjects?
Gerhard Richter opens his exhibition with a large-scale, almost monochrome painting, a painting—pale—of which underlying chromatic structures are layered with translucent veils of white paint with an occasional break on the canvas to suggest, perhaps, that even if there is nothing within nothing, there is a piercing shred of a void. Appropriately, the subtitle of the exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery New York is Voids and White: The Last Paintings Before the Last. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author of the exhibition catalogue, correctly describes these recent abstractions of the German artist as “painterly reduction” and “extreme forms of pictorial minimization.”
The Museum of Modern Art presents the first major museum retrospective of the artist Gabriel Orozco, who since the early 1990s has forged a career marked by continuing innovation, and has become one of the leading artists of his generation. On view until March 1, this mid-career retrospective examines two decades of Orozco’s career in an exhibition of some 80 works, revealing how the artist roams freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting to create a heterogeneous body of objects that resists categorization. Mobile Matrix (2006), a monumental sculpture composed of a reassembled gray whale skeleton, is installed on the second floor in the museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Orozco was commissioned to make the sculpture by Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts for its permanent home in the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City.
The boldness of Zadok Ben David’s solo exhibition, Human Nature, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, lies in its investigation of the human condition without relying on commonly central themes like evil, depression, death, and loneliness. These have come to provide a kind of safety net for many artists as they are always relevant, and easily lend themselves to an aura of heroism, intellect, or whatever. Ben David does not present a rosy picture of the world; however, he addresses a sense of inner vitality, a human bond to that which is not necessarily tangible, evincing faith in the possibility and strength afforded by change and in the sheer wonder of life. The earliest of the 17 sculptures on display at the museum’s Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion dates back to 2005, and the majority of the works were made in the past two years.
Mexico holds a fascination for artists with its edgy proximity to nature. Teeming with life and death and heir to a civilization at once technologically advanced and steeped in human sacrifice, it is a country of contradictions. The folk religion of Mexico is a fascinating combination of Christianity and Mayan traditions, combining a pantheon of saints with nature gods—some benevolent and others bloodthirsty.
Recently the Broadway Gallery NYC exhibited the work of Ukraine-born artist Igor Zaytsev. The pieces in the show were selected paintings that may appear realistic or abstract but in reality are extractions—a combination of the two extremes. The work asks the viewer to question what they are seeing: something realistic or something abstract or both. These paintings also represent the challenges of being spontaneous, working with different color schemes, and going on an artistic journey that pushes Zaytsev to go outside of his established comfort zone of figurative and classical artwork.
“A good question should avoid an answer at all costs.” is presented to us in gold letters, letting us know in advance that only open endings are allowed in this exhibition, histories with undefined limits as life itself. Dora García rescues the characters of a last paragraph so that they may live their own existence, so that they unveil narratives before us in which we may become involved. Where do they go when the story ends, when we close the book and the narrative stops in a non-existent ending. Answers are not to be found in the exhibition rooms, but rather more questions. The plot of a trial whose outcome depends, completely randomly, upon the dryness of an almond tree (Soy un juez [I, judge] 1997) or the 2,000 copies of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, with the text printed back to front, hence making it impossible to read such as fire itself.
Power and the poetry of money, the increasingly narrower latitude available for political action, the role of the self-generating war, the iciness of society, the execution of nature—these are the themes to which Malachi Farrell draws our eye, as well as to a bunch of cables, hoses, aluminum sheets, contraptions, and electronic parts everywhere, to which movement and sound are added. The result is loud and wild. The machinery is visible; it is meant to be visible. The artist, who was born in Ireland and raised in Paris, reveals to us what holds the world together at its core, but he does so very much from the perspective of a rapper version of a French artist-intellectual who has declared his support for the principle of political responsibility to society.
Artist Laurance Rassin, director of the New Blue Riders, is teaming up with the Durst Organization and Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl (CCOC) to create awareness and funding for not-for-profit organizations through Simply Blue, his first major solo show at Condé Nast’s exhibition space in Manhattan. The exhibition, curated by Lanny Powers, is open to the public from April 28 to June 4, with a cocktail reception on May 6, to be held at the Condé Nast Building. For this exhibition, the artist has put together a virtual parade of canvases and objects that reflect an inquisitive mind and a mature application of recognizable style and working methods.
An intriguing group exhibition, My Funny Valentine: A Tribute to Chet Baker curated by the outsider Tchera Niyego, featured Carl Andre, Ilsabé von Dallwitz, Jennifer Contini Enderby, Rudi Keimel, Ayşe Küçük, Robert Le Biez, and Michelle Sakhai. The subject matter of the exhibition explores the nature of love, and perception, visual and otherwise, in relation to the theater of passions and life. Niyego utilizes the talent of her artists to investigate the circumstance, psychology and the blueprint that comprise the performance of love. Captivated and inspired by Chet Baker’s tale of love and ardor, Niyego is almost effortless in her selection of artists who recreate the beauty of Baker’s blues in this omnipotent and wicked show.