Posted inArt
Not at the New York Galleries
by John Seed September 4, 2014 September 7, 2014
A view of Raul Martinez-Alvarez's riveting exhibition (image by the author for Hyperallergic)
For your reading pleasure: six short reviews of nonexistent shows, none of which are actually on view in New York this week.
Blinky Palermo: Early Notebooks, 1956–57
When: Until September 19
Where: The Olive Garden (2 Times Square, between Broadway and 43rd Street, Times Square, Manhattan)
During his eighth grade year at a Münster Gymnasium the aspiring German minimalist, who struggled with Algebra, filled several spiral notebooks with equations, adolescent sexual fantasies, and trenchant caricatures of his instructor, a balding former Luftwaffe pilot named Herr Jäger. Many of the images and equations have been "cancelled" (crisscrossed) by rectangular matrixes of scribbled lines that prefigure the totemic constructivism of Palermo's monochrome works of the 1960s.
Lapin Agile! The Bunnies of French Modernism
Where: Gagosian Bushwick (27 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn)
Curated by Syrian-American artist and designer Albert Leon Sultan, this charming rabbit-themed exhibition opens with Gustave Courbet's somber dun-colored oil sketch: "Lapin Suspendus" (1857). Featuring 85 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, and prints, the show's highlights include Andre Derain's chromatically dazzling "Lapins au Bord de la Mer, Collioure" (1905) and Pierre Félix Masseau's enigmatic Art Deco bronze "Le Secret du Lapin" (1903). A small but poignant Picasso crayon drawing — "Loulou" (1935) — depicts a Bourbonnais Grey doe that was brought to the artist's studio by Marie-Thérèse Walter, and later cooked by his driver during the occupation of Paris.
Ingeborg and Gunnar Landvik: Uncontacted
When: Until September 9
Where: Ransom Projects (318 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan), which is closed Wednesdays (11:45a to 3:15p) for extended lunch
A challenging new video installation by the inveterate wife and husband team from Porsgrunn, Norway. Between 2011 and 2013 the Landviks made a series of trips into the Amazon rainforest, bringing toys, clothes and makeup donated by a São Paulo WalMart to distribute to the members of remote tribes. The installation — which features looped videos playing simultaneously on three screens — includes footage of the members of a previously uncontacted tribe on the Peru-Brazil border trying on One Direction boxer shorts and applying eyeliner for the first time.
Raul Martinez-Alvarez: Frozen
Where: Harbinger, Nunez and Naughton (97 Allen Street, Upstairs, Lower East Side, Manhattan)
A striking debut show by a Mexican-born hyperrealist Raul Martinez-Alvarez, who recently earned his MFA at Parsons The New School. Following his extensive study of the Munsell color system, Martinez-Alvarez has been carefully crafting chromatically correct images of variously-hued popsicles from across the globe. The exhibition includes a suite of small acrylic studies of otter pops and also several ultra-high-definition Giclée prints of Mexican paletas (Mexican ice pops). In the alcove: painterly vignettes of melting ice cream sandwiches by Sandra Herrington.
Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney: Caprices
Where: Schwarzenegger (1710 Fifth Avenue, Harlem, Manhattan)
A two-man show of fantasies by the renowned tax crusader and a former Vice President of the United States. Cheney is represented by a series of sketches made on cocktail napkins and menus of a proposed oil refinery/prison complex for an unnamed West Asian nation. In the center of the gallery, Norquist is exhibiting a wooden allegorical figure of Nancy Pelosi that roughly parodies the Statue of Liberty, but which holds a checkbook in the place of liberty's torch. Titled "Stupider than France," Norquist has reportedly offered the full-scale version of the piece for immolation at next year's Burning Man festival.
*Critic's Pick* Penny Perkins: Cannabis Canines
When: Until October 8
Where: Hauser and Bauser (513 West 18th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan, by appointment only)
Horticulturist turned artist Penny Perkins has been experimenting with early photographic methods since moving to a 228 square foot "tiny house" in Ukiah, California, five years ago. Perkin's current exhibit consists of some 48 Calotypes of the loyal guard dogs that protect the marijuana farms surrounding her home.
In one memorable vignette a ragged one-eyed bulldog names Sparky stares down the camera with a threatening but disarming leer. Perkin's mastery of the Calotype process infuses her Mendocino dogapalooza with a discomforting tinge of déjà vu. The show is accompanied by a small selection of Murano glass bongs and dope pipes by students of the Pilchuck Glass School.
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John Seed
John Seed is a professor of art and art history at Mt. San Jacinto College in Southern California. Seed has written about art and artists for Arts of Asia, Art Ltd., Catamaran, Harvard Magazine, International...	More by John Seed
One reply on "Not at the New York Galleries"
Yana Yakubchik says:
:3 Paletas..