ArtSeen
Carolee Schneemann
By Stephanie BuhmannSince her staged body performances of the early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann has been known to challenge emotional boundaries and unmask, if not attack, taboos wherever society might have safely stored them. Over four decades, her multimedia work has remained a mirror of worldly disasters, in particular of wars led or caused in reaction to Western politics.
Merlin James
By Roger White1985 was a bad time for painters of a certain sensibility. One had, on one side, the rhetorical bombast and dubious values of neo-expressionism, and on the other, something much smarter but distressingly cold called Neo-Geo. To top it off, some lunatic took a knife and a liter of sulfuric acid to Rembrandt’s “Danae” in The Hermitage.
Yuliya Lanina
By James KalmMuch ink has been spilled and many voices have become hoarse in recent discussions on the current state of “feminist art,” and intentionally or not, Transfigurations of Queen Butterfly places Yuliya Lanina firmly within this contentious dialogue.
Cordy Ryman
By Tomassio LonghiIn mediating the on-going dialogue between painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Cordy Ryman’s latest exhibit at the Carol Shen, the Packer Collegiate Institute, seems to reveal a certain degree of natural responsiveness to and acceptance of the nature of this rather difficult and unconventional terrain.
Ten New Paintings
By William PowhidaThe curatorial proposition for Ten New Paintings at Parker’s Box notes that the selection of the artists, not the work, was the basis for inclusion in this survey of contemporary painting. The departure point for each artist appears to be figuration, and the canvases arrive at a range of aesthetic and conceptual possibilities.
Cheryl Molnar
By Hrag VartanianOver the last twenty years, north Brooklyn has endured one crisis after another: crack, gentrification, homesteading dot-comers, more gentrification, destination restaurants, luxury lofts, the closing of Engine 212, a new power station and now development of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront.
Gordon Moore
By Ben LaRoccoBetty Cuningham is currently exhibiting a painter named Gordon Moore. His canvases are all vertical. Each is cut horizontally in two by a lightly rendered grid that serves as backdrop to the slashing and meandering brushwork taking place over its surface.
Deborah Roan
By Stephanie BuhmannIn vibrantly saturated photographs of panoramic largesse, Deborah Roan portrays contemporary urban textures with a sensibility that is as musical as it is poetic. On the surface, rhythmic interplays of color and form characterize each composition, while the loose narrative established by the imagery of various neighborhoods offers depth.
K. K. Kozik and Sook Jin Jo
By James KalmDomestic bliss—an all enveloping cushion of comfort, security, and household good taste rendered within the pages of Martha Stuart Living or Good Housekeeping—is a pictorial theme that unites many of the paintings in K.K. Kozik’s latest exhibition, Shelter.
Mike Schall
By Shane McAdamsVisitors squirm and maneuver through the bottlenecked interior of Dam Stuhltrager’s cavernous, irregular galleries. It’s cold outside, crowded and stuffy inside. You can smell the person next to you and see the places they missed shaving.
Sandy Litchfield
By Ben LaRoccoThere is a spot on Atlantic Avenue, well known to Brooklyn art lovers, where a great deal of excellent art is exhibited at two fine galleries: Bruno Marina and Metaphor. I would have been as well served to visit Stephen Westfall’s exhibition of drawings at the former, but I strayed first toward the latter and became entangled in the work of a young Massachusetts native named Sandy Litchfield.
Kim Levin
By Lauren RossThe artworld is a complex apparatus in which artwork is but a single component. Spaces that show it, dealers that sell it, and critics that gauge and interpret it play as essential a role in establishing success and writing history. This exhibition in many ways is about those systems that are simultaneously ancillary to and crucially embedded in the experience of looking at art.
Santiago Calatrava
By Cynthia EardleyThe unusual and illuminating Santiago Calatrava exhibit at the Met, Sculpture into Architecture, offers a lively array of work by the contemporary Spanish architect who is also a lyrical draftsman and a sculptor. Calatrava’s sculpture and architecture are sometimes connected by a nearly one-to-one formal correlation and always by a distinct sensibility.
