William Corwin
is a sculptor and journalist from New York. He has exhibited at The Clocktower, LaMama and Geary galleries in New York, as well as galleries in London, Hamburg, Beijing and Taipei. He has written regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, Artpapers, Bomb, Artcritical, Raintaxi and Canvas and formerly for Frieze. Most recently he curated and wrote the catalog for Postwar Women at The Art Students League in New York, an exhibition of the school’s alumnae active between 1945-65, and 9th Street Club, and exhibition of Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Mercedes Matter, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Elaine Dekooning at Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. He is the editor of Formalism; Collected Essays of Saul Ostrow, to be published in 2020, and he will participate in the exhibition Anchor/Roots at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in 2021.
Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963 – 2017
By William CorwinEschewing the criticality of the minimalist sculpture around him in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Jack Whitten, primarily known as a painter, embarked on a course of aesthetic discovery aimed at producing sculpture that radiated the energy of collective memory and reflected the power of various individuals, living and dead, to whom he chose to pay tribute through his work.
David Row: Counter Clockwise
By William CorwinIt takes a few turns around the gallery to ascertain the layers encoded in David Row’s crisp and brainy abstractions. His fractured canvases, plywood assemblages, and faux-assemblages, are puzzles that question the act of puzzling.
Yasmin Kaytmaz: Hippocrene Runs Dry
By William CorwinLike a trail of breadcrumbs, Yasmin Kaytmaz leaves a succession of faux fragments
Cliche
By William CorwinAccording to the rationale behind the summer group exhibition Cliche, finding a painting that doesn’t fall into the pattern of one cliché or another is about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.
Jeanne Silverthorne: From Darkness
By William CorwinIn the exhibition Jeanne Silverthorne: From Darkness the top floor of the Marc Straus gallery is dominated by a singular object: Untitled (Chandelier) (1994), cast in resin.
Emily Mullin: Woman on Top
By William CorwinEmily Mullin’s project of creating a three dimensional still-life involves a complicated chain of reasoning cloaked in a seemingly simple premise. On the one hand, still lifes exist everywhere, but it is creating an assemblage in real space which inhabits two-dimensional pictorial space that lends her efforts an edge.
CARROLL DUNHAM
By William CorwinMy friend A., a Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar, introduced me to the activity of watching Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at various watering holes in Greenpoint and Williamsburg.
RAUL GUERRERO
By William CorwinRaul Guerrero is a pragmatic conceptual artist: he aims for the maximum emotional and mythopoetic impact using a pithy economy of means. For instance, The Rotating Yaqui Mask (1973) presents a fearsome devil’s visage with authentic animal horns and teeth, attached to a small motor installed on the far wall of the gallery.
Renaldo Kuhler: Rocaterrania
By William CorwinRenaldo Kuher invented the fantasy world of Rocaterrania as a teenager and inhabited it all of his adult life, which stretched from the mid ’40s until his death in 2013. By a bizarre confluence of its creator’s fixation on pin-ups, Fritz Lang, spy novels, and late Bohemian, Hapsburg, and Prussian fashion/architecture, his dystopian land of make-believe, situated on the border between New York State and Canada, turned out to be a demesne of steam-punk aesthetics and rockabilly swingers.
Tim Zercie: Regenbogenscherben
By William CorwinViewing Tim Zercie’s cycle of occult-themed stitched fabric wall hangings in his current show, Regenbogenscherben, brought back memories of recent trip to Paris, where I saw the “Lady and the Unicorn" (ca. 1500) tapestries at The Musée de Cluny.
New York-Centric
By William CorwinThree canvases hang as looming, watchful presences in New York-Centric, an exhibition at the Art Students League of New York curated by James Little: Al Loving’s stolid New Hexagon (1996), Dan Christensen’s Jarrito, (1997) and Ed Clark’s sensual and lugubrious X-form Untitled (Bastille Series) (1991).
Zoe Avery Nelson: The Measure of a Boi
By William CorwinRunning throughout this exhibition of nine canvases, the overwhelming vehicle of anatomical ambiguity, is the direction and intensity of the brushstroke, the modulation of tint and hue, and the inscription of a few well-placed lines—in other words—the handling of the paint (as opposed to narrative elements). The painter, Zoe Avery Nelson, presents a glossary of equivocal forms and plays on the visual interchangeability of joints, folds, seams, and protuberances of the human body.
Under Erasure
By William CorwinUnder Erasure is a timely, wise, and expansive exploration of the idea of erasure from all angles in visual art and textual practice, particularly poetry.
