Chelsea Thursday Openings

Although there were only a few openings yesterday, so I was able to tackle four in about 45-minute in West Chelsea. I am disappointed I didn't make it uptown for Gregory Crewdson before the show closes tomorrow. 

Brice Marden at Matthew Marks
This show was surprisingly amazing. It took me till I got home to realize how much I loved these paintings. The pieces were simple but beautiful and really popped. I can't imagine how much they cost, but their simple beauty is clear in the image below.  I normally steer clear of big name gallery shows, assuming I can see their work in larger museums. However, I have started to appreciate the smaller scale and singular focus of gallery exhibits. This show just opened and it may not hit you at once, but it definitely stayed with me.
http://www.matthewmarks.com/

 

Next up was Bruce Silverstein with works by Michael Wolf and Andre Kertesz. 

(www.brucesilverstein.com)

Both exhibits we're the highlight of the evening. Wolf's photographs were diverse and beautiful. Although some of the urban  imagery was familiar and seemed common, other photographs of people, distorted buildings and snapshots that seemed mischievous left me asking questions and wanting more. I loved the photograph below of the man's face pressed against the glass. To me it is a business man in a stopped taxi playing with a random photgrpaher on the street. I immediately fell in love with this photograph.

 

Another highlight, was a disotrted picture of a familar building in Tribeca. The way the photograph was printed distorted the viewer's perception of the building and the clarity of the image. When you viewed the piece from different angles and distances, it changed in surprising and distorting ways. 

In the back space of the gallery were phenomenal historical black and white photographs. The pictures that struck me were those of everyday people enjoying the sun on what I assume is a summer day in the City. Similar images could be captured in present day New York, but I love the romanticism and the mystery of the two photographs below.  

 

James Casebere at Sean Kelly (www.skny.com)

I was very excited to see this show based on the images I saw online. However, I think I love these works more in theory than in reality. The prints, computer-generated images of suburban landscapes, are pretty amazing, but it was the end of the tour and they were filming and I walked a million miles to get to Sean Kelly's 29th Street gallery, so I didn't spend as much time here as I wanted. These pictures seemed dreamlike and reminded me of stills from a Ryan Trecartin video. I saw them as some imaginary dream-scape created in an Avatar-driven reality. But upon closer inspection, you realize, even though they are computer-generated, they could be Anywhere, USA. It's at that moment, even through an exhausted haze, you realize these fairytale landscapes could be a reality. It was alarming, creepy, disturbing and amazeballs.

Bruce Wolkowitz
(www.brycewolkowitz.com)
Through a packed gallery  the works and images of Abelardo Morell didn't pop or catch my attention. the works were not inspiring or even all that interesting.  I am sorry, but I wasn't really feeling this show. The crowd, however, was very interesting including a Frida Kahlo-look-a-like. The back gallery was covered in continuous dark profile pictures, it was really crowded, so it was hard to see what exactly was going on or the point. It reminded me of the Andy Warhol piece at Dia Beacon (below), but less exciting and more one-note. I am not planning on going back to re-investigate.

Los Angeles Fall 2010

My Los Angeles trip was limited to a few galleries and museums that had new and exciting shows. I was extremely dissapointed to find out I was missing the Dennis Hopper show by three days, but luckily I was able to see Ryan Trecartin's new collection of seven videos - yes, 7! The videos were great - I wish he would upload them to Vimeo as they are almost always better at home than in the gallery. I only had 45 minutes, but that was more than enough as the craziness of Trecartin can only be taken in small doses - at least by me. 

I also made it to the opening of the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA. The building housed a  mix bag of exhibitions, including "European Dress in Detail: 1700-1915" as well as Masterworks of Ancient Mexico and then selections from the  Resnick Collection - it was an odd mix. The Pavilion was open earlier then the other buildings and I totally missed both Catherine Opie and The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins - sometimes being impaitent is a total downfall.   

 

Then it was off to a quick pop-in to Michael Kohn to see Simmons and Burke "If not Winter". The best part about this show was three large collages that included vocal accompaniment. Under each piece was a pair of headphones that contained another collage of sorts with different sound bites mixed with well-known audio scores from what I believed were mainstream movies. The pieces reminded me of Trecartin, although they were not moving images, the combined chaos of the images and the audio was total overload for my minor jet-lag. 

                                                    

Other pieces in the show included altered photographs, story paintings using words and the first image below which seemed etheral and dream-like - the total opposite of the other works in the show. 

  

I was lucky enough to have a business lunch at Century Park and finally made it the Annenberg Space for Photography. It was a lovely little jewel perched in an oasis of an office park - an urban planners nightmare, but the space was totally alive with pedestrians. The gallery was intimate and clean. The current exhibition was the Pictures of the Year - a great collection of emotional and sometime disturbing works. My favorites are below and more info, including the entire collection on view can be found here

I surprisingly found a parking meter and was able to pop into the Gagosian in Beverly Hills to see Taryn Simon's Contraband - a show of grouped photographs of items seized by the US government at JFK over the artist's five day stay. It includes everything including counterfeit luxury goods, dead animals, pills and everything in-between. The show required a lot of attention but really seemed simple in the end and again I usually turn to Gagosian for powerhouse shows that blow you away. But after Dan Colen in New York and this show in LA, I am left disappointed. http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-09-22_taryn-simon/

Finally, I kept going back and forth if I should attend a lecture at the Hammer by Yoshua Okon, a Mexico City-based artists who has ties to Los Angeles thanks to a MFA from UCLA. In the end, the lecture was much longer than expected but it was wonderful to hear the artist talk about his work and see the interaction with the audience, which was mostly engaging with intelligent questions. I think I just found a new favorite artist -

http://hammer.ucla.edu/residencies/detail/residency_id/17

http://www.yoshuaokon.com/