Blog Posts - (ART) femtoREVIEWS

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anish kapoor

5/17/2016

Anish Kapoor is showing his other side again, pushed even further! Every once in a while, his perfectly polished, symmetrical, classically beautiful metal sculptures give way to an antipode of grotesque. It is like a "jolie laide" though, and the swirls and textures reminiscent of raw, mangled flesh have an energy that transports you. I'd like to see more of it.
@ Gladstone Gallery

aleah chapin

5/16/2016

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Body/Being is a show of a series nude paintings. It is ambitious in scale - there are a lot of portraits, and they are large. Yet the paintings lack emotion and only superficially touch on the issue of gender identity. They look more like an art school project, or like figure studies set on a white background in order to look contemporary.
@ Flowers Gallery

ray turner

5/16/2016

"Population Defaced" is a well put-together show, small but rich. It consists of 40-50 small-scale paintings of heads that capture your attention and move your eye around in excitement. Some thinly painted, some impasto, some realistic, some distorted, they look like they each have a life and a story to tell. It's a delight to see the dynamic paint handling, the color getting pushed (especially in the shadows), and the marriage of German expressionism, Francis Bacon, and contemporary LA aesthetics.
@ JoAnne Artman Gallery

david hockney

5/14/2016

"The Yosemite Suite" is a series of Hockney's large ipad drawings - operative word Hockney, not ipad. The new medium doesn't add much to his work. If you liked him before you will like him now, and if you didn't like him before this show won't change your mind.
@ Pace Gallery

Luc Tuymans

5/14/2016

Le Mépris (from Godard’s film Le Mépris) is a series of hazy, gentle paintings of, among other things, floats from a parade and reflections on water. They are beautifully painted, and in some works areas of the canvas are untouched giving them an airy dream-like feel. They are reminiscent of 1960’s blurry Richters, but without the depth of feeling or the emotional impact of his images. I wanted to like these paintings but left unable to connect with anything other than the delicate touch of the artist’s hand.
@ David Zwirner Gallery

tim braden

5/13/2016

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At different levels of success Tim Braden’s paintings fulfill the show’s description, “House and Garden, the abstract in the everyday”. The better ones straddle the line between representation and abstraction, perspective and flatness. They have the appearance of spontaneity, a not-overworked treatment that exudes freshness; areas where the canvas is showing through and occasional accidental brushstrokes are a delight.
@ Ryan Lee Gallery

richard serra

5/12/2016

Serra's work never tires, especially the labyrinthine sculptures that invite you to interact with them and incite a desire to explore and get lost inside them. Heavy, severe, monolithic, yet balanced and in a sense light, they are simply marvelous.
@ Gagosian Gallery

Mary Hrbacek

5/11/2016

Hidden in a small gallery, "Vital Connections" is a show of medium-sized painting of trees. I found them lacking in the emotion they promised (the artist is apparently a tree-lover), but I enjoyed the clean paint, the swatches of color forming tree trunks, and the thick texture in the sky in some of the paintings.
@ Gallery d’Arte

CINDY SHERMAN

5/9/2016

Even if Cindy Sherman grows old, her art never does. Photographs of her usual impersonations, this time reflecting on aging. They are more tranquil than some of her older work, but just as captivating and thought-provoking. It is interesting (disappointing?) that figure and background are not part the same physical setting, but the background has been added digitally.
@ Metro PIctures

frieze new york 2016

5/5/2016

Miles of art in gallery-sized spaces on an island of wildflowers, Frieze is the queen of NY art fairs, opulent and spacious after the cramped overstimulation of its satellite fairs. You can't escape the ipad aesthetics, but the editing - and the packaging - was more careful, and there was so much good work by established artists that you grew immune to it ("Oh, it's just another Anish Kapoor.") Notable classics include Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Cornelia Parker, Peter Halley, Los Carpinteros, and new work by Lisa Yuskavage. It was also nice to see new blood, such as Rieko Otake's "Room" and David Altmejd’s room of gory humanoid heads.