This fall season there are many terrific exhibitions to see in New York City galleries and museums. Here is a short list of those recommended by Artview NYC:
CHELSEA
“50 Years at Pace”, Pace Gallery, 534 West 25 St, 545 West 22 St and 32 East 57 St (exhibition is on view at all three locations)
This is an exhibition not to miss. It brings together some of the key masterpieces that have passed through Pace’s doors, featuring loans from important collections worldwide. Jasper Johns’ “Three Flags” from the Whitney, Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Diptych” from the Tate and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased DeKooning Drawing” from SFMOMA are featured together in the exhibition and that is in just one room at the 25th Street location!
This is an all-star show including the best examples of each artist’s work telling the history of modern and contemporary art. There is an iphone application about the artists which you can download from iTunes for free. The artists are: Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Murray, Sol LeWitt, Clyfford Still to name a few.
“Roy Lichtenstein Reflected”, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26 St
An engaging exhibition of a dozen paintings and additional works on paper dating from the early 1960’s through the 1990’s. The show focuses on reflections, mirrors and doubling as a career-spanning motif in Lichtenstein’s work. There is also a major exhibition at the Morgan Library currently,
“Roy Lichtenstein: The Black and White Drawings”.
“Adam Fuss: Home and the World”, Cheim & Read, 547 West 25 St
This exhibition stems from inspiration rooted in the artist’s childhood. Remembering an oft-played board game, Snakes and Ladders, Fuss researched its original use, in ancient India, as a game of morality for young players, showing a pathe to enlightenment by good deeds. The enigmatic black and white photographs are very engaging and beautiful.
“Elmer Bischoff: Figurative Paintings, 1953-1966”, George Adams, 525 West 26 St
Bischoff, co-founder of the Bay Area Figurative School with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, is featured in this important historical exhibition showing the development of his figurative style. The earliest canvases in the exhibition date from 1953 and show the pronounced influence of Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec in both palette and composition. These paintings, intensely chromatic and tightly composed, are personal in nature depicting family members. Later paintings have a cooler and more limited palette. In addition, the paintings introduce a more heavily impastoed surface, the hallmark of the Bay Area Figurative style.
“Ingrid Calame: Swing Shift”, James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26 St
Throughout her career, Ingrid Calame has generated ideas for her paintings through a close examination of the world around her, using detritus left by people in passing as her source material. She focuses her gaze on the lowly and left-over – stains on a sidewalk, graffiti on a river bank, skid marks of a car tire on a roadway. This exhibition includes a new body of work made during an artist residency at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY where she made tracings from the shipping dock floors of the nearby former Bethlehem Steel Plant amongst other locations.
LOWER EAST SIDE
“Alex Olson: As a Verb, As a Noun, In Peach and Silver”, Lisa Cooley Gallery, 34 Orchard St
The artist received her BA from Harvard University in 2001 and her MFA from CalArts in 2008, this is her first solo exhibition with the gallery. These are paintings about surfaces. They have been scratched, scraped, scarred, imprinted upon, smooshed against and dragged across.They have been layered and layered on only to be subtracted from in the creation of the final iteration. The exhibition quickly sold out and this is a young artist to watch.
“Louise Despont: House of Instruments”, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 21 Orchard St
Despont continues to explore drawing as abstract meditations, balancing and integrating symbols and forms to link her art to the inscription of narratives and to mystical or literary concerns. The exhibition was onceived during a year spent traveling in India on a Fulbright Fellowship. Despont received her BA in Art Semiotics at Brown University and is another artist to keep a close eye on.
“David Adamo, Heather Cook, Breandan Fowler, Rashid Ohnson, Phil Wagner”, Untitled Gallery, 30 Orchard St
This is the first exhibition at this new gallery space on Orchard Street. The space is industrial and dramatic and creates the perfect environment for the large-scale installations by these five young artists.
“Heather Bennett: Sidetrack, Snapshots, Outtakes, Polaroids 2001-2008”
Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, 29 Orchard St
Photography and film by this talented young artist who has shown with the gallery over the years.
This compilation is a mini-retrospective of her work. Also, have a look at the emerging artists’ work in the basement space of the gallery.
MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
“The World of Kubilai Khan”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Ave and 82 St
This exhibition covers the period from 1215, the year of Khubilai’s birth, to 1368, the year of the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China founded by Khubilai Khan, and features every art form, including paintings, sculpture, gold and silver, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, and other decorative arts, religious and secular.
“Yoshitomo Nara”, Asia Society, 725 Park Ave, at 70 St
As one of the leading artists of Japan’s influential Neo Pop art since the 1990s, Nara is well known for his depictions of children and animals. Nara’s cute, though often menacing, children and animals are so readily associated with popular culture, particularly manga comics and animation, that viewers may neglect to contemplate his evocative imagery in depth.
“Abstract Expressionist New York”, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 St
Drawn entirely from the Museum’s vast holdings, Abstract Expressionist New York underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century’s greatest masterpieces.