A Conversation With the Consultants: Leslie Gerber-Seid,
Lacy Davisson Doyle and Emily Santangelo
In Conversation with Sharon Louden
Artview NYC Fall Newsletter
Here is a preview of the outstanding exhibitions on view in New York City this fall:
Best of NYC Museum Exhibitions
Picasso Sculpture
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd Street, New York
September 14 – February 4, 2015
Over the course of his long career, Picasso devoted himself to sculpture wholeheartedly, if episodically, using both traditional and unconventional materials and techniques. Unlike painting, in which he was formally trained and through which he made his living, sculpture occupied a uniquely personal and experimental status for Picasso. The first museum survey of Picasso’s sculpture in nearly 50 years includes assemblages made from nontraditional materials like plywood, as well as photographs and works on paper that reveal his groundbreaking approach to sculpting in three dimensions.
Frank Stella: A Retrospective
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1109 5th Avenue, New York
October 30, 2015 – February 17, 2016
This survey will be the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date, showcasing his prolific output from the mid-1950s to the present through approximately 120 works, including paintings, reliefs, maquettes, sculptures, and drawings. Co-organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Whitney, this exhibition will feature Stella’s best-known works alongside rarely seen examples drawn from collections around the world.
Kongo: Power and Majesty
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, New York
September 18 – January 3
Central Africa’s Kongo civilization is responsible for one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. This international loan exhibition explores the region’s history and culture through 146 of the most inspired creations of Kongo masters from the late fifteenth through the early twentieth century.
The earliest of these creations were diplomatic missives sent by Kongo sovereigns to their European counterparts during the Age of Exploration; they took the form of delicately carved ivories and finely woven raffia cloths embellished with abstract geometric patterns. Admired as marvels of human ingenuity, such Kongo works were preserved in princely European Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, alongside other precious and exotic creations from across the globe.
Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting
The Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York
October 9, 2015 – January 6, 2016
Burlap sacks, melted plastics and “hunchback” canvases are surrogates for bodies injured in World War II in Burri’s work. This is his first major survey in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted. Burri’s work both demolished and reconfigured the Western pictorial tradition, while reconceptualizing modernist collage. Using unconventional materials, he moved beyond the painted surfaces and mark making of American Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel. Burri’s unprecedented approaches to manipulating humble substances—and his abject picture-objects—also profoundly influenced Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, and Process art.
Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933
Neue Galerie, 1048 5th Ave, New York
October 1, 2014 – January 4, 2015
An exhibition devoted to Berlin during the prolific Weimar period, this show explores the city using a multi-media approach, revealing this complex period through painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, photography, architecture, film, and fashion. Approximately 300 works will be on display, organized into five thematic groupings: The Birth of the Republic; A New Utopia; The “Neue Frau,” or New Woman; The Crisis of Modernity; and Into the Abyss. The exhibition draws from various perspectives in order to demonstrate the dramatic changes that occurred at this time. Berlin saw explosive growth and transformation, as many were attracted to the burgeoning metropolis. Between 1871 and 1919, the population of the city quadrupled, and Berlin became the political center of Germany, as well as the turbulent crossroads of the modern age. This was reflected in the work of artists, critics, directors, and writers of the time.Downtown Galleries
Wolfgang Tillmans
David Zwirner, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York
January 8 – February 14, 2015
Over one hundred recent works installed by the artist, spanning a comprehensive selection of the major themes and processes in his oeuvre. The show also presents the United States debut of Instrument, a new, split-framed video. Concurrently on view through November 1 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is Book for Architects, a two-screen video installation of still pictures by the artist.
Nigel Cooke: Black Mimosa
Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York
September 8 – October 24, 2015
British artist Nigel Cooke will make his Pace debut this fall. His new works feature enigmatic characters in evocative hallucinatory landscapes. Representational standards combust with near-abstract and gestural treatments of landscape and foliage. Cooke’s paintings are philosophical propositions, articulating influences from the history of both abstract and figurative painting. Yet they are ultimately intuitive works, inspired by personal memories and life experiences, filtered through subjective aesthetic decisions.
Ron Nagel
Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, New York
September 11 – Octover 24, 2015
Including thirty-five sculptures made between 1991 and 2015, as well as a selection of drawings, this is the largest exhibition of Nagle’s work ever organized in New York. Nagle’s recent sculptures rarely measure larger than four by six inches. Their inventive shapes, vibrant colors, and contrasting textures make it clear why he cites not only Giorgio Morandi as an inspiration but also Philip Guston, Japanese Momoyama ceramics, and “Krazy Kat” cartoonist George Herriman. Produced using a variety of techniques, including slip-casting and hand-molding, in traditional and non-traditional materials, including glazed ceramic, Sculp-metal, polyurethane, and epoxy, Nagle’s works are displayed here in specially made niches and plate-glass vitrines designed in close collaboration with the artist.
Upper East Side Galleries
Franz West Möbelskulpturen/Furniture Works
Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Ave, New York
September 11 – November 7, 2015
During his lifetime, West reimagined the viewing of art as an interactive rather than passive experience. The sensuous and highly distinctive art that he produced over the course of forty years transformed galleries and public spaces into engaging aesthetic environments. Rejecting the notion that sculpture should be seen but not touched, in the mid-1970s he created the first Passstücke/Adaptives, “ergonomically inclined” objects made from plaster, wire, and other materials.
Riopelle | Miró: Color
Aquavelle Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, New York
October 1 – December 11, 2015
An exhibition of oil paintings by Jean Paul Riopelle and and painted bronze sculptures by Joan Miró, this exhibition highlights how the artists’ lives and works intersected through professional relationships, overlapping literary and artistic groups, personal experiences, and intellectual inquiry. Riopelle and Miró worked with the same dealers on both sides of the Atlantic, traveled in the same circles, and even shared a studio in the South of France. Their ideas and approaches to art differed considerably, but as contemporaries, colleagues and friends, it is compelling to view their work side by side in conversation.
Yashua Klos – As Below. So Above
Tilton Gallery, 8 east 76th Street, New York
September 10 – October 17, 2015
Growing up on the South Side of ChicagoYashua Klos saw first hand the empty lots with piles of cinder blocks and rubble. Often the central image in his work is a head in a quasicubist array of urban leftovers. He collages together multiple scraps of paper that have been printed on with woodblock. These segments, often joined at angles, give the work this cubist effect. Attached flat against the wall or to a paper support, Klos’s images give the illusion of reaching out into the viewer’s space, becoming part of the architecture of the room around them.