Winter 2015 Artview NYC Newsletter | Artview NYC by Lacy Davisson | Art Advisory, Collection, and Curatorial Services in New York City

By Lauren Klenow and Lacy Davisson Doyle

Here is a preview of the outstanding exhibitions on view in New York City this winter:

Best of NYC Museum Exhibitions

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World

Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd Street, New York

December 14, 2014 – April 5, 2015

Forever Now presents the work of 17 artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms.

The exhibition includes works by Richard Aldrich, Joe Bradley, Kerstin Brätsch, Matt Connors, Michaela Eichwald, Nicole Eisenman, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Dianna Molzan, Oscar Murillo, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Josh Smith, Mary Weatherford, and Michael Williams.

Chris Ofili: Night and Day

The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York

October 29, 2014 – January 25, 2015

“Chris Ofili: Night and Day” spans the artist’s influential career, encompassing his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Over the past two decades, Ofili’s practice has become identified with vibrant and meticulously executed artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration. The artist’s diverse oeuvre has taken imagery and inspiration from such disparate, history-spanning sources as the Bible, hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and the works of William Blake. As the title of the exhibition suggests, Ofili’s practice has undergone constant changes, moving from boldly expressive to deeply introspective across an experimental and prodigious body of work. The exhibition features over thirty of Ofili’s major paintings, a vast quantity of drawings, and a selection of sculptures from over the course of his career.

Helena Rubinstein: Beauty is Power

The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue, New York

October 31, 2014 – March 22, 2015

This is the first exhibition to explore the ideas, innovations, and influence of the legendary cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein (1872 – 1965). Madame (as she was universally known) helped break down the status quo of taste by blurring boundaries between commerce, art, fashion, beauty, and design. Through 200 objects Beauty Is Power reveals how Rubinstein’s unique style and pioneering approaches to business challenged conservative taste and heralded a modern notion of beauty, democratized and accessible to all. The exhibition reunites selections from Rubinstein’s famed art collection, dispersed at auction in 1966, featuring works by Pablo Picasso, Elie Nadelman, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse, among others.

Downtown Galleries

Robert Kushner: baroque

DC Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York

January 8 – February 14, 2015

Gallery Talk with the Artist: Thursday, January 29, 6:30 PM

In this exhibition of new paintings, Kushner fuses plant forms with references to the global history of ornament to extend his exploration of the conceptual and political implications of the decorative. The scale of the paintings on canvas situates us in an immersive landscape where flora takes on the presence of sculpture. Kushner achieved the animate quality of individual plants, including quince, phlox, and Queen Ann’s lace, by working from life in Waldoboro, Maine. Memories of the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens, near his childhood home in California, inspired the renditions of cacti and aloe. Kushner’s inimitable use of color freely ranges across metallics, pastels, and near-neons. Textiles, Japanese screens, and modern painting inform these compositions and the play with space.

Mamma Andersson: Behind the Curtain

David Zwirner, 519 & 525 West 19th Street, New York

January 8 – February 14, 2015

Andersson’s work often draws inspiration from archival photographs, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors. Her evocative use of pictorial space and her juxtapositions of thick paint and textured washes have a unique and timeless quality, which is further enhanced by a conspicuous absence of contemporary signifiers. Typically composed of thin layers of acrylic and oil paint on panel board, her paintings employ a broad range of techniques, deftly shifting between stark graphic lines to loose washes and thickly rendered brushstrokes. With their richly detailed and complex surfaces, the artist’s works stand as testaments to her deep engagement with the painterly process itself.

Warren Isensee: New Paintings and Drawings

Danese/Corey, 511 West 22nd Street, New York

January 9 – February 7, 2015

Warren Isensee’s new paintings and drawings continue to offer luminous, emotionally and optically charged color within the structure of geometric abstraction. These new works further demonstrate Isensee’s ongoing commitment to color and reductivist abstraction. The artist state “I have always worked to capture the qualities of both color and light that have throughout history activated the surface of painting. I am exploring how oil on canvas can tap into the rich resonance of luminosity or “glow”…. The goal for each painting is to capture light and contain it in a kind of perpetual motion field that, when married to color, gently pulsates, recedes and advances.”

Jiri Georg Dokoupil: New Paintings

Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street

New Paintings from January 8 – February 7, 2015

Comprised of large-scale works on canvas from the artist’s Soap Bubble Paintings series, this exhibition demonstrates Dokoupil’s continuously varied experiments with non-traditional media and chemical processes. As a founding member of the Cologne-based Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”), a group of young artists in the late 1970s, he rejected the reductive, austere, and unapproachable nature of Minimal and Conceptual Art during this time in favor of a more animated style and saturated palette. The first Soap Bubble Paintings were developed in the early 1990s by creating alchemical compounds fusing pigment and soap in various proportions. Seeking to reinvent traditional painting techniques, Dokoupil’s pictures are aesthetically bold and dynamic yet conceptually rigorous.

Ori Gersht On Reflection

CRG Gallery, 548 West 22nd St, New York

January 29 – March 14, 2015

Ori Gersht’s recent works examine how painting and photography represents reality. Gersht interacts with Jan Brueghel the Elder’s floral triptych from 1606, now in Vienna’s Kunst Historisches Museum. For Gersht, Brueghel’s painting and the city of Vienna embrace a certain sense of exuberant decadence and imperialism. A metaphor he connects to our own time. The mirror is a main element of this new body of work. By its nature, it raises the question of what is real and what is perceived as real.

Upper East Side Galleries

Richard Diebenkorn: The Healdsburg Years

Van Doren Waxter, 23 East 73rd Street

November 5, 2014 – January 16, 2015

Organized in collaboration with The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, The Healdsburg Years, is the first solo exhibition devoted exclusively to works made during the final years of Diebenkorn’s life. The body of work Diebenkorn produced in his Healdsburg studio is intimately scaled. Diebenkorn approached each work and phase of his career with renewed curiosity, which is the constant thread in his dynamic creative process. Diebenkorn saw his creations as open-ended, relishing the unexpected that he embraced because it always propelled his work in new directions.

Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957-1970

Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, New York

November 7, 2014 – January 23, 2015

This exhibition brings together some of the more rare works of the artist’s oeuvre. The combination of prints, drawings and sculptures in this exhibition draws attention to something not often mentioned in the extensive literature on the artist: the relationship between Mr. Johns’s two-dimensional works and his three-dimensional ones. Showing a tendency to pick a subject and then explore all its possibilities in different artistic media.