This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Beau Dick’s alluring masks, Al Freeman’s jokey book and album covers and Meghan Brady’s radiant new paintings from Maine.
Beau Dick
Through May 11. Andrew Kreps Gallery, 22 Cortlandt Alley & 394 Broadway, Manhattan; 212-741-8849, andrewkreps.com.
Not many people have the balance of Beau Dick (1955-2017). An activist and artist, he was a devotee of the wealth-redistributing feast known as the potlatch, which he called “the best form of resistance we have” against Western capitalism. He made masks for ceremonial dances within his Kwakwaka’wakw community in Pacific Northwest Canada and restored the practice, long discouraged by Western anthropologists, of burning them after use.
But he also sent his masks out into the gallery system, and the 23 examples now at Andrew Kreps, made between 1979 and 2016, are one of the most beautiful exhibits I’ve ever seen. As is often the case with ritual implements, Dick’s masks bring with them a sense of life, a vividness and allure, that conventional art works, made only to be bought and sold, can hardly compete with.
But they’re equally stunning even if you pretend they’re just sculptures. They stand for traditional characters, like the wild woman of the woods, but the artist’s inspired carving makes them as supple, as particular and as expressive as living actors. Without being flashy about it, the masks’ sharp lines and bright acrylic colors also illustrate Dick’s awareness of all the other currents of 20th-century art.
In a mask titled “Wind,” a white-painted face purses bright red lips, and its cheeks sink in with perfect anatomical fidelity. The eyeholes, one inch deep, are outlined in black, but their white inner surfaces, coming in and out of view as you move from side to side for a closer look, seem to be blinking.
Al Freeman
Through May 6. Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 212-980-0700, venusovermanhattan.com.
Through May 24. 56 Henry, 56 Henry Street, Manhattan; 646-858-0800, 56henry.nyc
Al Freeman makes satirical, Claes Oldenburg-style sculptures of beer cans, electrical cords and other lowly objects. She finds absurd photos on the internet to juxtapose with canonical paintings that happen to be similar. But I didn’t realize until this double show of her drawings of book and album covers that she’s basically a cartoonist.
A good drawing lets you see the world not just through someone else’s eyes, but through her mind. And Freeman’s mind, it turns out, is a homespun and jokey but curiously earnest place, where the well-known artists and writers of her parents’ generation nestle together in comfortable free-for-all. Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Joan Didion’s “White Album,” Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” — Freeman’s drawings of their covers are all the same size, their edges are all a little wonky, their spines are rendered with comic-strip Cubism as stripes on the left. Sometimes Freeman’s choice of a title — e.g., Danielle Steel’s “Daddy,” or a tattered blue Bible — seems to mean something special. Sometimes it offers the chance for her deft, charming line to “cover” someone else’s art, like Andy Warhol’s flowers, the blood vessels on the “Gray’s Anatomy” textbook, or Quentin Blake’s unforgettable illustration of the Twits.
But sometimes, as with a Japanese edition of Paul Simon’s single “You Can Call Me Al,” the only obvious significance of the subject is its very mundane specificity. It’s a grain of human experience that artist and viewer, by means of the drawing, can share.
Meghan Brady
Through May 11. Mrs., 60-40 56th Drive, Maspeth, Queens; 347-841-6149, mrsgallery.com.
The prolific painter Meghan Brady’s latest body of work fills two galleries, one in Maspeth, Queens, and one at Dunes Gallery in Portland, Maine, a couple of hours from her home base in Camden. You may not get to both (I only made it to Maspeth), but in either you’ll find striking, paper-cut-like patterns rendered in oil over acrylic in an alluring range of scales, from nearly pocket-size to over six feet tall.
Brady’s distinctive, milky palette is bright but nonconfrontational, so that her canvases have the mellow splendor of a beloved 1960s concert poster that’s been hanging in the sun. (They also remind me of the printmaker Corita Kent’s winsome hand with blocks of bold color.) The action is very much in the surface, which means that even a small amount of visible painterly texture — or just placing one layer of shapes like a stencil over another — produces a tremendous increase in the sense of depth.
In “Wrong Number,” a small canvas on which two tulips emerge on either side of a small lavender sun, a thin layer of white sitting over a block of teal looks formidably complex. “Nothing Fixed” is full size, but feels more compact; circles, flowers and stripes, peering out through a butterfly-shaped grille of muddy, grade-school orange, feel eager but just out of reach. Sometimes the rough, intuitive quality of Brady’s paintings can come across as a little hasty and undercooked — but when they work, they’re wonderful.
Last Chance
Claude Viallat
Through April 27. Templon, 293 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-922-3745, templon.com.
Although for decades people have talked about the “internationalization” of the art world, movements and heroes from other countries have had little traction in the United States. Claude Viallat, 88, is such a hero, from the French movement called Supports/Surfaces. (It’s usually pronounced in French: suePOOR-sirFASS.)
Viallat’s career survey, “Made in Nîmes,” at Templon should make him a minor hero over here — if not a Batman, then at least a Robin.
The movement, born in 1970, abandoned the calculated compositions of most abstraction, instead dwelling on the “support” (normally, some kind of textile) and the “surface” that it became once painted. Viallat’s take on the movement has involved sticking with a single shape — a soft-edged lozenge that looks like a half-melted Fig Newton — that could be repeated across different “supports,” from unstretched old tarps to fancy fashion fabrics, thus yielding ever-new surfaces.
If that sounds like the purely formal move of a traditional abstractionist, or even like a mostly decorative conceit, at Templon the results are surprisingly meaningful. As Viallat’s lozenge traverses the different surfaces, it comes off as something almost scary: a schizophrenic’s idée fixe, or even a spreading infection. Or there can be an almost militaristic feel to the motif’s march, in perfect lock step, across what might be a fancy tablecloth or a doyenne’s shawl, with no respect for people or property.
But mostly, in 2024, it reminds me of the terrifying march of a meme across our digital culture. BLAKE GOPNIK
Rudolf Stingel
Through April 27. Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-744-2313, gagosisan.com.
Devise your own theories about what went wrong with Rudolf Stingel’s disappointing show at uptown Gagosian. Mine speculate that Larry Gagosian, despite having some of the largest exhibition galleries in Manhattan at his disposal, gave one of his best artists too little space for his latest carpet-as-painting piece, or whether Stingel put too much in it, with oppressive results. These are not mutually exclusive conditions.
The installation looks great in photographs shot through the doorway: The gallery’s floor is covered with thick carpet in wide stripes of electric orange and blue. Stingel has made these near-legendary carpet works for more than 30 years, placing expanses of ready-made carpet on the wall or the floor. Color-based delirium began in 1991: Stingel simply covered Daniel Newburg’s gallery in SoHo with a brilliant orange carpet. Standing in it was like receiving new eyes; its expansiveness intimated the earth’s curve.
At Gagosian, Stingel has reduced the doorway to the gallery, leaving the beams on the hallway side of this construction bare (no drywall) and sanded smooth. Entering resembles stepping through the stretcher of a painting, as if signaling a more traditional approach to the medium. The plushy orange-blue carpet doesn’t have enough acreage to work its magic. The room’s walls seem to press inward, and the space further contracts thanks to three dark realist paintings signaling dissolution with images of an empty bottle of beer or assorted high-end bottled liquors. The paintings downgrade the carpet piece to décor, which may be why it does not appear on the checklist as an artwork in its own right. ROBERTA SMITH
Pam Glick
Through April 26. Stephen Friedman Gallery, 54 Franklin Street, Manhattan; 212-991-9099, stephenfriedman.com.
Born in 1956, Pam Glick exhibited only intermittently during the last decade while strengthening her improvisational approach to her art. She paints with a kind of freehand cursive that moves in many cultural directions: modernist, Indigenous, decorative.
In “Bark,” Glick’s solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman, she makes her paintings in three layers. First, she covers her canvases with a few, or more, blocks of bright color. These are then overlaid with a scaffolding, in white, of loosely parallel lines, either vertical or horizontal. Between these tracks, she adds more complicated ones — also in white — that extend in repeating loops, zigs, waves, saw tooths or Möbius bands, extending a quietly bristling white network backed by color.
At first, obsessive doodling may come to mind. But Glick’s recurring motifs quickly accrue into patterns, proto-writing and even symbols. There’s very little in these surfaces that doesn’t conjure reality: embroidered textiles and pieced quilts, rows of arches, forests, trees, ancient counting systems, figuring or record keeping. Occasionally the patterns break for a small rectangle containing a scribbly motif, often a radiant sun or symbols reminiscent of a coat of arms or an amulet.
Again, with close looking, Glick’s colors also reveal ambiguities. Several paintings that seem to be nearly all black reveal themselves to be amalgams of black, dark blues, browns and purples. In the brightest paintings, she has organized bars of color into concentric squares reminiscent of Frank Stella’s 1962 stripe painting “Jasper’s Dilemma.” But her relaxed working method has more to do with female painters like Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, Joan Snyder or Harriet Korman, who began softening the Minimalist grid in the early 1970s. Glick continues this process but in the more sustained work of maturity. ROBERTA SMITH
Paa Joe
Through April 27. Superhouse, 120 Walker Street, 6R, Manhattan; superhouse.us.
A cheerful mortuary feeling runs through the Ghanaian master craftsman Paa Joe’s exhibition of fantastical coffins. These figurative pieces are closer to sculpture than burial vessel, even though he’s been committing them to the earth for over 60 years. Carved from wood and painted with enamel, they update ancient traditions of funerary art into idiosyncratically honest, if reductive, portraits of the deceased — disproportionately sized vegetables or wildlife alluding to their trade, social status, or consumerist fetish. (Imagine an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus shaped like a Mercedes-Benz). They are equal parts reverence and exuberance, sacred and profane.
Here, Joe and his studio, run by his son, Jacob Tetteh-Ashong, speak in the visual shorthand of New York City caricature: bagel-and-schmear, yellow cab, pizza box. Others are more nuanced homages: an Hermès Birkin handbag stands in for the city’s scarcity-luxury complex; an oversized cigarette, perhaps, the resurgent affectation of the downtown scene. Scale is elastic, often to disorienting effect. The Guggenheim Museum and Statue of Liberty are compressed into cartoon abbreviations, a rat and hot dog are inflated to horrific proportions. Most are smaller than body-size. Following attention from Western collectors in the 1980s, Joe began making tabletop versions more palatable for home display, sacrificing their morbid thrust for Pop whimsy.
In a gallery context, the coffins straddle the gap between art object and craft, sometimes uneasily. The absurd, kitsch delight of an eight-foot-tall replica of a Heinz ketchup bottle stiffens when the lid is pried open to reveal its silk-lined cavity, filling the room with the reminder of your mortality. Still, it’s hard to think of anything more appropriate than a gleaming taxi to ferry a New Yorker into the next life. MAX LAKIN
Luigi Zuccheri
Through April 27. Karma, 188 East Second Street., Manhattan; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.
Monstrous figs line a country road, a fruit basket fills the town square, red primrose shades the yard. Luigi Zuccheri, born in 1904 to Italian aristocrats, began as a conventional, even retrograde modernist, assembling still lifes of fish and farm implements and studying ex-voto painting. But two world wars took their toll. Starting in 1950 he depicted a pastoral Italy distorted by hierarchical scale: Size conveys relative significance, not reality.
In Byzantine altarpieces, the saints are bigger than the parishioners and Jesus is bigger still. In Zuccheri’s egg tempera paintings, flora and fauna loom in the foreground while human figures skitter through the middle distance. One river scene features a pair of nuzzling ducks twice as tall as the hiker on the opposite bank. A painting of a pond reveals the dramatic irony of a gargantuan crab.
Ocher and olive, soil and spoiled cream, filtered through yellowing varnish, churn on these warped panels. Unlike the crisp sensationalism visions of the canonical Surrealists, Zuccheri’s inventions have a muddy matter-of-factness, as if nothing could be more normal than an elephantine otter.
In the second room, several smaller works share a basic composition: a wayfarer front and center surrounded by dog-size moths and grasshoppers. The brusque traveler goes about his business, almost an afterthought, except he’s a constant. He’s “you,” like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer overlooking the sea: You feel the bigness of the turtles and wildflowers, and your own relative impermanence. The animals receive doting strokes, while the men are dashed off. TRAVIS DIEHL
More to See
Richmond Barthé
Through May 31. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-247-0082, MichaelRosenfeld.com.
Richmond Barthé, the great African American sculptor, gets kudos for his realism, but that’s faint praise that damns him: In the 1930s, when his career took off, there were hundreds of artists who had as fine a technique; there are still lots in Times Square, sculpting tourists’ faces in clay.
Looking at the 16 busts and figures in the Barthé survey at Rosenfeld — it’s curated by the British artist Isaac Julien, who has a stunning video in the Whitney Biennial — I realized that it’s best to ignore technique and to think of them as three-dimensional photographs, or as much as you possibly could before the age of 3-D scanners. The sculptures look forward to our technology, not backward at traditional realism.
The best of Barthés’s figures make his Black sitters as directly available as possible to our eyes, the way a photo seems to. There’s no interfering dose of modernist style, which was imbued with stereotypes about Blackness and “primitive” African art that invoked ideas of the “savage” and the “primeval,” or, calling on an opposite set of clichés, of the “Edenic” and “authentic.” Those were applied to African Americans in Barthé’s era, forcing them into cultural pigeonholes.
He gives his subjects more room to breathe.
“African Woman,” from 1935, shows someone whose hairdo may distance her from 1930s America, but she’s not exotic or ancestral. She’s another person of today who happens to come from far away.
The male head in “The Negro Looks Ahead” enacts its title by just being there and looking out onto the world.
Three portraits of Black boys are just three children waiting to grow up, into a world they still imagine might treat them fairly. BLAKE GOPNIK
Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design
Through July 7. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org.
My favorite clock of all time is a video: A camera looks down onto two skinny mounds of garbage, maybe 20 and 15 feet long, meeting at one end like the hour and minute hands on a watchface; for the 12 hours of the video, we see two men with brooms sweeping these “hands” into ever new positions, at a pace that keeps time.
The piece is by the Dutch designer Maarten Baas, and it’s among the 80 works in “Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design,” a group show now in MoMA’s street-level gallery, which has free admission.
The “materials” of today’s most compelling design turn out to be ideas, even ethics, not the chrome or bent wood that MoMA’s title would once have invoked. This show’s ethical ideas center on the environment and how we might manage not to abuse it.
Baas’s “Sweeper’s Clock,” is perfectly functional — could I view it on an Apple Watch? — but it also works as a meditation on the Sisyphean, 24/7 task of dealing with the trash we generate.
All-black dishes by Kosuke Araki look very like the minimalist “black basalt” china designed by Josiah Wedgwood way back in 1768 (it’s some of the oldest “modernism” claimed by MoMA) except that Araki’s versions are made with carbonized food waste.
Food not at all wasted, but consumed — by cattle — goes into making Adhi Nugraha’s lamps and speakers, as explained by the title of the series they’re from: “Cow Dung.” BLAKE GOPNIK
Carole Gibbons
Through May 4. White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, Manhattan; 212-924-4212, whitecolumns.org.
As other writers have noted, the Scottish painter Carole Gibbons has an extraordinary gift for color. The dozen still lifes and one self-portrait in her imposing, and belated, American debut (she is 88) at White Columns favor complex earth tones offset by searing hot pink and turquoise. These unlikely combinations are bolstered by an awkward way with form, tables that tilt and vases whose upper lips float away.
What photographs don’t capture so well is the imposing internal scale of Gibbons’s compositions, which makes most of the paintings here larger-than-life still lifes. Everything about them projects forward and gives the show a startling jolt in person. Gibbons’s influences include Gauguin, Bonnard and Picasso. (Note the pink Picassoid gaping compote in “Still Life, Pink Bowl and Fruit” (from around 1996-98). But it’s also possible to see these works as filtering the domesticity of the School of Paris painting through Abstract Expressionism’s often raw boldness.
While Gibbons applies her heated pastels in relatively flat and thick layers, elsewhere she often varies color and brushwork, creating forms that feel light, even hollow. We see through the artist’s right shoulder in “Self-Portrait With Muse” while her face is another kind of hollow: an empty-eyed mask not unlike the visage in Matisse’s “Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg” (1914, Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Another jolt is simply Gibbons’s obscurity. Her work has not been shown much outside of Scotland. It could have easily been included in the Royal Academy’s “The New Spirit in Painting” show in 1981, which signaled the return of various sorts of figurative painting to the mainstream. But worry not, Gibbon’s art will find its place in history. ROBERTA SMITH
Christopher Wool
Through July 31. 101 Greenwich Street (entrance on Rector Street), Manhattan; seestoprun.com.
The dilapidated 19th-floor office space hosting Christopher Wool’s recent sculptures and paintings could not be more simpatico with them. In its state of abandoned tear-down, the venue offers melodious visual rhymes: electrical cords dangling from the ceiling ape Wool’s snarls of found-wire sculpture; crumbling plaster mirrors the attitudinal blotches of his oils and inks. Scrawls of crude graffiti or quickly penciled notes left by workmen emulate the tendril-like lines dragged through Wool’s globular masses of spray paint. The space is a horseshoe-shaped echo of Wool’s work — raw, agitated — and the restless elegance he wrenches from a feeling of decay.
Wool said he started to think about how environment affects the experience of looking at art when he began splitting his time between New York and Marfa, in West Texas. Photographic series he made there, like “Westtexaspsychosculpture,” depict forlorn whorls of fencing-wire debris that look like uncanny mimics of Wool’s own writhing scribbles, and which inspired scaled-up versions cast in bronze. (The Marfa landscape is fertile ground for New York artists. Rauschenberg made his scrap metal assemblages after witnessing the oil-ruined landscape of 1980s Texas, what he called “souvenirs without nostalgia,” a designation that’s appropriate here, too.)
Place has always seeped into Wool’s work. His photographs of the grime and trash-strewn streets of the Lower East Side in the 1990s — compiled as “East Broadway Breakdown” — aren’t included here, but “Incident on 9th Street” (1997), of his own burned-out studio, are. The chaos of those scenes repeat here, the wraparound floor plan and endless windows letting the city permeate the work, just as it did in their making. MAX LAKIN
Marian Zazeela
Through May 11. Artists Space, 11 Cortland Alley, Manhattan; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.
Marian Zazeela died on March 28 at age 83. A central figure of the New York avant-garde since the 1960s, Zazeela worked with light, paint and sound, often in collaboration with her husband, the minimalist composer La Monte Young. By coincidence (or resonance), a show at Artists Space called “Dream Lines” provides a rare concentrated view of her delicate and deep abstract calligraphy.
Moving clockwise around the gallery, you can see her technique grow. In pieces from 1962 and 1963, blocks of flared squiggles recall the holy pictorial lettering of Islam, ornamental strokes molded into bold shapes and replete with magnetic detail. The early drawings have the casual flair of studies. Pencil sketches underpin the compositions. One example, a rectangular congregation of serpentine blots, is inked on a paper towel.
By the late 1960s (one imagines, with devotional practice), Zazeela’s marks are so saturated and clean that they don’t feel drawn so much as placed. The lines curl into dense molars and concise arabesques, like visual mantras, repeated to form airy mandalas. The most seductive pieces include designs in colored ink; one square constellation of ruffled lines reminiscent of a Gothic chapel’s floor plan steps from indigo to yellow. In another, rings of unerring green curls accent a hot pink page.
In 1963, Zazeela and Young moved into a TriBeCa apartment two blocks from Artists Space. On the third floor of their building is a 1993 iteration of their “Dream House,” a public installation rigged with lavender light and a deep, droning raga — a total calligraphy. TRAVIS DIEHL
Candace Hill-Montgomery
Through May 4. Blank Forms, 468 Grand Avenue, Brooklyn; (347) 916-0833, blankforms.org.
Candace Hill-Montgomery’s remarkable résumé includes everything from runway modeling to babysitting Count Basie’s daughter while she was growing up in Queens. She exhibited at Artists Space in 1979 and created installations devoted to Black activists like Fred Hampton and to cuts in federal assistance. However, she’s been absent from the New York gallery scene since the early 1980s, and her current show of textiles made between 2016 and 2023 at Blank Forms offers a strong reintroduction.
A majority of the works in “Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar” are small weavings created on a handmade loom. Like jazz musicians improvising, Hill-Montgomery goes way off the grid of the loom, piecing together different sections and attaching non-textile elements. One work is dedicated to “the Carters” (that is, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Jay-Z and family) and has foam earplugs dangling from its threads. Another has a 3D-printed chain, while a third has a skirt of little pendant weavings that echo the patterns on afghans. Other works are dedicated to Kanye West, Richard III and a secret trip to Afghanistan that Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California took in 2019.
From the famous Bauhaus, where women who wanted to paint were sent to the weaving workshop, to the Black female artists in Alabama making Gee’s Bend quilts, fiber arts have proven to be a powerful vehicle for some of the most canny and talented artists in the last century. Hill-Montgomery’s weavings add another entry to this field. MARTHA SCHWENDENER
See the March gallery shows here.
