Irving Penn’s notion of photographism; Martha Diamond’s spectacular cityscapes; and the sculptor Fawn Krieger’s “experiments in resistance.”
Irving Penn
Through Feb. 13. Pace, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212 421-3292; pacegallery.com.
“Irving Penn: Photographism,” a thematically organized show of two dozen photographs, illuminates the distillation of Penn’s forceful, pared-down style. The show’s opaque title is taken from an uncharacteristically flat-footed neologism that was coined by this supremely elegant photographer. Penn, who died in 2009, was a connoisseur of both color and form. Rather than looking chronologically for a questionable evolution (this precocious artist knew very early on what he was doing), the show is arranged in groupings to juxtapose photographs that strike variations on forms or hues.
Penn went further than his Pop artist contemporaries, who harnessed the techniques of fashion illustration or billboard painting to make works that were exhibited in galleries. He never abandoned his commercial clients, continuing to serve advertising agencies and Vogue, while he also photographed nudes, portraits and still lifes for gallery display. The same pictures might appear in both contexts. And unlike his chief rival, Richard Avedon, he seemed — despite his frequent complaints about magazine photo reproduction — to be comfortable and undefensive as he straddled the two worlds.
From the start, he had a flair for graphic design. “Fish Made of Fish, New York,” which he constructed in 1939 by arranging innumerable whitebait into a finny form, is as clean and clear as a woodcut print. But in his youth, he had other strings to his bow. The seductively gorgeous “Girl Behind Bottle” (1949), a study of refracted silhouettes, is as subtly gradated as a conté crayon drawing by Seurat.
By the ’50s, he hit his stride and would maintain it for half a century. In exquisite prints, both in black-and-white and color, which he produced through innovative, painstaking procedures, Penn portrayed his subjects with a cold and controlling eye. The shadows behind the stems of two ginkgo leaves might have been drawn in ink, the beads of water on two lily buds are razor-sharp. There was no fuzzy sentiment. When he depicted a mottled pear, an overripe cheese and a black ant — a Vanitas still life of the sort that 17th-century Dutch painters employed to allude to the transience of life — he drained the tableau of mystery and converted its components into post-expiration-date commodities.
ARTHUR LUBOW
Martha Diamond
Through Feb. 17. Magenta Plains, 94 Allen Street, Manhattan; 917-388-2464; magentaplains.com.
The building in Martha Diamond’s 1983 painting “Orange Light,” an anonymous hulk near the Bowery studio she’s occupied since 1969, is soot gray and simplified halfway to abstraction. Silhouetted against a dense orange sky, it looks like an accidental vortex of ash in some supernatural forge. It’s made of nothing but straight lines and angles, but the brush strokes themselves are too slippery to lie even. And though no bodies or faces are visible, it feels inhabited all the same. In its self-contained grandeur and eerie harmony, the piece evokes a Mondrian windmill.
Along with “Orange Light” and three other spectacular cityscapes the size of skyscraper windows, “Martha Diamond: 1980-1989” includes two striking large still lifes and 22 tiny Masonite studies. The studies are surprisingly substantial, exhibiting a range of textures, compositional possibilities and colors that get sheared away in the headier large paintings. It’s interesting, too, to compare first drafts to two of the final cityscapes. The small version of “Facade 1982” feels less successful than its full-size simply because the colors aren’t quite as dreamy, whereas the miniature “Red Cityscape” matches point for point but, at nine inches high, feels drastically different.
Still, it’s the cityscapes you’ll remember. Red strokes as broad as floorboards roil like crashing ice floes in “Red Cityscape,” while in “Facade 1982,” buoyant yellow lines float against midnight blue.
WILL HEINRICH
Fawn Krieger
Through Feb. 14. Soloway, 348 South 4th Street, Brooklyn; 347-776-1023; soloway.info.
The sculptor Fawn Krieger began conducting what she calls “experiments in resistance” shortly after Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration. Filling clay boxes with a mixture of concrete and epoxy, she slowly pressed in solid clay blocks. Then she let them dry.
At first I was confused by the word “resistance,” which I found in the news release at Krieger’s show “State of Matter” at the artist-run gallery Soloway. I took it to mean that the stiffness of the concrete was a metaphor for political resistance to Trumpism. And if that was the idea, it seemed pretty discouraging, since the concrete doesn’t accomplish much beyond holding the unyielding blocks in place.
Or then again, maybe the whole show, which contains dozens of Krieger’s boxes in an extraordinary range of colors and configurations, is a demonstration of one artist’s strategy for protecting her aesthetic life from the brutal cultural environment of the last four years. This reading, while still severe, would at least be a little more hopeful.
But neither idea really does justice to the show’s sheer visual delight, with its overtones of chocolate samplers and children’s toys and its exuberant reminder that even the narrowest formal premises offer infinite room for movement. Now that we’ve had another presidential inauguration, I recommend simply accepting the delight.
WILL HEINRICH
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