Kitaoji Rosanjin’s graceful pottery; a dual show of Martin Wong and Aaron Gilbert paintings; the group exhibition “Latinx Abstract”; and Hou Zichao’s pixelized landscapes.
‘Tradition Redefined: Rosanjin and His Rivals’
Through May 5. Joan B. Mirviss Ltd., 39 East 78th Street, Manhattan. 212 799-4021; mirviss.com.
The polymathic Kitaoji Rosanjin (1893-1959) — widely known as Rosanjin — was arguably the greatest Japanese potter of the 20th century. He was also a painter, engraver, lacquer artist and a master of calligraphy, as well as an antiques dealer and restaurateur who served his guests on tableware he made himself. In 1954, he traveled to the United States for an exhibition of over 200 works at the Museum of Modern Art (which has seven in its collection) and then on to Europe where he met Picasso and Chagall. In 1955, he was selected in Japan to be a Living National Treasure for his mastery of Oribe ware. But he refused it, miffed that his former apprentice Arakawa Toyozo had already been so designated, for Shino ceramics.
“Tradition Redefined: Rosanjin and his Rivals,” is thus an aptly titled exhibition. It presents some 30 works by the irascible artist and another 14 by six eminent potters with whom he maintained often prickly friendships. Together they helped bring the old styles of Japanese pottery into the 20th century, researching and experimenting with clays and glazes while ferreting out the ruins of ancient kiln sites for shards. Arakawa — the first to replicate such late 16th-century, Momoyama period styles as Oribe and Shino — is represented here by a classic Shino-type tea bowl, straight-sided, thick-walled, with a rounded lip and touches of iron oxide beneath a white glaze. Rosanjin’s version is comparatively anemic in form but flamboyant with the orange tones.
This show is an extremely rewarding kind of free-for-all, with Rosanjin being especially adept at conflating aspects of different styles. He evokes traditional blue and white porcelains, but with a large vase sparsely scrawled with akimbo calligraphy. He decorates an Oribe scalloped platter, glazed a traditional deep green, with a subtly loose grid of incised lines seemingly set aflutter by wind or waves. Similar combed lines randomly crisscross the shoulders of two vessels that resemble large storage jars. There is something postmodern about the liberties Rosanjin took, and, going by this show, he may not have been alone. ROBERTA SMITH
Martin Wong/Aaron Gilbert
Through May 1. PPOW, 392 Broadway, Manhattan. 212 647-1044; ppowgallery.com.
Barely two decades after his untimely death in 1999, Martin Wong has taken on the aura of an old master. Pairing him with Aaron Gilbert, a figurative artist of the next generation, would seem appropriate even without an unhappy coincidence. Gilbert painted all but two of these canvases during the current pandemic, and Wong produced his paintings while witnessing the scourge of AIDS, which eventually took his life.
Stylistically, they are very different. Wong was formally more adventurous, exploring repetitions (the grid work of discolored brick, the hand symbols of American Sign Language) and the two-dimensional picture plane (the frontal flatness of brick walls, steel gates, cell doors), in ways that manifested his familiarity with abstraction, minimalism and Pattern and Decoration.
Gilbert’s monumental figures are more straightforward. They owe much to Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera. In one impressive portrait, “Goddess Walks Among Us Now,” a woman with Indigenous Mexican features is wheeling a shopping cart near a grouping of botanica candles. A couple of fallen calla lilies, which were a favorite Rivera subject, feel like Gilbert’s tip of the hat to an esteemed forebear.
What Wong and Gilbert share is a passionate sympathy for people who are underprivileged and oppressed. Wong repeatedly portrayed jailed prisoners, drawn to them politically and homoerotically. In one startlingly effective painting, “Prison Bunk Beds,” two brown-skinned, identically clad men are lying on metal beds without mattresses. Seen from above, the space is suffocatingly compressed, and the recurring holes of the plumbing drains and perforated bed frames stare like ghostly eyes.
Gilbert’s concern for the incarcerated is subtler. “Song to the Siren,” for instance, portrays a modern-day Saint Christopher wading across a river with a boy on his shoulders. Two transparent ovals with spectral eyes frame his head, and behind the beautifully painted water, with its ripples of aquamarine and ocher, looms the brick wall of what appears to be a prison. ARTHUR LUBOW
‘Latinx Abstract’
Through May 2. BRIC, 647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn. bricartsmedia.org.
The ten artists in “Latinx Abstract” have two things in common: As per the exhibition’s title, all are Latinx and make abstract art. Aesthetically, however, there are few similarities among their works. Each artist has a distinct approach and style — and that variety is key to the show’s success.
The oldest two in the cross-generational group, Fanny Sanín and Freddy Rodríguez, create geometric paintings — a significant type of Latin American abstraction with roots in Modernism. But whereas canonically appointed work in this vein is often staid and spare, Sanín and Rodríguez offer dynamic compositions that pulse with color and form (and in Rodríguez’s case, a host of symbolic meanings).
From that sense of motion, it’s a short step to giving up on geometry altogether. The shapes in Candida Alvarez’s intimate “Vision” paintings are blobby and curvy — suggesting a softness that appears in the textile works of Vargas-Suarez Universal and Sarah Zapata. Their pieces embrace imperfection and the fact of being handmade, as does Mary Valverde’s multimedia installation “Huaca” (2021), which suggests counting as a sacred ritual. Valverde’s use of repetition and references to Indigenous cultures resonate with Glendalys Medina’s wall constructions, which are intricate, vibrational totems.
If there’s an overarching theme to “Latinx Abstract,” it may be the connection between art-making and ritual. But more important is the feeling of freedom that pervades the exhibition. These artists are inspired by the possibilities of abstraction and their Latin American heritages, not bound by the expectations and institutional baggage that in the United States come with them. JILLIAN STEINHAUER
Hou Zichao
Through May 1. Downs & Ross, 96 Bowery, 2nd Floor, Manhattan. 646-741-9138; downsross.com.
It’s a truism that painters change the way we see the world. So do computers. But while artists of all sorts have been wrestling with digital technology for decades now — thinking about how the internet alters our thinking, wondering what it can do for them technically — I haven’t seen many attend to its purely visual effects like Hou Zichao.
A young Chinese painter who trained in London and lives in Beijing, Hou fills the landscapes of “Everlasting” at Downs & Ross, his debut American exhibition, with snowy slopes and mountainous chasms. The skies above them, whether apocalyptic orange or subtly unreal blue, are flat and unvarying, like a Photoshop effect, though still dense enough to hold their own in a painting.
The occasional figurative elements — a pair of rats with red ears, a misshapen tree — bring to mind digital technology, too, because they look like they were drawn with a computer mouse. But that’s just a distraction from Hou’s real insight, which is to have found, with marbleized splashes of paint and ragged edges, the ambiguous spot where pixelized reality meets abstract expressionist painting.
In “Mountain hotel, yelling & shouting, the world in color,” icy peaks cross a pale blue sky between rearing black and spotty brown rocks. Scores of red, green and white blotches fall over the scene like a beaded curtain. It isn’t quite the real world, but it’s not a screen, either. It’s that moment of cognitive dissonance when you glance up at nature over the edge of your phone. WILL HEINRICH
"right" - Google News
April 22, 2021 at 12:26AM
https://ift.tt/3n6qqQZ
4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now - The New York Times
"right" - Google News
https://ift.tt/32Okh02
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now - The New York Times"
Post a Comment