Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:33:28 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss David Cohen :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/David+Cohen istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/reading-between-the-linens-cecily-brown/86539/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A visitor to a Cecily Brown exhibition must think of him- or herself as a camera. Contemplating one picture at a time is the default mode. Seeing the show in a single take is the wide-angle view. And focusing upon individual brush marks, smears, and squiggles is the furthest extension of the zoom. In these terms, in the extremes of microcosm and macrocosm, her latest show of 39 canvases in three cavernous halls at Gagosian finds the artist in triumphant mode. It is hard to think of a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-conceptual-provocateur-rirkrit-tiravanija/86074/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Rirkrit Tiravanija is an art-world provocateur whose practice takes the central problem of conceptual art and runs wild with it. Conceptual art can mean different things, but whether seen historically — as an extension of Minimal art in its radical reduction of the art object for the sake of linguistically questioning art's nature — or understood more generally — as art where the material manifestation is strictly subservient to bigger ideas — the aesthetic problem of such art is: What is there... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/frozen-instants-of-failure/86080/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Diana Al-Hadid's menacing, heavily worked, baroque structures take arrested hubris as their theme. In three large sculptures, powerful in impact and ambition alike, a wall installation, and supporting drawings, once-soaring, elaborately engineered towers are rendered as ruins, whether slowly decaying in fragments or caught in a moment of catastrophic meltdown. Her evocations of destruction and decomposition generate rich surfaces as well as unsettling contemplations of the demise of powerful... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/paintings-post-feminist-form-sculptures-matron/85974/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A striking feature of the roster of shows on offer this season in New York's commercial galleries and nonprofit spaces is the strength of sculpture and sculptural installation. First up is a two-person show of sculptural installation at James Cohan Gallery (until October 4), featuring Xu Zhen and Folkert de Jong, whose aesthetic is similarly robust and visceral. Diana Al-Hadid, who is having her debut solo show at Perry Rubenstein (until October 11), has made a Tower of Babel-like structure... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-bordo-the-heady-hedonist/85598/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the title for his 2007 Venice Biennale, critic and curator Robert Storr exhorted the art world to "think with the senses, feel with the mind." One artist who has already staked a claim to what could be called the "concept-sualist" position is Robert Bordo. With his new show at Alexander and Bonin of 14 landscape canvases, the Montreal-born painter demonstrates himself to be more than ever the heady hedonist. He has an incredible touch, seducing the eye with lubricated surfaces as if his... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/bits-and-pieces-brought-together-ashbery-and-naves/85140/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry, in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets such as Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography — arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/trevor-winkfield-the-conceptual-collagist/85141/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Trevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of John Ashbery's collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, uniform, and automobile-like in their finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/locating-propriety-in-the-inappropriate/84405/ Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST There is something appropriate in finding Zach Feuer Gallery open for business in mid-August with a Phoebe Washburn installation, when the rest of Chelsea is a ghost town. Seeing this Dadaistic riff on productivity in a gallery district that feels like the artistic equivalent of the Rust Belt cannot but accent an initial response to it. Almost every door on West 24th Street has notices of apology as galleries prep themselves for the relaunch of the season, after Labor Day. Ms. Washburn's... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/british-modernisms-triple-threat/83812/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Wyndham Lewis was the "triple threat" of British Modernism: He was accomplished — and innovative — as the writer of linguistically dazzling satires such as "The Apes of God" and "Tarr." He was as an abstract artist who led the pioneering Vorticist group just prior to World War I. And, as a bracing exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London shows, he was a portrait artist of the first degree. Whether his subjects were literary lions, patrons, lovers, or himself, he painted... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/hopper-cityscapes-prior-to-the-paint/83325/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST As this gem of an exhibition on the Upper East Side demonstrates, Edward Hopper found himself in etching. For the first 18 years of his career, unable to support himself by painting, Hopper was obliged to work as a commercial illustrator. He worked for various New York advertising agencies, and enjoyed a short stint on the New Masses, the socialist paper whose art editor was his friend and, to some extent, mentor, John Sloan. Printmaking presented itself as a natural corollary to his day job... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/shh-hammershi-is-on-display/82500/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Whenever there is an exhibition of the Symbolist painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, his quietude is invoked. When he was shown at the Guggenheim in New York 10 years ago, partly through the efforts of the late Robert Rosenblum, who helped revive international interest in a master neglected since his untimely death at age 52 in 1916, the show was subtitled "Danish Painter of Solitude and Light." At the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1983, it was "Stillness and Light." And now, at London's... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/smears-scribbles-and-scratches-twombly-at/82044/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London's Tate Modern is a reminder that, above all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, with its extremes of slightness and scatter, informality can border on the infantile. This show, which is curated by the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall, and then to Rome's National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-location-of-the-second-generation/81598/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Only a philistine could think that something as complex and nuanced as artistic success could be explained along the lines of the real estate mantra "location, location, location." And yet, there is no doubt that location plays a key role in the careers of artists who make the canon. Absence from New York City, for instance, was crucially detrimental to the posterity of a would-be practitioner of Abstract Expressionism, which also goes under the name New York School. The Jewish Museum's current... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/phillip-pearlstein-objectifying-the-nude/81183/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost retrospective overview of his career at Betty Cuningham, "Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now," suggests in 13 canvases ranging from 1964-69 and 1988-2008. And yet, for all the pounds of flesh and claustrophobic constructions of actual, lived-in and worked-in space these pictures present, the paintings are... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-erotic-the-political-and-the-personal/80685/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor set off a strange chain reaction of anger and lyricism. She is an artist driven by both sociopolitical protest and ambiguous, personal longings, linking her to Surrealism. Her paintings are at the dual service of Eros and Thanatos, awash equally with alienation and empathy, desire and indignation... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-to-the-future/80264/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST New York will have a "back to the future" feel starting next week, thanks to the opening of the Whitney Museum's eagerly awaited exhibition, "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe." As if to keep company with this extraordinary, off-the-wall design theorist and inventor, two venues in SoHo have shows that celebrate lesser-known, though exemplary, mid-20th-century aesthetic theorists with a penchant for the fusion of art and science. These men, both scions of the Austro-Hungarian empire... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/elizabeth-cooper-and-angela-fraleigh-masters/79812/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes, artists look as if they are having such fun with paint that the sheer hedonism of their facture can be infectious. Such is the case with the painterly splurges, splatterings, and pourings seen in two solo shows by two exuberant artists, who both happen to be women in their 30s. Elizabeth Cooper's eighth solo show in as many years is her second at Thrust Projects on the Lower East Side, while Angela Fraleigh, a Texan and 2003 Yale graduate, is having her New York debut at the P.P.O.W... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/hunt-slonems-birds-of-a-feather-flocking-together/79827/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Marlborough Chelsea's second-floor premises in the new Chelsea Arts Tower, a gallery condominium building on West 25th Street, is an elegant space that cries out for subtle installations. That Hunt Slonem's solo exhibition there packs in 20 canvases of glaringly contrastive colors and sizes hung virtually cheek by jowl seems a strategy for generating a deliberately jarring aesthetic experience. If half these pictures had been left out of the show, it would have been exponentially easier on the... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/catherine-murphy-sneaking-glimpses-of/79339/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Catherine Murphy's first show with Knoedler & Company finds the veteran realist at her most compelling, though — as ever — her work is compellingly odd rather than compellingly beautiful. She is a tough painter to enjoy, but her unflinching, emotionally neutral realism is extraordinary for the level of its attentiveness. She has a fascinated gaze whose focus is both micro- and macroscopic, dealing with both minute details and broad philosophical issues about perception and aesthetic value in... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/milton-resnick-was-an-abex-pioneer/78823/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST A late starter or a painter ahead of his time? An earnest also-ran or a prickly, enigmatic genius? Too sensual or too hermetic? Milton Resnick was a first-generation abstract expressionist fated — in his lifetime, at least — to elude the canon of that defining 20th-century American art movement. And the legacy of this artist, who died in 2004, is still up for grabs, although if any show will persuade waverers of his sumptuous lyricism and high purpose, it is the stunning display of work from... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/hanging-the-group-shows/78654/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST High summer gallery-going in New York is low-key in the sense that few galleries schedule solo exhibitions, but the advent of group shows makes it a season for surprise discoveries. Most galleries take a short break at some point, but through the broiling months, those intrepid enough to brave western Chelsea, the Lower East Side, or West 57th Street will find in the air-conditioned galleries dealers taking a chance with artists they are contemplating for future representation, trying them out... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-to-basics/76849/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST What should be made of the conservatism of artists such as Walton Ford and Neo Rauch, who are subjects of shows of new work in Chelsea right now? The art world that prizes these men's work is a self-consciously cutting-edge milieu that is far removed from political conservatism, and yet these artists' success is thanks in no small measure to bravura displays of skill in traditional idioms, to a fond nostalgia for past worlds that produced such styles and the competence to execute them. Pictures... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-defense-of-painting/76465/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Unbelievably, painting is yet again under assault. Despite strength of activity evident in commercial galleries, art school degree shows, and studios, the medium is held in suspicion thanks to its virtual exclusion from the Whitney Biennial and the inaugural exhibitions of the new New Museum. Once more, oil on canvas is made to feel like a guilty pleasure. There is no better way to savor that sensation than in the enjoyment of "bad" painting. In this strange stylistic phenomenon of conceptually... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/lichtensteins-primary-ladies/76199/ Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 EST One thing is for sure: Roy Lichtenstein was not afraid of red, yellow, and blue. The primary colors burst shamelessly from his canvases upon the skylighted white cube that is the Gagosian Gallery's uptown powerhouse premises. The show gathers 16 paintings and related sculptural works and multiples from the Pop artist's classic early-1960s period of romance cartoon figuration, his "Girls." These Benday-dotted beauties cast their sweet siren smiles at us, or are lost in delectably sad thoughts... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/skipping-through-sculptural-styles/76089/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The sculptural pleasures of Rachel Feinstein's feisty show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery (her third with this dealer) border on the boisterous, the raucous even, but hardly live up to the notoriety that surrounds this artist's name. In magazine profiles, Ms. Feinstein is celebrated as an enfant terrible of the art scene, and critics emphasize her citations of diverse styles. Her new sculptures depict such items as an 18th-century carriage in a droopy state of deconstruction and a pair of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/untraditional-american-traditionalists/75671/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Lois Dodd and Jake Berthot are two painters who respond to landscape within what could be deemed American traditions. Neither would mind being called maverick in terms of individualism or a willingness to buck trends. And each in his or her way could be called conservative, painting rural places in which they live and work, drawing on forms that elicit warm feelings of comfort and familiarity. And yet they look like — indeed are — fundamentally different kinds of artists. Ms. Dodd is the... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/schematic-simplicity-of-wayne-thiebaud/75258/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Wayne Thiebaud — one of the great realist painters of the last half-century — has always kept faith with traditional genres. Although it was exclusive to his early career, his most familiar activity is still life. Mere mention of his name will populate the mind's eye with rows of near-identical cream cakes in correspondingly succulent impasto. Such imagery associated Mr. Thiebaud's name with Pop art, thanks to the gentle irony with which he interpreted edible mass-production. Second on his... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/little-pictures-big-statements/74820/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "As far as I can judge from reproduction, Kitaj finished on a high." So writes Frank Auerbach, who lives in London, in the catalog accompanying the exhibition of final works by his friend and fellow painter, the late R.B. Kitaj. Visitors to the Marlborough Gallery have every reason to concur. Kitaj's "little pictures" from his last years in Los Angeles, to which he retired after 40 years in London, and where he died by his own hand last year, are more than an encapsulation of his art and his... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/painters-painter/74475/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST When Thomas Nozkowski's paintings were first reviewed by The New York Sun in November 2003, this critic wrote: "His tight, awkward, oddball style excites a fanatical following in the New York art world, but there hasn't been a corresponding commercial or institutional take-up as yet." Things have changed. While this painter's painter continues to enjoy near-cult status among fellow practitioners, his international career is now on a rapid ascent. He was included in the Venice Biennale last... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/following-and-breaking-his-own-rules/74127/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST James Siena's sprawling show of mostly new works and some older materials, filling PaceWildenstein's hangar-like 22nd Street premises, is a landmark in the development of this artist. Mr. Siena has been known for highly wrought, invariably intimate, abstract works on paper or panel. His imagery entailed intensely concentrated geometric patterns executed freehand but adhering to strict mathematical rules. His love of rules situated him firmly within a trajectory of modern American art, among... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/alien-resurrection/73714/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The art of Alexander Ross contagious on many levels. Highly prolific, his labor-intensive paintings and drawings fill both the voluminous, museum-like Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea and the SoHo premises of David Nolan Gallery. There is, too, a proliferation of mediums and processes, especially in his works on paper, which now include collage. His imagery is concerned with morphology, with odd cellular structures metastasizing, imparting an ominous sense of alien substances spreading like... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/jasper-johnss-modus-operandi/73567/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Jasper Johns could well claim to be the most successful artist ever. It is not simply the conventional trappings of success he has earned: institutional and commercial take-up from the get-go; sustained interest and astronomical prices paid for his work at auction, and broad historical influence across generations. More impressive than all these is the way he successfully sustains his own artfully disguised intentions. Setting out to be so, he is a perennial enigma. With most artists, you can... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-to-the-future-2008-03-20/73333/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Host a world's fair and chances are you will end up with a cultural icon. It happened to Paris with the entrance arch to its Exposition Universelle of 1889 — now better known as the Eiffel Tower. Similarly, New York's World's Fair of 1964–65 left Queens with its defining symbol, the Unisphere, etched into even broader consciousness after its starring role in the science-fiction comedy "Men in Black" (1997). The Queens Museum of Art, with the Unisphere on its doorstep, has a pair of exhibitions... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/abstraction-adventure/73222/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Maybe it is because of the much-awaited Philip Guston drawing survey at the Morgan Library & Museum this spring, but there seems to be revived interest this season in Abstract Expressionism: A cluster of gallery shows coming up take a fresh look at canonical and fringe members of that movement, with Adolph Gottlieb at PaceWildenstein's uptown gallery (opens May 2), Hans Hofmann at Ameringer & Yohe (April 10), and Conrad Marca-Relli at Washburn Gallery (April 24), which will present an... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/deliciously-distressed/72817/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Paintings are sometimes like femmes fatales. You know they are trouble but you fall for them anyway. John Lees might well approve of this analogy, as he is a devotee of film noir. The one drawing in his first New York solo exhibition in nine years is the 9-foot-wide "Scroll Noir for Ann Savage, 'Vera'" (2002–05), in watercolor, ink, gouache, pencil, Conté crayon, and silver point. This is an assemblage of adjoining pieces of paper, listing dozens of classic and obscure movie titles in a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/jeff-walls-unlovely-world/72426/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Twenty or so men hang around looking at once bored and apprehensive, staring every which way, and disinclined to communicate with one another. A weary woman trundles home to a pitifully downtrodden housing unit populated by despondent men sitting around aimlessly and staring into space. Scruffy children playing war games eye one another menacingly, or play dead with an unsuppressed grimace on their face. A dark, grimy cold storage room is so inhospitable that anyone who had been there has fled... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/whitney-biennial-has-adopted-a-boho-vibe/72339/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST If the Whitney Museum were a bar, the 2008 Biennial would be its happy hour. Social networking is of the essence at this biennial, a fraternal, anarchic gathering. Many of the artists know each other and work on collective, nonstudio-based projects — in addition, sometimes, to making their own objects. But it is not a private drinking club — the public are welcome revelers, too. Anyone can sign up for the 24-hour dance marathon, attend the slumber party, or participate in the choreographed... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/taking-down-disney/72024/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Think Disney and what most likely comes to mind is a cartoon feature with some combination of the following: cuddly, instantly recognizable characters; lush, bright color; quick, ingenious animation, and the realization that countless hours of wizardry went into making each magical moment possible. The work of Luc Tuymans, the Belgian painter, on the other hand, could be defined as the opposite of the above on every count: His canvases are fuzzy, ambiguous, barely scrutable images rendered in... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/abstraction-from-overseas/71596/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Devotees of abstract painting have ample evidence that it thrives in New York these days. Two exhibitions by prominent Europeans not seen here so often demonstrate abstraction is riding high elsewhere, too. The Spaniard Juan Uslé and the Swiss Silvia Bächli are both artists in their early 50s. Mr. Uslé, who has been the subject of museum exhibitions in Málaga, Spain; Ghent, Belgium; Dublin, Ireland, and Madrid, Spain, in recent years, is having his first New York show since 2002. And Ms... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/empty-sparkle/71294/ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Karen Kilimnik is usually starstruck. Now she has her head in the clouds. For an artist who habitually creates elaborate installations featuring an eclectic mix of romantic history paintings and lovingly fey depictions of movie stars and pop singers, all delivered in a knowingly pathetic, illustrative hand, her show of paintings from between 2001 and 2007 is uncharacteristically austere. There is a series of cloud studies from 2001, mostly tondi; some mountain peaks, the most finely wrought of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/soul-revival/71286/ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST What are the chances of the same pop music legend appearing in the works of two unrelated artists showing concurrently in Chelsea galleries? Slim, you might think. And yet it has happened to the self-styled "hardest working man in show business," James Brown. His smiling, singing visage is collaged into a painting by Chris Martin, "Homage James Brown Godfather of Soul" (2001–07), in Mr. Martin's first show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, while the words "James Brown is Dead" appear in a... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/surfeit-of-genius/70872/ Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST William Kentridge seems to have a problem few contemporary artists are even eligible to suffer — a surfeit of genius. The G-word is never to be used lightly, but in relation to the South African draftsman, printmaker, filmmaker, sculptor, opera designer, theater producer, and political activist, resistance to the moniker seems churlish. Besides being a polymath, he enjoys several other attributes of genius. He is inventive, prolific, multifaceted, and highly dexterous. He has a style... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/peer-pressure/70553/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Like Cézanne, Richard Diebenkorn could generate a dynamic whole from a writhing mass of restless revisions. What comes across in one superlative canvas after another at the Grey Art Gallery's display of his breakthrough phase as an abstract expressionist is that research made manifest was his mode for keeping paint surfaces alive. Even where local details seem provisional, the overall effect is crystalline. "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" is the first show to focus exclusively on the fecund 30... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/lonely-planet/70132/ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST There is a pervasive ambivalence in Katy Grannan's portraits: The gaze that returns the viewer's is a mix of coyness and exhibitionism. The images themselves oscillate between similar extremes, building a visceral sense of the present through precision while succumbing to a remoteness that results from theatricality. She has two shows up in New York right now, which, together with a show at San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery, constitute a body of work she calls "The Westerns." This East... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/fusion-by-the-fistful/69721/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Alan Saret was an important figure in the postminimal art movement of the late 1960s who subsequently dropped out of the art scene. He is best known for enigmatic sculptures in chicken wire and similar materials that create dense yet airy forms, and are often suspended. Mr. Saret has been coaxed back into view in recent years: James Cohan Gallery, for example, staged a show of privately held early works in 2004. Now the Drawing Center has organized a show of 31 drawings, dating from between... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/brazen-beauty/69254/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Experimental painter Alberto Burri (1915–95) was one of the seminal figures of 20th-century Italian art, yet his work is rarely seen in New York. In fact, an overview of his career in the downtown gallery of Mitchell-Innes & Nash is, the gallery claims, the first in more than 20 years. It shows a daring master capable of brazen beauty. Burri is famous for the poverty of his means and the richness of his results. He was a pioneer, in the postwar period, of a sensibility for un-arty materials... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/drawn-together/68853/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Painting and photography have always endured a stormy marriage. But — as a fascinating, sumptuous exhibition of one of art history's most intriguing curios, the cliché-verre, or glass print, at Peter Freeman Gallery reminds us — the odd couple enjoyed an idyllic honeymoon. Photography was regarded as both "the handmaiden of science" and an aspiring artistic medium. It also proved an irresistible source for painters in search of ultimate truths in nature. But as much as its early exponents... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/body-language/68660/ Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Ornament is crime, according to the Austrian architectural theorist Adolf Loos. Two culturally prevalent forms of ornamentation that bear out this stricture, arguably, are graffiti and tattoos. But much as they violate the purity, respectively, of buildings and bodies, these ornamental systems have deep roots and cult followings as popular forms of artistic expression. Lina Bertucci traveled to tattoo conventions around the world, making portraits of women between the ages of 19 and 59 (mostly... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/out-with-a-bang-2007-12-20/68415/ Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST This exhibition of late paintings of Jules Olitski, who died earlier this year at age 84, is subtitled "A Celebration" — an apt name for such festive and colorful paintings. But these works equally bring to mind volcanic eruptions or intergalactic collisions. Worked with impasto so intense that the encrusted surfaces appear to belong as much to bas relief as to paint on canvas, they emulate geological formation both in physical fact and suggested scenes. Even if the world ends with a whimper... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-in-brief-2007-12-13/67985/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST BHARTI KHER Jack Shainman Gallery 'Unity in Diversity" was a familiar slogan from the early days of India's independence, and serves well for the debut New York exhibition of the ascendant British-born young Indian artist, Bharti Kher. Her show includes animal sculptures; what look, at first, like abstract paintings, and a vaguely surrealist found assemblage. There are marked differences of handling and sensibility from one group to the next, but common threads. "Solarum Series" (2007), a...