Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:05:07 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Gallery-Going :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/galleries istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/hirst-dealer-no-mountain-of-unsold-works/84849/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Damien Hirst's London dealer, White Cube, has denied it has a "mountain" of unsold works before a Sotheby's sale that previews today in the Hamptons and New Delhi. White Cube, which has galleries in east London, said in an e-mailed statement that its stock level for Mr. Hirst's work was normal. The Art Newspaper said on Saturday that the dealer held more than 200 paintings and sculptures by Mr. Hirst, valued at more than 100 million pounds, or $184.5 million, citing White Cube documents. "The... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/acquavella-to-show-wynns-damaged-picasso/86739/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A $139 million Picasso painting damaged by billionaire owner Stephen Wynn when he somehow poked his elbow through it will be publicly shown for the first time since the 2006 mishap. The patched-up "Le Rêve," or "The Dream," owned by the Las Vegas casino operator, is part of a Picasso exhibit opening Oct. 15 at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Other lenders to "Picasso's Marie-Therese" include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and collector Steven Cohen, founder of hedge... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/those-who-can-teach/86545/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'A teacher affects eternity," Henry Adams once said. "He can never tell where his influence stops." It might not stop at all if his influence has substance and his students are great enough. Francis M. Naumann's inaugural exhibition — in new, expanded quarters in Midtown — is a testament to Man Ray's influence on modern photography. It pays special tribute to his formative influence on his most distinguished studio assistant, Berenice Abbott, who, in turn, taught Naomi Savage at the New School... 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... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/director-half-of-gagosians-sales-are-to-russians/86527/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Buyers from Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union account for almost 50% of total global sales at Gagosian Gallery, the art world's global leader in exhibition space, one of its directors said. Four years ago, it had almost no Russian buyers. Their numbers rose rapidly over the past 18 months, Victoria Gelfand, director of Gagosian's London gallery, said during an interview in Moscow. On September 17, Gagosian opened a show of 70 artworks in a former chocolate factory near the... 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... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-origins-of-abstraction-order-and-intuition/86068/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Who painted the first abstraction? Some believe it was Kandinsky, and others Arthur Dove, or the Chicago artist Manierre Dawson. In any event, Americans have had a hand in abstract painting since its very beginnings around 1910. Toward mid-century, a second generation of abstractionists thrived, even with the ascendancy of Social Realism and Regionalism. The American Abstract Artists group was founded in 1936, and works by John Ferren, Ilya Bolotowsky, and other Americans were exhibited at the... 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... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/small-but-sumptuous-the-watercolors-of-romare/85589/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Color is indispensable for realizing pictorial space in all its variety; it is key to Romare Bearden's watercolors. "City Lights" assembles 18 radiant Manhattan views, almost all painted between 1979 and 1980. Many are from a series of cityscapes commissioned for the opening credits of John Cassavetes's 1980 film "Gloria." Born in Charlotte, N.C., Bearden (1911-88) grew up in Harlem at the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance. His parents were prominent figures among Harlem's creative aristocracy... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-auspicious-launch-for-new-yorks-haunch/85587/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The inaugural exhibition at the New York branch of Haunch of Venison — the contemporary art gallery with spaces in London, Zürich, and Berlin — is notable on several accounts. "Abstract Expressionism — A World Elsewhere" is an ambitious show, representing one of the most comprehensive surveys of New York School painting and sculpture in recent decades. The gallery's location is itself unusual, occupying the top two floors of a 49th Street high-rise office building. And, as wary dealers have... 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... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/gagosian-to-host-second-moscow-exhibit/84848/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST New York's Larry Gagosian — the art dealer with the most commercial gallery space worldwide — is planning a show next month of more than 100 contemporary works by almost 50 artists in a former chocolate factory near Moscow's Kremlin. Titled "For What You Are About to Receive," the show is Gagosian's second in the Russian capital, and runs from September 18 through October 25. The gallery said it sold "about two-thirds" of the 40 artworks it brought to a luxury mall in a Moscow suburb for 10... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/charles-mattons-magical-imagination/84833/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Charles Matton is a conceptual artist with the soul of a charm-struck miniaturist. He draws from the early European tradition of handmade cabinet houses and the trompe-l'oeil illusions inside 17th-century Dutch perspective boxes. His interiors, real and imagined, elude contemporary categories. Magical, detailed maquettes suggest a child's love of all things Lilliputian, precise, and make-believe. Born in 1933, Mr. Matton exhibited in his native Paris in the early 1960s before turning to... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/political-art-love-it-or-leave-it/84765/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Political art is a polymorphous genre. An instrument of both independent protest and totalitarian control, it embraces everything between gentle social commentary and strident advocacy. The sense of outrage that motivated much art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s can be traced to Goya's "Disasters of War," but today's artists have long since discarded Goya's pictorial acumen for a variety of confrontational tactics: Barbara Kruger's tabloid-style admonitions ("Your Body is a Battleground"), for... NELL GLUCKMAN http://www.nysun.com/arts/galleries-awaken-from-summer-slumber/84497/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For galleries in New York, fall begins on September 4. With the end of the summer comes new exhibitions that must be feted, and on the first Thursday after Labor Day, Chelsea will turn into an art-frenzied block party, with the area between 19th and 25th streets and Ninth and Tenth avenues flooded with gallery-goers. This September offers shows that address contemporary trends, including environmentally oriented exhibitions, visually disorienting installations, works that incorporate music and... 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... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/billionaire-chandler-establishes-showcase/84190/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Billionaire investor Richard Chandler is helping his mother break into Manhattan's clubby art scene by spending up to $4 million on a 14,000-square-foot gallery that will sell her paintings. Mr. Chandler, 49, considers the two-story gallery, set to open this fall, an investment, not a gift. "I have provided a loan," he said in an e-mail. "I anticipate being repaid in the fullness of time." Self-taught artist Ana Tzarev, 72, signed a 10-year lease for the space at 24 W. 57th St., with an... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/painting-pushes-its-limits/83816/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Painting: Now and Forever, Part II," a group show occupying both the Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries, refers back to a survey of contemporary painting (Part I) held a decade ago at Marks and the now defunct Pat Hearn Gallery. At the time, when painting was considerably more embattled and the market for it much smaller, the show's title rang defiant; today, it sounds ironic. Part II explores a medium — or approach, since the paint is often absent here — in a state of productive... KATE TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/three-friends-start-a-gallery-with-a-little-help/83433/ Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Most college students looking for a summer job in New York and interested in learning about the art market might try to get an internship at a gallery. But Genevieve Hudson-Price, Sabrina Blaichman, and Caroline Copley had a better idea: Instead of interning at a gallery, they decided to start one. Their gallery, called 7Eleven Gallery, in reference both to the address (711 Washington St.) and, Ms. Copley said, to "our society's consumerism," opened June 26 and will close in the fall. Their... KATE TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-serendipitous-art-space/83434/ Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The display in the window at 259-275 Tenth Ave. is intriguing but vexing: There is no clear way to enter the space and no indication of what's behind the glass, beyond a small card noting the artist's name (Denise Kupferschmidt), the title of the work, "This and That: My Grandmother's Cabinet, or Mary Jean in Maputo," and the date the installation made its debut. The window is curated by a former director of the Zach Feuer Gallery, Lumi Tan. The building's owner, Douglas Oliver, originally... WILLIAM MEYERS http://www.nysun.com/arts/summer-shows-asako-narahashi-the-good-life/83319/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Yossi Milo's current exhibition, "Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water," is an appropriately refreshing summertime show. As the title implies, a large part of each of the nine C-prints on display is taken up by water. Ms. Narahashi (b. 1959 in Tokyo) uses a commonplace Nikonos 35 mm waterproof camera and a set procedure. She floats chest deep in the waters of inland lakes or off the coast of Japan with the camera pointed toward the shore and shoots without using the... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-twins-of-the-rec-room-os-gemeos/83323/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Os Gemeos — "the twins," in Portuguese — is the nom de plume of the twin Brazilian artists Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. 1974) of São Paulo, Brazil. Their work borrows the idioms of outsider and folk art in a style heavily influenced by the one-time graffiti artist Barry McGee. And though, like Mr. McGee, they might once have been artists of the street, their gallery-sized installation at Deitch Projects, "Too Far Too Close," suggests they have since become artists of the rec room. The show... 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... NELL GLUCKMAN http://www.nysun.com/arts/summer-gallery-shows-attract-a-different-crowd/83178/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For galleries in New York, the summer season is notoriously slow. Major clients relocate to their second homes outside the city, leaving their collections stagnant for a few months while Chelsea swells with tourists. Though group shows keep the gallery walls filled with current work, dealers also take the opportunity to flex their curatorial muscle and experiment with creative marketing techniques. David Findlay Jr. Fine Art hosts its annual Summerset show, featuring the work of 27 of the... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/totally-rad-the-irony-and-agony-of-the-80s-art/82920/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In midsummer, when many galleries wrap up the season with group shows, Paul Kasmin Gallery is adding a welcome twist to an old routine. "Totally Rad" combines works by several gallery artists with significant additional paintings, sculptures, and photographs to offer a plangent sampling of New York art from the "go-go 80s." The decade of the 1980s saw the resurgence of painting and conceptual art under hyphenated labels ("Neo-Expressionism," "Neo-Conceptualism," "Neo-Geo") that reflected the... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-feast-of-loathings-tetsumi-kudo/82923/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Ogden Nash never saw the sculpture of Tetsumi Kudo (1935-90), never read his pensées. Even so, he would have known how to approach this installation at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Nash appreciated the justice of malice toward some: "Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, / But hating, my boy, is an art." Organized and curated by collector Joshua Mack, this exhibition is a feast of loathings. There is the unlovely work itself plus the artist's antirational epistemology that earns it the tag... ALIX FINKELSTEIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/crossing-the-line-a-year-in-drawing/82922/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Any artist engaged in graphic expression must contend with the creative dissonance between the controlling hand and the unruly line. "A Year in Drawing," now on view at Galerie Lelong, gives us a generous sampling of recent works on paper by 16 Contemporary artists. It is fascinating to view and compare their diverging approaches to the conundrums of drawing; while some artists willingly share creative authority with the line, others insist on absolute control. And with what is surely a knowing... STEPHEN MAINE http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-delicious-paradox/82503/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST A hidden gem of a summer group show now on view at Gary Snyder's recently inaugurated Project Space offers the delicious paradox of a tightly curated exhibition attesting to the fecund sprawl of contemporary abstract painting. The show's title implies that no single modifier of "abstraction" will suffice to characterize a currently dominant trend; reductive, gestural, and hard-edge proclivities are represented by accomplished mid-career painters. As always, more interesting than genre... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/devotional-objects-retablos-at-paul-thiebaud/82504/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the most reliable rewards of folk art is its honesty: the straightforward methods and materials of its making, and the directness of its purpose. The small devotional paintings known as retablos are especially poignant for their frank demonstrations of faith. Produced by the thousands by anonymous 19th-century Mexican artists, these images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and countless saints were placed in home altars and left at pilgrimage sites. Today they intrigue particularly for their... KATE TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-persecuted-artists-call-for-help/82376/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST More than any other work from the 1930s, Max Beckmann's "Self-Portrait With Horn" encapsulates the position of the persecuted and exiled artist in fascist-dominated Europe. Executed in 1938, after Beckmann had fled Germany for Amsterdam, the painting shows Beckmann, wearing a bohemian robe and a grim expression, holding a horn. His pose suggests that he has just blown the horn — a call for help, a rallying cry for humanists around the world — and that he is waiting, perhaps in vain, for the... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-pontormo-taken-back-from-salander-is-sold/81828/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST London old master dealer Clovis Whitfield said he has sold a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Pontormo, priced at $16 million. Pontormo (1494-1556) was one of the leading exponents of the so-called "Mannerist" style in early 16th-century Florence. The artist's 19-inch-high oil-on-panel portrait of the banker's daughter Francesca Capponi as St. Mary Magdalene is one of 20 old master paintings being exhibited by Mr. Whitfield at Partridge Fine Arts in New Bond Street. The Pontormo was... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/two-new-york-galleries-go-to-london/81829/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Two big-name galleries will be opening spaces in London in October, in time for the week of the Frieze Art Fair. Yvon Lambert, who began dealing contemporary artworks in Paris in 1966, now has branches at 550 W. 21st St. and the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, Paris, and will be inaugurating a 7,000-square-foot showroom in Hoxton Square on October 16, the gallery said in an e-mailed statement. His new space, occupying the ground floor and mezzanine levels of a former municipal building, will be in the... 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... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/jess-an-act-of-surrender-a-leap-of-faith/81566/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST What exactly Burgess Collins, known to the world simply as Jess, thought he was up to in his "Translations" series — those faithful appropriations of black-and-white images, mostly from the 19th century, that he transformed into thickly impastoed, full-color paintings — is difficult to say. The result, in any case, is a form of beauty as weird and memorable as any American artist has achieved in the past half-century. To appreciate these works, several of which are now on view at Tibor de Nagy... ERIC GELBER http://www.nysun.com/arts/taking-liberties-with-a-loose-genre/81600/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Unlike the film industry, which typically uses the trappings of science fiction to dress up adventure or horror narratives, visual artists, such as the ones included in "The Future As Disruption," now on view at the Kitchen, are influenced by the headier themes of the genre. The themes that have popped up over and over again in science fiction novels since the emergence of the "New Wave" in the 1960s, which included writers such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, revolve around such things as... 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... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/cut-and-paste-then-and-now/81192/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Shortly before World War I, the Cubists began incorporating bits of their physical environment — printed images, text, and patterns — into their work to heighten its spatial paradoxes. So was born the medium of collage. Today, the tenets of Cubism hold no special sway for most artists, but the medium of collage thrives. Always intriguing for its invocations of materiality and process, collage also lends itself especially well to the discordant, composite narratives of much contemporary art. It... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/retrospective-been-there-sold-that/81190/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Retrospective," a group show at Gagosian's 21st Street gallery, is like a summer concert festival with some very promising, big-name acts. Its organizing principle, the ways a major artist looks back and reassesses his — unfortunately, in this case, only his — career, also strikes a promising note. Too bad, then, that so many of these guys showed up out of shape, like Vegas has-beens listlessly running through medleys of their greatest hits. For the opening act, Gagosian wheels out the... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/americas-birth-papers-at-the-nypl/81185/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Americans began celebrating the Fourth of July before the nation had achieved independence, with the first celebration occurring in 1777, in Philadelphia. Tomorrow we celebrate the 232nd anniversary of our nation's birth. And once again, the New York Public Library has placed on display its copy in Thomas Jefferson's hand of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote out this fair copy in the week following July 4, 1776, for submission to the Continental Congress. Of the few copies he... 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... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/testing-the-urban-topography/80275/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Jane Jacobs called the city the "immense laboratory of trial and error." It is a site for experimentation and exploration for painters no less than city planners, architects, and designers. "Urban Landscapes," the summer group exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, showcases urban topography by eight painters. It is one of the season's most satisfying shows and one of the gallery's best ensembles. Rackstraw Downes is represented by two finely wrought studies that date back a decade or more and... ALEX TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-sopranos-of-another-sort/80099/ Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It reads like the setup to a New Yorker cartoon: eight of the opera world's leading sopranos squeezed into one not especially large room. Where, exactly, will they find room to fit their egos? Such is the concentration of drama and coloratura in "The Sopranos," an exhibition of portraits of eight opera singers, including such celebrated figures as Deborah Voigt, Renée Fleming, and Angela Gheorghiu, all of whom are scheduled to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in the upcoming 2008-09 season... LIZZIE SIMON http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-baribeau-applauded-at-allan-stone/79941/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It had been four years since the painter Robert Baribeau had a show in Manhattan. And before Wednesday night's opening at the Allan Stone Gallery, before the guests arrived and the gallery was sparsely populated with interns, Mr. Baribeau confessed that his anxiety around openings had only mounted in three decades of showing work. "Maybe I need some art Viagra," he said, his red-rimmed glasses still bearing a speck of paint. Mr. Baribeau need not have worried. The supportive crowd of friends... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/paolo-stacciolis-pride-of-place/80004/ Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:49:09 EST It is no surprise that the work of Florentine ceramicist and sculptor Paolo Staccioli, now on view at the Italian Cultural Institute, should be admired in China and Japan. Both countries share with Italy a high regard for the culture of ceramics. China's ancient cultural center, Xi'an City, has just honored Mr. Staccioli with an exhibit in the antiquities museum that holds the renowned "Terracotta Army," buried with the first emperor of China two millennia ago. Born in 1943, the artist began... 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... STEPHEN MAINE http://www.nysun.com/arts/fertile-ground-in-the-photo/79814/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The tradition of the hand-altered photograph is nearly as old as the medium of photography itself. Taking various methods of hand-tinting into account, the photographic print has long served as a "canvas," a ready-made support for pictorial intervention via paint, inks, collage, and much else. Derek Boshier and Berend Strik, very different artists, have both found fertile ground in this hybrid of techniques. Mr. Boshier is a first-generation Pop artist, having studied alongside David Hockney...