CATHERINE OPIE: AMERICAN CITIES
Gladstone Gallery

When she began her most recent series, “American Cities,” photographer Catherine Opie (b. 1961) hoped the work might exist as documentation 700 years from now when somebody comes across the photographs and they are able to put together some notion of civilization through the city and the structures that existed. I am really interested in the idea of an archeologist being able to figure out how we lived through found artifacts and what was constructed.” I don’t know that she succeeds as a pure documentarian, but as a photographic artist, Ms Opie is one of the most exciting practitioners working today. Widely admired for her gritty color portraits and semi-rural landscapes, also in color, she here takes the characteristically unexpected step of exhibiting black-and-white cityscapes. Formally beautiful, the images — taken in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York, and Chicago — almost all appear in horizontal formats and were shot over the course of a decade or more. In none are people visible. The parking lots of her forlorn, L.A.–area shopping plazas remain empty. So too is the strikingly composed picture of a covered highway in Chicago. Technical mastery abounds: the glow and flicker of lights in buildings shot at night cause otherwise static images to vibrate; dramatic compositions enliven the massiveness of skyscrapers, while central, unassuming compositions foreground signage. Like a virtuoso conductor, she summons geometry and space — circular façades, brute rectangles, receding distances, and the flat picture plane — into a visual symphony. The exceptions to the horizontal rule here are three vertical studies, in color, of the water and sky of Lake Michigan, which remind one of her earlier surfing images. Often one feels the power of anger, though not necessarily its literal manifestation, pulsing just beneath the surface of her photographs. No less heated, this body of work is emotionally slow-burning, its movements calculated, its significant pleasures cumulative.

— Daniel Kunitz

Until October 14 (515 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-206-9300).

JOHN WALKER: THE SEAL POINT SERIES
Knoedler and Company

Those familiar with the heroically scaled, expressive paintings of Englishborn painter John Walker may be surprised by the tenderness and humility found in his current show of 66 shockingly small Maine landscapes. They are each painted on 7-by-5-inch vintage bingo cards.

The diminutive scale initially suggest the works are meant to be notational, perhaps sketches for larger works. But within their tiny format we find completely realized paintings. The limitations imposed by this scale serve the artist well, resulting in a surprising freshness in each piece.

The singular fixed vantage point establishes a preset structure for the artist to hang his paint on in order to respond to the particular nuances of the shifting moods, weather, and light of this rough tidal zone. His trademark painterly techniques often obscure the motif and, in this case, it requires time to decode the impasto brush marks, dots, blobs, and glazes. Yet as the eye adjusts, orchestrated marks become alert observations of landscape.

The printed numbers and lines of the bingo card are an annoying, purposeful foil in the work, where, for example, an occasional fragment of print combines with a passage of paint to become a tree limb or a horizon line within the landscape. At times, a colorful riot of feverish marks and shapes can almost be misconstrued as an outright abstraction. At other times, rank and file strokes yield nearly straightforward landscapes that evoke traces of Courbet, Whistler, Marin, and de Kooning.

Mr. Walker’s clever choice of Bingo cards as a support could suggest that the activity of making, viewing, and selling art may also be a form of play. However, in his hands, the “high play” which occurs on these surfaces is more serious and complex than a mere parlor game. These 66 works may be read as direct, imaginative, and heartfelt messages by an artist who has invented a language in paint.

— Jennifer Riley

Until October 28 (19 E. 70th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-794-0550).

WALTER NEIDERMAYR
Robert Miller Gallery

One could say the Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr (b.1952) documents the interaction of people and nature, or the impact of certain man-made environments on people, but such a statements would unfairly demote his use of white. Although white does not dominate every image-suite in his at times stunning exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery, its few absences make a retinal dent. Whatever his subject here — skiers on a mountainside, tourists on a glacier, a hospital room, a highway overpass — Mr. Niedermayr casts a painterly eye upon it. His notably composed view, that sense of the photographer ordering rather that merely capturing a moment, is emphasized, strongly, by his use of multiple panels to make up the works here. Certainly other photographers, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall, to give two instances, gesture at painting through the size of their individual prints; Mr. Niedermayr bulks up his pictures through a sly mosaic principle. I say sly because his image suites can usually be read as individual images in series or as pieces making up a single larger image. In the diptych “Rumfolgen” (2004), for example, the receding rectangle of a white prison cell, its rear wall interrupted by a narrow, blue tinted stretch of horizontal brickwork seen through a window, is paired with what appears to be the first cell’s mirror image. The accumulation of 15 panels, in “Graue Wand IV” (2001), creates a panoramic view of snow left by a departing glacier. Any one of the panels can function as a fully legible image. Yet it the use of white, as a canvas or background for his daubs of color — the red jackets of a ski class, the patterns of gray and green trees on a mountain, the bits of clothing and furniture popping out from a white emergency room — that reinforces the sense that this is photography in the guise of painting. In the show, however, Mr. Niedermayr’s talents are in no way disguised.

— D.K.

Until October 7 (524 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-366-4774).