August For the Intrepid

Art — the inverse of life — hibernates in summer. Unlike in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” August, not April, is the cruelest month. Few collectors pound the city’s sunbaked sidewalks, where you are more likely to find mad dogs and art critics hungry for something new. With the latter in mind, an artist more interested in the press list than the price list could do worse than to schedule his or her show in this otherwise inhospitable period.Everything will change after Labor Day, when drought will be followed by deluge. But there are intrepid galleries that make August bearable for art lovers.It helps if a gallery eschews the profit principle, which is the case with the CUE Art Foundation in the heart of Chelsea, on West 25th Street. It usually shows two solo exhibits of overlooked talents, each selected and introduced by guest curators — artists and writers often better known than the people they choose. On August 1, the CUE opens a retrospective filling all its space with work by Hungarian-born sculptor Joseph Petrovics, best known for day jobs as employees of galleries and studios: “Nightshift II: The Artists’ Assistants Group Show,” following a similar show at White Box in 2005, opens August 14.The Prince Street Gallery, also run along altruistic lines, is a long-established artist cooperative located on the same street as CUE. It opens a solo show for painter and printmaker Sean Patrick Gallagher on August 3. The show will include circular canvases like “Mandala for Below Heaven” (2006).Exit Art, near the Javits Center, also marks an anniversary with “Sultana’s Dream,” a survey of 10 years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. This group show, the better known members of which include Samira Abbassy, Emily Jacir, andShahzia Sikander, opens August 4. And Envoy Gallery on the Lower East Side’s Chrystie Street opens a show of the veteran photographer of the hippie scene, Frenchman Alain Dister, whose show, titled “Elegy for the Summer of Love,” might be considered a coda to the Whitney Museum’s ongoing “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” (through October 14).This month’s big museum opening is the Guggenheim’s retrospective of first-generation abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, on August 17. While his work is not celebrated with the top tier of fellow painters Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, or Willem de Kooning, he was during the 1940s among the pioneers of large canvases delving into archetypal symbols, and went on to develop a luminous mature style. The exhibition of 40 canvases originated at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, and will enjoy a shamefully brief run in New York, closing September 25.The summer staple in the commercial galleries is the thematic group show. These shows provide an opportunity to testoutnew talents and enjoybrief access to artists not affiliated with a gallery, as well as examples of members of their stable. Sometimes these are guest-curated, as is Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s “Agitation and Repose,” organized by the husband-and-wife team Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk, reviewed in these pages last week (until August 17), or “In the Belly of the Whale,” an elegant selection put together by Simon Callery (former partner of Marianne Boesky) at Tracy Williams, Ltd., which closes August 3.Other shows are pulled together by the invisible hand of the gallery (if not the market), but very few such shows these days go under generic titles such as “a summer medley.” A sprawling group show of 30 artists at David Zwirner, for instance, takes its title from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “A point in space is a place for an argument” (until August 10). It includes minimalists and post-Minimalists Fred Sandback, Al Taylor, and Eva Hesse; assemblage and found object artists Paul Thek, Cathy Wilkes, and Jason Rhoades; outsider-ish painters Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess; and contemporary sculptors Ilsa Genzken and Vincent Fecteau. The show maintains a visual rigor while remaining as open-ended as its cryptic philosophical title.One intriguing group show comes complete with a manifesto. Artist Keith Mayerson has curated “NeoIntegrity” at Derek Eller Gallery (through August 24). The virtue celebrated in its title is not in short supply, as the show includes around 180 participating artists, from Jessica Abel to Jenny Zito, by way of many familiar figures in the New York scene. The manifesto does not make any claims as outlandish as those of surrealism or futurism in the last century, but settles for catchalls such as point number two: “Art is aesthetic, and whether ugly, beautiful, or sublime, it should be interesting to look at and/or think about.” This begs the question of what art would be like if it was not aesthetic, but with this many artists to look at and a manifesto to read, who is going to argue in August?

August For the Intrepid

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