The Greats in the Galleries

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The New York Sun

In singling out the most memorable show of 2006, a critic would ideally want to associate himself with a new arrival on the scene, an artist working innovatively in a style that defines the times.

But my vote has to go to Sir William Nicholson, who is not merely a dead, white, European male, but was a Knight of the British Empire, to boot.

Part of the appeal of this show, at Paul Kasmin, the descendant of the artist, was its unlikely setting — what appears, deceptively at first, as polite, intimate, drawing-room art in a raw, sleek, former industrial space. But on closer inspection, he is a true maverick, highly innovative within a language that was its own, unique mix of modernist and old masterly.

The show — a noncommercial venture, made up entirely of works on loan from private collectors — was organized by Sanford Schwartz. A painting borrowed from David Bowie, “Andalucian Homestead” (1935), looks up a vertiginously steep incline, presenting the houses as a shocking white crown to the curved brow of a hill composed of loose, fat, swift strokes and dabs of green and brown. The scale is completely thrown by a minuscule donkey being led at the foot of the hill, making us question where on earth the painter can be.

Alex Katz was the subject, in May and June, of a survey of his work from the 1960s in a new PaceWildenstein space on West 22nd Street. The show charted his transition from an intimate style to cool portraits of flat color and daringly impersonal scale that somehow retained warmth and individuality.

In March and April, the same venue hosted Tara Donovan’s extraordinary sculptural installation made entirely of common plastic cups arranged in a vast grid of stacks of varying height. Covering an area of 50 feet by 60 feet, this untitled work formed an undulating terrain of whiteness, with varying degrees of light and reflectivity.

In terms of sculpture, 2006 belonged to David Smith. Marking the centenary of his birth were a Guggenheim retrospective and many offshoot-Gallery in March and April, was of museum quality. It looked at the figural aspect of this radically abstract artist, at his roots in a Surrealist notion of the personage. The show ranged across his career, and offered a corrective to the Guggenheim’s refusal to acknowledge his fascination with the human body.

The veteran abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski staged a breakthrough exhibition at Max Protetch Gallery in February and March. A painter of notoriously inscrutable forms and often murky surfaces, this show exposed a new side of his personality, suggesting a painterly existentialist finally learning to relax. There was still plenty of fiddly awkwardness in the brushstrokes, tightness in his structure, and deliberation even in the loosest of formal effects. But within his reined-in format he started going for seductively legible compositions, bright colors in cheery relationships, crisp edges, and sumptuous bleeds. Showing a tender side, this notoriously “jolie-laide” painter was suddenly easy on the eye.

Over the summer, Cheim & Read staged a much-talked-about show that hung fine examples of Chaim Soutine, in company with a range of painters who were either directly influenced by, or bear striking affinities with, the East European-born French expressionist: New York School painters De Kooning, Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Philip Guston; figurative expressionists sometimes labeled School of London, among them Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Lucian Freud, and contemporary New Yorkers Louise Bourgeois, Bill Jensen, and Joel Schapiro.

The English painter who came across as the most Soutine-like was Leon Kossoff, represented by two of his finest works: “Here Comes the Diesel, Spring” and “Christchurch, Winter Evening” (both 1987). His motifs, like Soutine’s, seem to wobble precariously in the expressive effort of landing in the picture. And his buildings and trains, like Soutine’s French villages, anthropomorphize as if under the weight of their author’s ambition to instill into them a depth of feeling.

Several debut shows stand out from the last year. Juan Gomez, a young Colombian, was given his at the CUE Foundation in February. He paints cartoonish stick figures with emphasis on the erogenous zones. The limbs are extended beyond anatomical credibility, reading like blown-up balloons. Despite the seeming misogyny of such absurdist accentuations, his images exuded a lyrical sensuality.

A similar mix of banality and finesse animated the work of Chinese artist Liu Ye at Sperone Westwater in September and October. An obvious riff on Japanese anime, like so much Asian (and indeed non-Asian) art today, his saccharine portraits of young females held a mystique that defied their predictability, managing at times surface pleasures, lost in reproduction, to recall Balthus.

While the young Swede Mamma Andersson commands considerable attention in Europe, David Zwirner presented her first American solo exhibition in June. Her complex, multilayered paintings evoked intersections of landscape and interior, which in turn related to collisions of other kinds of different spaces: states of mind, experiences of time, and pictorial language. Unusually worked in a mix of acrylic and oil, the paint surfaces vacillate between solid presence and ethereal dissipation.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, fresh out of Columbia’s MFA program, made an arresting body of work from inlaid wood for her first show, at James Cohan in September. Her imagery deals with small-town teenage antics imbued with distraction, alienation, and imaginative poverty. Couples lounge or plot mischief in dreary, even polluted landscapes or tacky interiors. The fluency of Ms. Taylor’s handling of marquetry is quite breathtaking: The way the grain echoes stretched denim, the way different shades denote creases in clothing and body contours, the ability she has in such unwieldy material to explore nuances of facial expression. And yet, inevitably, the medium retains its inherent awkwardness, thereby conveying a tension that finds its emotional equivalence in the subject matter.


The New York Sun

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