Keeping Up with the Flood of Noteworthy Shows

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Labor Day signals regeneration of biblical proportions in the New York art world. If July and August are the 40 years in the wilderness, with the advent of fall, it’s the deluge.


And despite literal deluges that flooded galleries along Chelsea’s West 24th Street, Manhattan was abuzz with the excitement of exhibition openings. The lost tribes were gathering.


PaceWildenstein presented Alex Katz’s new series of portraits of “power women” in haute couture. Among the throng of friends and supporters were two artists who themselves have sat for Mr. Katz in the past and who are featured in solo exhibitions of their own this season.


Ena Swansea is one of them. Her show of group figure compositions, painted with slippery etherealism on almost kinky graphite grounds, opened the next evening at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert. Another was Rackstraw Downes, who last showed his Texan and New Jersey landscapes in New York in 2000 at Robert Miller. He has moved from Miller with their former director, Betty Cunningham, who launches her own gallery with what looks from the catalog to be images by Mr. Downes that are suffused with crystalline light – rich in social and perceptual precision (September 23).


Realism of a more quirky, personalist, naive variety is to be offered by artists Bonnie Steinsnyder, at Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery (open), and Scott Kahn at Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery (open). Mr. Kahn’s exhibition coincides with a retrospective organized by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.


Alexandre Gallery is presenting its third exhibition of Lois Dodd in two years (open).This time the focus is on a near-miniature series of plein-air oil sketches on, of all materials, aluminum roofers’ flashings.


Among the Chelsea galleries that were reportedly flooded, several as of press time were still scrambling to ensure their flagship fall show launch on schedule. Among these, Luhring Augustine is to show characteristically ambitious video installations by the Swiss Pipilotti Rist (open). One reconstructs a typical chalet that the visitor can enter and engage with alpine scenery.


Other video artists with shows slated include the controversial British twins, Jane and Louise Wilson, whose third exhibition with 303 Gallery (open) features a five-screen installation of a piece completed during a residency in New Zealand. Their fellow Brit, photographer Sam Taylor-Wood, will show at Matthew Marks starting September 18. Another very important and anticipated photography show is Justine Kurland, at Gorney, Bravin & Lee (open).


As ever, there is a large roster of British artists in high-profile solo spots this season. Veteran op artist Bridget Riley will show new work at PaceWildenstein’s uptown space (September 24), while two giants of the sculpture scene, Richard Deacon and Richard Long, are showing at Marian Goodman Gallery (open) and Sperone Westwater (open), respectively. The exuberant animalier, Nicola Hicks, is to show at the New York outpost of the London gallery Flowers (September 24).


The maverick Scottish concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, is to be the subject of a full-scale survey of works on paper at the UBS gallery (formerly the PaineWebber Gallery) in Midtown (September 24). Nearby, Israeli painters Ardyn Halter and Michael Kovner are launching a new venue, Gallery in the Sky, with a joint show of landscapes (open). They have as competition a background of skylight views of the Empire State Building.


Devotees of painting as shamelessly sumptuous decoration have a triple treat in store with exhibitions promising sensory overload: Richmond Burton, showing at Cheim and Read (open); Robert Kushner at DC Moore (September 21); and Hunt Slonem at Marlborough (September 21).


Viewers who prefer a more cerebral but no less emphatically chromatic approach to abstraction will tune into Pat Lipsky’s new exhibition at Eliz abeth Harris (open). Subtle color and serene texture are not the exclusive preserve of painting, however; they are hallmarks, equally, of the sculpture of Catherine Lee, showing at Galerie LeLong (open).


Exhibitions of importance are by no means limited to commercial galleries and regular museums: Intrepid art lovers will find art in art schools, rabbinic colleges, out on the street. Martha Diamond is to stage her first exhibition of paintings in many years at the New York Studio School in November. Around the same time, the Hebrew Union College will show a series of ambitious murals by Archie Rand (“The 19 Diaspora Paintings”) which bring the artist’s zany cartoon style to bear on weighty historical themes. And the Public Art Fund continues its tireless efforts to place significant contemporary art where the public cannot miss it: A group of intriguing, challenging bell jars now at Doris C. Freedman Plaza are by the Californian conceptualist Allan McCollum.


Alfred Leslie has been best known, for most of his career, as a realist, but a group of his early – and highly accomplished – works as an abstract expressionist go on view next month at Alan Stone (October 16). The Dane Karel Appel, an artist of similar vintage, will be showing drawings at JG Gallery uptown (Spet. 30), while the German expressionist Georg Baselitz is the subject of a two-part show at Gagosian’s uptown space (open), the show surveys his sculpture and also looking at a significant group of transitional painting from 1969 to 1971 when he discovered his trademark idiom of the inverted portrait.


On the subject of regenerations, one piece of news that might seem trivial to the public at large but will induce a collective sigh of wellbeing in gallery goers on the Upper East Side: St. Ambroeus, the beloved espresso-bar and art trade hangout (the late Leo Castelli lunched there everyday) returns after a two-year hiatus to 1000 Madison in the New Year.


The New York Sun

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