The New York Observer » Will Heinrich

Richard Serra’s Junction/Cycle at Gagosian Gallery and Matthew Barney’s DJED at Gladstone Gallery

The materials of Richard Serra’s two enormous new sculptures, currently dominating the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, will be recognizable to anyone who knows Mr. Serra’s work. They’re made from curved, continuous steel plates more than thirteen feet high, rusted into shades from powdery orange to Martian mahogany, and marked with what are or appear to be scales, drips, streaks, stretch marks, shadows, calcium deposits, water stains, and lightning bolts. The rust continues so evenly that it’s only the occasional glint of a silvery, unrusted corner that looks like evidence of the human hand. Seen from above, their shapes are also recognizable: Cycle is a triskelion composed of three floppy, interlocking “S”s, which create three roughly circular clearings and three spiraling corridors. Junction, also made of steel plates doubled into corridors, looks more like a pinched, four-pointed star. Read More

A Portrait of the Artist at Work

The characters that Nicola Tyson paints begin as quick sketchbook drawings and look like soap figurines who’ve taken too many baths. Their extremities are reduced to basic indications and look like the ovals from a drawing class. But while drawing-class ovals support the exploration of some particular model’s anatomy, Ms. Tyson’s ovals are bent primarily on exploring themselves, their own curves and crossings. There is an anatomy being portrayed, but it’s the artist’s own, the force of her tendons, her arm’s range of motion. The mystery of cognition takes the place of ex nihilo creation. Read More

‘Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities’ are Little Worlds Made Cunningly

The curators of “Otherworldly”—which consists largely of meticulous models and dioramas, some of them artworks themselves, others constructed by artists only to be photographed—trace the diorama back to Louis Daguerre and posit as its animating question, “What is real?” But that’s not really the question anymore, except insofar as Renaissance perspective, like Newtonian physics or the Ten Commandments, continues to dominate the popular imagination. If there is a question, it might be “What is the difference between art and design?” But there’s no particular urgency to that one either, since art and design, like spectacle and pathos, can so happily be concurrent. In fact, you could say that “Otherworldly” consists of two separate, concurrent shows: one for children and other devotees of technology, and one for devotees of art. Read More

‘Sigmar Polke: Photoworks 1964-2000’ at Leo Koenig Gallery

This modest survey of German painter Sigmar Polke’s photography includes portraits of several Afghan men leaning on a Jeep next to a mud-brick wall; a picture of a teapot pouring crumpled paper into a cup; a picture of Polke’s studio furniture arranged in a sculptural installation; and pictures of Polke’s own collages “Polke’s Whip” and “Menschenkreis.” Read More

‘In the Shadow of the Maggot’ at Anton Kern Gallery

Everything we do is in the shadow of the maggot—but why the long face? There’s always something newish under the sun. In a season of group shows and greatest hits, John Bock and the Anton Kern Gallery have transformed the usual repackaging into an absorbing entertainment of transformation. In the front room of the gallery, Read More

Image and Illusion at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

The title of this small but powerful exhibition, “Discursive Arrangements, or Stubbornly Persistent Illusions,” is either an ironic feint or it’s begging the question. Centered discreetly but unmistakably around what a Buddhist art critic might call the “emptiness” of images, the show forcefully makes the point that it can’t be quite right, in light of Read More

Lyonel Feininger is Living On the Edge at the Whitney

Lyonel Feininger was the Zelig of early modernism. Born in Manhattan to a German-American father who fought in the American Civil War, Feininger was sent to study violin in Leipzig when he was 16 but enrolled in art school in Hamburg instead. After an enormously successful career as an illustrator and cartoonist—mostly in Europe but Read More

Serious Play: Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid

In the 19th century, Great Britain used gunboats to address its trade imbalance with China. It must have seemed clear enough who was doing what to whom. But in the 21st century, things are more complicated. The gunboats remain ready, but the more visible weapons—if they are weapons—have so far been children’s television characters. In Read More

Coney Island of the Mind: George Tooker at DC Moore Gallery

Claustrophobia isn’t quite the right word when the tunnels go on forever. Using the endless and endlessly unwelcoming tiled surfaces of the New York City underground, George Tooker’s painting Subway gets at a dread that seems, despite its broad resonance, particular to the year in which it was painted, 1950. A woman in a red Read More

Meaty Matters: “Soutine/Bacon” at Helly Nahmad Gallery; Keith Haring at Gladstone Gallery

Looking at Chaim Soutine’s 1925 oil painting Flayed Beef is like taking mescaline in a slaughterhouse. Many artists start with studies, but Soutine did little drawing; he did almost everything with paint, and you can see it in both the ethereal freedom of his shapes and the fact that he manages to get more color Read More

$71 Million Can’t Be Wrong! ‘Andy Warhol Colored Campbell’s Soup Cans’ at L&M Arts

The first time you push through a scrum of tourist flashbulbs to peer through bulletproof glass at the Mona Lisa, you'll see a painting whose image is so familiar that it may well disappoint. Behind that glass does remain an object that, if you peer through its nimbus of fame, you can see. But what Read More

Los Angeles’s Off-Center Art Scene Decentralizes Lower Broadway

Trying to prove that Los Angeles is an art world center second to none, as the organizers of "Greater LA" have done by bringing the work of several dozen LA artists to a loft on lower Broadway seems, at first, like an unwitting irony. So does proposing that a center can be "distinctly horizontal"--i.e., decentralized. Read More

Malevich Cocktails and Bullet Holes: William Kentridge at Marian Goodman, Nate Lowman at Gavin Brown

Soho Eckstein, South African artist William Kentridge's self-portrait as beneficiary of white privilege, is feeling nostalgic for the clarity of a well-turned lie. Eckstein, as always, remains in Johannesburg, but Mr. Kentridge's latest stop-motion animated portrait of him is playing at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

Onto the film's title, "Other Faces," fall two Read More

From the Abstract to the Human and Back: Leland Bell and Andrew Kuo

Some artists are ahead of their time, but some, so to speak, work in parallel. Like others of his generation, the New York painter Leland Bell, who died in 1991, took modernist abstraction as his starting point. But unlike his peers, who turned to new problems, Mr. Bell turned to the human figure for a Read More

Paper Goes Gun Crazy: Sarah Frost at PPOW; Hannah van Bart at Marianne Boesky

Some boys like to make ships in a bottle. But some, apparently, prefer to make endearingly disturbing replicas of assault rifles, bazooka shells, pistols and guns from the video game Halo out of copier paper and Scotch tape. They post instructional videos on YouTube and sometimes adapt their guns to shoot conical paper blow darts. Read More