There is a show that you shouldn't miss at Rachel Uffner with her second show of works by Hilary Harnischfeger. (She also had an amazing solo exhibition of her works in her booth at the Armory show a couple of years ago.) I love these!! They are smaller 3-D abstractions made from layers and layers of multi-colored paper (she colors them herself) that are tightly compressed and cut with plaster, rock and clay that are molded into organic forms. These sculptures are hung on the wall, and remind me of either weather-beaten sea rocks or coral, solidified magma or a model of a mountain range turned on its side. They are gorgeous and although there is a kind of unfinished quality to them, you can also see the effort and labor it took to get them balanced in terms of color combination, hue, form and materials. There are also some new ceramic works that look like vases that are freestanding. She uses the same materials as in her wall sculptures, but a significant part of them are glazed and fired clay. They remind me of the kind of half-done paper weights that I made as presents for my parents as a child, but I mean that in a good way. They also remind me of smaller, abstracted Betty Woodman ceramics, but I appreciate these much more - I like the combination of materials and the colors and they are less garish and more accessible than Woodman's. There is also a very large work that is shaped like a rectangular canvas hung on the wall (I think her first in this scale) that really straddles the mediums of painting and sculpture. And be sure to check out the sides of the work - they are as interesting as the front!!
There is another fabulous show at DCKT with paintings by Timothy Tompkins (maybe their 3 or 4th show with this artist?). The artist has been working in the same method for a number of years - taking imagery, not his own, and manipulating it. He then paints these altered images in glossy enamel paint on aluminum where there is an intense blurring effect when you stand back from the painting. In this show, the images primarily focus on explosion - be it fireworks at the Olympics in Beijing or a rocket blasting off into the sky. There is also a more subdued painting of a spider web (which makes me think of Vija Celmins - although totally different style) and a fiery clouds. I love this work for a variety of reasons - I love its magnetic effect because of its blurred nature. Your eye doesn't want to look away because your brain is constantly trying to decipher all the details of the image through the lozenges of intense color. When you get very close to the painting, there is a wonderful second discovery of the layers and layers of complimentary and contrasting colors. The surface of the painting itself, in all its slickness, its a thing of beauty. When you are very close, the images becomes almost abstracted (not unlike an Impressionist painting - but here entirely controlled). The artist is a brilliant colorist - I feel that some of the colors he uses I have never even seen before and probably don't even have a name. I also love the kind of dichotomy of the images of explosion - with the blurring you can't really tell - is this a celebration of a global athletic event or superior technology or is something violent going on here? The images are above, but these works really can only be truly appreciated in person.
Link to exhibition
I don't know much about this artist, but I really enjoyed looking at Ben Grasso's paintings at Thierry Goldberg. The colors are rich and the brush stroke a bit loose in these fantastical images of houses being spun about and disintegrating before our very eyes. They remind me of Adam Cvijanovic's paintings of a similar subject that I haven't seen for a while - but also really liked. Here the scale is smaller than the latter artist's work and with the looser brushwork, there is a little more interesting play on the surfaces of the painting. Also, the vegetation that surrounds the levitating houses - plants, trees and grass - also seem to explode in a fury. There is a deconstruction around the center of some of these images into vertical and horizontal planes which makes me think of one of my favorite German contemporary artists, abstracted landscape painter, David Schnell (who for some reason is not represented in the US and doesn't have such a huge following here - not sure why?).
Is this what happens to homes during a tornado? Its a mystery because the sky is so blue....
Link to exhibition
Lastly, I went to the 11 Rivington exhibition of Caetano de Almeida paintings. The paintings are large, brightly-colored, geometric abstractions that are cool, but for me, they lack a little depth (I will attach a link below anyway). However, if you peek around to the back for a wonderful suprise, there are some prints that are fantastic. Maybe its just my love of German Expressionism and Modernism, but there is a handful of fabulous prints by the contemporary artist, Volker Hueller. He had a show with the gallery and the associated, Salon 94, last year of paintings and paintings with collage (I saw an example of one in the back - fantastic). These are etchings in which the artist manipulates with watercolor after the impression. The imagery is figurative - but part Cubist, Surrealist and very expressionist. There is an image that reminds me of Georg Grosz and the palette is also nostalgic of Klee and Schiele. Right now I don't have images of these exact prints that I saw - I will try to find them this week and add them. But here are some examples above and there is a link below to a show that he had in London with Timothy Taylor that has very good examples of similar prints that I saw.
Hueller's exhibition last year at Timothy Taylor in London
Link to Almeida exhibition
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