post-minimalism – Art Spiel

October 9, 2024October 10, 2024, by Claire Haik

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in October 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

Hanne Friis, The Mountain, hand-stitched faux leather and steel, 37 13/16 x 54 5/16 x 37 13/16 inches, at Locks Gallery, photograph courtesy of the gallery

Sometimes, we are confronted with artwork that hums with possibilities so profound you can feel them taking root in your chest and making a new home. You stand in the gallery, soaking it in, and you want to share it with as many people as possible. That said, I hope you take a good chunk of time to sink into the transcendent earthy abstractions of Warren Rohrer at Locks Gallery. Afterward, head upstairs and marvel, open-mouthed, at the unexpected forms created by sculptors Hanne Friis and Lynda Benglis. Then, journey over to Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and get lost in Sarah Gamble’s glittering forest interiors and interdimensional abstractions, filled with mystery and magic.

May 1, 2024April 29, 2024, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

Yi Hsuan Lai: Objects, Bodies, Things at Gallery 456

Yi Hsuan Lai. *Something Happened*, 2022. Archival pigment print mounted on dibond. 16.25 x 21.625 inches. Courtesy of Gallery 456 and the artist

I was scrolling through Instagram recently when I saw a post that read: “What’s your artspeak ick?” The word “anthropomorphism” immediately came to mind. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that a friend of mine had an art history professor who once (in)famously tweeted: “I will scream into a pillow if I see another student write the word ‘anthropomorphic’ in their paper.” Therefore, I paused before ascribing “anthropomorphic” qualities to the work of Taiwanese artist Yi Hsuan Lai.

January 31, 2024May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Harriet Korman’s Brutal Realism

Opinion

a hallway with paintings on the wall — Photo credit: Fernando Sandoval/MW

In Harriet Korman’s exhibition titled Portraits of Squares, the squares in question are either nested within the framework of a grid or stand alone as discreet entities surrounded by blocks of color. Her palette, in the main, is made of secondary and tertiary colors, which for the most part, are applied in an opaque and unmodulated manner — her surfaces tend to be flat and dry. Korman uses color both as a formal element to reinforce her composition’s structure as well as spatially. As one moves around the gallery, there seems to be no logical progression or sense to the paintings’ variations. The canvases, all of the same dimensions, are rectangular and are hung on the horizontal at eye level; their sequencing refuses to surrender an associative, conceptual, or anecdotal narrative. What one is left with is the fact they all, in part, reference squares and that they are all relatively different in approach. Subsequently, it is hard to determine if the “portraits” represent systemic deviations on a singular theme or if each painting was individually intuited. Behind the reception desk hangs a painting from 1979 whose forms are organic, their edges blurred, and whose surface is mottled. This painting stands as a reminder that Korman works thematically, and the present paintings are an aspect of her broader investigation of abstract painting’s various idioms.

December 26, 2023December 25, 2023, by Ágnes Berecz

At the Limits: Elena Dahn at Revolver

Thin, translucent layers of shaped and stretched natural latex are mounted onto walls or wooden boards to extend the limits of painting—these are Elena Dahn’s New Bodies, on view at the Buenos Aires-based artist’s first New York exhibition. Hosted by Revolver, a contemporary art venue launched in 2008 by Giancarlo Scaglia in Lima and subsequently in Buenos Aires and on the Lower East Side, the exhibition is an invitation to rethink the relationship between body and painting, performance and mark-making, space and surface.

February 10, 2023May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Impossible Failures at Zwirner

Opinion

A photo of Pope.L in his studio, dated 2022 — Pope.L, studio, 2022, photo courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery 52 Walker

When I heard about Impossible Failures it promised to be an exciting exhibition, in that it was to bring together Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), a White post-Minimalist artist best known for his site-specific works of cutting through buildings and homes, and Pope.L (b.1955), a Black artist who used to describe himself as the friendliest Black man in America, and is known for his public performances and installations, which address Black racial stereotyping and other such hypocrisies. In a not un-interesting way, the resulting exhibition is a curatorial mash-up in which the works in it are overwhelmed. As such, this is not an exhibition where the works of each artist supply a context for the other, nor does it explore Matta-Clark’s legacy by focusing on Pope.L’s overlapping strategies. Instead it might be thought of as a collaborative installation authored by the curator Ebony L. Haynes.

December 14, 2022December 12, 2022, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone at WCMA

A picture containing indoor, wall, floor, room

Description automatically generated — Installation view of Mary Ann Unger, WCMA

Power. Power, not bravado, not ego, but the power of intelligence, skill, fortitude, and vision is what Mary Ann Unger possessed and that is what is on exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art (referred to as WCMA). Throughout her life she defied limitations frequently imposed overtly and subconsciously on women. Attending Mt Holyoke College in the mid-60s, she studied biochemistry when few women were found in science departments, then transferred to studio art taking up welding, casting and carving. This was not the typical route for women during the mid-to late 60s. She traveled on her own to North Africa and this journey greatly influenced her work. Returning to New York she completed an MFA at Columbia and launched her career as a post minimalist sculptor, finding herself in the minority amongst a sea of men.

May 6, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

The Agreement: Chromatic Presences – Funky and Formal at Zurcher

A picture containing indoor, wall, ceiling, floor

Description automatically generated — Installation view of *The Agreement: Chromatic Presences*, curated by William Corwin at Zürcher Gallery. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery NY/Paris.

I’ll start with a question: does a critic have an obligation to propose a solution to an enigmatic puzzle an exhibition might pose? What has led to this, is reading William Corwin’s catalog essay for The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, in which he ignores recounting the history of sculpture and color—deemed for a very long time to be irreconcilable like fish and cheese. It is now common knowledge, sculpture till the time of the renaissance was largely polychromed, but a neo-classical notion of purity and essentialism came to be imposed upon it to differentiate it qualitatively from painting. As a result, sculpture came to be limited to the colors of its materials—marble, bronze and wood. In the West, this formalism was institutionalized by the Enlightenment’s and was the excepted norm until the mid-20^th century, when art’s traditional forms began to morph. Consequently, we must ask if there is a more contemporary issue concerning color and form at the heart of Corwin’s The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, and if so, what might it be?

December 23, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Milcah Bassel – Poetic Documents

Milcah Bassel, governing vessels, 2019, artist book (variant edition of 5), closed: 4 x 3 ½ x 3”, open: 34 ¼” x 26 ½”

Milcah Bassel is an avid art learner whose curiosity leads to cross disciplines and techniques such as sculpture, performance, and bookmaking. She probes deep into her subjects and investigates her forms with rigor, but also with a playful approach. That playfulness is revealed throughout her diverse body of work, giving us a distinct flavor of her thought process and sensibility.

November 26, 2019May 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Actual and Implied – Gregory Coates at Monica King Contemporary

Gregory Coates, My Big Brown Peace, 2019 deck brushes 76 x 252 x 3 inches

Each of Gregory Coates’s wall-based assemblages in Actual and Implied, the artist’s solo show at Monica King Contemporary, commands the space with its own powerful presence. Altogether, the show features over a dozen new mixed media assemblages made of found objects created with post-minimalist sensibility, for which Coates is mostly known for. It is a bold encounter with the objects of art at first, but the longer you look, the more subtle and fragile it becomes. The seemingly simple monochromatic surfaces from afar transform to complex arrays of color, line and dot from close-up.