Pope.L, Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/the vitrine problem/one of three) (2007), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Currently on at both of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s New York locations, artist Pope.L presents an exploration of various projects both current at historical at its Chelsea exhibition space and uptown gallery.  Pope.L’s practice often focuses on the uncertain but productive space between differences in language, class, race, and gender to create works that simultaneously enlist, mock and re-write convention. For Pope.L this gap is where ignorance, the unknown, or the unintended collides with human meaning and, even hubris to create fresh tensions around authenticity, self and icon. (more…)

Eddie Martinez, Love Letter #15 (2017), via Art Observed

Artist Eddie Martinez has returned to Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, bringing two different bodies of work to the gallery’s two exhibition spaces in Chelsea and Uptown.  These two shows mark the first time Martinez’s work has been exhibited in New York since major solo exhibitions at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and at The Drawing Center, New York, and signal a continuation of themes explored in those shows. Martinez’s work, which draws on languages of modernist painting while abstracting its language through varied techniques and imaginative approaches to the canvas.

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Anthony Caro, Terminus (2013), via Art Observed

In the early years of his career, Anthony Caro worked on a series of twisting, enigmatic depictions of human and animal figures, works that owed much to the spatial interrogations of Picasso and the broader canon of 20th Century European abstraction.  The works are impressive in their understanding of the gestural and conceptual operations of the era’s avant-garde, but for Caro’s career, served in part as a starting point for his own engagement with space, not only on paper or canvas, but in three dimensions.  This engagement with the dual acts of perception and depiction, sight and operation, takes center stage at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, as the late artist’s final sculptures are shown alongside some of his first drawings and paintings, a rare opportunity to appreciate the range of evolution the artist reached during the course of his prolific career.

Anthony Caro, First Drawings Last Sculptures (Installation View), via Art Observed  (more…)

GCC, Positive Pathways (+) Version II (2016), All images © GCC; Courtesy of the artists and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY Photo: Adam Reich

GCC, an art collective tapping on cultural and social implications of change in the Arab Gulf Region, last exhibited in New York in 2014, when MoMA PS1 opened the group’s first American solo exhibition, Achievements in Retrospective, followed by their inclusion in the New Museum exhibition Here and Elsewhere.  The collective, comprised of eight artist-“delegates,” all born or raised in the region, returns to the city for Positive Pathways (+) at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, presenting the show’s eponymous sculpture, originally exhibited at the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale this summer, alongside a group of sculptural reliefs created using Thermoforming techniques. (more…)

Jessica Stockholder, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room (Installation View), via Art Observed

In The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, Jessica Stockholder’s scattered arrangements of sculptural elements play with assumed boundaries to become a fluid meditation on space.  Through a variety of materials and forms, Stockholder avoids overtly breaking down traditional artistic lines, so much as she highlights that they have never truly existed at all.  Here, in her third show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Stockholder adds new dimension to her longstanding interest in intersection and continues to define the multifaceted significance of surface and structure.

Jessica Stockholder, Security Detail [JS 688] (2016), via Art Observed

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Martha Rosler, If You Can’t Afford to Live Here, mo-o-ove!! (Installation View), all photos by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Adopting its title from Ed Koch’s response to complaints regarding New York’s rising housing concerns, Martha Rosler’s current Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition If You Can’t Afford to Live Here, mo-o-ove!! promises a compact look at the artist’s influential 1989 exhibition If You Lived Here…, which was exhibited at Dia Foundation as a three part show.  Similarly, this current interpretation is a trilogy, culminating in this grand finale at the Chelsea gallery and proving the relevance of issues raised almost thirty years ago in the original version. (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude with Big Palm Tree (2004), via Art Observed

Mitchell-Innes and Nash has opened its doors on a broad, yet impressive career retrospective of the work of Tom Wesselmann, the iconic pop painter whose renditions of mass commodities, American landscapes and the human form defined him as one of the most original voices coming out of the Post-War landscape.  Perhaps best known for his large, shaped canvases depicting lipstick-clad mouths breathing out cigarette smoke, Wesselmann’s interests in painterly technique and the American subject were constantly evolving over the course of his career, even as some of his formal containers and pictorial content remained the same.

Tom Wesselmann, Interior #2 (1964), via Art Observed

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Eddie Martinez, Restartation (2015), via Art Observed

Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez had charted a particularly unique course for himself in recent years, exploring both expressly abstracted compositions and their relationships to more rigid, serial processes in both painting and sculpture.  Trained as both a draftsman and painter, the artist’s dual experience in both meticulously planned composition and free-roving expressionism floats to the surface in his first exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location. (more…)

Justine Kurland, Sincere Auto Care (2014)  via Emily Heinz for Art Observed

The complex landscape of Americana, in all of its grungy glory, has been documented many times, each time with a unique perspective and very often with a driving ethical or social message somewhere just below the surface. But in Sincere Auto Care, photographer Justine Kurland seeks to neutralize the otherwise political or cultural connotations of these semiotics. Instead, she presents the subjects as they are: beautiful but dry, deep but all surface, and, as the title suggests, truly sincere.

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