Mike Kelley, Kandors (Installation View), via Venus Over Manhattan

Venus Over Manhattan is currently presenting a curated review of Mike Kelley’s work in the Kandor series this month, exploring the artist’s work and research into the comic book mythology of Superman, the implications of his origin story, and the broader cultural and psychological frameworks that this story works within and through.  Selecting four of the artist’s works in the series, the show takes a meditative, focused perspective on Kelley’s expansive body of work. (more…)

Katherine Bernhardt, Sharks, Plantains, and Cigarettes (2015) all photos courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

Painter Katherine Bernhardt has created an exhibition of work inspired by her recent residency in Puerto Rico, taking inspiration and encouragement from the landscape and artists of the city as her muse, and translating them into the artist’s signature hand.   (more…)

Jack Goldstein – Where Is Jack Goldstein? (Installation View), courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

A member of the first graduating class of CalArts in 1972, Jack Goldstein made enormous and immediate contributions to the fine arts landscape in the 1970s and 1980s before vanishing from the public eye and tragically ending his own life in 2003.  Now, almost ten years after Goldstein’s death, collector Adam Lindemann is hosting an ambitious retrospective of Goldstein’s early work at his Venus Over Manhattan Gallery, pulling from Goldstein’s practice in painting, photography, poetry and film, including a recreation of Goldstein’s influential performance piece, Two Fencers. (more…)

Gallerist Adam Lindemann and artist Peter Coffin, photo by Art Observed

Peter Coffin’s first solo show in New York City in four years, A,E,I,O,U, is on view through November 2nd at Venus Over Manhattan Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue.

Prepared in just three months, the show features several large scale sculptures: an iconic Warholian larger-than-life dog, a skeletal wooden hand forming the “ok” symbol (reminding us of Nauman’s hand series, where each hand makes a sign whose meaning changes depending upon context), to a panel holding spools and spools of satin ribbons of various widths and colors.

Peter Coffin, Untitled (Dog) (2012). All photos by Ryann Donnelly for Art Observed

There are also several unassuming additions one might only find from reading the show’s checklist: a marble slab installed at the entry of the gallery and planter boxes which are hung outside the open windows.  A round speaker mounted to a stand near the middle of the gallery– a piece labeled Untitled (Pet Store)— also fills the space with sounds of birds, dogs, and bubbling fish tanks.

Art Observed recently sat down with Coffin to discuss the nature of the work, which he identifies as “Idea Art”.

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Nate Lowman, Bulletin Board (2012) via Venus Over Manhattan

“Bulletin Boards” at Venus Over Manhattan, collector Adam Lindemann’s new uptown gallery, is the product of a collaboration with White Columns, the downtown alternative art space directed by Matthew Higgs. On the heels of Venus Over Manhattan’s heady, decadent “Á rebours” inaugural show, which resulted in the sensational Dalí art theft, “Bulletin Boards brings a notably more experimental endeavor to the space’s industrial walls. The exhibition is modeled on a curatorial project that Higgs debuted ten years ago at the California College of Arts, in which a glazed aluminum bulletin board purchased from an office supply store would become a “project space” for invited artists such as Trisha Donnelly and Carter. In this show’s press release, Higgs states that “the project sought to gently subvert the typical function of a bulletin board, replacing the anticipated pertinent or useful information typically found in such places with something that approximated ‘art’.” In the project’s current manifestation, a selected group of artists and curators were invited to envision their own bulletin boards, resulting in the twenty-five works currently on display. Born from the same conceptual and material conditions presented by the constant of the bulletin board, the final works spring from the different variables employed by the individual artist and curators, resulting in a diverse assortment of ideas and aesthetics that multifariously engage, entertain, and confront the viewer.

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