Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barry, Mike, Chuck and Leonard), 1972-1975. All images by Art Observed.

The current exhibition of early works by Dan Flavin at Paula Cooper Gallery offers a concise exploration into the artist’s experiments with the effect of colored light on architectural space. A 1960s minimalist, Flavin’s works realize the infinite possibilities inherent in the simple gesture of a florescent light in a gallery, which, despite a limited vocabulary, create varied optical and experiential situations. Flavin’s works confound the way that art is viewed by testing the limitations of opticality while stressing color as a medium in its own right. Instead of the viewer looking at a two dimensional object with painted colors, Flavin brings the color to the viewer, aggressively inserting his color combinations into the viewer’s eyes. That is, instead of the art reflecting color, it is emitting the color as light. If the purpose of art is to look, to see, to contemplate a visual object, then Flavin’s art frustrates this standard notion by making it difficult to look directly at the art object itself. This difficulty of viewing the art object directly causes the viewer to notice the effect of light and color on objects, thereby implicating the architectural space within the work. The works thereby occupy every part of the room, using the unusable spaces of a gallery–the corners and the floors, spaces incapable of displaying artworks.

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barry, Mike, Chuck and Leonard), 1972-1975.

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Alice Neel’s ‘Hartley’ via David Zwirner

Running concurrently at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth on the Upper East Side are two shows surveying the work of painter Alice Neel. Known best as a portraitist during a time when figuration fell into disdain and obsolescence, Neel is considered one of the twentieth century’s most important American painters. While Neel gained critical acclaim by the end of her life (she died in 1984), recent years have seen increased interest in Neel’s work as contemporary figurative painters such as Lucien Freud and Elizabeth Peyton have attracted both record prices and museum retrospectives.  MZwirner & Wirth’s ‘Nudes of the 1930s’ covers the beginning of Neel’s career with sketches, watercolors, and oil paintings of desexualized nudes, including many of women with imperfect bodies. ‘Selected Works’ at David Zwirner presents a wider, more mature range of work.

The Estate of Alice Neel
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David Zwirner
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Zwirner & Wirth
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Decades of Painter Alice Neel in a Single Sweep [New YorkMagazine]
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Art in Review [NY Times]
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Overview: Alice Neel: Selected Works [Artinfo]

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Fred Sandback’s ‘Untitled (no. 48, Three Leaning Planes, from 133 Proposals for the Heiner Friedrich Gallery)’ via David Zwirner

Fred Sandback, who died in 2003, is known best for his yarn sculptures that fall somewhere between Minimalist and conceptual art. On view now are two concurrent solo exhibitions at David Zwirner in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth in the Upper East Side. Sandback’s sculptures create large planes using colored yarn, outlining a shape and using walls, floors, and ceilings to create a perception of depth and space. The sculptures present an optical illusion of boundaries, of planes cutting across space that look like they may not be crossed but in fact do not exist. It is in that illusion that the theatricality of Sandback’s work lies. Using only the sparest of material he creates a vast, imposing presence.

Fred Sandback at David Zwirner
Fred Sandback at Zwirner & Wirth
Art in Review: Fred Sandback [NY Times]

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