Tamuna Sirbiladze, Pomegranate (2015), via Art Observed

Artist Tamuna Sirbiladze’s first solo exhibition in the United States, at New York’s Half Gallery combines oil-stick on unstretched canvas, accented by an intuitive emphasis on interior design and decorative elements inside the gallery, emphasizing its position as a formerly domestic space.  Taking the artist’s signature style as a starting point, the works seem to move towards a more expansive, space-oriented technique.

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Jack Pierson, Two Places at Once (2015), via Cheim & Read

For his first exhibition with Cheim & Read in over 6 years, Jack Pierson has returned to the canvas, bringing a series of bright, pastel-colored compositions that trace the artist’s renewed interest in the painterly surface as an opportunity for encounter, while exploring his own meditative process in realizing, executing and completing his works.  Created during a self-imposed retreat on the island of North Captiva (just off Florida’s Gulf Coast), Pierson seems to have taken a moment away from his often brash, challenging wordplay and sculptural practice to examine the beaming sun and gentle waves of the island getaway. Read More »

Banksy, Dismaland (Installation View), via The Guardian

Banksy, the master of grandly executed public projects and sharp jabs at the banality of pop culture, has opened his newest project, Dismaland.  The exhibition, which the subtitle a “family theme park unsuitable for children,” is spread out across the Tropicana, an abandoned site in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, and features a number of contributions from more mainstream contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer.  Yet the park is still definitively Banksy, with his trademark irreverence and coy inversions of pop culture formats abounding across the derelict swimming club in the British resort town, and continues his barbs towards the Walt Disney Corporation.

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Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room (1967), via Art Observed

It’s easy to lose sight of Yoko Ono.  The Japanese artist has consistently shifted forms and formats over the course of her career, working with poetry, painting, performance, choreography, public art, and more, often in subtle actions that belie their often considerable emotional and physical affect.  The fluxus-trained artist brings her early work to MoMA this summer with One Woman Show, an in-depth consideration of her practice and evolution as an artist at the intersection of performance, encounter and installation in the early years of her work.

Yoko Ono, Bag Piece (1964), via Art Observed

The exhibition is expansive, to say the least, and despite the considerable amount of space afforded it, still manages to feel close to bursting with the artist’s work.  Her textual prompts run the length of the gallery, joined by paintings and drawings that mix participation, meditation and time as complicit elements of the work’s reception. Poetic in its presentation, there remains a trace of the physical throughout, from these calls to action, to works like A Painting in Three Stanzas, a frozen moment in time where a plant stem pierces through a fabric sheet painted in sumi ink. While time and process is suggested by the work, its status as a static work points to another number of timeframes, where the viewer might encounter a seedling, a fully grown vine, or perhaps no plant at all.

Yoko Ono, Painting in Three Stanzas (1961), via Art Observed

It also culls a number of the artist’s early, playful inversions on both Dada and Surrealism, like her classic works Apple and Three Spoons, divergent takes on Magritte’s linguistic subterfuge that maintain a more organic focus on the present object rather than a representation. One could almost consider this work an extension of the surrealist’s work, pushing his semiotic challenge to a natural conclusion. Also on view are a number of the artist’s early performative works, including Bag Piece, a performance for a single dance in which they cover themselves in a black sheet as they traverse a small space. Taken here amongst her other art objects and textual prompts, the minimal space afforded the work makes it all the more surreal.

Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961), via Art Observed

The exhibition continues through her work following her marriage to John Lennon, and the pair’s collaborative work in music, art and performance, including their famous Bed-In (in which the pair stayed in a hotel bed for days as a protest for peace), and their massive billboard installation project, War is Over (if You Want It). Video and audio from this period, including a special room set aside for the Plastic Ono Band (her long-running musical endeavor), reflects the power influence that both Lennon and Ono left on each other’s work, and on each other’s lives.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964), via MoMA

Perhaps what feels most compelling about Ono’s exhibition is her practice’s emphasis on possibility, the open-ended conclusion of her works as activated by the viewer/user. There’s a certain satisfaction, even, to this format, as if the work’s idea remains free from a final determination, and rather allows the viewer their own act of completion, liberated from the restraints of a physical space. Even in rooms so full of her various pieces, ideas and actions, that one can walk away from the show with this sense of completion is a testament to the artist’s practice.

One Woman Show is on view through September 7th.

Yoko Ono, Apple (1966), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 [Exhibition Site]
“‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971’ Review: Performance for a Lifetime” [WSJ]
“Review: In ‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,’ Text Messages From the Edge” [NYT]
“Yoko Ono at MoMA review – a misunderstood artist finally gets her due” [Guardian]

John Singer Sargent, The Fountain (1907), All images via Michael Ziga for Art Observed

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925),  Portraits of Artists and Friends, presents a collection of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, colleagues and friends of the painters, that offered Sargent the freedom to create more radical and dynamic works than those made for paying clients.  The sitters are often candidly depicted in the act of painting or lounging where others pose comfortably for Sargent. Read More »

Sofia Leiby, An excuse is a polite rejection (after JW) (2014), via Anonymous Gallery

There’s a telling line in the press release for The Negative Hand, a presentation of new works at Mexico City’s Anonymous Gallery, reflecting on the cave paintings as Lascaux: “by defining themselves, artists often define the systems around them as well, and inversely, by defining the systems around them, artist begin to define themselves.”  It’s an open-ended prompt, but one that feels particularly resonant in 2015: embracing the aesthetic fusions and detritus of modernity as equally worthy of examination and re-creation as any singular subject. Read More »

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum is Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks, the first major exhibition of the writings and sketches from Jean-Michel-Basquiat’s’ rarely seen personal archives. Without a doubt one of the most influential artists of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat worked with music, poetry, and  graffiti before finally arriving at painting. Tagging the walls of downtown New York, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz presented socially conscious graffiti under the tag name SAMO.  Straying from the visual attributes of popular graffiti, these tags were often full of sayings, quotes and poems in plain script that replaced graffiti’s showmanship with intellectual thought.  Navigating viewers into the personal thoughts of Basquiat with two video documentations and many rarely seen paintings,The Unknown Notebooks is a satisfying mixture of both seeing and reading.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Basquiat’s cultural plurality and vivid paintings begin with the socially investigative phrases, symbols and thoughts on these carefully curated pages.  Each of the 160 pages in the exhibition hold a single composition, with blank pages framing the words to a strong effect.  Intent on speaking with political and socio-economic strength, corporate symbols, quotations, crowns, skeletons and teepees hang above words, and at the end of sentences, altering these everyday phrases, while visual techniques, suggesting dichotomies in familiar linguistic comprehension, open more room for unique interpretation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Accompanying the notebooks are a series of paintings that possess a freedom and fearlessness directly related to the artist’s graffiti background.  Words fill the canvas from top to bottom, transforming text into texture and letters back into gestural marks.  Acting as much as a carrier of language as a layer of paint, Basquiat’s words successfully  imported graffiti’s aesthetic energy and social awareness into the white cubes of the art world. The anonymous foundations of his early craft embrace this energetic freedom, vandalism, and self-expression that have come to define youth culture. A contributing figure in the impact of the practice in contemporary art proper, Basquiat’s dedicated approach to symbols and lettering transform this anonymous art form into a new format inside his burgeoning artistic repertoire. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

The Unknown Notebooks reveals  the underlying elements that made expression a larger concern for Basquiat than fitting into the previously determined aesthetic standards of high art. The primitive and socially aware foundations that have defined his work, and kept its impact almost thirty years later are here at Brooklyn Museum in an almost elemental form, on display through August 23rd.

— R.Williams

Read more:
“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at Brooklyn Museum [Exhibition Site]
“Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Unknown Notebooks’ at the Brooklyn Museum” [New York Times]
“‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ Gives a Window Into Basquiat’s Mind At Its Most Relaxed” [Forbes]

Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)

Tiger Tiger is the current summer group exhibition at Salon 94 Bowery, on view through August 21, 2015.  The fittingly titled show brings together fifteen artists, whose works explore the ease of tropical landscapes, and the seemingly perfect equilibrium of wild life. Works boasting ample color spectrums speak to simple yet ecstatic rhythms of island life, while elsewhere a distinctive composition of flush tropical wilderness wins out.  Distinctively foreign to New Yorkers, elements from these tropical destinations blossom into depictions of dazzling animals, plants or landscapes, contrasting the city’s heavily industrialized and overpopulated dynamic just outside the gallery space. Read More »

Forcefield, Meerk Puffy Autumn Shroud (2002), via Art Observed

Over the past half century, American art has distinguished itself as much for its formal heroes (Pollock, de Kooning, Judd, etc.) as its outliers, artists working along distinct threads of the abject, pop culture and mass production who challenged the more refined and neatly conceptualized exercises of the 20th Century avant-garde.  This separate thread of American art, running from 1960’s comic-book art through the punk and funk movements of the 1970’s and onwards through the chaotic energies of turn of the century performance and video are the subject of What Nerve!, a documentation of the American underground at Matthew Marks. Read More »