CLICK FOR MANHATTAN CHELSEA ART OPENINGS, SEPTEMBER 21-22, 2006


MANHATTAN CHELSEA ART GALLERY OPENINGS; 02.28.04

Mike Weiss Gallery : Hermann Nitsch; New Paintings.

Comment: The pageantry of this show makes it work, the "spill paintings" displayed against a backdrop that includes a soundtrack suggestive of a Tibetan temple, ceremonial robes, flowers, and bare wood alter-like constructions with neatly arranged sugar cubes and napkin piles. Without the hubbub, all you'd have would be state-of-the-moment abstract expressionism or action painting or whatever you want to call it. Regarding those paintings, the yellows are really yellow, the reds are really red, and the thick is really thick, all nicely combined to generate motion. For those of you keeping score at home, four $40,000 pieces had sold stickers on them.

***

LFL Gallery : Jin Meyerson; "More Than You Want, Less Than You Need."

Comment: Screaming electric oil paintings; fluid DayGlo reflections. They're big, bright, hyperactive, reasonably competent, and intense to the point of overwhelming, unless, perhaps, their super psychedelia is tamed by stadium-sized settings. For those of you in the research community, these paintings may have remedial applications for downside bipolarites. For me, their amphetamized caffeination is more than I want, more than I need, and almost more than I can take.

***

Barbara Gladstone Gallery : Alighiero e Boetti.

Comment: This retrospective convincingly demonstrates the scope and breadth of the artist's work. Best of Show goes to the embroidered pieces, commissioned from Afghanistan and Pakistan weavers-- patchwork world maps with political overtones, and, especially, what looks to be an intricate rainbow abstract when viewed from a distance, but then morphs into a topsy-turvy tumult of figures, animals, and objects as you get close in. Also of note are sets of twelve-each, pencil-drawn magazine covers combined to mix cultures, politics, religion, arts, and current events without regard, reminding viewers that a whole lotta horns are honkin', everywhere, all the time.

***

I-20 Gallery : Stefan Bruggemann.

Comment: Let me preface what I'm about to say by saying that I possess neither the qualifications, time, patience, background, desire, nor unincorporated neocortical acreage necessary to thoughtfully comprehend, assimilate, and, therefore, comment on Bruggemann's contemporary applications of either conceptual, neo-conceptual, postmodern, or any related art forms of the seventies, a decade during which I was zoning out, in the following order, on poker, pocket billiards, Panama Red, Zeppelin, Disco, Zen, Werner Erhard, and capitalism. But if you drop the hyphen and add an "n" to "neo-," thereby forming the word "neon," the show did have neon, and I like neon, as well as the show's satiric thread, which I minimally decoded-- but don't try to quiz me.