New show up by Daniel Lefcourt.  One sentence in the press release is a glory of artspeak: “Meaning is simultaneously constructed and evaded, deflected and defined.“  HA!  Anyway – good stuff in that mid-60s Minimal vein.  More at his website: http://www.certainlynot.com/daniel/main.php

Sutton Lane: Exhibitions.

Plastic surgery as art at Apex Art. More>

Lynne Pidel, a gallery attendant at the New Museum has kindly organized a show of works by many of its employees.  There was no “curating” either artists or pieces.  The only criteria for inclusion was whether or not one worked at the NewMu.  Most of the artists are from Security or Visitor Services.  There are very few full time employees showing.  None from Curatorial, Development, or Education.

Your intrepid blogger will have one of his drawings on display.

So be a sport and see the show.

The Stanton Chapter
176 Stanton St., New York, NY 10002
Tues-Sat 12-6pm

November 3 – December 1, 2008
Opening reception: November 3, 6-8PM

Adam Hayes, an artist from Newark, NJ (remember when it was the new Brooklyn?) is having a show at the gallery Number 35 in Manhattan.

Sadly I can’t dig up much information (make a website for yourself, sir) but the press release suggests his drawings “feature a moment: hair blowing, the space between drapery, a shadow of a neck. They turn in images of incomplete sashes and quick snapshots of fur collars.”  Could be.  I like their spareness and the way they appear to be in formation.  Proto pictures, maybe.  More on Adam via his gallery’s badly designed site.

Francesco Longenecker, Bed, 2008, oil on canvas, 60" x 80"

Francesco Longenecker, Landing, 2008, oil on canvas, 60" x 96"

Francesco Longenecker, Pond, 2008, oil on canvas, 48” x 58”

Francesco Longenecker is a young painter (b. 1981) in New York with a promising show of new paintings at Rare Gallery.  Here are some selections.  More here.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the minisite I designed and built to accompany the Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the New Museum.  Features include an audio slideshow, interactive timeline of Peyton’s life and career, and an essay by the show’s organizer Laura Hoptman.  Special thanks to Amy Mackie and Nick Hasty.

SARAH BRAMAN AND JOEL SHAPIRO A project inspired by dialogue between Rita Ackermann and Andrea Rosen Gallery September 13 - October 18, 2008 Gallery2

Lord knows I’m not a Joel Shapiro fan.  I find his post-minimalist sculptures downright offensive.  His anthropomorphized geometries appropriate the “look” of minimalism without retaining any of a good minimal sculpture’s finest attributes: aloofness, mystery, and ambiguity.  Shapiro’s sculptures are too immediately accessible, too easily read.  And all within the visual framework of a movement that at its best made the viewer work.

Despite this I’ll still visit a show in the back of Andrea Rosen Gallery which presents the work of two artists: Mr. Shapiro and Sarah Braman.  Braman’s are works I think I can get behind.  I’ll withhold any opining until after I’ve seen the show but I’m hoping that when both artists are presented together Shapiro will look even more the hack that he is.

Katherine Gressel, Takeoff, 2008, acrylic on tyvek paper, 44 x 24 inches

Check out a show full of smart-looking work curated by my friend Jeanne Gerrity: Creative Cartographies at Brooklyn Arts Council.

From the release:

“Influenced by the organization inherent in cartography, the twelve Brooklyn-based artists in BAC Gallery’s latest exhibition, Creative Cartographies, present viewpoints both personal and political, mapping their own thoughts, journeys, and observations. Collectively, the artists show that structure and expression are not mutually exclusive and utilize a variety of materials to create imagined and real geographies. Maps traditionally suggest stability and a sense of purpose; they originally served to chart new territories and make the unknown less intimidating. In the age of Google maps and GPS, art inspired by maps continues to aid the viewer in navigating unfamiliar territory, but it also veers from the scientific and factual to the creative and subjective.”

The SFMOMA’s two massive Sol LeWitt atrium wall drawings – the last works still up from his retrospective in 2000 – are being painted over to make room for an upcoming Martin Puryear installation.

It doesn’t sadden me that they’re no longer on view.  Because the instruction set is the kernel of the work and can lead to infinite authentic resurrections, the piece is simply in one less place.  What’s more poignant to me is that after eight years the exhibition that changed the course of my personal, artistic, and professional life has finally concluded.

I feel fortunate that my first encounter with Conceptual Art wasn’t a chilly philosophical affair.  For while a Kosuth or Art and Language show would has been just as likely to pique my interest in this realm of art making, I’m grateful that it came in visual terms.  And in Sol’s unique way.  His work’s breathtaking delicacy, lyricism, intellectual rigor, and modesty are core features of the best art I could make and, by proxy, of the best life I could lead.

While his SFMOMA retrospective is now relegated to memory, I suppose it always was.  Our lives are lived in recollection, looking back on the wake of experience cast off from the fleeting present.

And since Sol’s work is fundamentally about the idea behind the work his pieces seem architected in the language of memory.  It’s appropriate, then, that his retrospective is now over – freed from binding physicality and loosened into the realm of remembrance.

Mass MoCA has launched a minisite in advance of Sol LeWitt’s 25 year wall drawing retrospective opening there in November.  Don’t look too hard or it will give away the surprise!

Promising show coming up at Peter Blum: Wendingen: A Journal for the Arts, 1918-1932 | Peter Blum Gallery

From their press release:

“Wendingen, meaning turnings or upheavals in Dutch, was a monthly publication organized by the Amsterdam art society Architectura et Amicitia. The first issue was published in January 1918, with a limited edition of 650 copies. In total, 116 issues would be published by its end in 1932. Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, an architect associated with the Amsterdam School, was its editor and primary force up till 1925 when he resigned at its height.

After the devastation of the First World War, and the postwar chaos, Wendingen united different artists and architects who found in it a unified purpose. Despite its connections to architecture, the avant-garde journal made egalitarian efforts to explore a variety of art and design topics. The journal devoted each issue to a single topic or artist, ranging from sculpture to dance and theatrical design. Each cover was created by a different contemporary artist and contained innovative typography, making it highly influential to the graphic arts of the period. There were no stipulations that the covers conformed to the journal’s content, resulting in an overview of contemporary Dutch art. The covers were an unconventional double square format, based on the Japanese tatami mat proportion, while the complicated hand binding was tied to the arts and crafts movement. Wendingen’s subjects and contributors included many prominent artists, designers and architects, including El Lissitzky, Eileen Gray, Josef Hoffman, Gustav Klimt, and Erich Mendelsohn. From 1925 to1926, it published a series of seven issues devoted to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 67, 1973, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 in.

Terrific news for those Diebenkorn fans out there: a retrospective of the Ocean Park series will be debuting at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2009.

From their release:

“Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967 to 1985
Newport Beach

Oct 11, 2009 – Mar 14, 2010

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967 to 1985 is the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s most celebrated series. Recognized as a leading West Coast Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Diebenkorn turned his attention to figurative painting in 1955 and achieved equal success in this alternate style. In 1968 he returned to abstraction, and during the next twenty years would forge one of the most compelling and masterful bodies of work of the 20th century: the Ocean Park series. Featuring nearly 75 works—including paintings, prints, drawings, and collages—this exhibition captures Diebenkorn’s practice of working simultaneously in diverse media and provides audiences with the first opportunity to explore the complexity of Diebenkorn’s artistic and aesthetic concerns in this seminal body of work. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 250-page fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, and will tour in 2010.

This exhibition is organized by Sarah Bancroft, curator at OCMA.”

Rumors have it that the show will travel to Washington DC so East Coasters like myself won’t have to make a trip to see it (although it will definitely be worth the trip).

More Diebenkorn posts coming soon…  What a guy – what a San Franciscan!