Chelsea, part II

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More on Wednesday's Chelsea visit. I'll be updating this post later with more links.

ATM - I like Deki Yayoi's work. She's an artist I've been aware of for a while, since her first or second show in Japan. The stuff here was more restrained than what I've previously seen of her work but still good. She's nuts. Every little dot of color has a smiley face in it. It was interesting to walk across the street to Baumgartner after that and see Kusama Yayoi's small painting. Can't find an image of that piece but it was a lot like one of Deki's without the smiley faces. They are both nuts. Is this the first show of Deki Yayoi in NYC? If so I wish you had been able to see one of her bigger more obsessively wacked and cosmic pieces.

Tomoo Gokita was a doodler.

DCKT - How could I not see Tyler Green's show? The artists in this show do that "lots of" thing again of taking lots of something and and piling it all together until they have a bigger something - lots of soy sauce packets, lots of little tape circles, lots of little pencil circles. Maybe the difference between the three in this show and most other "lots of" artists is that "lots of" people often let the final shape seem like a more organic thing, while the three here have mostly created straight-edge boundaries to box their growths in. Dan Steinhilber is the most interesting for me.

Augusto Di Stefano was a double disappointment because not only is he a lot-of artist he is also a doodler. I thought he would be showing paintings?

The gallerists were friendly. I wandered a little too far back but all three people back there gave a warm "hi".

Lehmann Maupin - At first I thought Christian Hellmich was the missing Leipzig chick except she's not from Leipzig and I'm not sure she's a chick. My favorite works in this show were the smaller of the David Deutsch paintings. Fabien Rigobert's video and photo came in second. I liked Angela Dufresene's smaller paintings at Monya Rowe more than her large ones here.

Clementine - Wayne White is so unbelievably boring. Please, no more! David Rathman is a doodler and boring (the link is from his old cowboy work, now he's doing boxers). No more scrappy drawings, please!!! There are very few people who can do scrappy doodles and lots-of well, and more are not necessary. Give me some meat and I'll take a scrappy doodle on the side, but I don't want any more scrappy doodles as the main course. It's not healthy!! Where is the nourishment in Chelsea? I can't believe I used to want to be in this gallery. Okay, I would still do it - but it's not my first choice!!!

Cynthia Broan - Melanie Stidolph's photograph of a radiant baby was a beautiful backyard Blakean cherub. Sarah Bednarek had a subversive sofa screenprinted with terrorists among the foliage. The Una-Bomber, Hitler - I forget who exactly but all of them are historical figures. This could be in your grandmother's living room with matching curtains and nobody would ever notice. If only this fabric could be slipcovered onto something for a Bush/Blair photo-op.

I'm a big Sarah Bednarek fan. Pictured above is a detail of her piece "Ideologues and Dictators", currently on the cover of the British magazine Miser and Now. Deadpan photos of her with Mussolini's mustache, Lincoln's mole, etc.