Chelsea

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Visited Chelsea yesterday. I'll update this post tomorrow or Saturday with more links to the artists and some shows I don't have time to get to now.

Gagosian - Had two Alexander Calder mobiles in a big back room that I liked a lot. I was reminded of the James Hyde lecture and his idea of the mobile as "ruined genre". It would have been nice to see some of Hyde's Fallen Mobiles lying around.

Robert Miller - Leiko Ikemura's hazy oil on jute paintings of Yoshitomo Nara proportioned women. Ikemura and Nara both live somewhere in Germany, maybe they've influenced each other slightly? Something about these soaked in paintings also made me think of Marlene Dumas. The thinness? The moodiness? These seven works and the Stephen Westfall mentioned below were easily my favorite paintings of the day.

Robert Miller also had very good paintings by Alice Neel and Milton Resnick.

Lennon, Weinberg - The Stephen Westfall painting. Dogwood is a large vertical rectangular canvas trisected by two horizontal and two vertical red bands, creating nine white squares. The white squares are each divided further by one horizontal and one vertical black line - like windowpanes. None of these bands or lines are exactly straight or match up. They're all a little off and it hurts your eyes looking at it trying to make this marks line up as they should. I saw this shortly after seeing the Good Vibrations show at McKenzie.

Here's a Jerry Saltz essay on Stephen Westfall.

McKenzie - Good Vibrations - lots of good stuff - I liked Julian Stanczak, Barbara Takenaga, and most especially the two paintings by Laura Watt.

Sonnabend - Four large landscape c-prints by Elger Esser that had an old postcard feel. Turns out that they actually are photographs of old postcards blown up big. My favorite got taken off the wall and wrapped before my eyes!

Barbara Gladstone - The Slater Bradley and Chris Burden videos. I didn't even realize this was an old (1980) Burden video until I looked at the sheet, I thought it was something new going for a trendy look. Big Wrench is an obsessive funny stalkerish video about a truck.

Nicole Klagsbrun - The seven playful Tuttle-esque pieces/interventions by Cordy Ryman. He had pipe pieces, door braces, a pink corner "ladder", and some wall painting-sculptures (Spider Star was my favorite of those).

Feigen - I liked Craig Love's small pieces best. At first I thought the Judith Linhares painting was a Dana Schutz (and here is a discussion on Edward Winkleman's comments about Schutz which mentions Linhares).

D'Amelio Terras - My favorites here were the two collages by Corin Hewitt. Really weird.

CRG - I liked Zak Prekop's small green painting best.

Monya Rowe - I was most interested in Angela Dufresne's three paintings here. She also had some bigger paintings at Lehmann Maupin but I didn't like them as much.

303 - The Shannon Oksanen portraits were too much the same but worse of the better portraits of that same gallery's Maureen Gallace.

Margaret Thatcher - friendly staff

Marianne Boesky - closed for installation but friendly staff-person who tried to get me a cup of water.

I've had enough of doodles, doodling, and doodlers and saw way way more merchandise than art. I wish I had had time to see the Helion show and Cezanne and Pisarro at MoMA.