chelsea, april 2007, #2

more chelsea, spring 2007 - last spring was skulls (cheese skulls, helmet skulls, sad helmet baseball skulls, many many skulls), this spring is silver. lots of silver everywhere...

Photography - there was NO GOOD PHOTOGRAPHY in Chelsea... it's all boring.
Sculpture/installation - there was very little sculpture, I think I only saw two or three interesting sculptural installations.
Video - not much video to be seen in Chelsea...
Painting - it was mostly painting/drawing shows in Chelsea, many were very good, with three favorites exhibitions of work by artists aged 78-91...


Sylvia Sleigh at I-20 - NICE painting from 1972... I am so happy to have seen this show. Most of the work is from the seventies, but one painting is from 1963 and the newest one is from 2006... it's the same one that was featured on PaintersNYC that I commented on liking; the bookshelf includes monographs on Fragonard, Jackson Pollock, Gorky, Juan Gris, and Sylvia Sleigh.

The girl on the bed painting above kind of reminds me of the 1974 Barkley Hendricks I saw in Miami, Family Jules.


Sylvia Sleigh, Concert Chempêtre, 1976.

She has a website...


Rosalyn Drexler at PaceWildenstein - This show was a must-see... I've been interested in her work since first reading about it on Roberta's artblog. I know that I also read Roberta's interview with the artist, but I must have forgotten a bunch of it because I was totally surprised to see how much photography was used. The mouth on the detail posted above is a cut-out photo, and all(?) of them are painted over cut-out and glued on figures.

She would either cut them out, stick them on, and paint over them... or she would cut them out and have them enlarged before sticking them on and painting. She didn't paint over the edges, she followed the form but left the edges... and in many of them the photographic source wasn't completely painted over, so you might get a face with a weird mash of photo dot detail with flat pasty paint.

There is just SO MUCH going on with her stuff... conceptually, technically, formally... read Roberta's first post and subsequent interview with the artist to get more info and see more images.

Brent Burkett loved it, Paddy Johnson says big whup.

okay, i'm done for tonight. i'll save the third artist, Jo Baer, for later....