this week in art

FIRST SATURDAY — GRAVITY AND GRACE: MONUMENTAL WORKS BY EL ANATSUI

El Anatsui, “Ozone Layer,” aluminum and copper wire, 2010 (photograph by Andrew McAllister, courtesy of the Akron Art Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 2, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates the recent opening of “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” the first solo museum show by the West African artist who uses recycled material to create dazzling wall pieces, at its March free First Saturday program. (Anatsui’s “Pot of Wisdom” was recently on view at the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea, and his “Broken Bridge II” can be seen along the High Line through next summer.) There will be African-influenced live performances by the Sway Machinery, Ria Boss, and Zozo Afrobeat; a curator talk on El Anatsui led by Kevin Dumouchelle; a screening of Jareth Merz’s An African Election, which is set in El Anatsui’s native Ghana; pop-up gallery talks honoring the sixth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; an artist talk with Fernando Mastrangelo, whose work is featured in “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn”; and interactive collaborative projects including a group photo mosaic and a Brooklyn Kung Fu & Tai Chi Academy workshop.

BROOKLYN / MONTRÉAL: JANET BIGGS / AUDE MOREAU

Aude Moreau’s installation at Smack Mellon contains two tons of refined sugar (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

AUDE MOREAU: SUGAR CARPET
JANET BIGGS: SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE
Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth St. at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 24, free, 12 noon – 6:00
www.smackmellon.org
www.brooklynmontreal.com

This past fall, Brooklyn-based visual artist Janet Biggs showed four of her video works — her Arctic Trilogy, made during an extraordinary trip to the far North, and A Step on the Sun, about a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano in Indonesia — at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of the “Brooklyn/Montréal” cultural exchange, which involves forty artists and sixteen institutions. In conjunction with that, French-born Montréal installation artist Aude Moreau presented her film of the New York City skyline, Reconstruction. The two have joined forces again for the second part of the exchange, a pair of solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon in DUMBO. Although Biggs’s and Moreau’s pieces reinforce each other so well it seems they might have planned the shows together, actually each artist had no idea what the other was going to do at the Brooklyn gallery. Biggs is very familiar with the area, however; Smack Mellon is just steps from the East River where Biggs staged the impressive Wet Exit for the DUMBO Arts Festival in September 2011. Moreau’s “Sugar Carpet” is a large-scale rectangular Persian rug made from two tons of refined sugar, bordered by an intricate black and red floral design. The piece is installed in the center of the gallery, incorporating eight of Smack Mellon’s structural posts, which pierce into the sides of the sugar, adding to the industrial feel referencing mass production. “Sugar Carpet” also evokes the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, a memorial to a past era, and serves as a splendid introduction, fittingly a white carpet rather than a red one, to the brilliantly bright expanse of Biggs’s latest video.

Janet Biggs fires a flare across a vast white landscape in SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE (photo courtesy of Janet Biggs)

Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, Biggs’s six-minute, two-channel follow-up to the Arctic Trilogy, which consists of Fade to White, Brightness All Around, and In the Cold Edge, was made during a 2010 art and science expedition aboard a hundred-year-old schooner. Over an electronic score by Will Martina, the camera-shy Biggs, in voice-over, narrates the tale of an early journey gone wrong as she shoots flares across an empty, vast white horizon that immediately makes one think of climate change and the melting of the glaciers. “The act of shooting off a flare became both an aggressive assertion of my presence and a cry for help that implied a condition of emergency,” she explains in an artist statement. “My efforts to either establish power or seek assistance failed as a thousand miles from civilization, I was too far north for anyone to see or respond to my act.” The nearly blinding whiteness of Somewhere Beyond Nowhere echoes that of “Sugar Carpet,” the frozen landscape Biggs walks across providing a stark contrast to the fragility of Moreau’s sugar sculpture, which would be ruined by the trampling of people’s feet. In addition, the pieces work particularly well in tandem during what has been an extremely cold winter, which has featured several powerful snowstorms. Biggs’s and Moreau’s installations continue through February 24; you can also catch Biggs’s In the Cold Edge through March 10 at Present Company as part of the group show “Through This to That,” which also features Biggs’s lightboxes from her Kawah Ijen series. For our 2011 twi-ny talk with Biggs, go here.

FABIO VIALE: STARGATE

Fabio Viale, “Thank you and Goodbye,” detail, white marble, 2012, and “Infinite,” white marble, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery
Tuesday – Saturday through February 23, free
212-999-7337
www.speronewestwater.com
stargate slideshow

A child prodigy, Italian sculptor Fabio Viale has been working in marble since he was sixteen years old. Now thirty-seven, the Cuneo-born Viale is having his first solo show in New York, “Stargate,” a diverse collection of marble works on two floors of Sperone Westwater that are all about juxtaposition and recontextualization, combining the modern world with the art historical. Upon entering the vestibule, visitors are greeted by “Souvenir Gioconda,” a marble casting of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that appears to be made out of Styrofoam and looking like pieces have been picked off of it. The sculpture is part of Viale’s Souvenir series, which references people’s desire to own great works of art, either in replica, like a souvenir from a gift shop, or by actually taking part of the original, a practice that has become widespread in Italy, with the nose being a particularly favorite target. The gallery’s main space on the first floor contains three statues that form a kind of Pop art trio: “Ahgalla III” is a life-size canoe that Viale has actually taken out on the water; “Stargate” is made up of stacked fruit crates that form a larger crate standing on its side, almost as if a doorway into the commercial world; and “Linea schiacciata” is a twenty-foot-long I-beam that calls into question the very structure of objects. In the back room, bathed in a religious glow, is “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” a gorgeous sculpture of Jesus removed from the arms of his mother, based on Michelangelo’s iconic “Pietá,” instead now spread across a black platform, to be experienced in a completely different way. “I never look back to the past. If you want to run fast, you must never turn around,” the Torino-based Viale tells interviewer Alessandra Galasso in the exhibition catalog. “My main aim is to go beyond tradition. As they are, my sculptures can be interpreted as being academic or nostalgic because they are made of marble, and it is therefore fundamental that I avoid any nostalgic references to the past. For example, when I look at the ‘Pietá,’ I am interested in understanding how Michelangelo managed to achieve certain effects using marble — rather than what this work represents in art history — in order to represent the same semantic values.”

Fabio Viale, “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” white marble, 2006 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The works upstairs continue Viale’s goal of transcending tradition. “Infinite” is a pair of impossibly interlocked white marble Michelin tires cast in great detail. “Anchor” is a fifty-five-inch anchor screw turned into a totem pole. And “Thank you and Goodbye” — made using a computer-controlled robot, while all the other sculptures were made by Viale’s own extremely talented hands — consists of two giant paper bags, one with a pair of eyeholes, the other with a circle for a mouth, on situated on either side of “Infinite,” taking an everyday mundane object and transforming it into something that recalls KKK hoods as well as Klan-like figures found in the work of Philip Guston. A paper bag is also something people use to carry items in, perhaps referencing bags from gift shops where one can buy iconic souvenirs of the Mona Lisa, the “Pietá,” and other classic works of art and take them home, but alas, there are no such objects for sale at Sperone Westwater. “Stargate” is on view through February 23, joined by “A Picture Gallery in the Italian Tradition of the Quadreria (1750 – 1850),” which includes paintings and drawings from the Italian figurative tradition, providing an interesting complement to Viale’s thrilling show.

FELIX DE WELDON: IWO JIMA MONUMENT

Felix de Weldon’s classic Iwo Jima Monument is on view in Midtown prior to Bonhams auction (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

WORLD WAR II: THE PACIFIC THEATER
Bonhams / 590 Atrium
580/590 Madison Ave. at 57th St.
Through February 21, free
Auction begins on February 22 at 1:00 pm
www.bonhams.com
iwo jima monument slideshow

On Friday, February 22, the 281st birthday of the Father of Our Country, a stunning piece of American history is being auctioned off at Bonhams in Midtown. Lot 163, estimated to sell for $1.2-$1.8 million, is the original cast-stone version of Felix de Weldon’s Iwo Jima statue, the sculpture based on the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945, of five Marines and one sailor raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi after a hard-fought victory on the Japanese island. (Since 2007, the work has been on board the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.) Part of the “World War II: The Pacific Theater” sale, the five-ton statue, which stands twenty feet high including the flag (twelve feet, two inches without) and is eight feet, one inch long, is the smaller sibling of the statue that resides outside Arlington National Cemetery. Austrian-born American sculptor Felix de Weldon, who served in the navy during WWII and became a U.S. citizen in 1945, sculpted three of the figures from real life, the other three from photos, as they had died in action; the men are Sgt. Michael Strank, Cpl. Harlon Block, PFC Franklin Sousley, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes, and PM2 John Bradley. “When I saw the picture of the Iwo Jima flag raising, actually, on the same deadline as the flag raising took place, I was so deeply impressed by its significance, its meaning,” de Weldon told Jerry N. Hess of the Harry S. Truman Library in 1969, “that I imagined that it would arouse the imagination of the American people to show the forward drive, the unison of action, the will to sacrifice, the relentless determination of these young men. Everything was embodied in that picture.” De Weldon captured that same embodiment in his thrilling sculpture, which will spend the next few days on view in the 590 Atrium, amid people having lunch, entrances to various stores, two of Zhan Wang’s shiny silver stainless-steel abstract “Jiashanshi” sculptures, and, oddly enough, several pieces from Bonhams’ March 19 sale, “Fine Japanese Works of Art.”

GEORGE BELLOWS

George Bellows, “Stag at Sharkey’s,” oil on canvas, 1909 (The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Gallery 999
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through February 18, $25 adults, children under twelve free
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

This is the last weekend to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s career-redefining exhibition on painter George Bellows. Simply titled “George Bellows,” the show explores the surprising diversity displayed by the Columbus, Ohio-born Ashcan artist who died too early, suffering a ruptured appendix and passing away from peritonitis in January 1925 at the age of forty-two. Bellows is best known for his spectacular boxing paintings, canvases that come alive with action and fury. In “Stag at Sharkey’s,” made during a period when boxing was illegal — Sharkey’s was a fight club across the street from Bellows’s studio on Broadway and 66th St. — every muscle and sinew bursts forth on the boxers’ bodies as they lunge at each other, the referee providing a visual counterbalance as the rapt crowd looks on. But Bellows, who moved to New York in 1904, was much more than a one-genre wonder. “Paddy Flanagan” is a striking portrait of a street kid, the palette and pose evoking the Old Masters. The darkness of “Forty-two Kids,” in which naked boys go for a dip on a ratty peer in the East River, stands in stark contrast to the bright, sunny “Beach at Coney Island.” Bellows’s creative process is examined in a series of sketches, drawings, and watercolors that result in the tour-de-force “The Cliff Dwellers,” which focuses on a busy, crowded street on the Lower East Side.

George Bellows, “Cliff Dwellers,” oil on canvas, 1913 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund)

Bellows echoed Winslow Homer in such sea paintings as “Churn and Break” and “The Big Dory” and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the family portrait “Emma and Her Children,” captured unique views of the Hudson River in “Pennsylvania Excavation” and “Rain on the River,” depicted high-end, grassy sports in “Polo at Lakewood” and “Tennis at Newport,” and detailed the horrors of war in general, and WWI specifically, in a controversial Goya-esque series featuring acts of violence that were later disputed. The show concludes with Bellows’s 1924 work “Dempsey and Firpo,” with Luis Ángel Firpo knocking heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey through the ropes and out of the ring at the Polo Grounds; the canvas is painted in a much more flat, graphic style than his previous boxing canvases made fifteen years earlier. A baseball player in college, Bellows learned about art primarily by visiting museums, including the Met itself, which served as a major influence on his work, so it is only appropriate that the Met is home to this must-see show, the first major career retrospective of the extremely talented, underrated artist since the mid-1960s and one that reveals him to be a masterful chronicler of life in early-twentieth-century America.

LOVE

Robert Indiana’s “Love” sculpture continues to attract attention on Sixth Ave. in Midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

LOVE by Robert Indiana
Southeast corner of 55th St. & Sixth Ave.
www.robertindiana.com

Pop artist and Warhol protege Robert Indiana, who was born Robert Clark but changed his last name to the state where he was born, has work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Whitney, and other prestigious locales, but the self-described “American painter of signs” is most famous for a single four-letter word. His iconic Midtown depiction of the word “Love,” which rests on two levels, in red letters with a tilted “O,” continues to attract tourist photos and people looking for a place to sit on their lunch hour. Dating from 1966, the statue, which has a smaller sibling in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, evokes a “so-what” attitude from many native New Yorkers, but it’s hard to pass by and not be enamored with the bold splash of color it brings to an otherwise gray corner. The big red letters with blue interiors brashly proclaim a word so many people are afraid to say, except perhaps at this time of year, when Valentine’s Day brings out the romantic in us all, for completely artificial reasons.

BOOK LAUNCH: LOUISE LAWLER

Louise Lawler, “Still Life (Candle),” digital cibachrome on aluminum museum box, 2003

Metro Pictures
519 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday, February 14, free, 6:00 – 7:30
212-206-7100
www.metropicturesgallery.com

For more than forty years, Pictures Generation artist Louise Lawler has been appropriating works through installation and photography, recontextualizing art and the art market in shots of paintings taken in auction house, in collectors’ homes, and before shows are hung, taking them out of their element, where they are usually seen on walls in galleries and museums. Now sixty-five, the New York-born conceptualist will be at Metro Pictures on Valentine’s Day, where she has shown since 1982, to celebrate the release of Louise Lawler: October Files (MIT Press, February 8, $35) as well as last year’s Louise Lawler and/or Gerhard Richter (Schirmer/Mosel, June 2012, $59.95). She will be joined by Helen Molesworth, editor of the former tome, and Tim Griffin, who contributed an essay for the latter. While at Metro Pictures, be sure to go upstairs to see some early works by Lawler, in addition to the main-floor exhibition featuring Trevor Paglen, which continues through March 9.