Will Ryman’s “Everyman” wraps around gallery space and lets visitors walk inside his head (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Paul Kasmin Gallery
293 Tenth Ave. at 27th St. and 515 West 27th St.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-563-4474
www.paulkasmingallery.com
anyone and no one slideshow
Will Ryman keeps growing as an artist, both literally and figuratively. Since 2003, the former playwright and student of Absurdist philosophy has been creating such fantastical characters and installations as “The Dog Walker,” “The Bed,” and, perhaps most famously, “The Pit,” containing figures made of papier-mâché, PVC tubing, wire mesh, and acrylic paint, amassing a rogues’ gallery of engaging creatures with oddly shaped heads. He’s also constructed giant roses out of fiberglass and stainless steel that first filled the Marlborough Gallery for “A New Beginning” in 2009, then reached new heights for “The Roses” along Park Ave. last year. For his first exhibition at Paul Kasmin, the New York-based Ryman has gone mammoth with “Anyone and No One,” a two-gallery show centered by “Everyman,” a ninety-foot-long sculpture of a man lying on his side, wrapped around three walls of the Tenth Ave. space. His huge papier-mâché white head leads to an upper body of 250 pairs of shoes painted blue and extremities made out of 30,000 silver bottle caps and dressed in enormous denim jeans. A welcoming hand reaches out at the viewer, the fingers raised in a beckoning manner. In “The Pit,” Ryman placed dozens of small characters in a white box that visitors would look down into; here he has one figure — perhaps representing the artist himself — squeezed into the gallery space, the artist as installation encircling his audience. Ryman then invites visitors inside his mind, as the huge head has an opening that allows people to walk into another room — the artist’s brain? — where 200,000 paintbrushes are stacked in rows forming a kind of forest one can wander through. Employing unused paintbrushes for these neural pathways is an interesting choice, given that Ryman’s father, Robert, is one of the leading minimalist artists of his time, most well known for his white-on-white canvases.
Will Ryman’s “Bird” is caged in at Paul Kasmin Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
While “Everyman” is squeezed into his white box, Ryman’s “Bird” has a bit more room in its cage, Kasmin’s West 27th St. space right around the corner. Loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Ryman constructed the twelve-foot-high, two-ton avian out of 1,500 real and fabricated straight and curved nails, as if the bird is its own cage. As with the paintbrushes, Ryman again uses objects more associated with the making and hanging of art as the very raw materials in his art. From its beak dangles a rose, referencing Ryman’s previous work as well as adding color to the piece. “Bird” eyes the ceiling-length windows from the side of its head, gazing upon a freedom that will never come, the artist trapped in his own cage.
There’s nothing abstract about the title of Corinna Belz’s documentary on German artist Gerhard Richter, no missing words or punctuation marks. Gerhard Richter Painting is primarily just that: Ninety-seven minutes of Gerhard Richter painting as he prepares for several exhibitions, including a 2009 show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City. In 2007, Belz got a rare chance to capture Richter on camera, making a short film focusing on the stained-glass window he designed for the Cologne Cathedral. Two years later, the shy, reserved German artist, who prefers to have his art speak for itself, invited Belz into his studio, giving her remarkable access inside his creative process, which revealingly relies so much on chance and accident. Belz films Richter as he works on two large-scale canvases on which he first slathers yellow paint, adds other colors, then takes a large squeegee and drags it across the surface, changing everything. It’s fascinating to watch Richter study the pieces, never quite knowing when they are done, unsure of whether they are any good. It’s also painful to see him take what looks like an extraordinary painting and then run the squeegee over it yet again, destroying what he had in order to see if he can make it still better. “They do what they want,” he says of the paintings. “I planned something totally different.” About halfway through the film, a deeply concerned Richter starts regretting his decision to allow the camera into his studio. “It won’t work,” he says. “At the moment it seems hopeless. I don’t think I can do this, painting under observation. That’s the worst thing there is.” But continue he does, for Belz’s and our benefit. Belz (Life After Microsoft) even gets Richter to talk a little about his family while looking at some old photos, offering intriguing tidbits about his early life and his escape to Düsseldorf just before the Berlin Wall went up. Belz also includes clips from 1966 and 1976 interviews with Richter, and she attends a meeting he has with Goodman about his upcoming show, lending yet more insight into the rather eclectic artist. “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too,” Richter, who turned eighty last month, says in the 1966 clip. However, watching Gerhard Richter Painting is far from pointless; Belz has made a compelling documentary about one of the great, most elusive artists of our time. “Man, this is fun,” Richter says at one point, and indeed it is; watching the masterful artist at work is, well, a whole lot more fun than watching paint dry. Gerhard Richter Painting opens on March 14 at Film Forum, with Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr introducing the 8:00 screening.