this week in art

SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA: PERSONAL EFFECTS IN BLACK

Painting and sculpture merge in Serge Alain Nitegeka exhibit in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Marianne Boesky Gallery
507-509 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through February 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
347-296-3667
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Burundi-born, Johannesburg-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka explores space and volume, flatness and depth in “Personal Effects in BLACK,” continuing at both Marianne Boesky Galleries in Chelsea through February 24. Seen from different angles, many of the works seems to have a three-dimensionality — and in fact, several do. His “Colour & Form” series consists of geometric shapes in soft blues, sunny yellows, sharp whites, and dense blacks that seem to emerge from and go deep into the unprimed plywood. A pair of “Form Ephemeral” pieces actually do extend off the wood like wall sculptures. And in one of the two galleries, the five objects that comprise “Personal Effects” are like unfinished paintings gathered on the floor. Nitegeka has connected the two galleries with a site-specific installation through a narrow corridor filled with black bars partially blocking the way, a kind of maze.

Serge Alain Nitegeka links the two Boesky Galleries with immersive site-specific installation in corridor (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Black is brute darkness,” Nitegeka explains about the exhibit. “An intangible destructive mass that is dense and viscous, weighing me down deep into silence. It puts me into a state of overwhelming appreciation and meditation — a space of unknown emptiness and depth. There is an uninterrupted silence, and nothing is familiar. It is there as I drift in and out of sleep, where I wander blindly, arms stretched outwards trying to clutch onto something. I move about in a majestic solitude of colors and forms. My mind blank and hands busy. The once straight lines bend evenly into curves as I learn to surrender.” Nitegeka develops his pieces spontaneously rather than planning out every detail, resulting in shapes and colors that are unexpected and abstract. In several works the raw plywood shows through, acting like a floor or a table. “I know that no one is exempt from the heaviness of the unknown,” he adds. “At the end of the day, while we close our eyes asleep in the black, the heaviness catches up. No one is spared. Black is ever constant.”

POLLOCK

Jim Fletcher and Birgit Huppuch star in US premiere of Pollock at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Laurent Schneegans)

Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
February 22-25, $20
212-352-3101
www.abronsartscenter.org

Abrons Arts Center and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York have joined forces for the US premiere of Compagnie l’heliotrope’s Pollock, a riveting show about the tempestuous relationship between Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who met in 1942, married in 1945, and stayed together, through good and bad — primarily Pollock’s alcoholism and infidelities — until his death in a car crash in 1956. Written by Fabrice Melquiot and directed by Paul Desveaux as part of a trilogy about American artists that also includes works about Janis Joplin and Diane Arbus, Pollock unfurls like one of Pollock’s paintings, nonlinear, experimental, and abstract, forming an intense and entertaining whole. Pollock (Jim Fletcher) and Krasner (Birgit Huppuch) tramp barefoot across Desveaux’s set, which features a pair of transparent plastic canvases, a small kitchen area, and microphones at either side, where Pollock and Krasner share some of their tale. The stage is a metaphor for Pollock’s thoughts; “Jackson Pollock drags on his cigarette and now he’ll go / into / into the bar that functions as his head / Jackson Pollock’s head is a bar not a head all I serve in my bar is pure genius no ice it rips out your tonsils plucks off your uvula,” the Wyoming-born Pollock says. Brooklyn native Krasner adds, “That’s what genius is /  Pollock  / It’s on your face like a mark of shame you’d like to hide but it’s got you in its grip /  It won’t let go will never let go drink all you like Pollock you’ll never escape it  / It’s how you’re made it’s there it’s /  It’s on your face on every one of your paintings poor love my poor love and because your face lets you see where to put your feet like the paintings help you stand up straight  / You keep your beautiful face for all to see and tuck your crutches under your arm / Then your genius explodes  / You don’t wanna fall flat on your face.”

Pollock depicts the tempestuous relationship between Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (photo by Laurent Schneegans)

The couple cuddle and argue, smoke cigarettes, drink from bottles, interview each other, dance, paint, and name-drop such friends and colleagues as Hans Hoffmann, Tony Smith, Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain, Pierre Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Alexander Calder. They speak in poetic rhythms — the English translation is by Kenneth Casler and Myriam Heard — as they relate various aspects of their relationship, including events after Pollock’s death in a one-car accident that might have been a suicide; Pollock’s mistress at the time, Ruth Kligman, was in the car too but survived. “Painting / And killing myself / I don’t do anything else,” Pollock says. A moment later, Krasner examines a Pollock painting using mathematics and fractal density. “You’re exactly what I wasn’t expecting this evening,” he says. It’s not exactly what the audience was expecting either, but Pollock is an insightful and entertaining exploration of love and the creative process. Fletcher (Isolde, The Evening), a longtime member of Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players and who most recently played Lemmy Caution in Why Why Always at Abrons, Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty’s multimedia adaptation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, inhabits Pollock’s mind, body, and spirit, giving an expert performance that is complemented by Huppuch’s (Men on Boats, Telephone) bold, beautiful portrayal of Krasner, just as Pollock was complemented by Krasner. Many of the scenes and much of the dialogue were inspired by real episodes, as Melquiot and Desveaux drip, scratch, and splatter the elements together to come up with an impressive theatrical canvas.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN AT MoMA

Carolee Schneemann’s early paintings and sculptures are a revelation at MoMA PS1 retrospective (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Doc Fortnight 2018: George (Jeffrey Perkins, 2017) and Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, (Lynne Sachs, 2018), MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-708-9400, Wednesday, February 21, $12, 7:30
“Art and Practice with Carolee Schneemann,” MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave., 718-784-2084, Thursday, February 22, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues at MoMA PS1 Thursday – Monday through March 11, suggested admission $5-$10, free for NYC residents
www.moma.org
www.caroleeschneemann.com

MoMA PS1’s “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting” is a revelatory exploration of the career of the immensely influential multidisciplinary artist. The seventy-eight-year-old Pennsylvania-born Schneemann will reveal yet more this week during two special programs. On February 21 at 7:30, she will be at MoMA for the world premiere screening of Lynne Sachs’s Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, a nine-minute short about Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson, which is screening with Jeffrey Perkins’s George, about George Maciunas and Fluxus, as part of “Doc Fortnight 2018: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media.” Schneemann, Perkins, and Sachs will participate in a discussion after the films; in addition, Alison Knowles will re-create her interactive 1963 piece Shoes of Your Choice. (MoMA PS1 will also be hosting “An Evening in Honor of Carolee Schneemann,” a screening and discussion on March 5 with Melissa Ragona, Jenny Jaskey, Branden W. Joseph, and the artist.) “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting” continues through March 11, an expansive two-floor survey that shines a light not only on Schneemann’s well-known feminist video and performance pieces but her exceptional paintings and sculptures. Superbly curated by Sabine Breitwieser with consulting curator Branden W. Joseph and organized at MoMA PS1 by Erica Papernik-Shimizu with Oliver Shultz, the show takes deep looks at such Schneemann works as Meat Joy, in which a group of people roll around with raw beef, chicken, and fish; Interior Scroll, in which Schneemann pulls a long strip of paper from her vagina and reads the contents; and Up to and Including Her Limits, for which she strapped herself in a harness and used her body to draw on a surface. In 1993, Schneemann declared, “I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.” For the Abstract Expressionist Pinwheel, a white-gloved staff member will spin the painting upon request. Like Joseph Cornell, she made shadowbox-type works, and her collections of sharp, often aggressive detritus hang on the walls like three dimensional paintings. Colorado House is a “failed” painting turned into a freestanding sculpture. Magnetic audio tape falls out of the bottom of One Window Is Clear — Notes to Lou Andreas Salomé, a tribute to the Russian-German psychoanalyst and writer.

Carolee Schneemann’s Flange 6rpm consists of seven foundry-poured aluminum sculptures that move at six revolutions per minute (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“My work can take substance from the materials I find,” Schneemann wrote to French poet and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1964, which helps explain Blood Work Diary, a visual document of her menstrual flow. For Body Collage, a naked Schneemann, coated in wallpaper paste and molasses, rolls around in paper shreds. Her body is also one of the main subjects in Fuses, a film in which she makes love with her then-partner, James Tunney, while her beloved cat, Kitch, hangs around nearby. Kitch can be found in several works, but it’s Cluny (and later Vesper) who Schneemann gets perhaps a little too close to in Infinity Kisses. Meanwhile, Vulva’s Morphia is so hot that Schneemann includes four electric fans to cool off the thirty-five vaginal depictions, with such text as “Vulva decodes feminist constructivist semiotics and realizes she has no authentic feelings at all; even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions, and conditioning.” That statement gets to the heart of Schneemann’s six-decade oeuvre, taking back the female body, and the power that comes with that, and redefining it, with no limits. Particularly in the era of #MeToo, “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting” is an extraordinary exhibition by an extraordinary artist who has never been afraid to make the private public, and political.

DAVID HOCKNEY

David Hockney, “A Bigger Splash,” acrylic on canvas, 1967 (Tate, purchased 1980 / © David Hockney; photo © Tate, London 2017)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through February 25, $25 suggested admission
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

There’s something very pure about the paintings of English artist David Hockney, so directly enchanting that Randall Wright’s 2015 documentary about him was simply called Hockney and the Met’s grand retrospective, which closes February 25, is titled David Hockney, no further description needed. I called the film “a wonderful documentary that celebrates not only the artist but his work and process, which comes alive on the screen, digital technology allowing the paintings and photographs to pop with their brilliant colors. If you didn’t appreciate Hockney’s talent before, this documentary will change your mind about it. And if you already were a fan of him and his work, this film will make you love him even more.” The same can be said of the Met show, including the digital aspect; the first major survey of Hockney in New York City in thirty years features the digital triptych “View through the Artist’s Bedroom Window, Bridlington” that reveals the development of a trio of images made on an iPad. Celebrating his eightieth birthday, the show comprises more than eighty painting, drawing, photographs, and video works as Hockney, over the course of nearly sixty years, goes from abstraction to realism, from portraits to landscapes, from 1960’s “Love Painting,” when he was still at the Royal College of Art, to 2017’s “Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden.”

David Hockney, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” acrylic on canvas, 1968 (private collection / © David Hockney)

David Hockney, “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills,” acrylic on canvas, 1964 (Tate, purchased 1980 / © David Hockney; photo © Tate, London 2017)

Hockney was born in Bradford, England and has lived on the Yorkshire Coast and in the Hollywood Hills. He still paints every day, with a sparkling control of color, form, and space that instantly engages viewers making their way through the galleries, divided into “Early Works,” “Los Angeles,” “Pair Portraits,” “Sketches & Photocollages,” “Assembled Views,” “Roads & Landscapes,” and “Blue Terraces.” He didn’t hide from his sexual identity in his paintings, even though homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Many of his classic works are on view: 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” a spectacularly rendered backyard pool with a small home, part of a diving board, and two tall palm trees set against a blue sky, a bravura example of his use of line and geometric shapes; 1964’s homoerotic “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills”; 1980’s swirling, mazelike “Nichols Canyon”; and 1986’s chromogenic print “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #1,” which focuses our gaze on the word “stop” three times, an instruction that we, and Hockney, have no intention of obeying.

David Hockney "Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy" 1968 Acrylic on canvas 83 1/2 x 119 1/2" © David Hockney

David Hockney, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” acrylic on canvas, 1968 (private collection / © David Hockney)

But the show goes much deeper. “One of the surprises for me is how varying he was,” curator Ian Alteveer says in a Met video. “He, at a very young age, was expressing themes of queerness and of difference and displaying them very proudly in his work.” This is perhaps best exemplified by 1963’s “Domestic Scene,” in which a nearly naked man washes the back of a fully naked man taking a shower in a bucket, and 1960’s “The Third Love Painting,” which includes a large phallic object and a quote from Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard at the Close of the Day,” among other text. Meanwhile, the gems keep coming, from such double portraits as “American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman),” “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy,” “My Parents,” and “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” to the Matisse/Picasso-inspired “V.N.” paintings and depictions of the Grand Canyon, art dealer John Kasmin, onetime lover Peter Schlesinger, artist Ron Kitaj, and his longtime manager and former companion Gregory Evans. You’ll leave the show feeling gleeful and chipper, ready to bask in the glow of the world outside while excitedly wondering what Hockney will come up with next.

CATS ON GLASS

Cats seek forever homes in Chelsea pop-up exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

524 West 26th St. at Tenth Ave.
February 15-19, free with advance RSVP, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.freshstep.com/cat-love
cats on glass slideshow

Fresh Step’s Cats on Glass pop-up show, continuing in Robert Miller Gallery’s Chelsea space through Presidents Day, is a sweet-natured celebration of all things feline, a tribute to our whiskered friends who essentially rule the world, all in the name of a new kitty litter. Not only are you encouraged to take lots of pictures, but if you post a photo or story on Instagram, you will receive a pair of cat sunglasses.

A giant cat surveys his territory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The “Larger than Life” room honors the historical power of cats in “Larger than Life,” consisting of several large-scale pussies standing on small podiums so you may “Treasure the Monumental” and bow at their majesty.

Meditating to purrs is good for the soul (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Feline fanciers can take a break by sitting on a furry seat, putting on cat-ear headphones, and finding “purr-vana” in the Me-owm Meditation Room, which welcomes visitors with a neon “Meowmaste” sign and offers everyone a chance to meditate alongside an imaginary cat in their mind.

Pom Pom Room is a colorful display of cat toys (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Everyone is invited to get on all fours and “Revel in a Cat Daydream” in the Pom Pom Room, an area filled with colorful pom pom garlands and balls hanging from above and reaching toward the comfy floor carpet, where there are objects to bat at like playful kitties.

You can get a cat’s-eye view at interactive show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the lobby are small cat paintings and mirrors that lead to the mane event, the Live Cats on Glass Playhouse, where you are given the opportunity to “Admire Cats from a Totally New Purr-spective.” On the walls are large-scale photographs of cats that are available for adoption. In one corner, you can put giant kitty heads on and see the world through a cat’s eyes.

Cuteness abounds at unique cat exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

But the centerpiece is the deluxe Live Cats on Glass Playhouse, a series of rooms, encased in Plexiglass, about six to seven feet off the ground, where cats can run around, play with other cats, hide in corners, and mew away. Visitors are able to walk under the structure and watch the cats from beneath, looking up at their toe beans pushed against the glass, see them being taken out of and put back into their carriers, or slightly pet them through small holes and slits.

Craig and Roberto are happy to be back together in playhouse (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Roberto was not happy until he was joined by his brother, Craig. Geisha ruled from a spot that was clearly just for him. And Twinkle wasn’t sure what to do and where to go.

Meet-and-greets with potential adoptees are available (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

And finally, people can interact with some of the animals in a separate room, with the possibility of giving one of them a forever home. Once the Chelsea exhibit ends, it is likely that Fresh Step will take the show on the road, sharing feline joy around the country.

FREE TICKET ALERT: SALONS@NATIONALACADEMY

national academy salons

Who: Judith Bernstein, Mickalene Thomas, Odili Donald Odita, David Reed
What: Conversations between National Academicians
Where: National Academy of Design, 5 East 89th St. at Fifth Ave., 212-369-4880
When: Thursday, March 15 & 29, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: Exhibits and classes at the National Academy of Design, situated in the Huntington Mansion on Eighty-Ninth St. and Fifth Ave., have been on hiatus as the institution seeks to sell its buildings and find a new home. But the organization, which was founded in 1825 to promote the fine arts in America, is still hosting special programs. In March, the salons@nationalacademy series continues with what should be two fascinating conversations between National Academicians. On March 15 at 6:30, two New Jersey natives who live and work in New York, Judith Bernstein, known for her explicit sexual imagery, and Mickalene Thomas, a multimedia artist who explores feminine desire and power through glittering works, will get together for a conversation that has the potential to be explosive given what is happening in the country today and in the art world specifically. Two weeks later, on March 29 at 6:30, California multimedia artist, lecturer, historian, and curator David Reed will be joined by Nigerian-born abstract painter Odili Donald Odita, who lives and works in Philadelphia and specializes in large-scale, ornately colorful wall installations. Admission is free, but there is limited seating, so advance reservations are strongly suggested.

NEVER BUILT NEW YORK

A model of Eliot Noyes’s never-built Westinghouse Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair is turned into a bouncy castle for kids as part of Queens Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Through February 18, $8 adults, $4 seniors, free for children eighteen and under
718-592-9700
www.queensmuseum.org

Oh, what might have been. There are only a few more days left to get a gander at a Gotham that just was not meant to be in the sensational exhibit “Never Built New York,” which on February 18 will go the way of all the projects that comprise it. Curators Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin have brought together paraphernalia from nearly eighty structures, including newspaper clippings, computer renderings, models, architectural drawings, sketches, blueprints, watercolors, photographs, and more, that, for one reason or another — money, safety, graft, time, politics, war — never took form. The would-be projects range from John Rink’s 1858 Plan of the Central Park, Richard Morris Hunt’s 1866 New-York Historical Society, Alfred Ely Beach’s 1870 Beach Pneumatic Railway, and Rufus Gilbert’s 1871 Elevated Railway to several possibilities to replace the World Trade Center, Zaha Hadid’s 2012 425 Park Ave., and Work AC’s 2015 Guggenheim Collection Center. Among the familiar names who attempted and failed to reshape parts of the city are Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Robert Moses, R. Buckminster Fuller, Isamu Noguchi, Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Marcel Breuer, Michael Graves, Santiago Calatrava, and McKim, Mead & White.

The Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum temporarily includes a series of projects that were never built (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Moses wanted to construct the elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. Fuller wanted to put up a pair of enormous domes, including one for a stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Norman Sper was going to fill in the Hudson River to connect Manhattan with New Jersey. Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates included the world’s largest clock in their design for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. Norman Bel Geddes’s “Rotary Airport” floated eight hundred feet off the Battery. In 1925, Harvey Wiley Corbett’s “How You May Live and Travel in the City of 1950” featured half-mile-high skyscrapers and four levels of streets for automobile traffic. There are also proposals for the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Times Square, the Metropolitan Opera, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Terminal, Lincoln Center, Battery Park, Columbus Circle, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, and an Olympic Village. The show is capped off by the genius idea of temporarily adding many of the projects to the museum’s glorious Panorama of the City of New York, a 1:1200 model of every street and building in the five boroughs that is kept up-to-date; be sure to use the virtual reality headsets to learn more about some of the projects and see what they might have really looked like in relation to the actually built city around them.

“Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake” includes two related videos dealing with ritual mourning and cleansing (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Also at the Queens Museum is “Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake,” a multimedia exhibit by the California artist that features a unique exploration of water and relieving oneself in China as well as a pair of videos involving ritualistic mourning and cleansing, one of a grounded ship, the other of a beached whale; “Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence,” a complex journey into incarceration and trauma; “Julia Weist with Nestor Siré: 17.(SEPT) [By WeistSiréPC]™,” dealing with internet connectivity and file sharing in Cuba; and “Anna K.E.: Profound Approach and Easy Outcome,” in which the Georgian-born artist, who lives and works in New York City and Germany, has created a site-specific wall commission for which, in two of the pieces, she reenacts paintings by Otto Dix and Balthus at the Met, dominated by her feminine gaze.