this week in art

ROBERT INDIANA

Robert Indiana’s Love Wall stands tall at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Paul Kasmin Gallery
515 West 27th St.
Through March 3, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-563-4474
www.paulkasmingallery.com
robertindiana.com

Letters, numbers, shapes — there is something very basic, very primal, about Robert Indiana’s most popular works, such as the red-and-blue Love sculpture at Sixth Ave. and Fifty-Fifth St. and the similar Hope at Fifty-Third and Seventh. “People don’t stop to think about how beautiful numbers are. Perhaps for the same reason that they don’t stop to think about how beautiful words are,” Indiana has said. “It’s the role of the artist — my particular role, if you will — to make words and numbers very, very special.” In honor of his ninetieth birthday year, the Paul Kasmin Gallery is showing two pieces by the Indiana-born visual artist, who lives and works in Maine and was the subject of a major Whitney retrospective, “Beyond Love,” in 2014. Love Wall, which was originally planned as a painting, sits by itself in a large, open white space, a twelve-foot-high, four-foot deep stacking of the word “Love” in unpainted Cor-ten steel, arranged so that the four tilted “O”s come together diagonally at the center. In 2007, the work was installed on the Park Avenue meridian at Fifty-Seventh St., part of the exhibition “Art in the Parks: Celebrating 40 Years”; it is much more peaceful here, away from the traffic and the noise, just relaxing by itself, giving viewers private moments to contemplate its message. It’s also more abstract when looked at with the naked eye; seeing it through the lens of a camera gives the words and letters more definition.

Robert Indiana’s ONE through ZERO counts up and down at Paul Kasmin (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, in a room at the back is ONE through ZERO, a wall sculpture of the numbers zero through nine, each on its own small base, the first row featuring 1, 2, and 3, the second row 7, 6, 5, and 4, and the third row 8, 9, and 0. “Our very lives are structured around numbers,” Indiana has noted. “Everything we do is reckoned on numbers.” ONE through ZERO has a hypnotic quality as you scan the numbers, follow their order, and consider the different color pairings for each numeral (which were inspired by the work of his friend and colleague Ellsworth Kelly). The numbers and letters go beyond mere Pop art and instead conjure up cultural symbols and language and reference life and death in a world Indiana would “like to cover with Hope,” as he said on the Today show in 2010.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

“Judy Chicago Designing the Entry Banner for ‘The Dinner Party,’” 1978 (courtesy of Through the Flower Archive)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 3, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Women’s History Month with its free March First Saturday program, featuring live performances by Leikeli47, DJ Sabine Blaizin (Oyasound) with live percussion by Courtnee Roze, MICHIYAYA Dance (with Anya Clarke and Mitsuko Verdery leading a jam session), and Brown Girls Burlesque, presenting “Act Like a Lady! Strippin’ Fo’ the Culture,” with Hoodoo Hussy, Elektra Taste, Dakota Mayhem, Skye Siren, and Dirty Honey Shake dancers, hosted by Ravenessa; a book launch of Beverly Bond’s Black Girls Rock! Owning Our Magic. Rocking Our Truth. with Bond, Michaela Angela Davis, and Eunique Jones Gibson; pop-up gallery talks by teen apprentices in the “American Art” galleries; a community talk with representatives from THINK!Chinatown; Cave Canem Foundation poetry with zakia henderson-brown, Marwa Helal, and Aracelis Girmay; a hands-on art workshop inspired by Judy Chicago’s banners; a curator tour of “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making” led by Carmen Hermo; and a Feminist Book Club discussion of Janet Mock’s Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me, with Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “One Basquiat,” “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making,” “Arts of Korea,” “Infinite Blue,” “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

TOM WESSELMANN: STANDING STILL LIFES

Tom Wesselmann’s “Standing Still Lifes” are brought together for the first time at Gagosian (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through February 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-741-1111
www.gagosian.com

For the first time ever, Gagosian has gathered all nine of Tom Wesselmann’s large-scale “Standing Still Lifes,” made between 1967 and 1981, joined by drawings, maquettes, magazines, photographs, and other paraphernalia associated with the dynamic, colorful works. Melding Pop art with hyperrealism, each work consists of multiple freestanding pieces that depict basic objects, from lipstick, a telephone, sunglasses, and keys to a toothbrush, a framed picture, a cigarette, and an orange. Other subjects include his wife, Claire Selley, and actress Mary Tyler Moore. “In all of my dimensional work I use the third dimension to intensify the two-dimensional experience,” the Ohio-born Wesselmann, who died in New York in 2004 at the age of seventy-three, explained under a pseudonym, Slim Stealingworth. “It becomes part of a vivid two-dimensional image. The third dimension, while actually existing, is only an illusion in terms of the painting, which remains by intent in a painting and not a sculptural context.” The show continues through February 24 at Gagosian’s Twenty-Fourth St. space.

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

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.