Tag Archives: kiki smith

DRAWING DIALOGUES: MEL CHIN AND SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ

Left, Shellyne Rodriguez, BX Third World Liberation Mixtape No. 2 (Esquire Strikes Empire), colored pencil on paper, 2021; right, Mel Chin, detail, Elements of a Trophy Frame for Leopold II, graphite on vellum, gold leaf, drafting dots, 2007 (photos courtesy of the artists)

Who: Mel Chin, Shellyne Rodriguez
What: Artist conversation
Where: National Academy of Design, 519 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., second floor
When: Tuesday, December 5, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: Formerly located in the Archer Milton Huntington House on Museum Mile, the National Academy of Design has moved to Chelsea, where it is hosting its inaugural exhibition in the new space, “Drawing as Practice,” a group show featuring work by such artists as Richard Artschwager, Judith Bernstein, Cecily Brown, Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Frank Gehry, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Christine Sun Kim, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Robert Mangold, Mary Mattingly, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Clifford Owens, Renzo Piano, Judy Pfaff, Howardena Pindell, Jenny Polak and Dread Scott, Liliana Porter, Joel Shapiro, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, Billie Tsien, Rafael Viñoly, and many others. On December 5 at 6:30, National Academician Mel Chin and Shellyne Rodriguez, both of whom are represented in the show, will sit down for an artist talk, part of the series “Drawing Dialogues.” The exhibit, which continues through December 16, includes Chin’s Elements of a Trophy Frame for Leopold II and Convo Pool Mood Board and Rodriguez’s India and Bangladesh on Pugsley Avenue and BX Third World Liberation Mixtape No. 2 (Esquire Strikes Empire).

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LEMON GIRLS OR ART FOR THE ARTLESS

A quartet of senior women gets more than they bargained for in Lemon Girls or Art for Artless (photo by Andrew Bisdale)

LEMON GIRLS OR ART FOR THE ARTLESS
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, the Downstairs
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Thursday – Sunday through March 27, $25-$30
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org
talkingband.org

Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless is a small show in a small space, but it’s one of the most exhilarating and inspiring shows I’ve seen since the pandemic interrupted in-person entertainment in March 2020. It’s an uproarious and touching celebration of aging and coming to terms with who you are and what you’ve accomplished, a kind of alternative to the wickedly fun Six on Broadway, where the six wives of Henry VIII battle it out to see who had it worst with the monarch.

Continuing in the Downstairs theater at La MaMa through March 27, Lemon Girls is about four senior women whose connection to life changes when they meet a stranger in their local café, appropriately called Solo, where the quartet, friends since attending the progressive Lemon Elementary school together, meet for coffee every Tuesday at 3:30. They sit at the same table each week, but they are surprised one afternoon to not only find a line to get in — the new pencil latte has become a thing — but also see that a stranger has taken their spot.

Urban historian Nivea (Patrena Murray), social worker Topo (Lizzie Olesker), retired civil servant Pinny (Louise Smith), and cookbook writer Lorca (Ellen Maddow) assume that the man, Sid Spitz (Jack Wetherall), will cede them the table, but instead he cheekily asks them to join him, in some ways becoming their fifth friend, painter Fran (Tina Shepard), who is not there. They recognize instantly that he’s not like the other males they know, who call themselves the Romeos: Retired Old Men Eating Out. (“They enjoy the turkey chili. It gives them gas,” Pinny points out.) An FIT librarian and performance artist, Sid invites the women to become part of a music theater workshop he leads in the basement of a rec center.

After some waffling, they do actually show up. Their skepticism of Sid’s earnest direction gives the rehearsal scenes brilliant, low-key comedy. “Keep on walking, fill in the spaces, curve through the people, use your arms. And STOP. And float. And STOP and float,” he advises, adding, “The floor is sand, your feet are hands, they squeeze the sand. They caress, they sink, they caress, they squeeze.”

Lorca says to Nivea, “What does he mean our feet are hands? Like monkeys? Does he mean monkeys? Is this the beach? Are we supposed to be at the beach, or the zoo?”

When Sid tells them to move underwater and “fill the empty spaces,” Lorca wonders, “Underwater? How do we breathe? People can’t breathe underwater.” And when he prompts them to glide like their hands are knives and the air is bread, slicing away, Lorca argues, “Suddenly it’s the kitchen?”

Sid Spitz (Jack Wetherall) leads rehearsals for upcoming show in charmer at La MaMa (photo by Andrew Bisdale)

But the four women are superb actors, able to play their characters, older women who are learning to perform, with skill and nuance as the quartet eventually enjoys adapting to Sid’s unique choreographic methods and come up with songs that share intimate details of their lives. As they prepare to put on a public show for an organization called Art for the Artless, there’s conflict: In order to keep the workshop funded, they need a fifth participant, and Nivea promises to bring Fran.

In addition, Sid needs to get paid so he can afford his rent to his landlord and best friend, Marvin; the unseen Marvin is about to turn ninety and is close with artist David Hockney, which excites the group, who rave about how Hockney’s recent show at the Met changed their lives.

At one point, Topo opines, “What I think I look like and what I look like don’t match. That gives me the creeps,” to which Lorca replies, “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.” Before the rehearsals, the women had resigned themselves to a plain existence, exemplified by some of Lorca’s bitter songs. Sitting outside the café, Lorca and Pinny remember one of Lorca’s schoolgirl ditties: “I sit on a bee because I am dumb / I scream at my teacher cuz she isn’t fair / I kick the doctor because he hurt me / I drown in the river because it is there.” But hope is on the way.

Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless is the latest from avant-garde mainstays Talking Band, which has staged more than fifty new works since 1974. The show is directed by four-time Obie winner Paul Zimet (The City of No Illusions, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth), who cofounded the troupe with Maddow (Fusiform Gyrus — A Septet for Two Scientists and Five Horns, Fat Skirt Big Nozzle), who wrote Lemon Girls and composed the wonderful songs, and Shepard. Sean Donovan (Cabin, The Reception) did the marvelous, often hysterical choreography, which is a character unto itself, helping define the four women and how they view the world. The fab costumes are by Kiki Smith.

Anna Kiraly’s set is anchored by the slightly raised Café Solo at the corner of stage right, covered by a blue curtain when the action is taking place in the central makeshift workshop space, where a door leads beyond. The characters open and close the curtain as scenes there begin and end; on the back wall of the café, Kiraly projects pixelated, abstracted black-and-white footage of younger people hanging out in the shop, which the four women ignore.

As we emerge from the coronavirus crisis, which hit senior citizens particularly hard, it is an absolute joy to watch Nivea, Topo, Pinny, Lorca, and Sid, portrayed by a supremely talented cast, meeting new people, trying new things, and finding renewed meaning in their everyday existence.

“That’s what’s changed!” Nivea suddenly declares. “That’s what I’ve gone back to, I mean. I’ve stopped watching myself. I used to always be watching myself watching myself. Did you ever do that?”

Lorca replies, “Oh yeah. Everything was such a ridiculous complication of layers. And finally I just got tired of it, really, really tired of it. I would watch myself reflected in store windows looking like a hobbling old hag. It was so sad and exhausting! So I just stopped looking. It’s like I went back to when I was eight or something. Whatever I feel like doing, I do it.”

Talking Band has been around for nearly a half century; if you haven’t seen them before, you’ll be thrilled that you’ve met them now and have finally been introduced to their intoxicating philosophy.

WOJNAROWICZ: F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER

David Wojnarowicz tells his own story in Chris McKim documentary (Andreas Sterzing, David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), photograph, 1989 [courtesy of the artist, the estate of David Wojnarowicz, and P·P·O·W, New York])

WOJNAROWICZ: F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER (Chris McKim, 2020)
Film Forum Virtual Cinema
Opens Friday, March 19; live Q&A on Tuesday, March 30, free with RSVP, 7:00
filmforum.org
kinomarquee.com

David Wojnarowicz packed a whole lot of living into his too-brief thirty-seven years, and the frenetic pace of his life and death is copiously captured in Chris McKim’s dynamic documentary, Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker. Born in New Jersey in September 1954, Wojnarowicz — pronounced VOY-nah-ROH-vich — experienced a difficult childhood riddled with physical abuse from his father, became a teen street hustler in Times Square, and later dabbled in heroin. He gained fame as an avant-garde artist and anti-AIDS activist in the 1980s, when several of his pieces earned notoriety, condemned by right-wing politicians who wanted to censor the works and defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which had supported the shows of art they found objectionable or morally corrupt. (The controversy continued decades past his death, into December 2010, when the National Portrait Gallery edited his short film Fire in My Belly in a group show.)

McKim lets Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related complications in July 1992, tell his own story, using the multimedia artist’s extensive archive of journals, cassette tapes, phone messages, photographs, and super 8 films; Wojnarowicz lived his life as if it was an ongoing radical performance installation itself, obsessively recording himself. “All the paintings are diaries that I always thought as proof of my own existence,” he says. “Whatever work I’ve done, it’s always been informed by what I experience as an American in this country, as a homosexual in this country, as a person who’s legislated into silence in this country.”

Editor Dave Stanke does a masterful job of putting it all together, primarily chronologically, seamlessly melding Wojnarowicz’s paintings, photographs, and videos into a compelling narrative that is as experimental, and successful, as the artist’s oeuvre, placing the audience firmly within its milieu. He intercuts news reports and other archival footage as Wojnarowicz’s life unfolds; among those whose voices we hear, either in new interviews or old recordings, are cultural critics Fran Lebowitz and Carlo McCormick, gallerist Gracie Mansion, curator Wendy Olsoff, his longtime partner Tom Rauffenbart, photographer and close friend/onetime lover Peter Hujar, artists Kiki Smith and Nan Goldin, artist and activist Sur Rodney Sur, Fire in the Belly author Cynthia Carr, Wojnarowicz’s siblings, and photographer and filmmaker Marion Scemama, who collaborated with Wojnarowicz on the haunting Untitled (Face in Dirt), pictures of the artist partially buried in the southwest desert. In addition, McKim includes such conservative mouthpieces as Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association and Senator Jesse Helms, who both sought to shut down Wojnarowicz and the NEA.

Influenced by such writers and artists as Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Arthur Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz’s art is as bold and in your face as it can get, relentlessly depicting a hypocritical world inundated with lies, violence, and perpetual inequality. Among the works that are examined in the film are Untitled (Buffalo), Untitled (Peter Hujar), Gagging Cow at Pier, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Times Square), Burning House, Untitled (One Day This Kid . . . , David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death, New York), Untitled (Genet After Brassai), and his Fire, Water, Earth, and Air four elements series. McKim also focuses on Wojnarowicz’s incendiary East Village punk band, 3 Teens Kill 4, with snippets of such songs as “Hold Up,” “Hunger,” and “Stay & Fight.” Wojnarowicz spoke in a relatively calm, straightforward tone, especially when compared with the constant whirlwind surrounding him, but his work, from art to music, revealed the fiery emotions bubbling inside, a roiling mix of rage, rebellion, and resistance.

Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 1983–84 (photo by Ron Amstutz/Whitney Museum of American Art)

McKim (RuPaul’s Drag Race, Out of Iraq) adds a curious, overly sentimental modern-day ending that might elicit a tear or two but is completely out of place; otherwise, Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, named after one of the artist’s works from 1984, is an intense journey into the mind of a deeply troubled soul who shared his endless dilemmas in very public ways that made so many people uneasy. “Last night I was standing around here, looking at my photographs. They’re my life, and I don’t owe it to anybody to distort that just for their comfort,” he says.

Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker opens virtually at Film Forum through Kino Marquee on March 19 and includes a prerecorded Q&A with McKim, Mansion, McCormick, and producer Fenton Bailey, moderated by journalist Jerry Portwood. There will also be a live Q&A on March 30 at 7:00 with McKim and Stanke, moderated by artist and activist Leo Herrera, that is free and open to all.

AROUND DAY’S END: A CONVERSATION

Architectural model for David Hammons’s Day’s End sits outside related exhibition at the Whitney (Catherine Seavitt and Rennie Jones of Guy Nordenson and Associates, 2017 / photograph by Ron Amstutz)

Who: Elena Filipovic, Frances Richard, Judith Rodenbeck, Randal Wilcox, Laura Phipps
What: Online discussion about “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York 1970-1986” exhibition
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art Zoom
When: Thursday, October 15, free with advance RSVP, 6:00; Tuesday, October 27, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: In 1975, land artist and anarchitecture specialist Gordon Matta-Clark deconstructed an abandoned industrial building on Pier 52 on the Manhattan riverfront, cutting into the walls, doors, and floors and turning it into a unique kind of performance art piece, at least until the police shut it down and arrested him. You can watch Matta-Clark’s twenty-three-minute silent film about the project, which he called a “temple to sun and water,” here. American artist David Hammons is revisiting Matta-Clark’s intervention, known as Day’s End, by constructing his own version on the same site for the Whitney, which is right across the street. It is expected to be completed in December; in the meantime, the Whitney is presenting “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York 1970-1986,” a small show in the first-floor gallery that explores art depicting the waterfront area at the time, when it was known as a gay cruising hotspot. Among the photographs, drawings, sculpture, video, and paintings in the exhibition, which continues through November 1, are Dawoud Bey’s David Hammons, Pissed Off performance photos, Christo’s Package on Hand Truck, Joan Jonas’s Songdelay video, Martha Rosler’s The Bowery photo and text series, David Wojnarowicz and Kiki Smith’s Untitled (Psychiatric Clinic: Department of Hospitals), Anton van Dalen’s Street Woman on Car, Peter Hujar’s Canal Street Piers: Fake Men on the Stairs, and Carol Goodden’s documentation of Matta-Clark’s Jacks, in addition to works by Alvin Baltrop, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jimmy Wright, and G. Peter Jemison and a vitrine of proposed projects for Pier 18 from Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, William Wegman, Richard Serra, Harry Shunk, János Kender, and Matta-Clark.

On October 15 at 6:00, the Whitney is hosting a virtual discussion about the exhibit, focusing on Baltrop, Hammons, Jonas, and Matta-Clark, with Elena Filipovic, author of David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale; Frances Richard, author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics; Judith Rodenbeck, associate professor and chair of media & cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside; and Randal Wilcox, who worked with Baltrop and is a trustee of the Alvin Baltrop Trust. The free Zoom talk will be moderated by assistant curator Laura Phipps, who organized the show with senior curatorial assistant Christie Mitchell. Phipps and Mitchell follow that up October 27 at 6:30 with the Zoom discussion “Community Conversation: Around Day’s End,” teaming up with the Hudson River Park Trust, the Meatpacking Business Improvement District, and Manhattan’s Community Board 2 to look at the project from a different angle.

FRIEZE SCULPTURE AT ROCKEFELLER CENTER

Jaume Plensa, Behind the Walls, 2019 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

30 Rockefeller Plaza
Between West 48th & 51st St. and Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through June 28, free
212-588-8601
www.rockefellercenter.com
frieze.com
online slideshow

The Frieze New York art fair takes place May 2-5 at Randall’s Island Park, where tickets run up to $85.50 with ferry service and a magazine subscription. But you can get a free taste at Rockefeller Center, where Frieze New York and Tishman Speyer have partnered for Frieze Sculpture, an exhibition of public works by fourteen artists, with pieces lining Rockefeller Plaza outside and a few hidden away in lobbies. The participating artists are Nick Cave, Aaron Curry, Jose Dávila, Walter De Maria, Rochelle Goldberg, Goshka Macuga, Ibrahim Mahama, Joan Miró, Paulo Nazareth, Jaume Plensa, Pedro Reyes, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, and Hank Willis Thomas. The display is curated by Brett Littman of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, whose choices were inspired by Noguchi’s 1940 News on the facade of the Associated Press building as well as the 1934 Diego Rivera mural that the Rockefellers destroyed because it included an image of Lenin.

Nick Cave, Untitled, 2018 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One of the themes linking many of the works is that of protest, of speaking out to fight the status quo and to initiate change. Paulo Nazareth’s DRY CUT [from Blacks in the Pool — Tommie] depicts a larger-than-life cutout of Tommie Smith raising his gloved right hand while accepting his Olympic medal in 1968. An untitled piece by Nick Cave features an arm with a fist at the end emerging from an old gramophone speaker. Jaume Plensa’s monumental Behind the Walls is a huge white head with disembodied hands covering the eyes, as if refusing to see what is happening. Joan Miró’s Porte II consists of two slanted doors with a long chain dangling in between, as if a threat of punishment.

Goshka Macuga, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 25, First Man: Yuri Gagarin, 2016 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Junkie and Kiki Smith’s Rest Upon are reminders of humanity’s connection to nature — and what might occur if we’re not more careful. Ibrahim Mahama has removed the nearly two hundred flags of UN countries that surround the skating rink and replaced them with fifty ratty flags made of jute in Ghana, evoking global poverty. Hank Willis Thomas’s Harriet and Annie (Capri) and Josephine and Kazumi (Real Red) offer passersby a public platform to share their thoughts. And Goshka Macuga’s Institute of Institutional Co-operation, seen below Dean Cromwell’s 1946 mural The Story of Transportation, shows just what we are capable of.

Paulo Nazareth, DRY CUT [from Blacks in the Pool — Tommie], (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There will be several family programs, on alternate Sundays at 10:30 am, held in conjunction with the sculpture display. On May 12, Noguchi educators will lead a “3D: Build Up!” tour of the sculptures for four-year-olds (advance registration required). On May 26, “Your Neighborhood: Public Art” offers a guided tour for five- and six-year-olds, followed by a model-making workshop (advance registration required). On June 9, “Figures: Strike a Pose” consists of a tour and a workshop for children ages seven to eleven with advance RSVP. And on June 23, the drop-in “Get the Scoop: Stories and Art” offers children two to eleven the opportunity to explore the exhibit and make art in response to what they experience.

GREATER NEW YORK

Lionel Maunz’s “Fertilize My Mouth” emphasizes feeling of absence at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through March 7, suggested donation $5-$10 (free with MoMA ticket within fourteen days of MoMA visit), 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
momaps1.org

The fourth iteration of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial exhibition, “Greater New York,” is very much about absence and presence, what is not there as well as what is. Instead of focusing primarily on up-and-coming artists, curators Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, Mia Locks, Mark Beasley, and Jenny Schlenzka have included works by nearly 150 artists, more than 60 of whom are over 50 (or would have been if they were still alive), resulting in a wide-ranging look at how New York City and the art market have changed over the last generations. James Nares’s 1976 Super 8 video “Pendulum” shows a wrecking ball ominously swinging in an empty Tribeca alley but not actually knocking anything down — yet. Amy Brener encases such found objects as watches, motherboards, and calculators into colorful resin, foam, glass, and plaster sculptures that harken back to a long-gone era. Alvin Baltrop’s silver gelatin prints remind us what the piers were like prior to renovation and gentrification and what gay life was like before AIDS. Liene Bosquê uses found souvenirs from around the world to construct imaginary cities in “Recollection.” Henry Flynt’s SAMO© Graffiti Portfolio photographs from 1979 reintroduce us to Jean-Michel Basquiat. A large gallery of lifelike sculptures by Tony Matelli, Elizabeth Jaeger, John Ahearn, Judith Shea, and others create a false sense of reality and investigate the human figure and physical relationships. Joy Episalla’s photos of motel bedrooms reflected in television sets fill viewers with personal memories. Fierce Pussy’s “For the Record” features backward text about the AIDS crisis, repeating such sentences as “he would be at this opening if she were alive today” (sic).

Amy Brener repurposes found items into memory sculptures at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Glenn Ligon’s silkscreened “Housing in New York: A Brief History” details the various places he lived between 1960 and 2007 and reveal how the neighborhoods changed. In the boiler room, Lionel Maunz’s cast iron and concrete “Fertilize My Mouth” consists of a pair of disembodied legs standing in front of a tilted slab of concrete on which something bad appears to have happened. Louise Lawler’s “Not Yet Titled (adjusted to fit)” is a stretched photo of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Bingo” sculpture of a derelict house. And photographs of Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts” into the walls of PS1 back in 1976 bring the exhibition full circle. Among the other artists in the show are Chantal Akerman, Richard Artschwager, Dara Birnbaum, Mel Bochner, Rudy Burckhardt, John Giorno, William Greaves, Yvonne Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Sergei Tcherepnin. If you were around in the 1970s, you know that New York City was not exactly a paradise — and “Greater New York” takes us back there while also putting it all in a contemporary now you see it, now you don’t context.

Sound comes and goes in Christine Sun Kim’s visitor-operated “Game of Skill 2.0” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibition will be on view through March 7, and there are still a handful of programs left on the schedule. On February 21 at 4:00, Hayley Aviva Silverman’s live-action “Twister” casts dogs as characters from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister; Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World is being shown February 21-27; on February 25 at 7:00, Fia Backström will perform “Aphasia as a visual shape of speaking – A-production and other language syndromes”; on February 28 at 1:00, Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York will host participatory activities; on February 28 at 4:00, Devin Kenny will deliver the performance essay “Love, the Sinner”; short films by Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Ira Sachs, and others are screening February 28 through March 7; on March 3 & 4 at 7:00, Geo Wyeth will present “Storm Excellent Salad”; and on March 6, you can catch Stewart Uoo’s “It’s Get Better III” at 3:00 and Angie Keefer’s roundtable “What Is Authority?” at 4:00.

A SECRET AFFAIR: SELECTIONS FROM THE FUHRMAN FAMILY COLLECTION

Ron Mueck’s ultra-realistic “Spooning Couple” is part of “A Secret Affair” at FLAG (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday through Saturday through May 16, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-206-0220
flagartfoundation.org

The name of the current exhibit at the FLAG Art Foundation, “A Secret Affair,” conjures thoughts of clandestine coupling. Indeed, the show, which continues through May 16, features works that explore, both as physical objects and conceptual ideas, the notion of pairs, of the double, built around what senior curator Heather Pesanti refers to in her catalog essay, “The Subversive Body,” as “meditations on the most primal and basic emotional need in life: that of human connection.” Spread across two floors of the Chelsea gallery, “A Secret Affair: Selections from the Fuhrman Family Collection” consists primarily of sculptures, along with several C-prints, that are either partnered within themselves or with another piece, by the same or a different artist. The subjects in Ron Mueck’s ultra-realistic but miniature “Two Women,” a pair of older women in heavy coats standing together but looking away, might recall fondly, or jealously, the nearby “Spooning Couple,” in which a partially naked man and woman spoon each other on a hard surface representing a bed. Meanwhile, not far away, Subodh Gupta offers a counterpart, “Spooning,” a sculpture of two large-scale stainless-steel spoons one on top of the other. In Juan Muñoz’s “Two Laughing at Each Other,” a pair of men sit in chairs halfway up a wall, not far from Maurizio Cattelan’s “Frank and Jamie,” two life-size wax figures of New York City policemen standing on their heads. In Louise Bourgeois’s “Couple,” a naked and armless man and woman, in pink fabric, face each other in a vitrine, belly to belly, while Yinka Shonibare’s “Girl Girl Ballerina” depicts a pair of headless female figures wearing colorfully patterned fabrics, hiding guns behind their backs. Gillian Wearing’s lifelike “Olia,” a topless model in jeans, finds its counterpoint in Marc Quinn’s “Sphinx (Fortuna),” a painted bronze sculpture of Kate Moss in a seemingly impossible pose. And Thomas Schütte’s patinated bronze and steel busts, “Wicht (4)” and “Wicht (7),” are on plinths next to each other, a pair of mysterious, already fading figures.

Fuhrman Family Collection exhibition focuses on doubling and human connection (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Even the single pieces in the exhibition, curated by Louis Grachos, deal with pairs. “I decided that the exhibition would focus on interrelated themes concerning the body and the figure, as well as coupling and conversation,” Grachos explains in his catalog foreword. In Charles Ray’s “Light from the Left,” the artist offers flowers to a woman, trying to make a connection. In Katharana Fritsch’s “Oktopus,” an orange cephalopod mollusc holds aloft a faceless human figure in black in one of its tentacles. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1995 untitled work comprises two silver-plated brass rings flat against a wall, touching each other, evoking the magician’s trick as well as the prize one can win on a merry-go-round. Anish Kapoor’s “Blood Solid,” a red balloon-like sculpture that resembles a huge drop of blood, invites viewers to see their reflection in it, their own double. There are also works by Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith, Robert Gober, Jim Lambie, David Hammons, and Jim Hodges that provide yet more insight on the theme. In conjunction with Frieze week’s Chelsea Night, Hodges, whose “picturing: my heart” dual skulls and “First Light (Beginning of the End)” mirrored glass pieces are on display at FLAG, will be at the gallery on May 16 at 5:00 for a special closing conversation with FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman, who owns the collection with his wife, Amanda.