Tag Archives: roni horn

NEW YORK GALLERY WEEK

Thomas Struth, “Lab Reactors Ineos Phenol, Gladbeck,” 2009 (courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

Multiple locations in Chelsea, SoHo, and Midtown
May 7-10
Admission: free
www.newyorkgalleryweek.com

More than fifty New York City galleries and fifty artists will be participating in New York Gallery Week, four days of openings, receptions, talks, tours, book signings, live performances, and extended hours – including many galleries open on Sunday and Monday from 11:00 am – 6:00 pm, when they are usually dark. Among the special programs are a book signing with Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer on May 7 at 5:00, an opening party for Roni Horn at Hauser & Wirth (May 7, 6:00), Richard Galpin discussing his new installation on the High Line (May 7, 7:30), a book signing with Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman (May 8, 2:00), Donelle Woolford interpreting Dan Graham’s “Performer / Audience / Mirror” at Wallspace (May 8, 4:30), Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom in conversation at Alexander Gray (May 8, 5:00), Thomas Eggerer and David Joselit in conversation at Friedrich Petzel (May 9, 12:30), a live performance and gallery tour by William Pope.L at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (May 10, 3:00), and an opening reception for Martin Creed at Gavin Brown’s enterprise (May 10, 4:00).

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE / RONI HORN / ALICE GUY BLACHÉ / OMER FAST

Roni Horn, “Becoming a Landscape,” detail, twenty chromogenic prints, 1999–2001 / © Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: $18 (Pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

This might be the last weekend to catch “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” an examination of the painter’s development from dark abstract works to her more familiar, repetitive flowery canvases that often feature a palette tailor-made for warm-weather living rooms (however, be sure not to miss the room of intimate photographs of O’Keeffe taken by her longtime lover, Alfred Stieglitz), but there’s a little more time to see the far more interesting and rewarding “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn,” which runs through January 24. In this wide-ranging midcareer retrospective, Horn searches for the nature of identity in photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation, incorporating images of landscape and language while playing with perception and duality. Horn forces the viewer to question their own place in an ever-changing world in such works as “You are the weather,” comprising one hundred photos of the same woman in Iceland gazing into the camera, her mood shifting based on how hot or cold she is; “Becoming a Landscape,” in which Horn places side by side pairs of photographs taken an instant apart, with only the barest hint of difference evident; “This Is me, This is you,” two large grids of multiple pictures taken of her niece over a few years, consisting of pairs of shots that seem like duplicates but are not; and “Dead Owl,” two pictures of the title subject that are indeed the same. Spread over two floors, “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn” offers a unique and fascinating perspective on both art and reality.

Alice Guy Blaché, A HOUSE DIVIDED, 1913 (courtesy of the Library of Congress MBRS Division / photograph by George Willeman)

Also continuing through January 24 is “Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer,” screenings of the little-seen films of the first woman director and studio owner, a series of shorts and longer works that are worth sitting down and spending time with in the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video & Video Galleries, while “Omer Fast: Nostalgia,” in the first-floor Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery through February 14, displays Fast’s three-part film that investigates fact vs. fiction, reality vs. invention. (Fast fans can also check out his new exhibit at Postmasters in Chelsea, which includes the videos TAKE A DEEP BREATH and DE GROTE BOODSCHAP.)

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES

Gonzalez-Torres leads the way to Hodges in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FLOATING A BOULDER: WORKS BY FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND JIM HODGES
FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday 12 noon – 5:00 pm through January 31
Admission: free
www.flagartfoundation.org

PAIRED, GOLD: FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND RONI HORN
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through January 6 (closed Thursday)
Admission: $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturdays 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3500
www.guggenheim.org

Even in death, Cuban avant-garde artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres continues to team up with some of his friends and colleagues and offer presents to strangers. At the beginning of 2009, Andrea Rosen presented “A Shadow Leaving an Object,” a dual exhibition matching Gonzalez-Torres’s mirror piece “Untitled (March 5th) #1” (1991) with Robert Gober’s “Prison Window.” From certain angles, you could see Gober’s work, way up at the top of a wall, in Gonzalez-Torres’s eye-level mirror in the otherwise large, empty Chelsea space. Gonzalez-Torres’s and Jim Hodges’s pieces interact similarly at the FLAG Art Foundation, where Hodges has curated a two-floor show combining his fragmented circular mirrors, stained-glass screens, colorful fabric hangings, and “the bells/black” sound installation (yes, you can ring the bells, which are all at a different pitch) with Gonzalez-Torres’s double clocks (“Perfect Lovers”), candy and poster sculptures (yes, go ahead and take one of each), and lighted go-go-dancing platform, where every day at an unannounced time a male dancer will get on the lighted stage and gyrate away for five minutes. Primarily focusing on temporality, the exhibit, which also includes six billboards by Gonzalez-Torres spread across three boroughs, closes January 31.

Gonzalez-Torres leads the way to Horn at the Guggenheim (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Guggenheim has gotten into the action as well, teaming up Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996, with another living artist, New York native Roni Horn, in “Paired Gold,” which can refer to both the material itself as well as their brief but treasured friendship. After winding your way through the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky retrospective – we’ll have more to say about this wonderful show in an upcoming post – make sure to go into the very last gallery at the top of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling structure, where you’ll have to walk through Gonzalez-Torres’s large-scale ceiling-to-floor gold-colored beaded curtain, “Untitled” (Golden), in order to see Horn’s “Gold Field,” two pounds of pure gold pounded into a delicate sheet that looks like it would disintegrate at the merest touch. (Don’t try this or the security guard will be very unhappy.) Gonzalez-Torres called Horn’s 1990 sculpture, “Forms from the Gold Field,” a “new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty”; it’s simply delightful to see these two innovative and influential sculptors back together again, sharing a place of rest.