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THE GALLERY VIEW BY ROB REED AL HELD Alphabet Paintings Fedruary 28 - April 20, 2013 Cheim & Read 547 West 25th Street NY, NY Tension and play were a couple of Al Held's guiding forces in creating the Alphabet Paintings that Cheim & Read in Chelsea presents. All made between 1961 and 1967, the monumentally scaled acrylics on canvas take their queue from letter forms – a technique for composing and dividing abstracted space that retains also a sense of visual familiarity that would otherwise be lost in purely minimalist works. Typography, here, offers the artist a heuristic that yields surprising results without ever slipping into alienating territory. Held used both serif and sans-serif typefaces, and in works with letters as titles, he isn't merely transposing and cropping letter forms. In "The 'I,'" for example, the white vertical bars flanking the sides are indeed the spaces created between the capital letter's top and bottom serif. The white bars are not true to form, however; they're shortened, and angled slightly more than 90 degrees, which builds compositional tension and holds the shapes in. Thus, the black and white work is strikingly modern without feeling cold. Turning to letters themselves, consider that the quintessentially modern typeface Helvetica – it's now used by Apple, American Apparel, and even the MTA subway system – was designed just four years prior to the earliest painting in this exhibition, "Ivan the Terrible," 1961. Modern is synonymous with stripping forms of ornament, and with ornament goes sentiment. But for all of Held's paring down, he packs emotion back in with intense color, compositional skewing, and, at least in the "X" paintings, thwarting of linear perspective. In the back exhibition room is "The Yellow X," 1965. The second largest piece in the exhibition, its content is true to its title. The power of the yellow hue is nearly overwhelming as it bounces off the adjacent walls and fills the room. Lost in some reproductions, however, is not only the work's scale, but the center divide where the diptych merges and creates a black sliver that slices the X rather dramatically. The Alphabet Paintings prefigure the "abstract illusionism" developed in Held's later works by tweaking recognizable shapes. Without all the overlaps, three-dimensionality, and spatial depth that dominate the latter-day paintings we more closely associate with Held, these works have an eccentric iconicity all their own. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT February 7 - April 6, 2013 Gagosian Gallery 555 West 24th Street NY, NY It's nearly impossible to respond to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat unencumbered by what history has made of him, or even, for that matter, what he made of himself. Yet the voracity of the artist's ego and that of the 1980s art market is essential to appreciating how the artist worked and, frankly, how much art he was able to make – roughly 1000 paintings and 2000 drawings in the seven years before his death of a drug overdose at the age of 27. (Without a stream of collectors, where do 3000 pieces of art go?) This inseparability of man and market can translate to an irreducibility that makes either severe criticism of his work or effusive eulogizing a bit inadequate. Gagosian Gallery's Chelsea location offers a unique opportunity to mine Basquiat's oeuvre through over 50 works drawn from private and public collections. A curatorial theme isn't obvious if it's here. The exhibition rooms' large sizes, however, create ample space for incongruities to commingle without much fuss. And incongruities, disparities, and stream-ofconsciousness pastiche are what make Basquiat's art what it is. Among the metaphors Basquiat assumed for his persona is the boxer. We've all seen the black and white posters of Basquiat and Andy Warhol in boxing gloves, as if ready to spar. The boxer asserts Basquiat's aggressive rounds with the art world, and perhaps – at least in the portrait series of black boxers, including Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Cassius Clay, etc. – a critique of the art world's racial makeup (though this he denied). Al Held (1928 - 2005), IVAN THE TERRIBLE, 1961. Acrylic on canvas 144 x 114 inches 365.8 x 289.6 centimeters CR# He.31324 Photos courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. REVOLT The "boxer series" contains some of the most inventive works, essentially bricolage, seductively <strong>Magazine</strong> Number 4, 2013 6
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), 1982, Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 80 x 125 inches, (203.2 x 317.5 cm). Photos courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. unusual in appearance and clever in their material combinations. "Cassius Clay," 1982, is an acrylic and oil stick on canvas; however, the stretcher is a found wood pallet which creates rounded edges on the top and bottom, lifted in the center by the pallet's vertical stringer. Half sculpture, half painting, these works have a presence that humorously undermines modern painting and how "high art" ought to look. Toward the end of his short life, Basquiat's paintings began to empty out with a haunting fatigue. "Riding with Death," 1988, is one of the most poignant. A man, red, rides the barely joined bones of a crawling skeleton, perhaps his own, in an empty bronze field. The metallic sheen gives the work a royal dignity as if the artist had unwittingly bestowed his own last rites. with prismatic projections emitted from the eyes and lips making diamonds in the painting's center. The symmetry, simplicity, and complimentary colors of dark blue and orange make the 26-inch square piece feel iconic. Geoff McFetridge's medium-sized painting "12 Dots," 2013, depicts twelve individuals from a bird's eye view. Their heads, each a black circle, and bodies with limbs are choreographed in a cool palette of grays, blues and whites, punctuated by a red shirt or two. The graphic, almost mechanical, quality of the composition gives the image a slick iciness, especially since no eye contact is being made either inside or outside the painting. Ryan Schneider's "How Long Have You Known?," 2013, shares a palette similar to Oinonen's, yet it's more saturated and high-keyed. A topless woman sunbathes, only partly shaded by palm leaves, on a red-and-black striped towel with various fruits around her. As the towel and fruit appear atilt, leaning unnaturally forward, the painting's lower half feels like a Matisse still life. It's a nice effect, even if the crotch-centric composition (and exaggerated signature) is a tad heavy handed. At the same time, overstatement seems to authenticate contemporaneity these days. Fifty years ago artist-critic Fairfield Porter reviewed a MoMA exhibition "exploring recent directions in one CHICKEN OR BEEF? March 6 - April 20, 2013 The Hole 312 Bowery, NY, NY If you're "crossing the pond," as international travelers phrase it, the flight attendant's question at mealtime could be "Chicken or beef?" Hence the title of The Hole's mini-survey exhibition of figure paintings drawn from artists mostly in Europe and North America. There's no real premise here. The press release alludes to connecting threads, but the pleasure in the show is in the disparity of approaches to representation sustained by an evenness in quality. Several artists are widely known, such as Cecily Brown, Barnaby Furnas, and Jules de Balincourt. The latter employs a Rubin vase motif (i.e., two facing silhouettes that make, by illusion, a center vase) Xstraction: A survey of new approaches in abstraction, installation view. Photos courtesy The Hole, New York. One knockout piece is "Unopposite," 2012, by aspect of American painting: the renewed interest Canadian-based artist Anders Oinonen. Keen in the human figure." A figure painter himself, he sensibilities of abstraction and figuration arise in quickly pointed out that "[s]ince painters have equal measure in one large saddened, upwardgazing face. Painted in bright, fine-tuned pastels to represent a renewed interest in the figure on the never stopped painting the figure...it could be said strategically modified with angled planes that part of critics and the audiences rather than among function like scrims or thin white washes, the sevenfoot-tall painting appears to genuinely emote, albeit painters." I'd like to think that's still true. painters. To this extent the critics are following the in a cartoonish way – which is surprising given how rigorously abstract its composition is.
Page 2 and 3: m a g a z i n e TM volume 1 no. 4
Page 4: THE R LIST Social Activism in fancy
Page 9 and 10: artist, “Father of MTV,” concep
Page 12 and 13: TOP 10 NYC !#$%12456!@# ARTISTS NOW
Page 14 and 15: FASHION Today The Cult of the First
Page 16 and 17: absurd and misogynistic claims leve
Page 18 and 19: the Black Power Movement on the att
Page 20 and 21: Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York
Page 22 and 23: Westbeth PHOTOS BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUS
Page 26 and 27: Art & Politics:Fracking Drawingthel
Page 28 and 29: Christy Rupp, Cut & Run, detail, cu
Page 30 and 31: THE LITERARY VIEW Skyscraper Blues:
Page 32 and 33: THEATREVIEW Theatre for the Person:
Page 34 and 35: to you, telling you, ‘This is how
Page 36 and 37: ARCHITECTURE VIEW On Being Post-Seq
Page 38 and 39: of “performative queerness.” Do
Page 40 and 41: 2 Tha Beat Y’all When Hip Hop Ped
Page 42 and 43: hip hop, I’m equally seduced by t
Page 44 and 45: SWAGILISH Salomon and THEillUZiON B
Page 46 and 47: narrative, like party at the end of
Page 48: Dominique Claire models Revolt Wear

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