nyc art scene

Opens Tomorrow, June 13, 6-8p:

“Smuggling the Sun”
 Eamon Ore-Giron

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 327 Broome St., NYC (bt Bowery & Chrystie)

Likening the return to elemental abstraction to the revisiting of acoustic instruments from electronically generated sound, Ore-Giron references ethnomusicology as a conceptual influence. Ore-Giron’s intimately scaled paintings reference a meticulous approach to the handmade, using a combination of raw linen and a palette rooted in tones of red and orange to lend an intrinsically organic feeling to his otherwise minimal compositions. - thru July 12

thru June 28:

“Floater”
 Clint Jukkala, Alexander Kroll, Evan Nesbit,
 Erik Olson, Eric Sall, Amanda Valdez

BravinLee programs, 526 W26th St., NYC (#211)

the work of six painters, whose abstracted imagery is located between the familiar and peculiar, revealing spatial ambiguities and vague references. Most of the work emerges out of abstraction and plays with its conventions and classifications, much like the “floater” that moves about your field of vision. “Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, and consistency that exist within the eye’s vitreous humor. They may appear as spots, webs, fragments, or threads that float slowly before the observer’s eyes.”

pictured:    Erik Olson, 2013, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

thru June 29:

“Works on Paper 1976-1977”
 Palermo

David Zwirner Gallery, 537 W20th St., NYC

Drawn from museum and private collections, this exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Palermo Archive on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the artist’s birth (in 1943 in Leipzig, Germany). The majority of the works on view were executed in New York, where (Blinky) Palermo lived and worked from 1973 until the spring of 1976. The artist died in February 1977. Executed at the end of the artist’s brief career, Palermo’s works on paper from 1976-1977 suggest a kind of summation of his artistic practice: not only do they exemplify his ongoing experimentation with the symbolic and formal possibilities of composition and space, but they also convey his understanding of color as a system of signs.

Opens Thurs, Mar 14, 6-8p:

“Cloud Weight”
 Ky Anderson

frosch & portmann gallery, 53 Stanton St., NYC

Brooklyn-based Ky Anderson’s exquisitely rendered formations are naturally symmetrical and properly balanced, like totems that tower upwards to the sky or stacked structures with appropriate supports. The paintings and drawings are executed in many layers; each layer relates to one another to create a feeling of three-dimensional distance. An abstract perspective is created that encourages the viewer to consider the distance from their viewpoint to the farthest horizon in the work. - thru Apr 14

Opens Today:

“Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925”

MoMA, 11 West 53rd St., NYC

Abstraction was not the inspiration of a solitary genius but the product of network thinking—of ideas moving through a nexus of artists and intellectuals working in different media and in far-flung places. Its pioneers were more closely linked than is generally understood. This diagram maps the relationships among the artists represented in Inventing Abstraction, all of whom played a significant role in the development of a new modern language for the arts. Vectors connect individuals whose acquaintance with one another during these years could be documented; the names in red are those with the most connections within this group.
- thru April 15

Just Opened:

“Lyrical Color”
Rico Gatson, Sam Gilliam, Brece Honeycutt, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, Jane Kent, Meg Lipke, Maggie Michael, Dan Steinhilber & David Storey.

Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC (bt Clinton & Jefferson)

Color has an echo and at this exhibition’s center is Sam Gilliam, internationally recognized as one of America’s foremost Color Field Painters and Lyrical Abstractionist artists. Around Gilliam, there’s restraint, equanimity and balance. There is the blackness of both Rico Gatson’s and Dan Steinhilber’s sculptural abstractions, works that are intensified by Jane Kent’s overlapping musical scores, further blurred by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson painting upon silk threads and made distinctive by Meg Lipke’s beeswax with India-inked and fabric dyed drawings. -thru Aug 24

Just Opened:

“Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday”
 curated by Matthew Higgs, the Director of White Columns

James Cohan Gallery, 533 W26th St., NYC

Collectively the works in the exhibit seem most interested in the point at which the self-contained rationality of earlier modernist abstraction is ruptured. This sense of “rupture” – both physically and psychologically - is perhaps the prevailing aesthetic attitude that unites the otherwise highly idiosyncratic artists – and art works – brought together here. In the work of all these artists traces of our material culture are transformed, or perhaps more accurately, re-purposed into something that is simultaneously familiar and strange. - thru July 27

Artists: Walead Beshty, Alexandra Bircken, Sarah Braman, Wolfgang Breuer, Tom Burr, Ernst Caramelle, Andy Coolquitt, Paul Cowan, N. Dash, Tony Feher, Michel François, Joe Fyfe, Kim Gordon, David Hammons, Richard Hawkins, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Bill Jenkins, Sergej Jensen, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jason Loebs, Agnes Lux, David Moreno, Virginia Overton, Manfred Pernice, Judith Scott, Nancy Shaver, Gedi Sibony, Michael E. Smith, Josh Smith, Shinique Smith, Al Taylor, Bill Walton, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, Philadelphia Wireman, B. Wurtz, Amy Yao