[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: March 28, 2011]
The good news is that my remarks on Tom Otterness's Marlborough Gallery show do not come too late. It was set to close on March 26, but has been extended through April 7, according to the gallery's website. Hurry to see its edgy delights.
The delights are obvious; the edge perhaps more apparent than in his previous works.
Continue reading for Pollock, Kelly, Malevich and Parlá.
A few years ago, the green vein which runs down Upper Broadway was lined with his familiarly bulbous figures. One can only hope that some of the larger works at this extensive show of new work, "Animal Spirits," find a home somewhere in our urban outdoors. Trawl the website for images; marvel at his ability to make bronze a cuddly material. The enormous "Mama Bear," a full-grown bear swathed in her cubs, is absurdly heart-warming. "Mama Pig," suckled by her litter, is similarly funny and moving.
There has always been a political element in Otterness's work. His human figures, for example, seem dwarved by the city's machinery, crushed by a weight of big, thick coins and heavy dollar bills. The wheels of capital turn relentlessly behind all the cuteness. "The Big Bad Wolf" shows the third little piggy, building his house of bricks, a menacing wolf with money bursting from his pockets circling around, preparing to strike. Houses built of bricks are no longer safe. Lest there be doubt, the message is stated plainly by a large black board on which the artist has diagrammed our decline and a solution. The show also includes a number of works on paper.
If you know any children, take them with you. They will love it.
More studious shows can seem pallid in comparison, and indeed, current shows of Pollock and Malevich are more instructive than entrancing. At the Washburn Gallery through April 2, early Pollock is the order of the day - works on paper primarily from the 1940s. Don't expect drip pyrotechnics here; rather, it's an opportunity to see yet again how heavily the yoke of Picasso and Miró weighed on Pollock's shoulders.
It's almost customary to show a few of Pollock's early works in shows otherwise dominated by his imposing abstractions. We've all seen the figurative, semi-mythic/semi-surrealist dreamscapes he created in his struggling days. In a show devoted to this period, however, one realizes what a distinctly minor artist Pollock would have remained had he not broken with European influences. Here one finds him repeatedly just copying Picasso. A couple of bulls here, some tears shaped like nails there, hands with extra fingers - not to mention a Miróesque battery of floating, star-like/bird-like icons. It's a sobering exhibition.
"Malevich and the American Legacy," strewn through three floors of the uptown Gagosian similarly reinforces something we kind of knew already, namely the extent to which traces of his influence can be found throughout American post-AbEx abstraction, especially in color field painting, as well as in minimalist sculpture. Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Barnett Newman and Richard Serra all show up to testify.
Curiously, the works by Malevich himself are curiously lifeless. They have not worn well, in a material sense. The white backgrounds are faded and scruffy, the colored shapes imposed on them no longer bright. These are small pictures too. Malevich's tropes are everywhere, but his actural works would suffer mightily hung alongside Mondrian, let alone Kandinsky. My preferred works in the show, an uncharacteristically Cubist-ic 1913 Malevich, "Desk and Room," and a vigorously scribbled Twombly tribute, "Malevich in Point-à-Pitre" (1980).
Returning to the ranks of the living, through April 17 at Bryce Wolkowitz it's worth an effort to catch the "Walls, Diaries and Paintings" of the Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá. There is no escaping art history, and Parlá has created an environment which will recall, for many, the downtown street art of the '70s and '80s. Call it graffiti or call it tagging, scrawling and splashing on walls is heavily referenced here. The thing is, Parlá does it very well. His colors are deep, his energy tangible, and - I always find this telling - he causes your eye to linger over the details. (Oh, he'll remind you of Twombly too).
See more at Parlá's own website, if you can figure out how it works.
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