This week, our selections for New York City gallery shows look back at the Abstract Expressionists, featuring artists who returned to figuration and those who delved deeper into gestural abstraction. Galleries in SOHO, the East Village, Chelsea, Uptown, Brooklyn and Chelsea are highlighting California DIY, radical approaches to sculpture and conceptual art that comments on the white male heteronormativity of today. Continue reading to discover our picks for highlights of new NYC gallery shows opening through November 13, 2017.
DOWNTOWN
Peter Freeman, Inc.: “Richard Wentworth: Now and Then”
November 7 through December 22, 2017
Opening Reception: Tuesday, November 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Peter Freeman, Inc. will present “Richard Wentworth: Now and Then,” a solo exhibition of new sculpture by the artist.
Richard Wentworth, a leading figure in the New British Sculpture movement since the late 1970s, will present new sculptures in his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Wentworth’s sculptures, made with materials such as cable, glass and mirror, crisscross ways of reading and the territories in which these materials might habitually occur. His sculptures employ “dumb materials,” according to the artist himself, and deal with questions of language and etymology and the hardware and hardwiring of the world. Linking the “modernismo” architecture of Antoni Gaudi to the folkloric energy of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Wentworth draws meaningful connections and creates continuums in his work.
Peter Freeman, Inc. is located at 140 Grand St, New York, NY 10013. www.peterfreemaninc.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
Karma: “Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington & Franklin Williams”
November 12 through December 22, 2017
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 12, from 5 to 8 p.m.
Panel Discussion: Sunday, November 12, at 5 p.m.
Karma will present “Jean Conner, Wally Hendrick, Deborah Remington & Franklin Williams,” a presentation of artists who emerged in Northern California during the 1950s and ’60s.
Linked through attitude, camaraderie, California and DIY art culture, the group of artists emerged during a time when they were not saddled with canonical modernist art history and were encouraged to reject dogma and follow their instincts. The exhibition will include important works from each artist.
Jean Conner will present collages made from 1950s to present. Created out of found imagery from magazines, the collages are surreal, witty meditations on contemporary life. Wally Hedrick will present his Black Paintings, made and remade over extant works that were made and remade over surviving paintings to protest each war in the artist’s lifetime, and his Dada-inflected image-based paintings from the 1990s.
Deborah Remington will present her pastoral abstractions from the mid-1950s and her kimono-inspired gestural paintings from the 1960s. Franklin Williams will exhibit color-infused soft sculptures, as well as densely painted and sewn wall pieces.
A panel discussion with Jean Conner, Franklin Williams and Dan Nadel moderated by Anastasia Aukeman will be held on Sunday, November 12, at 5 p.m.
Karma is located at 188 E 2nd St, New York, NY 10009. www.karmakarma.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
CHELSEA
Paul Kasmin Gallery: “Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings, 1959–1962”
November 9, 2017 through January 13, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9, from 6 to 8 p.m.
In collaboration with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Paul Kasmin Gallery will present “Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings, 1959-1962,” an inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery of paintings by the late artist.
The exhibition will feature works from Lee Krasner’s “Umber Paintings,” a series of 24 paintings made during one of her most ambitious periods of creative production. Following the deaths of her mother and her husband, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner (1908-1984) suffered from insomnia, which led her to make these paintings during the nighttime and under artificial light. With a refined palette limited to umber, cream and white, the paintings are larger in scale than her previous work with a further commitment to all-over compositions and an emphasis on gesturality. With abstract form and explosive brushwork, the series has been lauded as among her most psychologically evocative works.
Paul Kasmin Gallery is located at 293 10th Ave, New York, NY 10001. www.paulkasmingallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Seeded" by Lee Krasner, 1960. Oil on canvas, 70 3/4 x 109 inches. © 2017 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery.
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Hauser & Wirth: “David Smith: Origins & Innovations”
November 13 through December 23, 2017
Opening Reception: Monday, November 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Hauser & Wirth will present “David Smith: Origins & Innovations,” a solo exhibition of work by the late artist.
Bringing together paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures from the 1930s alongside his later, better-known work, the exhibition will contextualize the early inspirations of David Smith (1906-1965) and his lifelong investigation of their potential. Smith transformed sculpture and raised it to the status of painting by making his work on his own in the industrial factory rather than with assistants in an atelier. Highlighting less familiar aspects of his practice, the exhibition will feature works such as his brightly-painted reliefs made from animal bones and surreal figures assembled from commercial bronze sand casts of hand-carved wood. The focus of the exhibition is on the artist’s radical approach to line, space and mass as well as his merging of forms from nature and industry.
Hauser & Wirth is located at 548 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011. www.hauserwirth.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
UPTOWN
Van Doren Waxter: “Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper 1955-1967”
November 8, 2017 through January 20, 2018
Van Doren Waxter will present “Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper 1955-1967,” featuring works from a figurative period of the late artist.
Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), one of the major artists of postwar American abstraction, took a break from abstraction for figurative works on paper from the mid-’50s to the mid- ’60s. The exhibition features 27 works, many of which are being exhibited for the first time. Intimately scaled, the paintings depict common domestic scenes as contemplative studies, featuring table settings, telephones and the view from the window of the artist’s studio. The exhibition highlights the shifts from Diebenkorn’s abstraction, which he later returned to, as well as his willingness and drive to improvise and reinvent himself.
Van Doren Waxter is located at 23 E 73rd St, New York, NY 10021. www.vandorenwaxter.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Untitled (CR no. 2493)" by Richard Diebenkorn, c. 1958. Gouache and graphite on paper, 12 3/8 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Van Doren Waxter.
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BROOKLYN
Pioneer Works: “White Man On a Pedestal: Kenya (Robinson) and Doreen Garner”
November 10 through December 17, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, November 10, from 7 to 9 p.m.
Pioneer Works will present “White Man on a Pedestal: Kenya (Robinson) and Doreen Garner,” a two-person exhibition questioning prevailing western history that uses white-male heteronormativity as its persistent model.
For the exhibition, the two artists approach the “White Male on a Pedestal” from their individual responses as black women operating in a system of white male supremacy. Doreen Garner takes on the figure of Dr. J. Marion Sims, a gynecologist whose procedures on enslaved women were performed without anesthesia or consent, while Kenya (Robinson) uses the archetype of corporate success in #WHITEMANINMYPOCKET.
Garner’s installation aims to recognize Sims’s test subjects, while protesting the doctor’s practices. Garner scanned Sims’s statue in three dimensions in Central Park and rebuilt it in Pioneer Works, where she will enact a dissection of the monument in an interactive constructed theatre. Garner will also exhibit related meat sculptures, featuring sutured skins, body parts and surgical ephemera into organic, fleshy forms that will hang from a meat rack in the exhibit.
(Robinson) has been carrying the #WHITEMANINMYPOCKET, a five-inch tall plastic white male figure carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit, since 2013. The object, which questions the privilege assigned to whiteness, is a representation of the absurdity of homogeneity in spaces of power. (Robinson) will enact a large-scale memorial service for the figurine, as a way to lay the idea to rest. She will also manufacture 10,000 figurines in terracotta, to be buried in an undisclosed location at the exhibition’s end.
Pioneer Works is located at 159 Pioneer St, Brooklyn, NY 11231. www.pioneerworks.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Twelve Thousand Maniacs!" (detail) by Kenya (Robinson), 2017. Plastic, dimensions variable. White Man on a Pedestal: Kenya (Robinson) and Doreen Garner. Pioneer Works, New York, November 10 – December 17, 2017. © Dan Bradica.
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NYC Gallery Scene - Highlights publishes weekly with exhibitions selected by Hamptons Art Hub staff. This edition was written by Genevieve Kotz. Click here to visit our Gallery Guide to find more exhibitions on view.
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