Play Your Cards Right

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Linnea

The Cloisters in Fort Tryon park, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is displaying a lovely set of fifty-two Medieval playing cards that constitute the only known complete deck of illuminated ordinary playing cards (as opposed to tarot cards) from the fifteenth century. The face cards are especially fun.

The Met says that their “exaggerated and sometimes anachronistic costumes suggest a lampoon of extravagant Burgundian court fashions.” Perhaps, but I think they look charming. The real question is: how did they survive this long?

Li Songsong at Pace

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Linnea

These huge canvases with their impasto surfaces struck me as almost ugly at first: the colors, the quasi-photographic Gerhard Richter feel, the imagery. But by the time I left Pace these works by Chinese painter Li Songsong had not just grown on me, but wowed me.

I had a visceral reaction to the textured, thick application of paint.

The scale was humbling.

The imagery took on more context and nuance seen together, and the grids of color the images were reassembled in seemed less rigid and more poetic.

This one is incredibly layered both in the subdued pastel and sepia coloring and literally: As you can see below, the artist mounted separate metal panels and layered them on top of one another.

This canvas seems almost Impressionistic in the way it dabbles light through the trees. The subject, however, is anything but.

Up at Pace Gallery through August 5, and certainly worth a viewing this summer.

Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works at Cheim & Read

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Linnea

Installation View

I thought I just loved her spiders, but in fact I found Louise Bourgeois’ stitchings rather touching variations upon themselves and ‘woman’s work.’ These abstract drawings are made from scraps of clothes and other domestic material that Bourgeois had hoarded over the years. Per usual, Cheim and Reed has done a lovely job with its exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works. The pieces are perfect sketches in themselves, but seen as a series they make a much greater impression that individually.