Category Archives: Chelsea

Pistoletto’s “Lavoro” at Luhring Augustine

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Perhaps photographing Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work ought to be considered an art in its own right. In  photos of Pistoletto’s show Lavoro, at Luhring Augustine Gallery through April 28, it is difficult to tell what is part of the artist’s original composition, silkscreened onto mirror, and what is a reflection.

At least that’s the case with my photos. The gallery website provides you with the works sans reflection. But maybe my photos show better what it is like to view the exhibition, and particularly the immersive quality with which Pistoletto draws the viewer and the temporal setting into play with the realistic scenes he creates. The ladies in the background above, and myself below, deserve such a prominent place when looking at and talking about the artist’s work. Pistoletto begins to create them, but the works are complete when placed in a room and viewed by a person. 

Lavoro is Italian for work. The bright colors, hyperrealistic treatment of surfaces, and prosaic tools depicted here relate to the industrial kind of work done in warehouses and on construction sites. 

Pistoletto began painting on mirror as early as the 1960s. (I wrote about Pistoletto’s early work and original mirror paintings here after visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective in 2010.) His cropped compositions and bold color are different here, looking much more like photographs and much less like the delicate portraits on tissue he used to paint. They look like their respective times in that way.

I especially like the sign here, telling the viewer: “Public forbidden to enter.”
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Bottle caps, paintbrushes, and nails: Will Ryman

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Will Ryman, of roses fame, had new work up at Paul Kasmin in Chelsea in a show that just ended. My first impression as I walked into the gallery of the large figure wrapping around the room was that it was like a large Buddha in a temple. However, this large plaster head doesn’t look nearly as serene, his blue t-shirt is surfaced with sneakers, and his glittering arms are made of bottle caps. Lots and lots of bottle caps. Everyman is like a Bart Simpson version of the Buddha.
Going under the statue’s head, the viewer walks into a new environment, a labyrinth created with high vertical stacks of paintbrushes. Like the shoes and bottle caps, there are some great textures being created here. I wish these environments came through better in photographs. The windings go nowhere in particular and turn you back around to the sleeping (dying?) figure in the next gallery.

Around the corner, a third new work by Ryman, one more suited the public display like his roses were, presides over Kasmin’s new exhibition space. Bird is made up of real and fabricated steel nails, some of them enormous.

I became more than a little fascinated by the size of the nails, and the hollow interior of the structure. The materials Ryman uses in all these installations never lose their original identity, the way the materials used by Tara Donovan do. Instead, their existence as bottle caps or paintbrushes or nails never gets lost even as through multiplication and shaping they take new, bigger forms.

Yinka Shinobare MBE at James Cohan Gallery

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Yinka Shonibare MBE’s has some new works up at James Cohen Gallery in Chelsea through March 24th, although what you see in the photos above are rather like the sides to the main dish hidden in the back. In the interior room, the video Addio del Passato is screened on the wall and the great soundtrack to it drifts back into the outer rooms.

The video features a black woman in African-print but traditional European-style clothes in some Roccoco European palace singing the opera Traviata. The storyline is that the character of Frances Nisbet, Lord Nelson’s estranged wife, sings an aria from the last act of Verdi’s Traviata, which dovetails into some of Shonibare’s previous work in London about Lord Nelson. What Shinobare is interested in is the distance and irony between imperial Britain’s history and the present as well as emotions like longing and passion. Honestly there is a lot going on in the video and his work in general, and I had do some more research. The short video below is some great background from Art 21.

 

Also on view in the gallery are his suicide portraits, reworkings of famous death portraits with the subjects wearing the African print cloth and the sex/fetish objects, with their historically accurate attributes also somewhat reworked by the artist. Shinobare uses the same fabric in all of these work because although we think of it as African, it is actually a Dutch reworking of Indonesian batiks.