Category Archives: contemporary art

Cy Twombley: Selected Examples

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Originally published Sunday, March 1 2009 and reblogged in honor of the artist’s death today at 83.

A Progression Into Chaos







Beautiful images for your Sunday morning. Twombly’s work is something I never tire of, even if seeing these images on a screen really takes away from their painterly quality and large size. Cy Twombly is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and if they would bring Le Quattro Stagione, his quartet of paintings, back to the atrium of MoMA, I would be quite happy.

Still Life & Motion at DCKT Contemporary

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Bouquet, Everest Hall, 2011

Still Life and Motion: Everest Hall and Sean Capone opened Thursday night on the LES DCKT Contemporary gallery, and alltogether made for a nice, small show that speaks to a very contemporary way of handling the age-old still life genre. Everest Hall provides the still lifes of the exhibition’s title, with roses on rather geometric  backgrounds that seem paper-thin, fragile, and false. Sean Capone provides the motion, showing roses and other flowers exploding and fading out like a kaleidoscope setting for a flat screen. The works complimented each other nicely, but Hall’s work seemed the weaker part of the show. 

Still from Sub Rosa (What We Do Is Secret), Sean Capone, 2009
Capone’s two video installations were fascinated to watch as they played on an endless loop. I was also very intrigued by the sales premise behind them. Literally a few minutes after complaining to a friend about how I can’t afford any of the artwork I see, I looked at the price list and saw the videos being sold as a file on a USB drive for $125, and that they artist had limited the editions to 100. The artist created his own principle of scarcity that was really interesting, and I could certainly dig projecting those patterns onto my living room wall 24/7. I was also really impressed and interested by the site-specific installations he had created in the past. In fact, they are amazing: see here. 

FloralWall (Skull & Void #3), Sean Capone, 2010

Lydia Venieri: The Last Conflict

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Can a cornucopia of fake flowers, shiny things, dolls, dolphins and unicorns escape being twee? The Lydia Venieri exhibition The Last Conflict: Retrospective: Sculpture, Video, and Photography is, as the title suggests, a mixed media installation that occupies the majority of Stux Gallery’s space that begs the question.
Her bubble sculptures, supported by tree trunks or suspended from the ceiling, depict hyperbolically natural flora and fauna. The materials mix the organic (moss, wood) and plastic. The miniature ecosystems seem like the baubles of fairies from a bad production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Authenticity is hardly the point, however.

The exhibition also featured satin digital color prints from the artist’s “Planet Exodus” series. In them, wide-eyed dolls pose like models.

Their large eyes reflect the manmade surroundings, and suggest a (fake?) innocence in the face of natural devastation. The worlds Venieri portrays in the dolls’ eyes, and in the video installation as well, suggests the world of man in conflict with the natural world.

That message comes differently from the mouths, so to speak, of the little plastic people that Venieri employs.

Rather like a Japanese Lolita, Venieri’s exhibition tweaks twee on the nose, and manages to seem coy about the darkness underlying her plastic arts.

Up through June 25th at Stux Gallery.