Category Archives: MoMA

Three New York Exhibitions to Catch Over the Holidays

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In New York over Thanksgiving, I saw so many great shows, much of which I want to write about in more depth, and missed so many that I wanted to see. To save you from a similar fate of missing shows in the holiday chaos, allow me to point out three exhibition that will be closing soon after the New Year. Of the shows that I did see, these three stuck out as being well-worth the effort of seeing over the holidays.

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Chris Offili: Night and Day was the biggest (pleasant) surprise for me. I was familiar with the British artist’s work, from his original controversial dung paintings to his red, green, and black makeover at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but I hadn’t realized how lush and sensuous his large, detailed paintings could be. This gorgeous visual quality was apparent overall, and highlighted by the way they were installed in the museum. Especially in his most recent blue paintings, the viewer gets the rather rare experience of painting as one would with Rothko: an intense bodily confrontation and visual experience that grows over time. However, the subject matter quickly pulls it away from the sublime and into the lyrical.

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I, being an ignoramous, or perhaps merely too young, was not familiar with Gober’s work and wasn’t sure what I would make of the artist’s sinks and other examples of warped domesticity at Robert Gober: The Heart Is A Metaphor. What I found was pleasantly tactile work whose logic proceeded like that of dreams, intuitively making sense. It was odd, touching, bizarre–and images of it stick. I only wish I could walk through it again.

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Finally, Egon Schiele: Portraits is a beautiful and thorough show of this Viennese Expressionist painter’s work. The collection overall makes clear the stark break a young Schiele made with Gustav Klimt’s decorative style in favor of the psychological, in a city where Freud was doing his pioneering work in psychoanalysis. Remaining stylized, Schiele veered toward an expression of the inner mind, in ways that feel freshly startling. Similarly, his drawings, sometimes conventional, show his precocious skill as a draftsman.

Formal Comparison: Isa Genzken and Vasa-Velizar Mehic

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I think you could also categorize this as: “things you find in the library when you should be working on your thesis.” That aside, I thought this was a striking formal comparison between Genzken’s and Mehic’s work, although certainly serendipitous rather than evidence of a connection between the contemporary German artist and the older Yugoslavian aartist. Having recently seen the Genzken show at MoMA though,  it popped out at me.

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Isa Genzken’s building representing Berlin’s buildings made by leaning colored glass panes at MoMA’s current Isa Genzken: Retrospective. Part of her 2004 series “New Buildings for Berlin.”

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Vasa-Velizar Mehic’s Bouquet (1970) in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, found in a book in the library called The Museums of Yugoslavia, which dates it pretty clearly.

Mike Kelley at PS1

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The Mike Kelley show at PS1, up through February 2,  is a big show. As Holland Cotter notes in his New York Times review, it easily fills all four floors at MoMA’s Queens outpost. Over a long and prolific career Kelley, who committed suicide in 2012, produced work more united by the thematic of Americana kitsch pop culture attacked with wierdness and dark humor in a colorful, uneasy aesthetic unrestrained by medium. All of which promises a fun viewing experience, yet my own felt uneasy, claustrophobic.

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Kelley’s uncharacteristically glossy later works called the Kandor Project begin the exhibition, which examine Superman’s birthplace and which Kelly recreated in sculpture after sculpture. These sleek and fancy forms obsessively explore childhood interests, and were quite appealing even if the glut of them left me feeling the theme had been exhausted.

While I found some of it amusing, like the video pieces above, the pop culture manipulations really didn’t move me for the most part. That said, there were some great works in the show, like the massive installation of Day Is Done, an unfinished multichannel video and performance piece. It presents Kelley’s work at its best: overwhelming, disorienting, and disturbing.

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