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Li Songsong at Pace
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.
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.
Richard Tuttle at Pace Gallery
Installation View |
System 4, Hummingbird, 2011 |
The title Hummingbird suggests a flurry of intense movement that turns into a blur of motion. Here we have a duct tape spire rising high over an internal core of small parts flanked by two enormous boards. Or, we have a long beak, small fat body, and two strong wings keeping the hummingbird afloat.
Detail of System 4, Hummingbird |
The body of the sculpture is open, and these little circles and plinths seem to me like they should be free moving rather than fixed.
System 3, Measurement, 2011 |
Measurement has large, candy colored suspended balls hovering over a circle. Here the fixed structure works to create tension as the balls seem to defy gravity. I had the rather more unfortunate impression of a banana split melting into a waiting mouth. Off hand, I’d say the ice cream isn’t going to fit in the “mouth” below, if that was what Tuttle was trying to measure.
Richard Tuttle’s Whats the Wind up at Pace Gallery through July 22.