Friday, September 14, 2012
Art Art Picks From Print
Posted by Paul D'Agostino on Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 2:07 PM
Gazers and glimpsers and curious vacuities bridge art picks from the 9/12 print issue of our handsome publication.
MATTHEW MILLER: FOOLS ARE THOSE WHO LOSE THEIR MIRRORS
Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., through October 14th
Matthew Miller's most widely esteemed and readily recognizable works are meticulously rendered, subtly variant portrayals of a certain man in a restrained range of mindsets and moods, his mysterious presence always a foreground for fathomless supple backdrops of deep black obscurities. Such are many of Miller's oil paintings, but he has also produced commensurably engrossing graphite drawings for this solo show—which extends uptown to C.G. Boerner, Pocket Utopia's partner gallery—as well as a series of abstract drawings. This promises to be Miller's most inspired and expansive exhibition to date.
ROGER FRITZ: QUERELLE
White Columns, 320 West 13th St., through October 13th
Conceived in collaboration with VeneKlasen/Werner in Berlin, where it was first exhibited earlier this year, Querelle is a gathering of ten dozen full color production photographs from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's eponymous, and final, film. Since Fritz both acted in and created documentary images for Fassbinder's films, his awareness of how to produce stillform visions of action sequences is particularly keen, and his eye particularly akin to the auteur's. Filmmakers, photographers, actors and models might well learn a thing or two from Fritz's glimpses. All visitors are likely to be enthralled.
SANDER CEDEE: INSIDER / OUTSIDER
Slag Contemporary, 56 Bogart St., ground floor, through October 7th
Dutch painter Sander Cedee transfigures now familiar, now solemn, now airy interiors into emotive spaces invaded by light, inhabited by objects and ruptured, however freshly, by flight. A subtle sense of escape, evacuation or some otherwise induced absence—perhaps voluntary, in other words, perhaps not—becomes a crucial lens through which to behold and explore the artist's lushly illuminated compositions. Cedee's works pose meta-narrative questions that might well evade answers, but they capture the allure of emptiness with great certainty.
EYES CLOSED / EYES OPEN
MoMA, 11 West 53rd St., through January 7th
This gathering of drawings recently added to the museum's collection are politically inspired, curiously interactive and introspectively, in a way, quasi-whimsical. Franz Erhard Walther's mixed media meta-drawings beg human interaction for complete realization, hence the scheduled presence of trained facilitators to help visitors experience them in full. Martha Rosler's drawings from 1967-72 comment on the fraught sociopolitical discourses of their time. Willem de Kooning's works, then, turn the focus all the way inside. His almost wispy, fleeting drawings vary to some extent in terms of subject matter—but he executed them all with closed eyes.
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