Thursday, November 8, 2012
Art Art Picks From Print
Posted by Paul D'Agostino on Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 12:37 PM
Bodies in space and hellbent lakes ground this set of art picks from the 11/7 issue of our dashing gazette.
ANTONY GORMLEY: BODYSPACE
Sean Kelley Gallery, 475 10th Ave., through December 22nd
In some ways alarming and terrifying, in other ways soothing and amusing, in most every way wholly captivating, Antony Gormley's Event Horizon installation a couple years ago dotted various building nooks and rooftops around Madison Square Park with life-size figures frozen perfectly erect, many perched at the verge of a perfect fall. The sculptor's new show, Bodyspace—the first solo exhibition in Sean Kelley's new location—might not generate as many 911 calls as his last effort in NYC, but it is certainly a similarly striking and poignant investigation of bodies and gravities, materials and structures, energies and latencies, masses and voids. Assuming he did so last time around, Gormley is sure to captivate you once more.
KIM JONES: AVERNO
Pierogi, 177 North 9th St., through November 11th
Full of bold gestural movements, nethered scenes in deep sweep and flatulent airs discharged by some plunge into ruin, Kim Jone's drawings at Pierogi, evidencing various levels of creation and revisitation over time, gain richness and allure in their verbal vacancy, in their protagonists' tight lips and atmospheric terseness in which creakings, croakings, growls and moanings are imaginably diegetic at most, ostensibly eternal at least. His inspiration for the works is of an infernal sort, after all—Lago d'Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy that Romans of yore held to be an ingress to Hades. Jones' show is most certainly an ingress to something hellish. A fuller review of Averno is here.
BRUCE DOW & ALLYSON STRAFELLA
Norte Maar Gallery, 83 Wyckoff Ave. #1B, through November 18th
In the gallery's main room, a lone sculpture by Bruce Dow, Love Seats, is a graceful, nearly seamless merging of kindred Eames chairs whose frozen moment of mirror-like confrontation—a lovely instant of ergonometric implausibility—is grounded by marble and framed by a room, its bichromatic palette well timed for All Hallows' Eve. Accompanying this piece are two of Dow's works on paper, one born of the positive-space elements extracted from the other. Similarly splendid in their simplicity are Allyson Strafella's drawings in the project room, the delicate yields of a painstaking meta-manual process in which the wielded utensil of mark making is a typewriter. Both exhibits are perfectly spare, perfectly placed, perfectly poised to please.
FRANCIS ALŸS: REEL-UNREEL
David Zwirner, 525 & 533 West 19th St., postponed until January 2013 due to Hurricane Sandy.
If you saw Belgian artist Francis Alÿs' show at MoMA last year, you might have seen videos in which he dashes into cyclonic storms, pushes a melting block of ice through Mexico City, performs Sisyphean cycles with an automobile, and simultaneously acts out and reenacts a surprisingly long stroll he took in public wielding a handgun unto arrest. If such works of great absurdist moment were to your liking, you will not want to miss REEL-UNREEL, a video work he produced for dOCUMENTA(13) in which Afghan boys play a traditional street game using a film reel instead of a wheel—underscoring the mixed ontologies of media representations of life in Afghanistan under the aegis of war. A series of paintings accompanying the video are further explorations of the same.
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