But before we move on to future exhibitions, don’t miss Andrew Ohanesian‘s “Untitled (The Jetway),” a brilliant site-specific installation at Famous Accountants in Brooklyn. It’s only up for one more week and, believe me, pictures don’t do it justice.
�’Money is a kind of poetry,’ Wallace Stevens once said, and nowhere is this more evident than in Pop and post-Pop art of the last few decades. From Warhol�s silkscreened dollar signs to Damien Hirst�s bejeweled 100-million dollar skull, everyone wants a piece of the action; the borderline between art as commodity and commodity itself is officially blurred. The five artists in ‘HAYMAKER’ explore the message and madness behind this trend, in subtle and not-so subtle depiction. Warhol also coined the familiar phrase ‘everyone is famous for fifteen minutes’, and in the gallery world, artists� careers in many cases are abbreviated: five years in the public favor, five weeks for the typical run of an exhibit, five days in the case of a art fair, or literally five seconds when a work is on the auction block. Cruel and unusual marketing practices are the norm these days; an artist leaves grad school, and if lucky, grabs the horn of the mechanical bull, and holds on for dear life while the attention lasts. During that time the market demands its version of the classic dog-and-pony show; artists and galleries who are better equipped to satisfy the appetite for hype and trend generally survive the longest in the rodeo, and those with the long view tend to, well, take a long time to bear fruit � both commercially and critically.”
“Deborah Brown�s most recent paintings represent the urban landscape with an equal respect for chaos and for crumbling, serendipitous beauty. Drawing inspiration from Bushwick, Brooklyn, the community where she works, Brown examines her post-industrial surroundings with a fresh and questioning eye, noting down decay and rejuvenation with the same authoritative, sympathetic brush. Glowing candy-colors and luminous skies juxtaposed with blurred shadows and ominous forms create a strangely harmonious universe, one where the traces of humanity are glimpsed but the human presence is never directly seen. The viewer is left to wonder whether people are unwelcome in an eerie, fractured Utopia, a strangely balanced ecosystem that, having survived our disruptive influence, has taught itself to get along without us.”
“Flanagan’s paintings conjure up distorted, indefinite figures, ghoulish revenants, and zombie-types, all of whom are situated in scenes teeming with implication, and rife with ambiguity. At once familiar and unfamiliar, the work oozes the uncanny, and viewers find themselves both drawn in and excluded, captivated and unnerved.”
“Lee Lozano: Tools,” Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. January 12 – February 19, 2011.
“Lee Lozano (1930 � 1999) has been described as one of the least known great artists of the New York scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. Navigating the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, from Minimalism to Conceptual Art, she created a radical, overtly sexual, and aesthetically provocative body of work in a male-dominated art world….Lozano�s turbulent tool paintings and drawings can be understood as critiques of both sexual and art world decorum at a moment when the feminist movement had yet to coalesce and actively question either. She began using these objects so closely identified with male power and productivity in 1963, departing from the multi-colored, surreal �comix� in which her acerbic wit and rebelliousness were expressed in punning captions (�Let them eat cock�). With the tool paintings and drawings, Lozano�s intense relationship with language, perhaps the most continuous thread in her oeuvre, is invisible but still acutely felt. While these tool works bear no writing, the viewer is always aware that a �tool� is both an implement used to build the world, and a slang name for a penis. Perhaps more meaningfully, the word �tool� describes a dupe whose low self-esteem or limited knowledge invites others to take advantage.”
“Winter Break,” artists include Marina Adams, Peter Hopkins, Robert Janitz, and Brooke Moyse. Momenta Art, 359 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY. Gallery Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12-6pm,
Note that the show is only open for ten days: January 7 -16, 2011.
“Some of the paintings resist being read literally, others provide a complexly balanced image for contemplation and focus. But all of the work acknowledges the problem of culture, reference, and association within the field of abstraction as something to be respected, not rejected. These works don�t try to sidestep reality, they keep their eyes trained on it � even as they back towards the infinite.”
Check out ArtCat for more previews.
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Thanks for the "Haymaker" shout-out, Sharon! Hope you were able to check out the show. Lemme know what you think.
These other shows look awesome– especially Lee Lozano. I can't wait to check them out.
Yeah!
– Tatiana Berg