C H a P T E R N Y

C H A P T E R N Y

Oct. 5, 2018

Perched atop five round white pedestals of varying heights, in Sam Anderson’s show, “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” at Chapter, are a slender papier-mâché princess; two grotesque babies with snowball heads and wooden struts for legs; a found ceramic hippo; and a tube of Babyganics sunscreen, its bold graphic sun logo peeking up over a collar of tape rolls. At one end of the gallery, near the door, sits a wooden harp with multicolored strings. At the other side, by the office, two low, armless figures watch a video pastiche of clouds, storks and hippos, accompanied by an eerie voice-over and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s gentle 1957 instrumental take on the Billy Strayhorn song, after which the video and Ms. Anderson’s show are named.

To me, this all felt both precious and ad hoc, as if the pieces weren’t finished sculptures but props, or even maquettes for props, for some unspecified performance. What I couldn’t figure out, at first, was just what that performance would be. But as I looked from the wedding-white princess, with her blank expression and tiny earrings, to the ceramic hippo, and from the yawning hippo to the grimacing, listing baby, and as I struggled to reconcile the chaotic bouquet of sadness, silliness, yearning, dislocation and theatrically exaggerated self-consciousness that Ms. Anderson’s work evoked in me, I finally recognized the performance she was going for: It was a long, slow wink, and I was doing it. WILL HEINRICH

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CRITIC’S PICKS

NEW YORK Sam Anderson CHAPTER NY 249 East Houston Street September 13 - October 21

“Does anybody need my love?” one of New York’s nine million strangers murmured on the street as I walked to this exhibition. His inquiry felt out-of-nowhere, gentle but rather threatening: descriptors that also apply to the show in question, Sam Anderson’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” View of “Sam Anderson: A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” 2018. Here, other lovesome/lonesome things—a harp, an outsize cake-topper bride, a grinning tube of sunscreen—become stripped-down monuments to withheld affection. Anderson’s fragile, frugal sculptures often appear hurried to the point of incompleteness, as if to stress that her work is not a product of impassioned labor but of studied abandonment. It often puzzles. At a moment lousy with “immersive” art experiences, Anderson favors spatial and emotional exclusivity. Her deceptive whimsies signal inner worlds you may never access.

In the room’s center, five tall, round plinths comprise an awkward archipelago. On separate pedestals are Two Babies (all works cited, 2018) made of papier-mâché and given a few taped-up sticks for legs. One mouthless tot eyes its frowning, turned-away twin, wondering perhaps if it could make the jump. The aforementioned bride, Paula, gazes at nothing, presumably jilted. Elsewhere, a pair of Best Friends—epoxy-clay and papier-mâché pawns conjoined at the hip—binge on a video bearing the show’s title. It’s projected to look like what Anderson calls a box-office window. The footage, comprising stock imagery and scored by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, loops through visions of longing: prayerful aliens, cartoon storks ferrying baby bundles, somersaulting astronauts, and napping hippopotami who bring to mind anthropomorphized internet darling Fiona the Hippo and her mother. There’s a voiceover, but it’s too soft to hear. Communication—its delicacy and swift infantilization— emerges as a concern, one underscored by the fact that each sculpture loosely resembles an emoji prototype. Anderson’s show doesn’t disclose much, but its unmoored feeling follows you outside, making you a little stranger.

—Zack Hatfield

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Sam Anderson’s The Great Assumption is rife with curiously dissimilar figurines and objects—a model airplane, a row of miniature containers atop a conveyor belt, and a diminutive caricature of a waitress make up a motley collection of sculptures molded in white paper mache. Elsewhere, a miniature plastic fairy statuette rests in front of a film about oranges, and another sits beside a swaying feather sculpture affixed to wires and small electronics. The exhibition is a study in absurdist arrangements, a curio of sorts that pique Anderson’s fancy and ultimate interest in the notion of transition and its broad undertones; the airplane tarmac, the rotating baggage conveyor belt, even the gates of heaven figure into the artist’s musings on movement and passageway. Anderson’s trajectory, however, is straightforward in some instances and circuitous in others.

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

While the artist looks to movement as a thematic, most of her works are stationary models. This lends an eerie tone to many pieces, which, like the jet replica Privacy (all works 2018), appear suspended in time. The tedium of delay likewise surfaces in Business Professional (all works 2018), a clay model of a man in the throes of waiting, his hands buried in his pockets in a gesture of rootedness. Lingering at these sites, the artist hones in on moments of monotony that disrupt the ever-moving flow of capitalist time. Here, the act of waiting is one that resists productivity, and quite literally slows us down. Other works encompass the theme with regard to progress, evolution, and transcendence. Waitress (a) and Waitress (b), for example, portray two female figurines in waist aprons, which seem to allude to the transitory exchanges that define this profession.

For Anderson, the conditions of transition are not always overt or even concrete. Rather, they surround us in architectural and intangible spaces both evident and covert. She slows down at these sites, observing the altered perception and odd minutiae that surfaces when one reflects more deeply on the mutability of their surroundings.

Sam Anderson: The Great Assumption runs February 17–April 8, 2018 at JOAN (1206 S. Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Los Angeles, California 90015).

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CRITIC'S GUIDE - 29 FEB 2016 Critic's Guide: Berlin BY ELISA R. LINN

Cooper Jacoby, Tobias Kaspar, Kiki Kogelnik and more: the best current shows in Berlin

Sam Anderson,Pregnant Kiwi Skeleton, 2015, Kiwi skeleton replica, egg replica, wood, acrylic, 21 × 57 × 19 cm. Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Sam Anderson: ‘Endless Love’ Tanya Leighton 26 November, 2015 – 27 February, 2016 New York-based Sam Anderson’s first solo at Tanya Leighton, ‘Endless Love’, comprises a scattering of objects, figurative sculptures, and an eponymous video work. Most of the (small) pieces sit on the floor, ostensibly marginalized; their atomized arrangement affording each an air of self-evidence. Possible connections are suggested but hardly given. Composed of various natural and artificial materials – including bird skeletons and orange peel – some of these figures rest on sheepskin and leather (skin is a recurring element in the show). In front of the video sits two simplified white tractors and nearby is a clay sculpture of the artist’s mother (a professional actor) holding a gong. Appearing again in the video she delivers a monologue comprised of various textual elements – extracts from personal conversations; an excerpt from a play. Yet the exhibition isn’t just the subjective staging of the artist’s own emotional connections. Anderson opens up a space where visitors can weave their own narratives into the objects on view.

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ART & DESIGN ‘All Back in the Skull Together’ By KEN JOHNSON APRIL 9, 2015

Lynda Benglis’s sculpture “Swinburne Figure I.” Credit: Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Cheim & Read, New York Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street, at Morton Street, West Village Through April 18

It’s hard to say what if any conceptual point there is to this metaphorically resonant show, but its judiciously selected works by 17 artists all hang together beautifully. The first three objects, playing with feminine associations, are illustrative. Lynda Benglis’s “Swinburne Figure I” (2009) is a wall-mounted sculpture evoking a human torso made of crystalline-textured polyurethane tinted vivid pink. Nearby is a free-standing sculpture by Birgit Jürgenssen called “Cinderella” (1976), a wooden, half- life-size spiral staircase with a high-heel shoe on the top step. The shoe’s toe has surrealistically morphed into a flattened, flexible extrusion flowing down the stairs. A

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y small, grainy photograph taken sometime between the mid-1960s and the ’80s by Miroslav Tichy shows a woman’s legs in white tights and black slippers protruding from behind a wooden wall, calling to mind the Wicked Witch of the East’s legs jutting out from under Dorothy’s house in “The Wizard of Oz.”

On the other side of the gallery, Sarah Lucas’s “Mammerylooloo” (2010), which has pendulous breasts made from stuffed tights spilling out of a real toilet, adds a note of raunchy feminist comedy. Alice Neel’s “The Sea” (1947), a dark painting of waves under a turbulent sky, converses with Jo Nigoghossian’s rough, concrete-and-steel sculpture “Hole with some bars” (2010), which looks like something coughed up by the ocean. John O’Reilly’s dreamy photomontage “Caress” (2010), in which the partly torn, close- up image of a man licking someone’s hirsute skin is conjoined with a painted image of a gently wavy sea, brings out the sensuality of Kathy Butterly’s funky ceramic cup “Mushroom Nirvana” (2011).

Abstracted faces drawn by Nicole Eisenman, diminutive collages of women hybridized with nonhuman elements by Eva Kotatkova, and miniature landscapes made of tiny found and handmade objects by Sam Anderson on pieces of leather further animate this exhibition’s captivating synergy. KEN JOHNSON

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

ART & DESIGN 15 Group Shows Not to Miss Art Exhibitions From Chelsea to the Lower East Side By ROBERTA SMITH JAN. 29, 2015

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967 at Clifton Benevento Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Connecting the Dots on the Art Map Connecting the Dots on the Art Map

Group shows are a staple of the New York gallery scene, but right now they are not only more plentiful than usual, they are especially good. The 15 group shows reviewed or mentioned here form a welcome antidote to the deluge of monolithic, big-name, single-artist shows that have drawn most of the air in the art world over the last year. They take us to a place where money is not king and give us small snapshots from the gigantic disorderly sprawl that is contemporary art. These shows often represent dealers, their gallery directors or invited curators — usually artists or critics — thinking slightly or very outside the box, putting together disparate works often by younger or lesser-known artists, in new and illuminating combinations. The dizzying bounty here reveals not only the elastic nature of the words “art” and “artist” but also of the group-show format itself.

FAR-FLUNG POINTS OF INTEREST

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The current movable feast offers striking contrasts. At the PaulKasmin Gallery in Chelsea, you can wade into “The New York School, 1969,” a reprise of the groundbreaking exhibition organized in 1969 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Henry Geldzahler, its young, superconnected and first curator of 20th-century art. Radiant with works by the big-name movers and shakers of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism, this show harks back to a time when art history was seen as altogether more orderly, monolithic and male. (293 10th Avenue, at 27th Street, through March 14)

An equally luminous but quite different display is at Artists Space in TriBeCa: “Welcome to My World: An Anthology of Poems and Artworks by 7th and 8th Grade Students.” It presents the fruits of a program in two New York public middle schools, overseen since its founding by the artist Chrysanne Stathacos, among them sculpture, drawings, paintings, videos and a gorgeous collective quilt, all created by students over the past 13 years. (55 Walker Street, through Feb. 8)

“Vis-à-Vis” at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea lands somewhere between the extremes of hyper-blue-chip and inspired amateur. This beguiling selection combines works by outsider artists with disabilities from the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., and the efforts of those of the insider persuasion. The unpredictable artist Michael Mahalchick has orchestrated the show, bringing together familiar and new names from this increasingly blurred divide: the latest of William Scott’s painterly tributes to black popular culture (through a sci-fi lens) and the pseudo-kitsch “Social Butterfly” ceramic busts by Jeff Schwarz. They are festooned with Andy Warhol fright wigs and seemingly vandalized by graffiti artists. (134 10th Avenue, near 18th Street, through Feb. 28)

A STANDOUT Forgoing some of the esoteric cliquishness found in its annual surveys of shows from New York museums and galleries, White Columns, the West Village alternative space, has mustered one of its most ecumenical, visually rewarding overviews in years. “Looking Back: The Ninth White Columns Annual” was assembled by the four members of Cleopatra’s, a Brooklyn-based exhibition space and curatorial collective, and it is a great way to revisit shows you saw and glimpse others you missed. Works by Sigmar Polke, Maria Lassnig, Carrie Mae Weems and Charles Gaines allude to notable museum exhibitions. Certain gallery solo shows are acknowledged, as with Mike Cloud’s “Removed Individual,” a luscious star-shaped painting à la health food game board, and Robert Longo’s bravura charcoal homage to Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountains and Sea.” Some inclusions look stronger than they did the first time around, including Polly Apfelbaum’s diaphanous dotted abstractions on white silk velvet. Peter Fend, Sam Anderson, Trevor Shimizu, Josh Kline and Greg Parma Smith also help commemorate 2014. (320 West 13th Street, through Feb. 21)

ART’S SPRAWL, IN ONE MEDIUM

“Call and Response” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village is a boisterous affair: The efforts of 59 painters mostly from the United States and Europe hang cheek by jowl in one immense space.

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

The totality resembles a juried exhibition that still needs some jurying. Walk around, subtracting what you dislike in your mind’s eye, and quite a bit worth considering will remain. Some high points are contributed by Katherine Bernhardt, Sean Landers, Bjarne Melgaard, Kerstin Brätsch, Henry Taylor and Brian Belott. Several artists raise their games strikingly, including Allison Katz, Silke Otto-Knapp, Tala Madani, Caragh Thuring and Ida Ekblad. And unfamiliar names impress, among them mix-masters like Raina Hamner (James Ensor meets Mad magazine) and Jamian Juliano-Villani (graffiti, action figures, Miró) as well as Avery Singer, who takes a more classical turn with a grisaille, geometricized face that looks computer-generated but isn’t. (620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, through Feb. 28)

SEEING THE NEW THROUGH THE OLD

One interesting group-show tactic is to use something by an older, preferably unappreciated artist to frame the work of younger ones. In “The Curve” at Wallspace, in Chelsea, this role is played by the small and exquisite black-and-white still-life photographs of Jan Groover (1943-2012). They bring out both the underlying still-life concerns and the formal purity of abstract paintings by Rebecca Morris and Monique Mouton, ceramic sculptures by Kristen Jensen and Zachary Leener, and Matt Paweski’s complication of Minimalism in painted wood and metal. (619 West 27th Street, through Feb. 14)

At Clifton Benevento in SoHo, the artist Zak Kitnick has organized “The Gentle Way (Judo)” around his love of judo. (In Japanese the written word judo is composed of the characters for “gentle” and “way.”) The older presence here is Roelof Louw, a South African artist who has lived in New York and London. He is represented by a stunning blast from the past: “Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges)” from 1967. Presaging relational aesthetics by some years, it consists of a large, gorgeous pyramid of oranges that are free for the taking, as with Félix González-Torres’s piles of wrapped candy from the early 1990s.

Mr. Louw’s simplicity and prescience and his effortless repurposing of everyday life echo throughout the show. A sculpture by Anicka Yi contemplates human isolation with enlarged versions of cellphone texts cast in slabs of foggy silicone that resemble nothing so much as dense air. Two wall pieces by Charles Harlan consist of found chunks of trees that have grown around bits of razor wire or chain-link fencing — vivid metaphors for acceptance. Meanwhile, drawings from 1990 by Edward and Nancy Kienholz dot the walls, announcing their titles and their original prices (“For $788,” “For $455”). Nora Mapp, Kyle Thurman, Rochelle Goldberg and Mr. Kitnick himself make equally resonant contributions. (515 Broadway, near Spring Street, through Feb. 14)

GROUP SHOW AS TRIAL BALLOON

Group shows are often a chance for art galleries to expand or redirect their focus. This happens subtly at the Kate Werble Gallery in SoHo. In the well-named show “Quiet Tremors,” the gallery’s somewhat Minimalist aesthetic is maintained, but this is the first time in its six-year history that the gallery has featured paintings. Just as subtly, the show makes a good case for that understated, overtouted abstract painting based on unusual materials or processes. William Latta uses painting and polymer to form dark, bulging surfaces that are muscular and lavalike. Ulrike

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

Müller fashions her small, gleaming geometries from baked enamel on steel. Davide Balula makes textured tondos by alternately soaking in water and drying out factory-primed linen until its white coating starts flaking off. Alison Hall, Kristen Van Deventer and David Schutter further enlarge the gallery’s purview. (83 Vandam Street, near Hudson Street, through Feb. 21)

Similarly, Invisible-Exports, on the Lower East Side, abandons its usual program of envelope- pushers like Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Ron Athey and Kenneth Anger, in this case to tack toward slightly more conventional waters. Or so it seems. “Fetching Blemish,” a selection of eccentric self-portraits by nine artists, is hung salon-style on a single wall with an initially charming effect that soon palls. Strange and unsettling depictions abound. This applies to Dan McCarthy’s ghostly ceramic variations on smiley faces, Amy Sedaris’s ghoulish setup photographs and Rebecca Morgan’s remorselessly detailed self-caricatures, one of which is a painting titled “Self-Portrait at Thirty Living in My Hometown, Post Big Mac Meal.” At the center of all this hangs “Nicoles,” a drawing from the 1990s by Nicole Eisenman, which portrays that artist in multiple, mostly male guises — the still point of this particular storm. (89 Eldridge Street, through Feb. 15)

ARTISTIC DISSONANCE

If there is a group-show look at the moment, it is one of emphatic diversity in which nearly every work on view seems to be in a different, not necessarily identifiable medium. The Lower East Side harbors several worthwhile iterations, including the elegant “Zabriskie Point” at the Jack Hanley Gallery (327 Broome Street), where that 1970 film’s surreal, ultracontemporary sense of displacement prevails. “It Rained Again” at Bureau (178 Norfolk Street, through Feb. 15) is an appealing assortment. “Proper Nouns” at Rachel Uffner (170 Suffolk Street, through Feb. 22), organized by Wyatt Kahn, an artist and the gallery’s director, remains closely focused on the body in different guises. Especially sparse but rewarding variations are “Eraser” at Laurel Gitlen (122 Norfolk Street, through Feb. 15) and “Believe You Me” at247365 (131 Eldridge Street, through Feb. 15), a hole-in-the-wall arrival from Brooklyn.

The most provocative example of the dissonant group show is “Thanks to Apple, Amazon and the Mall” at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery(54 Ludlow Street, through Feb. 8), which expands our sense of the gallery’s activities by celebrating the line of artists’ e-books it started publishing in 2013. All nine of the writers, artists and filmmakers who created them are represented in this highly diverse presentation. The series has been edited by Brian Droitcour, a freelance critic and an editor at Art in America who also helped organize the show.

The works here include the erotic haiku of the artist duo known as Body by Body, rendered in big black letters on the wall, and the ephemera that Lance Wakeling collected while making his film “Field Visits for Chelsea Manning.” Heightening the show’s none-too-sanguine outlook, these include a Rubik’s Cube produced by the National Security Agency and a brochure about the history of Leavenworth, Kan., home of the federal prison where Ms. Manning, convicted of releasing classified documents on WikiLeaks, currently resides.

Another standout in the show at von Nichtssagend is James Duesing’s “End of Code,” a droll, 15-minute computer animation in which fantastical semihuman creatures deliver deadpan non

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y sequiturs, wisecracks and aphorisms while deciphering the code that controls both traffic lights and society. Whatever the future may bring, it seems to say, it is likely to be disorderly, but it could also be very funny.

Correction: January 29, 2015 An earlier version of this article misstated the address for the “Welcome to My World” exhibition. It is at Artists Space’s 55 Walker Street location, not the organization’s 38 Greene Street site. The article also misstated the title of the exhibition at the Kate Werble Gallery. It is “Quiet Tremors,” not “Gentle Tremors.” Ulrike Müller’s baked enamel geometries in that show are made on steel, not bronze. And Wyatt Kahn was misidentified as the director of Rachel Uffner Galary; he is the curator of “Proper Nouns.”

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

== #2 2014

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013

3/3/2014 The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries | Gallerist

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THE YEAR OBSERVED The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries

BY ANDREW RUSSETH 12/18/13 1:40PM Like 366 Tweet 28 Share submit Email

Installation view of T. J. Wilcox, ‘In the Air,’ 2013. (Photo by Bill Orcutt/Whitney Museum) CONNECT WITH US It’s been brutal trying to whittle down a “best of” list for 2013, but the top slot? That’s easy: the Sign up for our Newsletter SEND New York art world’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy. It’s astounding to think back to October 2012, when galleries were flooded and art was destroyed, when artists and art handlers, dealers Send an anonymous tip SEND and interns could be found without electricity, carrying soggy works from basements, tearing out drywalls and trying to figure out what to do next. The entire foundation of the art world felt threatened. But galleries dug out. They raised money to help dealers who had suffered losses, RECOMMENDED FOR YOU and by January most of the affected ones were up and running again.

That experience colored the year for me, as I suspect it did for others. I can’t prove empirically that the art world got any nicer, but it felt like a sense of camaraderie grew out of it. It made an already strong year in art feel just a little bit stronger.

It definitely made the jam-packed summer show that Ryan Foerster hosted at his Brighton 88 Year Old Yoga The 10 Best Museum Teacher Shares Her Exhibitions of 2013 Beach home all the more poignant and inspiring. The storm had rendered his bungalow Secret To Never Endi… uninhabitable, and he was still working on repairs when he opened the show, stocked with work Health 1st by exciting young artists like Zak Kitnick, Rose Marcus, Win McCarthy, Jory Rabinovitz, http://galleristny.com/2013/12/the-year-in-and-beyond-the-galleries/ 1/6

60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

3/3/2014 The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries | Gallerist Rochelle Goldberg and Joshua Abelow. It may have been the liveliest group show of the year, spreading out into his yard, onto the roof and into his bathroom.

A fierce competitor for that title is “Draw The Most Memorable Homeowners Are In Gym,” the blowout drawing exhibition that Gallery Shows of 2013 For A Big Surprise artist Brian Belott organized at the ascendant LendingTree

247365 and Know More Games galleries in Promoted Content by Taboola Brooklyn’s Donut District, filling their walls with A bench sculpture by Kitnick and McCarthy in Foerster’s scores of black-and-white drawings by as show. (Photos by The New York Observer unless Popular on Gallerist many artists, with scores more drawings otherwise noted) Morning Links: Trophy Art Edition

spilling onto the ground. Two other The 50 Most Powerful Women in the New York contenders: Bob Nickas’ summer Art World extravaganza in Jose Martos’ North Fork Vito Acconci: ‘The Worst Performance Would Have to Be Marina Abramovic at MoMA’ home and Greene Naftali’s bracing “Freak Here’s the 2013 Art Basel Exhibitor List Out.” 11 Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before On the solo-show front, the new work I’m still March 3 thinking about, and longing to see again soon, include Keith Mayerson’s heartbreakingly masterful paintings—abstractions, family ‘Draw Gym.’ (Courtesy 247365 and Know More Games)

portraits, that Obama family stunner—at Derek Eller; Jamian Juliano-Villani’s explosive, jaw- droppingly controlled airbrushed numbers from her debut, at Rawson Projects; Michael Williams’ gutsy paintings at Canada, in which he pairs digital prints and airbrush marks to make art that looks startlingly new; everything Bjarne Melgaard did around town, but especially his necrophiliac outing with William N. Copley at Venus Over Manhattan;

Mathieu Malouf’s gothic-tinged paintings and Installation view of ‘Ajay Kurian: Proleptic’ at 47 Canal. chic, creepy BDSM lair at Real Fine Arts (not (Courtesy 47 Canal) to mention his luxurious paintings at their Miami Basel booth); Amy Yao’s charming show of six beautifully accented ladders at 47 Canal; Ajay Kurian’s meaty sculptures, also at 47 Canal, which take still-developing sculptural modes into deliciously rococo territory (you still have a few days to catch that one); Ben Morgan- Cleveland’s sly, haunting, frankly disgusting floor works at Eli Ping Gallery, which he made by leaving affixing sheets of burlap to cobblestone and letting passing trucks do the work overnight; Yashua Klos’ haunting, fragile paper constructions at Tilton Gallery; Amanda Friedman’s deliriously weird paintings, which climbed Spare Room Projects’/Jackie Klempay’s walls and backyard tree in Bushwick; Alice Mackler’s wildly entertaining ceramics at Kerry Schuss; JTT’s succinct and long-overdue Diane Simpson sampling; Artists Space’s long-overdue and impossibly fresh survey of Zilia Sánchez; everything by Sam Anderson, whose small, mysterious sculptures, strewn with animal skeletons and little props, pack serious punches; and the delectable No-Neck Blues Band ephemera show at Audio Visual Arts.

Galleries also delivered the goods when it came to work by artists who are no longer with us. At Zwirner, Robert Storr’s Ad Reinhardt show, which included 13 of his black paintings, witty cartoons and travel photographs, was the revelation of the year, neck and neck with John Elderfield’s late Willem de Kooning stunner at Gagosian. (There are a few days left on both of those also.) Meanwhile, Davis & Installation still of Bender, ‘Total Recall,’ 1987, at The Langdale made a worthy case for an Albert http://galleristny.com/2013/12/the-year-in-and-beyond-the-galleries/ 2/6 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y

3/3/2014 The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries | Gallerist Kitchen. (Courtesy the Kitchen) York museum exhibition, and the Kitchen a strong argument for a much larger Gretchen Bender show. (We’ll get more at next year’s Whitney Biennial.) And the embattled American Folk Art Museum deserves praise—and, if you’ve got the cash or art, donations—for bringing us not one but two choice Bill Traylor shows.

Much of the most memorable art lasted for only a few hours, or a night or two. There were Ei Arakawa’s performances with friends early in the year at the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art that burned with his inimitable ludic wit. (Another reason to get pumped for next year’s Biennial: He’ll colab with Carissa Rodriguez, who offered up one of the year’s most terrifyingly sharp shows, at

Front Desk Apparatus.) Ei Arakawa at the Guggenheim. (Photo by Paula Court/Guggenheim)

In June, Los Angeles-based artist Dawn Kasper staged an hour-long performance in the living room of a Tribeca condominium once used by Dominique Strauss-Kahn that progressed from funny to exasperating to weirdly pleasurable as she bumbled through a lecture and demonstration before a baffled audience that had been corralled by dealer David Lewis. Late July brought Park McArthur’s head-scratching residency at

Performance still of Kasper. Essex Street, which had her hanging clothes outside the shuttered space for two weeks in midsummer, a quiet, oblique show about homelessness, space and place that never closed.

“Under the BQE” arrived in September, a scrappy show organized by artists Marie Karlberg and Lena Henke for one evening under, yes, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which had young guns like Sam Pulitzer, Nicolas Ceccaldi and the curators themselves offering up major new works. (Ms. Karlberg and Ms. Henke are hosting a nail-art salon this evening, Wed., Dec. 18.) On the

tonier end of the spectrum, Dominique Lévy Pulitzer in ‘Under the BQE.’ (Courtesy ML Artspace) Gallery staged Yves Klein’s gorgeous “Monotone-Silence” Symphony with a full choir and orchestra at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

And did you catch David Diao’s epic, stemwinding lecture on Barnett Newman at Dia? I missed it but got the audio from Dia. It’s amazing, as was his painting show at Postmasters. (Still another reason to be excited about the Whitney Biennial.)

The worst art of the year? The less said about that the better, but the glut of bland, meaningless abstract painting currently dominating Lower East Side galleries is a

Diao, ‘Double Rejection 2 (MoMA Boardroom),’ 2012. trend that would be nice to stop now. My least (Courtesy the artist and Post249mast eEastrs) Houston St., Newfavori tYork,e show NYs of 10002the yea r : Nate Lowman at http://galleristny.com/2013/12/the-ye60ar- Walkerin-and-be ySt.,ond -Newthe-g aYork,lleries/ NY 10013 3/6 C H A P T E R N Y

3/3/2014 The Year in, and Beyond, the Galleries | Gallerist the Brant Foundation, Angel Otero at Lehmann Maupin and Josephine Meckseper at Andrea Rosen.

But let’s end on a positive note, with what were, for me, the year’s highlights (setting aside MoMA PS1’s Mike Kelley retrospective, which is in a once-in-a-generation class of its own):

3. The classical music concert that Rainer Ganahl organized early in January (with support from White Columns) at the soon-to- close El Mundo department store in East Harlem, a grand, dilapidated space built as a soaring theater in the 1920s, with professional and student musicians (including artist Ken Okiishi) playing violin and piano, and singing. It was freezing outside, but it was brilliantly warm and deeply melancholic within, amid

stacks of clothes and a rapt audience, amid Ganahl’s concert at El Mundo. (Courtesy the artist) the brutal upheaval that New York continuously inflicts.

2. Danh Vo’s Hugo Boss Prize show at the Guggenheim, for which he presented thousands of trinkets, knickknacks and bric-à-brac (and a few little paintings) from the collection of the late Lower East Side painter Martin Wong (who was himself the subject of P.P.O.W.’s great-looking booth at the ADAA Art Show in March). It was a touching portrait of an artist we lost too soon and a treatise on the meanings that objects generate and the reasons we collect them, whether in our homes or just our heads—a virtuosic piece of art.

1. And finally T. J. Wilcox’s “In the Air” panoramic video installation at the Whitney. Shot through the windows of his Union Square penthouse studio, it shows 24 hours of New York’s skyline in the span of about 30 minutes and is interspersed with other short videos: an improbably hilarious vignette about Warhol and the Pope, a sizzlingly entertaining one about Gloria Vanderbilt and one about Sept. 11 that brought me to the verge of tears. (I

Still from Wilcox’s ‘In the Air,’ 2013. (Courtesy the artist, know I’m not alone on that.) It ranks as one of Metro Pictures and the Whitney) the most important, most moving artworks ever made about New York. It makes you see our resilient, evolving city anew and invites you to fall in love with it all over again, and again, and again.

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ON VIEW ‘Sam Anderson: Flowers and Money’ at Chapter NY By Andrew Russeth • 12/10/13 4:01pm

Installation view. (Courtesy Chapter NY)

There may be no works on view in New York that are more improbable than Sam Anderson’s latest sculptures. The Brooklyn-based artist’s solo show, which inaugurates this new space in what was formerly Bureau gallery’s Henry Street shoebox, includes 39 of them, none more than a few inches long. They are arrayed on a 5-by-5 grid marked out by thin standing wood dowels of various heights, which frame views of works and sometimes act as pedestals.

There’s a little wooden bird skeleton that looks as fearsome as a giant dinosaur as it stands gingerly amid minuscule clay flowers, two stacks of miniature Wall Street Journals tied with twine atop one dowel and, on the ground, three adorable little barrels paired with two carob seeds and a cherry stem slid through a minute metal string, alluding to settings as diverse as prehistoric times, the present day and the Wild West. At the center of the grid is the meatiest work, just about 9 inches tall: a frog skeleton struggling to climb a rock like it’s fighting for its life.

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‘Drum,’ 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Chapter NY)

Each little assemblage seems to hint at a vignette as short as one or two sentences that could be fused with other pieces to produce an almost infinite number of longer, surreal narratives. Charles LeDray’s carefully modeled bite-size sculptures are clearly reference points, but Ms. Anderson seems to work small less for reasons of fetishistic craft than for its storytelling potential.

Ms. Anderson’s recent, only-slightly-larger show at the Bed-Stuy Love Affair project space, her current one-work solo outing at SculptureCenter and now this exhibition position her as one of today’s most interesting young artists. (Through Dec. 22)

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To Do: November 13-20, 2013 By Jerry Saltz November 18, 2013

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