June 01, 2007

New in the museums: Richard Serra scores big

Here is a look at what the critics had to say this week about some of the new exhibitions in New York City:

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art (through September 10)

"These shapes and experiences are new. That’s about the best, and the rarest, compliment you can give to any artist. Mr. Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses” and “Torqued Toruses” and other recent works like “Band” and “Sequence” have their origins in work he did 40 years ago in rubber and lead, as this retrospective handsomely affirms, but these are nonetheless unprecedented variations on the theme of dumbfounding spirals and loops." - New York Times
"Their rusted, velvety orange, brown, and golden skins are sleek yet earthen, and their nature — both reptilian and womblike — is as inviting as it is menacing. Walking in and around their wobbly walls, narrow corridors, and circular clearings, which lean forward and pull you deeper, as they also appear ready to fall or to chomp down and to swallow you whole, give you sea legs; and their organic enclosures produce a specific kind of euphoric dizziness, as well as conflicting senses of burrowing, well-being, and dread." - Sun
"At once predictable and astonishing, they are beautiful, immense and impossible just to view. To 'see' any work by Serra is to experience physical sensations and cognitive dissonances similar to those of an amusement-park thrill ride." - Bloomberg
"But this was a different order of magnitude from the already high achievement of this artist. The three pieces installed on the Museum of Modern Art's second floor (as part of the artist's retrospective, opening Sunday) were, as director Glenn Lowry told me at the press preview, made site-specifically: They were designed to fit perfectly into MoMA's loft-like contemporary gallery, the floors of which had been expressly designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi to bear the mega-ton force of Serra's steel behemoths." - Culture Grrl

"With sharply angled walls and high sweeping curves, Serra's sculptures induce mind-bending, even disorienting effects. The shapes evoke familiar shapes - the hull of a ship, cooling towers, curtainlike strips. Yet while strolling through the structures, it's easy to lose track of where a work starts and ends, underlining that empty spaces and a sense of movement are integral to the works." - Associated Press
"Of the pieces made in 2006, "Band" is the biggest, with no distinct interior or exterior. As the continuous band of steel curves inward and outward to the length of more than 70 feet, it forms four cavities, each of them different. Serra has described it as promoting "movement through form" - which means, we guess, that you'll have fun walking through it." - Post

"182nd Annual: An Exhibition of Contemporary American Art" at the National Academy Museum (through June 24)

"Although there is little here that will surprise you, some works gain interest when read against the grain. Paintings like Thomas Cornell’s demented pastoral filled with smiling figures, “The Birth of Nature and Dance of Love”; Frank Mason’s antiquated religious painting, “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”; and Don Perlis’s creepy “Polyphemus, the Escape of Odysseus” would register as quirky-cool if moved to a different context (say, further downtown). Here they’re merely among the stranger works." - New York Times
"But even as the Whitney goes through its formulaic tantrums, the 182nd Annual Exhibition at NAM, for all its conservatism, is full of surprises and can be viewed with outright pleasure." - Sun

And there's more:

"On the one hand there are the superslick, super-flat, superexpensive, and to me superficial paintings of the Japanese entrepreneur–Energizer Bunny–artist Takashi Murakami. On the other, there’s the seemingly insurrectionary but clubby group show of what could be called the “boys and girls in black and silver,” organized by two leading downtown artists, Adam McEwen and Nate Lowman. The two shows, the first flashy, the second self-consciously disheveled, couldn’t be more different. Their juxtaposition at Gagosian, however, points up disconcerting similarities; under its combative surface, the group show is as buddy-buddy as the Murakami is self-satisfied. Still, seeing the two exhibitions back-to-back suggests that a shift in aesthetic sensibilities is under way." - New York magazine on a pair of shows at the Gagosian Gallery: “Beneath the Underdog” (through June 16,) and Takashi Murakami (through June 9) both at 980 Madison Ave.

"But this gallery show covering his long career invites us to reconsider his virtues. On the heels of the Met exhibition, where he left a vivid impression, its timing is good. Rouault was never chic: he was too moral, too religious, too tender, too popular. But at his best he was touchingly strange, and a model of integrity." - New York Times on "Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores" at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Ave., (through June 9)

"Bizarre though the forms are, they are also formally rather beautiful in their voluptuous finesse and sinuous sensuality. They are also glorious fun." - The Sun on Tony Cragg at the Marian Goodman Gallery at 24 W. 57th St. (through June 9)

"It took Kai Althoff, the internationally known, Cologne-based German artist, and his Brooklynite collaborator, graffiti artist Nick Z, two weeks to install "We Are Better Friends for It," this ambitious display of painting, video, sculpture, drawing, and assemblage. Many areas and moments within the show live up to that ambition, but it is marred in places by an over- reliance on clichéd, street-art hipsterism." - Village Voice on Nick Z. and Kai Althoff: "We Are Better Friends for It" at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 515 W. 24th St. (through June 16)

Image credit: Richard Serra, "Band," 2006, Weatherproof steel, Collection of the artist, © 2007 Richard Serra, Photo: Lorenz Kienzle. Provided for use by MoMA.

Earlier: New in the museums: Dragons, Summer of Love

June 1, 2007 07:51 AM in Midtown, Museums, Sightsology

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