Art Views: Exhibitions in New York, January, 2019
Better late than never? The holidaze kicked my butt this year, so I threw this post to the bottom of the priority pile. There are a couple of art shows opening this week, so I’m perhaps getting it in just in time.
Closing Soon
It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200 | Morgan Museum {archived}
It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200 {archived} at the Morgan Library’s museum is closing in a few short weeks by January 27th. The exhibition is a small one, but very impressive and wonderfully curated. It explores the culture at the time the story was published including what art works and science inventions may have inspired Shelley to write the story, Mary Shelley’s own history, and the myriad iterations the story took in subsequent years from stage plays, to movies, to comics.
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 | MoMA {archived}
Through January 13
Toward a Concrete Utopia explores themes of large-scale urbanization, technology in everyday life, consumerism, monuments and memorialization, and the global reach of Yugoslav architecture.
January
After Dark | Gristle Gallery
Opening January 19, 2019
graphite and watercolor on Stonehenge paper in antique frame (plexiglass)
New work by Gina Altadonna, Karly Anderson, Gori Bautista, Christine Benjamin, Michael Camarra, Christa Dippel (defectivepudding), FLuX, Katie Gamb, Danny Gonzalez, Claudia Griesbach-Martucci, Amy Guidry, Alexis Kandra, J. L. King, Michelle Avery Konczyk, Michele Melcher, David Morritt, Johannah O’Donnell, Bill Ross, and Dylan Garrett Smith.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Towards An End Of Biological Perception | Marlborough Gallery {archived}
Opening Reception: January 10, 6–8pm
Jan 10 — Feb 16
Excelsior: The World of Stan Lee | Society of Illustrators {archived}
January 08, 2019 to March 02, 2019
Artist: Don Heck | Editing: Stan Lee
February 1967
Pop Porn | MF Gallery {archived}
Opening reception: Jan. 12th, 2019, 7pm
Open by appointment until February 17th, 2019
‘Pop-Porn’ is Neo-Pop Erotica for the Masses! Five artists celebrate all forms of intimacy; untethered, unabashed, and unbound. Featuring Eronin, Fernando Carpaneda, Ellen Stagg, Martina Secondo Russo and Anna Park. Curated by Matt Myers, aka Eronin.
Jewelry: The Body Transformed | Met Art Museum — 5th Ave {archived}
Through February 24
What is jewelry? Why do we wear it? What meanings does it carry? Traversing time and space, this exhibition explores how jewelry acts upon and activates the body it adorns. This global conversation about one of the most personal and universal of art forms brings together some 230 objects drawn almost exclusively from The Met collection. A dazzling array of headdresses and ear ornaments, brooches and belts, necklaces and rings are shown along with sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs that enrich and amplify the many stories of transformation that jewelry tells.
Bloom | Booth Gallery {archived}
November 16th, 2018 — January 26th, 2018
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future | Guggenheim {unable to archive}
Through April 23, 2019
Af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862 and went on to study at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honors in 1887. She soon established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm, exhibiting deftly rendered figurative paintings and serving briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists. During these years she also became deeply involved in spiritualism and Theosophy. These modes of spiritual engagement were widely popular across Europe and the United States — especially in literary and artistic circles — as people sought to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with scientific advances and a new awareness of the global plurality of religions. Af Klint’s first major group of largely nonobjective work, The Paintings for the Temple, grew directly out of those belief systems. Produced between 1906 and 1915, the paintings were generated in part through af Klint’s spiritualist practice as a medium and reflect an effort to articulate mystical views of reality. Stylistically, they are strikingly diverse, incorporating both biomorphic and geometric forms, expansive and intimate scales, and maximalist and reductivist approaches to composition and color. She imagined installing these works in a spiral temple, though this plan never came to fruition. In the years after she completed The Paintings for the Temple, af Klint continued to push the bounds of her new abstract vocabulary, as she experimented with form, theme, and seriality, creating some of her most incisive work.
This Month’s Whines
Last Rites/Booth Gallery aren’t updating their websites. The Emil Melmoth show has been listed for Spring, 2019 for ages without any updates. I wonder what’s up…
The quality of some of the photographs of objects posted on the MoMA and Met exhibitions are quite low (low light issues). Looks like I shot some of these images — ha!
