News

Looking back to Miami Art Week (which took place the first week of December), one would have thought the perpetual rainstorms would have dampened the spirits of attendees. However, practically every art gallery that I spoke with said the inclement weather had absolutely no effect on the reported record sales.

The overwhelming majority of artworks on view in Something are paintings. The works evoke illusory and imaginative revisions of reality, manifesting curator Noah Becker’s vision to highlight playful ambiguity in contemporary art trends. Becker explains about the title, Something: “It’s a bit Warholian to use a word like that as a starting point…for an epic group show. Words are pop art due to words being universal symbols. The idea of things being universal and understood instantly…how does one express it in their art?”

Noah Becker—artist, curator and founder of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art(full disclosure, I also write for the publication)—takes on the role as the first guest curator at Berry Campbell with a show of 20 international artists exploring enigmatic narratives in their paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Michael Anderson contributes the massive 2009 collage Blue Abstract, which is assembled from street posters gleaned from New York, Los Angeles, Rome and Mexico City. Marc Dennis presents a witty, realistic painting of a young woman looking at Gustave Courbet’s controversial canvas Origin of the World from the vantage point of the woman’s long hair obscuring Mr. Courbet’s subject’s genitals and pubic hair. Meanwhile, Nir Hod’s painting of the word “Fame” on an oxidized chrome canvas looks tarnished, as if to express that celebrity just might be a passing thing.
Berry Campbell, 530 West 24 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Are you ready for some strong color? Go west, young paintaholic, to Chelsea for the two most ecstatically chromatic shows in New York. Both feature artists using acrylic (nothing gives the bounce of hue, value and chroma like it) who were bold-faced names by the 1970s: Larry Poons at Danese/Corey, and Syd Solomon at Berry Campbell. Syd Solomon was a fixture on the Hamptons scene beginning in the glory days when giants roamed the beaches, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alfonso Ossorio. It was Syd Solomon who hosted the first artists vs. writers softball game in 1966.

The 49th Parallel too often functions like an invisible sound barrier: few Canadian artists have been able to become well-known in the U.S. But the splendid Saskatchewan painter William Perehudoff has been posthumously making himself into one of those happy few—first, two years ago, and second, now.

Berry Campbell, a Manhattan gallery with an affinity for gifted but sometimes overlooked South Fork artists, plans to give James Brooks center stage in its Art Miami booth. Brooks will be accompanied by contemporaries such as Charlotte Park (his wife), Alfonso Ossorio, Perle Fine, and Syd Solomon. Artists from younger generations — Dan Christensen, Susan Vecsey, Eric Dever, and Mike Solomon — will be shown at Berry Campbell as well.

Anchoring the center of the space is John Walker’s great “Wake,” a rough and muscular canvas only surpassed in the show by Ken Greenleaf’s “Chelsea Bridge,” a shaped multi-panel geometric painting that writhes with ecstatic slowness on the exhibition’s otherwise empty end wall as a brilliant bit of punctuation. Gideon Bok’s powerful studio paintings are also particularly notable in this setting as they model the elegant chaos curator Ferris has targeted.

Known for his ambitious experimentation with gestural abstraction during the Minimalism-dominated 1960s, the late painter Dan Christensen is being honored this month in a retrospective at Berry Campbell Gallery. Exuberantly kicking off the gallery’s fall season, “Dan Christensen | Retrospective” includes work from all four decades of the artist’s career.

The paradigm of the “overlooked female artist” is both a cliché and a truth. We all know the art market is unceasingly hungry, and previously sidelined women artists are the perfect food. But that doesn’t change the fact that countless female artists have been ignored, forgotten, and stepped on, that movements defined by their male stars have entire other histories still in need of writing.

Exhibitions are a way to begin that process, and next spring, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) will mount one. The title — Women of Abstract Expressionism — says it all: this is a show devoted to the women artists involved with the famously macho movement, and it is the first of its kind. Highlighting better-known names — Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell — alongside lesser-known ones — Sonia Gechtoff, Perle Fine — the exhibition will encompass 12 women’s work, “focus[ing] on the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of abstract expressionism, while revealing inward reverie and painterly expression,” according to the description. It will also include a new video exploring these women’s lives — the particulars as well as the broader (sexist) cultural conditions of the 1950s — through their own testimony and that of their children.

Berry Campbell is pleased to open its fall season with a retrospective by renowned Color Field painter, Dan Christensen (1942-2007). Christensen’s relentless experimentation with new tools and materials made him among the most ambitious abstract and gestural artists of his time.  This important exhibition will feature more than twenty paintings from various periods of his forty year career: rare “early spray” paintings from the late 1960s, saturated stained canvases from the 1970s, dizzying spray ovals from the 1980s, pulsating orbs from the 1990s, and rhythmic calligraphic swirls from his last decade.  Several paintings have never been on public view. Berry Campbell will present the retrospective in a sixteen-page catalogue featuring a poem written as a tribute for Christensen by Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate of the United States and Christensen’s close friend.