Klara Liden @ Reena Spaulings
Reena Spaulings is a difficult gallery to find. The search, and the reward for finding it, is compounded by the current installation by Klara Liden within it – which is ALSO difficult to find even after you’ve found the gallery. I will not ruin the surprise but I promise you it’s well worth it. If it’s your first time, print this out. You’ll need it.
1. At the weird intersection of E. Broadway & Rutgers Street is a Chinese Seafood Restaurant with a grey awning: “Wing Shoon”. On the side of that building beyond the subway stop is a maroon awning that reads “165 East Broadway”.
2. To the left of the glass door you’ll see, barely legible, the word “gallery” on the lowest door buzzing button. Press it (Thursday-Sunday 12-6) and wait to be buzzed in.
3. Walk up the stairs 1 flight to a closed door. Open it. You’ve made it!... almost.
4. Once inside the gallery you’ll be faced with a painted blue construction wall. Look for a secret door (you’re on your own here) and open it.
5 Explore and enjoy the space inside! (It’s awesome)
Klara Liden “Pretty Vacant” is open at Reena Spualings Fine Art through February 19th. 165 East Broadway. (gallery website)
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Jon Kessler @ Salon 94 Bowery
What does Violet Beauregarde, Tobias Funke and Marty Wolf have in common? Besides the fact that I had to IMBD all of them to learn their names - they’re all blue, and all in Jon Kessler’s latest sensory overload surveillance camera installation. They join life-size cardboard stand-ups, about a dozen robotic security cameras, a miniature gallery model, some pretty messy walls, and most importantly: you.
I was walking around Uniqlo a few weeks ago and got annoyed at another customer who was walking straight for me with a glare on his face… wearing the same cloths as me. I’m sure you’ll do something equally stupid at this pleasantly confusing show.
Jon Kessler “The Blue Period” is on view at Salon 94 Bowery through March 10th. 243 Bowery, New York. (gallery website)
Find more recommendations under the Lower East Side tab.
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Weegee @ ICP
There’s not a lot going on at “major” museums right now while they install their spring exhibitions. Luckily the International Center of Photography comes through with a great show of gory, funny, artful and relatable photographs (most are all 4 things at once) from the 1930s by tabloid photographer Weegee.
The photos are the star of the show, so as not to get attention exhaustion, I suggest you go through the exhibition twice – first ONLY looking at the photographs and skipping the first room with artifacts from his life and all the wall text, and the second time to read the wall plaques and newspapers and all that.
My favorite part of the show was seeing how his dramatic and artful photographs contrasted with more documentary (boring) police photos of the same scene, so watch for those – you’ll know when an image doesn’t seem like his style and is listed as “anonymous photographer” (small type, so sometimes you have to hunt for it). Skip the whole upstairs but the “Magnum Contact Sheets” exhibition in the middle of the Weegee show downstairs is worth checking out – don’t miss Philippe Halsman’s multiple attempts to capture 3 cats, a chair, a bucket of water and Salvador Dali, all flung into the air simultaneously.
Go see it! “Weegee: Murder is my business” on view at the International Center of Photography through 9/2/12. 1133 Avenue of the Americas (43rd St & 6th Av) museum website
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Doug Wheeler @ David Zwirner
Only a small number of people are let into this exhibition at a time, so expect a wait – but it’s worth it. In the movie “The Matrix”, there’s a scene where Neo enters a blank program – only white space extending infinitely in all directions. Imagine that… without Keanu. Wheeler has removed the corners, texture and shadows from the wall giving your eyes no frame of reference. The result is that you feel like you can see forever but fear you might walk into the wall at any second. It’s about as close to actively looking at nothing as you’re ever going to get.
Get there before the New York Times writes this up and there’s a 3 hour line out the door (I had to wait 10 minutes on a Tuesday morning, which isn’t bad – but I’m surprised I had to wait at all on a Tuesday morning).
Doug Wheeler is on view at David Zwirner gallery (519 W 19th St) thru 2/25 (gallery website)
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Marble @ Sperone Westwater
You can do a lot when your only rule is “exhibit things made of marble”. Sperone Westwater brings some ancient history to the Lower East Side by showing work from 350 BC to “last week”. It’s a nice mix of work but each piece is so interesting, I wish I had more than a title, a date and an artist. The Gagosian released an iPhone app for the Damien Hirst show, but I really wish there was one for THIS show instead. Still a lot of fun. Check it out.
p.s. If you enjoyed the Ai Weiwei show in Chelsea, there’s a sculpture of his in this show too!
"Marble Sculpture from 350 BC to last week" is on view at the Sperone Westwater gallery (257 Bowery) thru 2/25. (gallery website)
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Tantra Paintings @ Feature Inc
Sometimes the best art is anonymous - and perhaps not even technically “art”. Feature has been showing these anonymous Tantra paintings for years and I love them every time. I’m not going to pretend I know much about Tantrism. According to the press release, the paintings are used by practitioners in India as meditation devices to “stimulate specific mental and/or spiritual experiences that are part of Tantra’s teachings.” But you don’t have to know exactly what that means (or anything I just told you) to feel a pleasant spiritual vibe coming off these. They’re simple, beautiful, honest objects that couldn’t have taken a more opposing route to achieve something incredibly similar (and possibility more visually successful) to much of the secular art hanging in galleries right now.
Anonymous Tantra Paintings are on view at Feature Inc (131 Allen St) through 2/12 (gallery website)
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Michael Zelehoski @ Dodge Gallery
I’m recommending Michael Zelehoski at Dodge Gallery on the Lower East Side “Top Five”, but there are actually 2 exhibitions in the gallery worth seeing. Upstairs, Zelehoski presents objects (mostly wooden crates of various shapes and sizes) that he’s disassembled and then cut each piece so that he can make a “picture” of the original object. It’s like he’s making a massive collage, but instead of using pieces of paper, he’s using the actual wood of the object he’s representing. One of those rare things that is both conceptually and visually stimulating.
Downstairs, a show of work by Daniel Phillips compliments the show upstairs perfectly. He has filmed crumbling buildings and debris in spooky and funky time lapses, then used that same debris to make massive projection screens for the films. It’s like watching a movie on a huge chunk of sidewalk suspended on a small crane.
It’s a great double-show – check it out!.
Michael Zelehoski and Daniel Phillips are on view at Dodge Gallery through 2/19 (gallery website)
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Liselot van der Heijden @ LMAKprojects
Sorry for the late notice on this one – you have 2 more weeks to see this thought-provoking 3-channel film installation in the Lower East Side. I think a little bit of mystery is best with this one (so don’t read the press release, just trust me and go see it), but I will say this: At some point you’ll have a minor out-of-body experience when, for a moment, you understand that your presence is extending (if not completing) the film into real space. If anyone else were in the gallery with me, I would certainly link their unreciprocated art-watching stares to the action on the films – since I was alone, I imagined watching myself watching a film watching itself. Very cool.
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Damien Hirst @ Gagosian
EVERYONE is talking about it, so I’ll keep this brief. Sometimes art is about what it does and sometimes it’s about what it’s doing. What this show DOES is provide a little cold weather cheer like colorful past-season Christmas lights. What it’s DOING is pissing people off because of the millions of dollars being wasted on these trophies of excess. But why I love it (and why 24th St is my favorite) is the gift shop installed in the gallery – no multi-thousand dollar Louis Vuitton’s here, just dot buttons, dot t-shirts, dot cufflinks (my favorite), & dot stickers, most under $20. Since just about every multi-million dollar painting in these shows is on loan from collectors who already purchased them, it’s like he’s making fun not of us, but of them, asking a very simple question “I know it’s pretty, why did you spend over $20 bucks on it?” It's both fun, and nice to be part of the discussion. Check out some pretty harsh (and fun) reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and ArtFagCity
555 W 24th St & 522 W 21st St, thru 2/18
gallery website
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Ai Weiwei @ Mary Boone
To answer your first two questions: “no” and “4 million”. They are not real sunflower seeds – each is a unique hand-painted porcelain sculpture of a sunflower seed, and there are 4 million of them in the gallery. After seeing photos of the installation in London with 100 million of these, I was a little underwhelmed (which is crazy considering the 4 million seeds on the floor). But I quickly began to appreciate this incarnation for what it wasn’t: what you can’t see is often scarier than what you can. It’s relative smallness makes it’s massiveness a little more comprehensible. Here you can see the depth of the seed bed and don’t have to walk or spin around to see the whole mass – your imagination takes over from there: This is huge, and there are 32 times more than this that were made, and the population of China is 10 times THAT. wow.
Ai Weiwei is open at Mary Boone (gallery website) through February 4th.
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