Make Way for the Megadealers! And Better News from Members
The news that really grabbed my attention over the weekend was not the slimeball's suicide in a lower Manhattan jail or the half-baked tweets from our peckerhead-in-chief, but a New York Times report that four major dealers—Pace, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner—"are shifting their emphasis from selling and showing art to a more full-service visitor experience that offers food, performance spaces, research libraries and open storage.” As the Times notes, “small and midsize galleries are struggling, closing or merging because of a decline in foot traffic and the rise of costly art fairs, [but] New York’s four mega-galleries are doing the opposite: doubling down on major building projects in Chelsea.”
So that means Pace, founded by Arne Glimcher (who once told me he was Agnes Martin’s best friend—really??) and now headed by son Marc, will have a new eight-story home in Chelsea; Gagosian is annexing the former Mary Boone Gallery; and both David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth will have spiffy huge starchitect-designed spaces in the West 20s in Manhattan. “Hauser & Wirth arguably set the standard for the full-service gallery with its sprawling Los Angeles complex, which opened in 2016 and features a farm-to-table restaurant, public vegetable garden (with egg-laying chickens), sculpture courtyard, gift shop and bookstore,” says the Times. For its new New York emporium, Pace has even acquired a food truck to park on “its expansive terrace.”
Hey, welcome to ChelseaWorld! Maybe there will be a Jeff Koons talking bunny to greet you at the entrance! (I know I promised never to mention him again, but….)
What this all means for mid-sized and small dealers, who represent the likes of you, remains to be seen. Marc Glimcher says they will have to turn to teamwork and collaboration. I’ve reported on how smaller galleries are adjusting, but now it seems time to revisit the situation, and I will when I get back into the reporting business this fall. (Yes, I’m going to keep the site going after I do another fund raiser, probably in September or October. This would surely be a bad moment to abandon the V21 audience!)
On a happier note, I had the chance to see a lot of work by members over the past couple of weekends. On August 3, as I noted on social media, I paid a visit to Gallery Fritz in Santa Fe, where Ed Haddaway, Paula Castillo, and the husband-and-wife team of Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton all have impressive testaments to their varying talents. Castillo’s work ranged from intimate tabletop and wall-hanging constructions to a nearly 10-foot-in-diameter bristling circular relief called Moon Pie. Says the sculptor in her artist statement: “I am most well-known for my sculpture which utilizes both fabricated and carefully appropriated industrial steel bi-product scavenged from regional fabricators to ‘show and tell’ a piece of the suffocating dislocation of matter. I arrange and weld these modest forms to mimic the manic intensity with which we structure our world, i.e. the human agency to arrange and work nature/ culture.”
Paula Castillo, The Roof (2019), mild industrial steel plate, 26.5 by 69 by 26 inches
Paula Castillo, The Periwinkle (2019), steel mesh and landscape ties, 24.5 by 24 by 6 inches
Ed Haddaway has three large-scale sculptures at the entrance and rear terrace of the gallery. More about the artist can be found in my profile of him here. (Both photos below are by Margot Geist.)
Ed Haddaway, At Play Amongst the Moons (2019), painted steel, 17 by 12.5 by 10 feet
Ed Haddaway, For Them That Balance the Night (1997-2019), painted and rusted steel, 12.5 by 6 by 6 feet
And, finally, Hamilton and Carlisle (also profiled for the site here) have a nice sampling of video sculptures in an alcove all their own off the main gallery space. The glass tower shown here, say the couple, features invasive species of plants that are proliferating throughout their respective regions. “Both Burma Reed (Florida) and Salt Cedar (Southwest) disrupt the structure and stability of native plant communities and wildlife habitats, displace native plants and wildlife, deplete water systems, destabilize and damage the soil, and increase the frequency, intensity and effects of fire and flood," they write. "During a residency at the New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop we made glass bricks from recycled bottles that we gathered at NM Waste Management/the Santa Fe dump….Projections of the plants through the glass create a visceral, watery world of instability and change.”
Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle, Salt Cedar (2007), video projection on recycled glass, 24 by 26 by 4 inches
This past Friday, on our way to an exhausting weekend jaunt in Silver City, NM, Annabush Crews and I stopped by the show “Black Hole/Atomic City (State of Decay)” at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque, NM (through August 30) to see the works of artists who are part of an “exhibition dedicated to alternative stories related to ‘the nuclear business’ in New Mexico since the dawn of the Anthropocene/Trinity test near Tularosa in July 1945," says the introduction to the show. "The combined burden of nuclear byproducts and waste that decays over tens of thousands of years weighs heavily on New Mexico, a ‘national sacrifice zone.’” Not that I am in any way prejudiced, of course, but I did think Annabush’s installation, called “Dying is not very exciting,” Ed Grothius, of a rusting metal-frame bedstead with humanoid ceramic molds containing ashes was the strongest statement in the show.
And now here’s the news from other Vasari21 members….
Beginning August 15, Chandrika Marla will be part of a show called “Art + Movement” at Gearbox Gallery in Oakland, CA (through September 7). “Art + Movement, was inspired by questioning how art made in our current divisive state of cultural, political, and religious points of view will be regarded historically,” writes curator Maria Porges. “Art movement is defined as a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time. Art history points to how various movements in art, referred to as isms (impressionism, cubism, fauvism, expressionism, surrealism) were reflections of the views of their time. Additionally, of course, movement also refers to a principle of composition in art and can be used to cause a visual tempo or beat.”
Chandrika Marla, What Lies Ahead (2016), acrylic and pigment on canvas, 36 by 40 inches
Lorrie Fredette writes that the closing reception for her work at BioBAT Art Space (which I should have written about earlier) will be on August 16 at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Brooklyn, NY. “Fredette's installation 'tender exchanges' stems from her intensive research into neural networks—branchlike hanging forms created a complex landscape that allow visitors to walk through and wonder how visible and invisible physiological networks transmit information and how neural networks resemble other systems in nature such as tree roots, vascular systems, and microbial and fungal communities.” Below, a glimpse of her installation from the show.
Through October 13, Mokha Laget is part of Alcoves 20/20 at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, NM. The series is one of six exhibitions featuring the work of New Mexico-based artists, like Laget, who started working with shaped canvases about a decade ago, playing with perceptual ambiguities on an often heroic scale, and recently enjoyed a show at David Richard’s new gallery in Harlem, NY. (You can read more about the artist here.)
Mokha Laget, Borderline #2 (2018), acrylic and clay paint on shaped canvas, 62 by 110 inches
“To commemorate my relationship with Elizabeth Moore Fine Art (she first exhibited my work in Manhattan at her gallery some twenty seven years ago) and my newer relationship with Andy Goldsborough and Moore's The Gilded Owl gallery we are showing these early paintings taken from storage,” says Margaret Evangeline of her two exhibitions at the gallery. “What I understand seeing these works now is my own process of opening up. Sometimes it's explosive, sometimes it's transparent as when I abraded metal surfaces to encourage light to animate the paint from within. This becomes a story, how light enters into matter. Not always by the same process but light often does get into matter over the years, especially human material. Yes, the body seems to become translucent as we age.” The shows are in two parts at the Gilded Owl in Hudson, NY (August 10-September 15 and September 21-November 24).
Margaret Evangeline, Isabel’s Burning Blue (2002), oil on aluminum, 48 by 48 inches
Susan Walsh has a solo exhibition called “Vibrant Traces” at the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, NY, through September 15. "Walsh embraces nature as a way of marking time through observable changes in natural phenomena,” says the announcement for the show. “Her recent works are created outdoors using wind, rain, and sea waves, both as material and co-collaborator. Exploring time through multiple concepts of chance, control, chaos and entropy, Walsh’s process of engaging with nature plays out fluidly, allowing unexpected things to happen. The writings of composer and artist John Cage, especially his ideas about chance, are of special interest to Walsh and make perfect sense in the context of her body of work.”
Susan Walsh, The Wind Drawing, Beacon, NY, #15 (2018), wind, charcoal powder, Arches paper, 22 by 24 inches
Jonathan Morse is part of “Collage to Now,” an installation described as “28 recent prints in conversation,” at the Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, NM, through the end of September. “Digital artistry enables a confluence of visual sources and personal influences and mirrors that process of construction and deconstruction through which the past becomes the new, and through which we literally make our mark,” writes Morse. “It’s just another pencil, taking its rightful place in the continuum of human mark-making. A traditional (sort of) printmaker with early twenty-first century tools, I make layers that dissolve, transform and republish themselves into a recombinant vision. For me photography has always been a mark-making medium and I weave its spell back into my images, merging, painting, drawing and distilling.”
Jonathan Morse, Spaces 5 (2019), limited edition pigment print on Moab Juniper rag, 24 by 36 inches
Another Santa Fe member (I do seem to have quite a few, lucky me), Christopher Benson has new work at Evoke Gallery in SF from August 16 to 24 (but says some of the work may be around longer). “Growing up in the 60s and 70s when there was a sharp segregation between abstraction and representation, I was drawn to a whole lineage of much earlier painters who had combined the two in a kind of expressionistic, near abstract picture-making--usually executed late in life after long careers spent making more conventionally representational work: Rembrandt, Goya and Turner especially are the three painters I hoped to emulate on a similar path,” Benson writes. “Because of this, I very intentionally spent the first 40 years of my career painting as a realist, but always with the intent one day to shift to something more like what I’m doing now. The reason being that I believe expressionism and abstraction are most powerful when built on top of a substrate of substantial classical skill—like serious jazz musicians who learn their classical theory and master their scales before they presume to improvise.”
Christopher Benson, Baked Alaska (2018), oil on panel, 30 by 30 inches
From August 15 to 19, Jeff Laird will be part of the Albuquerque Art Showcase at the Albuquerque, NM, convention center, and will also be showing work at April Price Projects Gallery in the Hyatt Hotel lobby in Albuquerque (through October 5). Laird describes Linguini Spring Bosque at the Art Showcase as “part of on ongoing series converging Italian cuisine and trees, two of my favorite interests.”
Jeff Laird, Linguini Spring Bosque (2019), acrylic on canvas, 48 by 36 inches
And that about wraps it up for the week.
If you are a new member and have sent me an image for publication in the newsletter, please give me a poke! I have been in somewhat of a summer stupor (though still writing catalogue essays, somehow….) but hope to snap out of it once the heat abates. It’s been so bad in my house I retreat to the library in the afternoons.
And a reminder that I will be introducing critic/painter Peter Plagens and moderating a panel of art critics as part of the Taos Fall Arts Festival at the end of September. So if you’re in the area, mark your calendars for September 27 and 28.
Till next time,
A correction: I failed to give the full name for Camille Eskell’s contribution to the show “Crashing the Party” at Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City (through August 25). It’s Useless Females: Don’t Stand There Like a Decoration (2018). Here it is again.
At the top of the newsletter: From Christopher Benson’s show at Evoke in Santa Fe, NM: Maybe, Maybe Not (2019), oil on panel, 24 by 24 inches
