EVENTS AND ARTISTS FOR THE TO-DO LIST
Alex Israel, Lens (Purple), 2015, UV Protective Plastic Lens
ALEX ISRAEL at NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER
Through January 31, 2016
Los Angeles-based Alex Israel uses art to explore the cultural eccentricities of his home city of LA, as much of his work riffs on the Hollywood culture and the cult of celebrity. Partly an act of performance art, Israel's YouTube show, As It Lays, has him interviewing (mostly past-their-prime) celebrities. With a series of odd and mundane questions, the show is an homage to Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests" of the '60s, in that they are both forms of video portraiture. On the surface, his interviews are strange, but upon closer inspection, it becomes clear he is mining the celebrities' pasts to understand Hollywood's global influence. Israel, though, is best known for his sculpture series, "Lenses." The sculptures, in yellow, orange and purple, are a nod to his own sunglass company, Freeway Eyewear. In October, Israel opened a solo show at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas called, Sightings. It combines new sculptural objects made in the vernacular vocabulary of Hollywood movies to make a quasi-narrative installation related to a film that Israel is soon to release.
Peter Schuyff, Untitled, 2014, oil on linen
PETER SCHUYFF at MARY BOONE GALLERY, NY
Through December 18
Painter Peter Schuyff, born in 1958, is known for using paint to create abstract forms from light and shadow to depict complex patterns that warp around irregular surfaces. His signature undulating figures move around the canvas and weave through themselves. He positions these forms against realistic imagery, juxtaposing two seemingly dissimilar styles of painting. The work is playful and charming and nods to Schuyff's personal exploration of fact and fantasy. Though Schuyff's work is illusionistic, it suggests enigmatic stories, as he often uses found paintings and landscapes as the background for his geometrical overlays. Born in 1958, Schuyff was a prominent member of the East Village art scene in the 1980s as a part of the "Neo-Geo" movement. During this time, he showed with the Pat Hearn gallery but in 2003, Schuyff left New York for Vancouver and Amsterdam, where he is now based. Last year, he was included in the Whitney Biennial. His work is also included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles and Portland Art Museum, Portland. In his upcoming show at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, Schuyff presents new paintings that continue to explore his signature spacial and optical effects. Floating orbs with checked patterns distorted by unseen forces and multiple orbs gyrating in loops and arcs suggest an underlying narrative.
Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967
FRANK STELLA at WHITNEY MUSEUM, NY
Through February 7, 2016
The Whitney Museum in New York is presenting a retrospective of Frank Stella's work, one of the most important living American artists. The show includes approximately 100 works that span his career, from his abstract Expressionist period (1958) to his austere black paintings later in the decade. It also includes his monumental "maximalist" 3D works for which he is more recently known. His black paintings first brought Stella into art world notoriety. What appear to be white lines are actually bare, narrow spaces of unprimed canvas. These paintings appear to project off the wall, asserting their presence; what Stella called "objectness." Accompanying the exhibition will be a scholarly publication. The show will travel afterwards to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
Frank Stella, Die Fahn Hoch!, 1959
ILIT AZOULAY AT MOMA / ANDREA MEISLIN, NY
MoMA's upcoming show, Ocean of Images: New Photography examines the various ways of looking at the world through images that are born digitally, made with scanners or lenses in the studio or the real world, presented as still or moving pictures, morphed into three-dimensional objects, or re-mixed online. The show presents bodies of work that critically re-define photography as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry, where digital and analog cross over. On view November 7 - March 20, 2016
Ilit Azoulay, 7th Option, 2014, archival pigment print
