NYC Gallery Trip

Marjolijn de Wit @ Asya Geisberg

Joan Brown @ George Adams

Chantal Joffe @ Cheim & Read

June Leaf @ Edward Thorp

Hope Gangloff @ Susan Inglett

Giordanne Salley @ SHFAP

Charles Burchfield @ DC Moore

Andrew Lord @ Gladstone Gallery

Jessica Dickinson @ James Fuentes

I went for a day of gallery hopping last week.  I always seem to do a really intense survey of Chelsea and LES right after the teaching semester ends.  Its sort of like my send off from being enclosed in this mental space of other people's art and issues (read: students) to my own studio time and schedule in the summer.  I like to go up and get a read on what I keep referring to (to myself) as 'the good, the bad and the ugly'.  

This visit I felt like most things were as expected.  In a mostly good way -- there were a lot of things I wanted to see and while they didn't bowl me over, they stood up to in person looking.  Most of those are pictured above.  

The surprises of the day were Jessica Dickinson and Andrew Lord.  Both were artists I knew little of and was really excited by.  Dickinson's surfaces were so contradicting -- solid and heavy in object form but airy and atmospheric from a distance -- they were beautiful.  Andrew Lord's work was raw and playful and well considered.  The ugly of the day for me was for sure Lisa Yuskavage.  I don't understand -- her color and compositional choices are as banal as the subject matter.  I'm sorry, these suck.  

Another thing I noticed was a lot of mixed media.  The places I thought it worked best were in Hope Gangloff's work, she uses elements of paper collage which added to the painted surfaces and de Wit's smaller pieces that hung on the wall at Asya Geisberg.  They were like relief sculpture paintings and I thought they were pretty nice.  

I probably saw 30-40 shows and the weather was beautiful and I was in a great mood looking forward to the studio days stretching ahead.  All in all a good day.