Luba Drozd: ...the end and the beginning

 

Luba Drozd's solo exhibition at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, from September 13th to October 31st, 2024.

Upon entering the gallery, a narrow and oblong room, you are immediately met with enormous, 10-foot tall slabs of steel suspended a few inches above the ground. Walking further into the space You begin to feel that the exhibit is occupying the space with more than just its physical presence. Some curved sheets  intersect the walls and floor while others hang midair, and small windows cut into the walls show you glimpses into the raw plaster and piping innards of the gallery itself.

Drozd’s site-specific work entices viewers through more than just their visual senses. A low vibration echoes throughout the space, and if you walk close to the sheets of steel, you can feel the trembling of each piece of metal whisper in your ear, courtesy of small wired motors trailing from the bottom of each slab. No wall texts explain the exhibit's works or their meanings, immersing you immediately.

The exhibit physically resonates, making you feel something out of the ordinary, from your eyes in your head to your feet grounded on the floor. The transformation of these materials into something more profound, keeps the experience of the show reverberating relevant well after you leave the space.

kader kayser#

Klara Liden: Verdebelvedere

Klara Liden's project at the Reena Spaulings Gallery transforms the space, bringing elements of the urban landscape inside. Born in Stockholm and based in Berlin, Liden is known for her provocative, site-specific installations incorporating urban materials and themes. In "Verdebelvedere," she uses materials familiar to every New Yorker—silver-painted tar paper, bitumen, and plywood—evoking the city's buildings and rooftops. This industrial theme emphasizes the raw, ever-changing nature of urban life.

The exhibition includes videos of Liden's performances, where she attempts to squeeze through diamond-shaped viewholes cut into construction plywood walls. These performances poignantly link the city's perpetual construction to human experiences of constraint and freedom, highlighting the resilience required to navigate urban spaces. A soundscape blending ambient noises and electronic music enhances the immersive atmosphere. Liden’s integration of construction materials extends to the benches in the gallery, crafted from construction walls and supported by bags of charcoal briquettes. This setup invites visitors to engage with the contrasting textures of rough wood, shiny silver, and earthy green tones, making visitors feel part of the city's fabric.

"Verdebelvedere" is a testament to Liden's ability to blend art with the realities of city living, creating a space that resonates with both familiarity and innovation. The exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider their surroundings and the impact of urban environments on their lives, making it a compelling and insightful experience.

Polina Ostrovskaya

Manoucher Yektai: Landscapes

Karma’s posthumous solo show of Manoucher Yektai’s work highlights his significance in the New York School—associated with abstract expressionists like De Kooning, Kline, and Pollock. Yektai, a colleague of these artists, brought a European classicist sensibility to their burgeoning forms of abstraction, though he never reached the same level of fame.

The exhibit at Karma is a retrospective of Yektai’s oeuvre, from his earlier pictorial works to abstracted gestural landscapes. The gallery opens with six works from 1956-57, depicting his earlier representational style. The works feature bright colors and perspectives that flatten spatial depth, reminiscent of Cézanne; despite their more classical nature, in these works, Yektai was already beginning to explore the sculptural impasto technique that would later define his work. In a second room, a later series, painted during a trip to Italy, shows his brushstrokes becoming looser and more aggressive.

The final room displays Yektai’s series of 95th Street landscapes from 1958, fully embracing critic Harold Rosenberg’s notion of "action painting." Yektai produced these paintings by straddling floor-bound canvases and releasing all control over his strokes. 

Four paintings near his 95th Street series represent the latter part of his career. These landscapes, produced in Bridgehampton, where he lived until his death, reflect a shift away from the city's erratic energy. The action in his work became more thoughtful, his brushwork more controlled, and his landscapes captured the tranquility of his later years.

Cristobal Cosio*

Peter Fischli David Weiss: Polyurethane Objects

The open-plan gallery's white walls and ceiling, combined with the cement-gray floor, create an industrial aesthetic. The artists' rough-textured polyurethane cubes evoke home renovation. The cubes are arranged with deliberate casualness, some stacked on top of each other, while others stand isolated. Scattered among them, brushes, paint cans, and other household tools appear as if left behind.

There are playful details that surprise viewers with humor, such as a random box of green tea hidden in the corner or several duck toys holding cigarettes in their "mouths". Despite the absence of human figures, these objects hint at unseen "owners" or "workers," encouraging viewers to imagine those lives and stories. The green tea suggests an anonymous worker who might have passed there for a break, and the cigarettes are given by workers or a naughty teenager passed by. The artist's humorous tableaus allow the audience to re-examine everyday objects with renewed curiosity and imagination.

 

Fischli and Weiss' work continues the spirit of Marcel Duchamp's readymade, presenting familiar, everyday objects in an art context. As the exhibition press release notes, “By removing their function, the objects are no longer enslaved by it," underscoring how alienation and recontextualization invite viewers to rethink ordinary items.

Jessy Hu#

Sprüth Magers, Jenny Holzer: WORDS

Upon entering Jenny Holzer's solo exhibition, WORDS, one is inundated with text. A portion of the show is filled with framed works, hung salon-style. Other works—text-based drawings, paintings, stone sculptures, and a container of condoms—are arranged throughout the remaining space. In one corner, an installation features smashed stone benches with fractured texts, a large painting turned ninety degrees, and two large LED bars running AI-generated text. One display is prompted by extremist right ideology. The other disgorges joyous descriptions of beauty and love. The saturated corner contrasts the stagnant, monochromatic paper works. 

What struck me first was an overwhelming sense of wisdom, often associated with writing. Aphorisms cover everything; some prophetic, written long ago; others investigative, like reproductions of redacted government documents; all relevant to our current context. Topics in Holzer's show, such as gender, war, and the January 6th riots, provoke anxiety through overstimulation, contradictions, and an urgent demand for attention.  

The fragile paper works (sometimes obscured by ghostly marks of Holzer's imprinted pigmented appendages), the contemplative benches, and the LED installation (which uses AI technologies we cannot trust) together create tensions in their use of disparate media. Inherent to each media is a brokenness that transcends time, creating unstable meanings. By turning text into imagery, Holzer uses the immediacy of vision in conjunction with prolonged contemplation evoked through writing, to address pressing matters. 

-James DeBay

(Friday, 3:00 PM class)

Hill Art Foundation, Jordan Casteel: Field of View

Hill Art Foundation, Jordan Casteel: Field of View

Jordan Casteel’s exhibition, Field of View, captures subjects across her years of practice through New York’s diverse backdrops from Harlem to bustling gardens in the Hudson Valley. Her large scale oil paintings take over every wall, displaying portraits of Black subjects meeting the gaze of the viewer. The eyes of her subjects are soft and inviting. An emphasis is shown on familial dynamics with multiple representations of fathers with infants. Scattered seating areas accompany Casteel’s work bringing the viewer into the domestic environment displayed across the paintings. The armchairs and rugs were made up of a variety of floral patterns reflecting the colorful palette and vegetation in her works. 

The figures and thriving gardens in Casteel’s works are brought to life with her choice of vivid colors and bold brush strokes. Her assured hand taking up only one layer of paint highlights her deep connection to her subjects. She paints them easily, confidently capturing their essence. She leaves the underpainting to shine through like specks of light, letting the viewer peer into the layers of each work, mirroring how the viewer is let into the intimacies of the subject's internal life. She uses her brightest colors in these breaths of transparency. 

Within Casteel’s work she lets the Black subject shine aiding in representation of Black people in domestic environments especially those like gardening and presentations of loving Black fathers.  It seems Artists of Color are pressured to discuss profound narratives about their struggles as minorities through their art. This pressure leaves out moments of representation which are just as important as societal commentary.

Franka Ziemann #