ARTINFO presents a guide to the most interesting gallery openings in New York each week.
Earlier this week, ARTINFO's Andrew Goldstein spoke with writer Richard Price about plans for the massive multi-gallery "Lush Life" exhibition on the Lower East Side. It turns out that Chelsea galleries have similarly ambitious plans, hosting a wide range of offerings this week. It's all enough to forget about the BP disaster, the death of an art-dealing legend, and the fact that the Met has decided to show the gold-plated instrument of the least interesting Beatle.
Downtown, Thursday night will see the biggest and most exciting openings. Here are three that we heartily recommend (and visit ARTINFO for the rest of our gallery opening picks).
"Creeds, Colors and Combinations"
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (21 Orchard Street)
Opening Thursday, July 1, 6-8 p.m.
A good alliteration never hurts, particularly when it is as charged as this one, which could variously describe issues of formal and political concern. Sarah Crowner appears fresh off her Whitney Biennial run (where her tautly-stitched-together canvases won converts), potentially fruitful work to pair off against painter Jim Lee, whose shaped canvases suggest a madcap Ellsworth Kelly. The show is rounded out by Ben Berlow, Cheryl Donegan, Zach Rockhill, and Louise Despont whose ornate drawings suggest Picabia's early mechanical diagrams gone baroque and beautiful.
"False/Divide"
Miguel Abreu Gallery (36 Orchard Street)
Opening Thursday, July 1, 6-8 p.m.
This show is subtitled "representations of abstraction in a few photographic works," which is a neat explanation of the false division that maestro Abreu has in mind: the one between abstract art and photography, a mimetic medium. It should be interesting to see how Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard -- two artists whose recent, definitively representational images have focused on intimate, private moments -- tackle that task. Fellow participants Liz Deschenes and Eileen Quinlan, on the other hand, are old pros at photographic abstraction. Add in the men -- Sam Lewitt and Matthew Buckingham -- and things could get even more interesting.
"SWELL: Art 1950-2010"
Opening Thursday, July 1
Nyehaus (358 West 20th Street)
Friedrich Petzel (357 West 22nd Street)
Metro Pictures (519 West 24th Street)
Ferus-fetishist Tim Nye and designer Jacqueline Miro have organized this sprawling three-venue show of surfing-themed art, dating from 1950 to 2010. Expect a solid showing from Los Angeles-based legends from the Light and Space, Minimalist, and Finish Fetish movements, like Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Moses. John McCracken, whose leaning planks resemble sporty surfboards, and Raymond Pettibon, master draftsman of the crushing wave, seem like natural fits. One wonders what the two curators have dug up from photographer Roe Etheridge, sculptor Dirk Skreber, and -- no joke -- painter Mary Heilman.
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