ARTINFO presents a guide to the most interesting gallery openings in New York each week.
Wild things are happening on the international art circuit. Havana is slowly becoming a major contemporary-art destination. Traditional Chinese hand scrolls are selling for remarkable sums. The beloved "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade is in financial trouble. It makes one a bit nostalgic for the old days, when gentlemen like Leo Castelli and ladies like Peggy Guggenheim sold art out of intimate townhouses. Still, today's rough-and-tumble art market offers higher stakes and more excitement. Anyone can make a play for the attention of critics, collectors, and curators. Here are three shows bidding to do just that this week in New York.
(And don't forget to visit ARTINFO.com for more detailed gallery previews and to see the rest of our New York gallery opening picks.)
Ben Gocker, "There really is no single poem"
P.P.O.W. Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, Room 301
Opening Thursday, June 10, 6-8 p.m.
Rochester-born Gocker got his MFA in poetry, which is a good grounding for the art world. Gocker has some writing to share -- a handy pamphlet entitled "Egg on a Roll," for instance, catalogues that humble sandwich's place in big-city life -- but also a helping of childlike sculptures (clocks and notebook paper that would impress Oldenburg) and a pattern-filled paper scroll of "undetermined size," according to the gallery. One suspects the budding artist may soon choose to desert his librarian day job.
Keith Hennessy, "Almost Nothing, Almost Everything"
New Museum
Opening Friday, June 11, 7 p.m.
The promotional image for this free-form performance at the recently "Skin Fruit"-less New Museum shows a bare-chested Hennessy leaping in the air while wearing a Scream mask (Munch, not the movie) and blue wristbands. Though the artist regularly directs a performance company called Circo Zero, he'll be appearing solo here. If museum curators know what they're getting, they're not letting it slip. "He might go off on a political rant, he might take questions from the audience," the Web site explains, though it predicts "he'll probably change costumes and be naked."
Noam Rappaport
White Columns, 320 West 13th Street
Opening Friday, June 11, 6-8 p.m.
"For a corpse... painting has been exquisitely reanimated -- and rereanimated -- time and again," Howard Halle noted in his recent review of Blake Rayne's show at Miguel Abreu. You can count midcarrer Rappaport as another one of those pesky necromancers. He's of the Steven Parrino variety, a perverse fetishist of the medium's raw materials. Canvas gets bunched up on and around frames, sometimes slipping its mooring, paint joyfully brushed across its expanse. Occasionally there's too much to make a finished work, other times too little. Too cool? Decide on Friday.
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