The Bowery: Gritty Art Elbowing Grit, 4/15/11

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The Bowery: Gritty Art Elbowing Grit: a gallery roundup

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/the-bowery-gritty-art-elbowing-grit/1188/

Katy Grannan, Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010, 2010 Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper mounted to Plexiglas 39 x 29". Edition of 3.

The Bowery gallery area is still sparsely populated with galleries so that it’s not mentally and physically overwhelming, as Chelsea can be. The art venues sit jarringly in contrast to the still-present Bowery Mission residents and restaurant supply wholesalers, and Whole Foods, Pulino’s and DBGB Kitchen lord conspicuously over the corners of Houston. So the tipping point can’t be far, but at the moment, it’s still exciting and somewhat untrodden.

Salon 94 now has two spaces: one at 243 Bowery, and another (Salon 94 Freemans) on the gritty yet Parisian-like Freemans Alley. Both are exhibiting the work of Katy Grannan (through April 30), a two-part show calledThe Happy Ever After.Boulevard, at the Freemans space, is a haunting series of color portraits of people on the streets of San Francisco and LA, all taken in front of a white stucco wall strafed with that white California light. While we know nothing of the subjects (all the titles are “Anonymous”), we get the sense that many are outliers who have recreated themselves in a specific, idealized image, and that all have a strong sense of self, despite their unconformity. Despite perhaps being societal castoffs, they live enviably within a liberated sense of their remade selves. These portraits sit within sleek new galleries amid folks not wholly unlike Grannan’s subjects, but for want of some self-actualization and grooming. Salon 94 Bowery, with its elegant grand staircase descending to the basement, is screening Grannan’s video, The Believers, a kind of intimate animated version of the portraits, shifting between documentary and spy camera.

Veduta in The Moving Room at Sperone Westwater Gallery, 2/11/11

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Venetian veduta paintings at Sperone Westwater Gallery

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/veduta-in-the-moving-room-at-sperone-westwater-gallery/1059/

Installation view. Italian Paintings from the 17th & 18th Centuries. Sperone Westwater, New York 7 January – 19 February 2011. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

Sperone Westwater has been around since 1975—long enough to be excused if it were in fact jaded and lethargic—but the gallery has made some recent bold business decisions. The foremost is to commission and build a new space on the Bowery designed by the renowned architect Norman Foster. It’s a slender, steel framed, eight story building with exhibition spaces on four floors. The kicker is the annex, termed the “moving room”—a 225 square foot elevator that can be used conventionally, locked in place, or as a free-floating installation chamber/elevator, as it was for a sound piece in Bruce Nauman’s recent show. The exterior of the elevator’s box is Ferrari red, and can be seen through the facade’s frosted glass. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think, “why hasn’t anyone done that before?” (In no small part because it’s really expensive, for one thing.)

Upon entering the ground floor, look up and you’ll see the bottom of the moving room. If it’s descending toward you, you are guaranteed to look right and left to observe the rubber-topped steel safety posts that will prevent you from getting crushed, should the brakes fail for some reason. The attention to surface and detail is high, and combines with the exhilaration of being in that space to create a simple, memorable experience by itself that will no doubt be immortalized in some Iron Man film down the road. Unfortunately, the main exhibition spaces are two floors joined by an atrium with one large wall at left, and mezzanine space overlooking it, plus some hanging space to the right. I’m sure some smart artists will be inspired by the space and create with it in mind, but for more conventionally scaled art, it’s a diminished, spatially confusing experience. The third floor is a better-proportioned room for such things. And the fourth is similar, with the exception of the intriguing elevator space. On view through February 19 areEarly Metal Reliefs by German artist Heinz Mack, refreshing in its straightforward obsession with the sheer material glitz of chrome and acrylic and how these materials interact with light and perception.