"Painting Expanded" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Lauren Luloff, Yellow Window, 2011. Oil, bleached bed sheets, and fabric on muslin, 76 x 60 in., in "Painting Expanded," at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, through July 29, 2011.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's summer show brings together work by 17 painters, most of them young and closely watched, for a group show called "Painting Expanded," which was curated by Renee Coppola, Phyllis Lally, Emily Ruotolo, and Scot Surdez.


Sam Moyer, Untitled, 2011. Ink and bleach on canvas mounted to wood panel, 60 x 48 in.

It's a largely black, white, and beige affair on Bonakdar's ground floor, where a quirky, tightly assembled wood construction by Donelle Woolford (the nom de plume of artist Joe Scalan) hangs near a mirror wrapped in Plexiglass by Justin Beal and a bright silver denim trapezoid by Anissa Mack. The much-discussed Jacob Kassay has a small diptych that spans the floor's staid spectrum: one of the panels is white, the other black, and neither one sports Kassay's trademark burns. According to the checklist, they're brushed with oil and silver deposits, and they show Kassay exploring that ultra minimal, almost-empty zone that he ventured into in the works in his recent Mitchell-Innes & Nash show with Virginia Overton and Robert Morris.


Jacob Kassay, Untitled, 2011. Oil on linen and silver deposit on canvas in two parts, overall installed dimensions: 12 x 24 in.


Hayley Tompkins, Knife, 2009. Found object, gouache, 9 1/4 x 3/4 x 2 in.


Ivin Ballen, 62 Diamond Street, 2011. Fiberglass, aquaresin, acrylic, gouache, 80 x 74 in.

The exhibition takes a flashier turn on the second floor, which harbors most of the more-colorful works. Alchemical processes seem to be at work in a few pieces, as in Ivin Ballen's enormous 62 Diamond Street (an address out in Greenpoint), which unites pulsating, nearly-three-dimensional bands of angular, patterned abstraction with faux duct tape delicately forged from fiberglass and aquaresin. Strange magic is also at work in Anna Betbeze's Slab, which looks from afar like a gloriously decomposing piece of sod that she's actually fashioned from wood, ash, acid dye, and watercolor.

Most of the artists will be familiar to those who have visited the galleries of the Lower East Side and the less-traveled sections of Chelsea over the past few years, but that's fine by me: summer can be as much a time for catching up with old favorites as discovering new ones.


Installation view of "Painting Expanded" on the first floor of Tanya Bonakdar.

Picasso and Arianna, Kröner and Bernstein, Sifton and Art, etc. [Collected]

Sam Falls, Untitled, 2011. Digital C-print and collage, 31 x 24 in., in "Out of Practice," curated by Nudashank, at Art Blog Art Blog, New York, through June 18, 2011.

• "The Picasso Wars": Arianna Huffington and her "portrait of the artist as a bad man." A "dog of a book," says Robert Hughes, in 1988. [New York on Google Books]

• Sharon Butler on career advice for artists and "Reverie," a group show curated by artist Stephen Westfall at Galerie Zürcher that includes Shirley Jaffe, Stanley Whitney, Patricia Treib, Westfall, and others. "Yeah — it's OK to include your own work if you're curating the show," Butler writes. [Two Coats of Paint]

• "A Complete Guide to Seinfeld's Sneaker." [Complex via @Cory_Arcangel]

• Magdalena Kröner interviews Judith Bernstein: Kröner: "Why does the subject matter of your work continue to be controversial?" Bernstein: "The connection between screw and phallus, present in much of my work, touches upon many sensitive aspects that exist in the subconscious. Men especially can feel intimidated by the scale of a work... [ART BLOG ART BLOG]

• "Invitations are style statements in a minor key, ancillary artworks of a collective sort. Designed by artists, by graphic designers, by art dealers and museum curators — usually a combination of the above — they are the advance guard for the real thing. Their merit is judged in the very act of reading one's mail." — Roberta Smith, "Art Invitations as Small Scraps of History," the New York Times, May 16, 1993

• The Class of 2011: Curator and writer Jamillah James posts highlights from recent New York MFA exhibitions. [Frontiers]

• "Tom Harris ... cooks lamb sweetbreads with butter beans and wild garlic that can set off an episode of synesthesia if you are so inclined: a Constable landscape of flavors and textures, of menacing clouds and plump trees and soft grass for the lamb, Britain on a plate." New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton's art references are growing deeper and richer and continuing to flow. [16 Miles]

• June 4: "Leverage," with Sonja Engelhardt, Luke Stettner, Gustabo Velazquez, and Claudia Weber, opens at Jo-ey Tang's Notary Public space on the Upper East Side. [TNP via ROLU]

• June 4: In SoHo, Los Angeles–based artist Wu Tsang unveils his New York solo debut, which includes a video about a 15-year-old Salvadorian refugee who arrives in L.A. in 1985 and is befriended by trans women at a local bar. [Clifton Benevento]

• June 5: "A+" — a three-day group show at Bushwick's ARCH Production & Design NYC Studio with work by Ivin Ballen, Evan Collier, Meghan Petras, Adriana Santiago, and more — closes. Curated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne, the exhibition includes "allusions to dome culture, inflatable architecture, minimalism, kitsch, the surf and skate subcultures, abstract expressionism, mid-century modern design and obsolete technology." [Bushwick Open Studios]

• June 6: The Museum of Modern Art's "Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914," the most entrancing museum show of the New York season, closes. It feels like it only just arrived. [MoMA]

Bushwick's WILDLIFE: "Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jon Lutz"

The lobby of 245 Varet Street, Brooklyn, New York, the home of WILDLIFE. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

A plastic Santa Claus greeted visitors on the first floor of 245 Varet Street on February 25th. His hand was raised to the sky, pointing to the third floor WILDLIFE space, an empty studio in which independent curator Jon Lutz had organized the latest installment of his Daily Operation series. That sterling brand would be reason enough to journey to the farthest reaches of Bushwick, and though that was not necessary (WILDLIFE is mere blocks from Roberta's), Lutz made the evening impossible to miss, tagging his exhibition with a title that promised class and discernment: "Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jon Lutz." (Click for more photos of the show, via Lutz.)


Left to right: Joshua Abelow, I MISS YOU BITCH, 2008. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in. Joshua Abelow, I MISS YOU BITCH, 2008. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in. Joshua Abelow, I MISS YOU BITCH, 2008. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in.

The press release also heralded an auspicious evening. In it, artist Ivin Ballen writes breathlessly that Mr. and Mrs. Lutz's "ability to make decisions that are applauded by both museum and artist is truly remarkable." He notes that he first happened to meet Mr. Lutz when they were both at a local cobbler. Before long, he was enjoying cocktails with him and his wife on their yacht. "The rest is history," he says. Such antics aside, it was, of course, Lutz's quartet of artists that guaranteed the hefty turnout at the reception: Ballen, Ethan Greenbaum, Janine Polak, and Joshua Abelow.

Three nearly identical paintings by the Brooklyn–based Abelow, each with two smiling faces, a triangle, and the sentence "I MISS YOU BITCH," held one wall and dominated the room with their ambiguous, gleeful mania. Abelow is the proprietor of the wonderful art blog ART BLOG ART BLOG, which he updates relentlessly with photos of a wide range of (mostly) contemporary artworks. Astoundingly, he is apparently unaffected by this steady stream of imagery, having honed his practice to a single definitive style: just a few (if any) images — various self-deprecating self-portraits are a recurring theme — and some absurd or sardonic text. It has the rare distinction of looking complete, razor sharp, and fully formed.


Janine Polak, Once bitten, twice shy, 2011. Wood, tinted plaster, silver jewelry, paint.


Ivin Ballen, Mud Fence, 2010. Fiberglass, Aquaresin, embedded dispersed pigments, 24 x 24 x 1 in.


Ethan Greenbaum, Untitled, 2010. Artificial plant, concrete cast, various sizes (all plants)

Other Abelows included a 2008 painting with the equation "YES=NO" and a double portrait called Artist & Collector, which shows an obsequious patron kissing the Pinocchio nose of an artist. (Is it Abelow?) Fully confident in — and even proud of — its pleasant idiosyncrasies, Abelow's work evinces a great and ridiculous sophistication, like that of a difficult gymnastics maneuver ("a double Abelow!") or a rare antique fishing lure ("My Abelow has brought me my finest catches."). Seeing his work, I feel like the woman who appears in another of his pieces (sadly not on view in the show), tilting back her head in ecstasy and mouthing the title of the drawing in which she resides: OH! ABELOW.


Joshua Abelow, Artist & Collector, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

On the subtler side, Greenbaum placed artificial plants, which had been encased in concrete, around the walls of the room. Polak — like Greenbaum, a Yale graduate — kept it low-key as well, with three precariously balanced thin wood sculptures embedded embedded with tiny pieces of metal. Think David Adamo without the whittling or Susan Collis on a budget — not a bad thing. And then there was Ballen (a Cranbrook alum, like Abelow), who was represented by four effervescently colored works that could have been made by four different artists, as long as each was an extrovert determined to have a great time and, thank goodness, intent on including you in the festivities.


Ivin Ballen, Partyland, 2011. Fiberglass, Aquaresin, absorbed ground, gouache, acrylic, 32 x 24 x 1 in.


A view of the crowd