Some Memorable Shows from 2021-2022

The past two plus years have been challenging in so many ways -- no travel, no restaurants, no openings, no hugs -- to mention only a few of the more minor Covid losses....Nevertheless, some important shows happened in New York, and I was able to get to a small fraction of them. Here are images from a few of the standouts. My sincere regrets to all my friends and colleagues whose shows I missed.

 

 Jacqueline Humphries at Greene Naftale

 

 

Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

 

 

 Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace

 

 

 Thornton Willis at David Richard

 

 

 Michelle Stuart at Lelong

 

 

Ron Gorchov at Vito Schnabel

 

 

David Diao at Postmasters

 

 

Mary Obering at Bortolami

 

 

 Frank Bowling at Hauser & Wirth

 

 

 Svenja Deininger at Maryanne Boesky

 Brice Marden at Gagosian

Maja Ruznic at Karma

Terry Winters at Matthew Marks

 

 

 

 Jasper Johns at the Whitney Museum

RICHARD POUSETTE-DART at Bowdoin College

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Meditation on the Drifting Stars, 1962-63, oil on linen

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Meditation on the Drifting Stars, detail

One of the younger, and perhaps less famous, members of the first generation of New York School painters, Richard Pousette-Dart pursued a highly personal, quasi-mystical investigation that grew steadily more focused. An exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine (through September 16, 2018), titled Painting/Light/Space, features work from what I think is his most brilliant period, from the early 1960's to the mid-'70s. Here Pousette-Dart has worked his way out of Surrealism, and its depictive tendencies, arriving at a free and open dialogue with the painting language -- a direct transposition of pure sensation in which experience is embodied in color.

The large scale works in this thrilling exhibition are built of small dabs of thick paint, layered over time to form undulating atmospheres that are also crusty objects. Color relations are intuitively constructed and deeply soulful, reflecting a vision that is both ecstatic and meditative. These are timeless and expansive paintings that, in both intention and form, are as ancient as they are utterly contemporary.

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Golden Presence, 1961, oil on linen

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Magnetic Space, 1962, oil on linen

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Presence, Amaranth Garden #1, 1974, oil on linen

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Presence, Amaranth Garden #1, detail

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Hieroglyph Number 7 (Hieroglyph of Light), 1968-69, oil on linen

 Richard Pousette-Dart, Hieroglyph Number 7 (Hieroglyph of Light), detail

 Richard Pousette-Dart, White Silence, 1974, acrylic on canvas

Richard Pousette-Dart, Radiance Number 8 (Imploding Red Light), 1973-74, oil on linen

RICHARD POUSETTE-DART at Pace

Richard Pousette-Dart, installation, Pace Gallery, NYC, 2014

Another museum quality revelatory show arrived this week in Chelsea, the exhibition of late paintings by Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace through January 10, 2015. One of the youngest of the first generation New York School painters, Pousette-Dart continued to refine his approach to painting into the early 1980s, creating a body of late work that, more than 40 years later, remains singular and potent. Not unlike the severity and radicality of Rothko's last work, these paintings are an important departure from Pousette-Dart's earlier gestural works, and a tougher, highly simplified elaboration of his more overtly "cosmic" pointillist paintings from the 1960s. Here the artist achieves a full realization of the metaphoric power of elemental form, creating undulating particular surfaces that coalesce into simple geometric configurations, while maintaining the sensation of perpetual flux. As Pousette-Dart worked his way out of the illustrative mindset of surrealism, he began to construct iconic objects that for him embodied pure transcendental energy. If these paintings in their boiled down immediacy look quite contemporary, which they do, they also remind us in their unabashed commitment, just how much courage it took to make them.

Richard Pousette-Dart, Time, Space, Window, 1982-83, 62 x 89 inches, acrylic on linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Presence Number 3, Black, 1969, 80 x 80 inches, oil on linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Radiance, Blue Square, 1978-80, 50 x 72 inches, oil on linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Black Circle, Time, 1979-80, 90 x 90 inches, oil on linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Transcendental Red, 1982, 50 x 72 inches, oil on linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Eye of the Circle, 1975, 44 x 83 inches, oil on linen