Matthew Marks Gallery

Overview: Spring Highlights

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Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue
On view through June 5

Jessi Reaves’ recent installation at SculptureCenter was intriguing but too small to encompass the breadth of her project. This exhibition impresses with an excess of funky, homespun pieces of semi-functional, inside-out furniture displayed in a showroom setting. The most prevalent materials are plywood and foam, which the artist often leaves exposed, though they are normally hidden beneath upholstery. In addition to repurposing found furniture, Reaves also uses leather scraps, silk, plywood, sawdust, and driftwood to create lounge chairs, cabinets, bookshelves, lamps, and tables. In Rules Around Here (Waterproof Shelf), 2016, a free-standing shelving unit is “waterproofed” by clothing it in a midnight-blue vinyl case that doubles as a kinky dress, emphasizing the natural relationship between design and the human form. For Mind At the Rodeo (XJ Fender Table Noguchi Knockoff #2), 2016, she creates a variation on Noguchi’s iconic table, using fenders from a Jeep Cherokee truck for the legs. This piece is indicative of how Reaves uses her own slapdash style of design to appropriate modernism, replacing its pristine tendencies with something more human.

99 Bowery | Chinatown
www.bridgetdonahue.nyc

Top: Installation view with Muscle Chair (Laying down to talk) and Beaver's Lunch (The Uncoverer), both 2016; Bottom: Installation view, “Jessi Reaves,” April 10 – June 5, 2016, Bridget Donahue, NY. (Photos: Chris Murtha)

Josh Kline at 47 Canal
On view through June 12

Josh Kline, who isn’t shy about his politics, shares his apocalyptic vision of employment, which reduces everything to disposable commodities, including workers. In a carpeted gallery, 3D-printed sculptures depict dejected employees—most notably, a mortgage loan officer—curled up on the floor and wrapped up in clear plastic bags. They are ready to be discarded or recycled, just like the silicone casts of bottles and outmoded computer parts that are piled up into shopping carts. In Universal Early Retirement (spots #1 & #2), 2016, Kline advocates for guaranteed basic income with two commercials that imitate the idealized aesthetics of banking and pharmaceutical advertisements. Instead of blissful relief and financial security, Kline offers to liberate time from the limitations of a monetized system. In a darkened side gallery, a series of virus-shaped pods, titled Contagious Unemployment, 2016, are suspended from the ceiling. Like time capsules, each sculpture contains a banker’s box filled with the kind of personal belongings the recently laid-off would assemble from their cubicles—a potted plant, children's art, a baseball hat, and a spare tie. These are objects that tether a job to life outside the workplace, humanizing the daily grind. At least you get to take them with you when you go.

291 Grand Street | Lower East Side
www.47canal.us

Top: Installation view with Universal Early Retirement (spots #1 & #2), 2016; Bottom: Installation view, Josh Kline, “Unemployment,” May 3 ­– June 12, 47 Canal, NY. (Photos: Chris Murtha)

Ken Price at Matthew Marks Gallery
On view through June 25

In 2013, I was blown away by The Drawing Center’s exhibition of Ken Price’s works on paper, a show that spanned the sculptor’s entire career. The cups! The volcanic landscapes! The west coast noir! Similarly, this exhibition features previously unseen drawings that run the gamut, from his early sculptural studies to the spare Los Angeles interiors and car crashes he depicted in the 1990s, and onto the lava- and lightning-charged landscapes he created until his death in 2012. Price’s work in the medium has a laid-back graphic sensibility and his application of background washes and vibrant blocks of color points to the influence of popular art, especially comics and illustration. Several drawings, such as Egg Flower Specimen (1968), detail sculptures that may or may not have been realized, whereas others situate the amorphous forms that were typical to his later ceramics within acid-toned desert landscapes, as in The Beautiful West (2005). While his earlier drawings benefit from a relationship to his three-dimensional works, Price’s surreal landscapes stand on their own, rendering a desolate, imaginary world that has an uncanny resemblance to our own.

523 W 24th Street | Chelsea
www.matthewmarks.com

Top: Car Plunge (detail), 1994, Acrylic and ink on paper, 14 x 11 1/4 inches; Bottom: All Alone (detail), 2007, Acrylic and ink on paper, 9 x 6 inches.

Other Recommendations:

Lui Shtini at Kate Werble Gallery
83 Vandam Street | TriBeCa
On view through June 4

Ariel Dill at Turn Gallery
37 East 1st Street | East Village
On view through June 12

Hilton Als at The Artist’s Institute
132 E 65th Street | Upper East Side
On view through June 18

"Frida Smoked" at Invisible-Exports
89 Eldridge Street | Lower East Side
On view through June 19

"Overview" posts provide recommendations for current exhibitions in and around New York City.

The Shape of Light: Ellsworth Kelly’s Photography

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For this exhibition, which is the first to focus solely on Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, Matthew Marks Gallery compiled images that were taken over thirty years and printed shortly before the artist’s death this past December. Though Kelly did not use his photographs as direct sources for his paintings, they share a striking emphasis on geometric forms, from simple squares and triangles to skewed diamonds and rhomboids. These images are revelatory not only because we are unfamiliar with Kelly’s extraordinary work in this medium, but they also provide a context for and a contrast to his colorful abstract paintings.

Kelly spent the last forty-five years of his life in rural Upstate New York and the images in this show are a reminder that even though the hard-edged minimalism of his works can seem urban or industrial, he more frequently found inspiration in the pastoral. Two early photographs from 1950—one of curling tendril-like pine branches, the other of re-bar and concrete—call to mind his elegant contour drawings of plants and flowers. These images are outliers though; overwhelmingly, Kelly’s photographs are preoccupied with how mass and volume can be suggested by light and shadow.

Potato Barn, Southampton, 1968, Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 13 inches; Above: Doorway, Belle-Île-en-Mer, 1977, Gelatin silver print, 12 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches. (Photos: Chris Murtha)

Kelly was especially attracted to the simple architecture of barns and the shadows cast by their gabled roofs and large doorways. In Barns, Long Island (1968), one barn abuts another perpendicularly, creating an intricate stacking of linear structures, but the eye is drawn to the starkly white fragment of sky created by the roof’s peak. Often, these negative spaces and shadow forms act as referents for Kelly’s canvases, as in Movie Screen, Waterbury (1982), in which a drive-in screen creates a diamond-shaped white void against the backdrop of dense foliage, or the jewel-like shadow in Doorway Shadow, Spencertown (1977).

With these black-and-white photographs, Kelly—an artist so famous for his use of color—was able to visually compress and distill the three-dimensional world into a flattened space, emphasizing the forms he spent his career examining. When taken collectively—especially as viewed on the gallery’s website (as seen below)—the photographs read as an index of Kelly’s visual vocabulary. Perhaps more importantly, they provide a context for his abstractions, one that is based squarely in his lived experiences.

Screen capture showing thumbnails of Ellsworth Kelly's photographs on Matthew Marks Gallery’s website, www.matthewmarks.com.