The New York Times-20080125-Art in Review- -Review-
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Art in Review; [Review]
Full Text (1008 words)DAVID SMITH
Sprays
Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue, near 77th Street
Through Feb. 23
Your world may be rocked by David Smith's spray paintings and drawings, contrived with a wily stencil technique that cushions crisp white silhouettes in clouds of color. Seen with Smith's sculptures and other works, they tend to look brittle and lightweight, like distractions. On their own, in bulk, bolstered by several large, unfamiliar canvases, they feel different. They become complex, daring and pugnacious, like formalist graffiti art. They are also very much of the moment, especially in the Gagosian setting, where they bring to mind both the decorative precision of the painter Philip Taaffe and the reckless disregard of artists like Steven Parrino.
Smith (1906-65) clearly had fun making these works, but he wasn't just fooling around. The basic technique was an especially mobile form of stenciling. Metal bars, scraps or tools were laid on bare canvas or paper and sprayed around the edges with one or more colors. The arrangements could be pristine and orderly, mimicking the balancing acts of the artist's Cubi or Zig sculpture series. Or they could be jumbled, like two narrow works from 1958 that suggest scrolls of angular calligraphy. (It helps that in one the scraps are apparently metal letters: v's, e's and t's, it seems.)
This simple approach was somewhat contradictory. It enabled Smith to experiment with sculptural compositions unimpeded by weighty materials and to make paintings almost devoid of traditional touch. But he also combined aspects of photographs, photograms, X-rays and blueprints while offering ghostly immaterial after-images of temporary assemblages.
The especially startling large works here have not been seen in New York since 1959, when they were shown at French & Co., a prestigious gallery in the same building, it happens, where Gagosian's uptown branch is now. In palettes partial to black, red and gold or yellow, these works complicate their motifs with second layers of stenciling or additional touches of spray, white in-painting and deep irregular borders, also painted white.
The result is boldly bizarre. Island in Alaska and Main Pribilof suggest that someone painting a shop sign decided instead to depict ancestral grave sites, one of which seems to include tire irons. The third, an untitled canvas, features two large white shapes dappled with bits of blue, yellow and tan, like decorated teacups.
This electrifying show evokes the full range of Smith's sensibility, from brusque to dainty. It provides a textbook example of an artist making the most of a new medium, veering from misty monochromes to parti-colored splattering, between vertical and aerial space, and among softer shapes and compositions that suggest flower or vegetable still lifes, while always circling back to issues of sculptural composition. And it is a reminder that any time can produce the art of our time. ROBERTA SMITH
CHRISTOPHER K. HO
Happy Birthday
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street, Chelsea
Through Feb. 9
As you enter through the glass front door you glimpse a naked man lurking behind the big square column that sits in the center of the dimly lighted gallery. Inside, the gallery has been painted entirely gray and is empty but for that life-size sculpture of a muscular nude man, also painted gray, who stands facing the column as though frozen in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
The statue is a portrait of the gallery's proprietor, Edward Winkleman. The 6-foot-1-inch painted polyurethane sculpture is realistic yet simplified, its details smoothed over as though it had been sandblasted. The exhibition's title, Happy Birthday, spelled out on one wall in vinyl black letters, alludes in part to Mr. Winkleman's being in his birthday suit. A red spot just below the title is like the red dot customarily used by galleries to designate a sold work.
The effect of all this is funny, creepy and mysterious. The image of a dealer -- who in reality wields considerable power over an artist -- stripped bare and turned to blindly face the blank expanse of the column produces a weirdly Oedipal effect.
Mr. Ho is a conceptualist who uses art in many different forms to critique the art system. His aims are detailed in a tediously academic exhibition catalog, which is supposed to be a discrete artwork in its own right. In the Magritte-like gallery installation, Mr. Ho's garden-variety neo-Marxist conceptualism comes surprisingly to life. KEN JOHNSON
FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH
Adelson Galleries
19 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
Through March 1
The 19th-century American painter Frederic Edwin Church mostly stuck to his formula of late-afternoon light creeping over distant hills, whether that landscape was a South American jungle or the view from Olana, his estate on the Hudson River. While his commercially successful vision was honed in the studio, Church traveled extensively and made many sketches on location. This exhibition of 35 paintings, which includes a number of large-scale museum loans in addition to smaller oils, is a lavish postcard book of sorts.
Works are divided by region, with paintings of exotic locales on the ground floor and North American vistas upstairs. On loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Aegean Sea (1877), which splashes a watery rainbow over cliffside ruins, dominates the downstairs galleries. Other large canvases show the Magdalena River in Colombia and the Ecuadorean volcanos of Pichincha and Cotopaxi. These scenes, while impressive, come across as exhaustively researched arguments for Manifest Destiny.
The North American paintings veer from the serene Twilight, Mount Ktaadn (1858-60) to the lurid Marine -- Sunset (1881-82). That painting, of a boat sailing toward a blazing crimson horizon just after the sun has dropped out of view, was one of the last works Church created for public exhibition.
The smaller sketches in the upstairs hallway show a humbler, more local side of Church. They include the satisfyingly seasonal View From Olana in the Snow (1870-75) and the cloud study Sunset on July 26, 1870, an eyewitness account of divine radiance. KAREN ROSENBERG
[Illustration]PHOTO: Main Pribilof, a 1959 painting by David Smith, at Gagosian Gallery. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID SMITH ESTATE AND GAGOSIAN GALLERY)