Art Across America

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From California to New York, some of the best shows of the season feature works that range in style from classic to cutting-edge. – By Steven Biller

Time is precious, and unless you have it in abundance, you can never see all of a city’s great art when it offers it in world-class quality and variety. Bespoke Magazine set out to find what the best galleries—and one museum—are showing this season. Here, find the must-see exhibits near you.

 

NEW YORK
Dan Flavin & Donald Judd 

November – January 2013;

David Zwirner Gallery

David Zwirner inaugurates his third New York location—a new, five-story, 30,000-square-foot, LEED-certified building designed by architect Annabelle Selldorf—with the goods that made him a global brand: seminal minimalist works and large-scale installations.

Donald Judd and Dan Flavin pioneered this form of postwar American art. Both brushed off the minimalist label, asserting that art should be about nothing at all, that it should simply create a presence. Judd’s sculpture—small and monumental— focuses on fundamental form. Expect immersive, salon-sized installations of his signature anodized aluminum boxes, each open-topped to expose a brightly colored Plexiglas panel.

Meanwhile, Flavin, who died in 1996, made his name synonymous with everyday colored fluorescent tube lighting. His large-scale installations used precise sizes, shapes and colors of the lights to explore dimensional space in the simplest of terms: thin, rigid lines. Flavin’s later work grew larger and more figurative, such as complex barriers and barred corridors. Like Judd, Flavin was concerned with the relationship between his art and its spatial environment. While categorized as a minimalist, he thought himself a maximalist because of the way his work fully inhabits space, bathing it in an artificial glow. It draws a range of emotions. (212-727-2070; davidzwirner.com)

 Gary Simmons

Nov. 8 – Dec. 15; Metro Pictures Gallery

The timing and content of Metro Pictures’ Gary Simmons exhibition feels serendipitous. The show, which unfolds as a 20-year retrospective, coincides with a solo show of new work at Fort Worth Museum of Art in Texas. Metro Pictures’ survey compels viewers to reflect on a year that saw so much violence (domestic and foreign) based on identity. Simmons reminds us that it all cuts through our fragile lives and popular culture.

A New Yorker who earned his Master of Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif., Simmons literally references Hollywood in some of his most resonating canvases: the burning “Hollywood” signs. The paintings recall Ed Ruscha’s iconic paintings of the Hollywood signs and Los Angeles County Museum of Art on fire, but Simmons’ dramatically monochromatic Hollywood signs feel more animated, with wisps of ethereal smoke to subtly underscore the instability and vulnerability of our cultural foundation.

The “Smoke” series took its inspiration from the film “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” widely considered a metaphor for the rise of the black liberation movement in the late 1960s. Metro Pictures, which produced a substantial catalog for the exhibition, will also feature Simmons’ early sculptures, drawings with poignant phrases from movies about uprisings and his well-known “erasure” chalkboard paintings, wherein he illustrates figures, objects and structures with white chalk—and then smears them. Look for his new, 12-panel drawing in rich and flaking charcoal, which has a burnt effect, and drawings from his 2012 “Ghost Ship” series. (212-206-7100; metropicturesgallery.com)

 

SAN FRANCISCO
Tom McKinley

Late November through

December; John

Berggruen Gallery

Inviting and mysterious depictions of midcentury, modern-designed residences prevail in the new show of photorealist paintings by San Francisco East Bay artist Tom McKinley.

“A rhythm of geometry, pattern and repeating forms permeate these quiet settings,” says Tatem Read, the gallery’s director. “Light from peripheral windows breathes life into these otherwise inanimate spaces.”

So perfect are his rendered spaces, it seems anticlimactic to populate them with people. So, rather, McKinley finishes the paintings with cherry-picked objects of iconic modern furniture and blue-chip contemporary art (including Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Richard Diebenkorn) that shows evidence of occupants but reveal only their desire for refined taste, simple beauty and elite status. (415-781-4629; berggruen.com)

HOUSTON
Joseph Havel

Nov. 10 – Jan. 26, 2013;

Hiram Butler Gallery

A Houston-based artist known for transforming mundane objects into sculpture, Joseph Havel can seemingly engage any material and restore, even elevate, its significance.

At Hiram Butler Gallery, he introduces a body of work made of men’s dress shirt labels packed in framed Plexiglas, calling them “sculptures of paintings.” Each composition contains up to 30,000 labels and offers a nod to a modernist painting, particularly the minimalist works of Frank Stella. Havel custom weaves each label and embroiders them with a single word he gleans from books that have had a deep influence on him, especially John Berryman’s poetry compilation, “The Dream Songs.” Havel densely packs the frame, and the text on the labels is most hidden—except the ones he slightly pulls out and twists to reveal a single word, such as “desire.” Havel chooses emotionally or historically loaded texts and objects, and then manipulates them to register the void left by erasing a singular or specific meaning.

“At the core of this practice is the idea of memory as fluid and open to constant reconstruction and reformulation,” says Josh Pazda of Hiram Butler Gallery. On the occasion of his first major museum exhibition in 2006, Peter Marzio, director of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which mounted the show, says, “Joseph Havel sees art in everyday items that most of us rarely give a second thought. In his hands, shirts, bed sheets, and drapes mutate from the ordinary into something otherworldly.” (713-863-7097; hirambutler.com)

ORANGE COUNTY

“Transcending Abstraction IV”

December – January 2013;

Peter Blake Gallery

In Orange County, Calif., the fourth installment of the “Transcending Abstraction” series continues Peter Blake Gallery’s love affair with reductive art. While solo exhibitions for gallery artists working in this genre—Ruth Pastine, James Hayward and Steve Burtch, for example—offer deep encounters with each of their subtle beauties, the group installation shows the possibilities of what a collection of reductive art could look like. And it’s dynamic with rich color, slick and sumptuous surfaces, curious shadows and improbable energy.

The works carry the proverbial torch for West Coast minimalism and indigenous California light and space and finish fetish art. Their work has a remarkable finished quality and conjures a feeling rather than any particular meaning. Pastine typically paints several canvases simultaneously, letting them interact and then reacting to what she sees. At first they appear as monochromatic veils. However, value shifts reveal a careful process that allows other colors to come into harmony.

Hayward’s monochromes, on the other hand, thrive on rich, thick, gestures that pack tons of action on every square inch. The movement of paint defies the single-hued simplicity of the final pictures, which actually include other colors—something of a special effect that rewards viewers who come forward for close inspection.

Burtch’s already-classic white squares are remarkably intimate engagements in mixed media—acrylic and graphite on cast acrylic panels. The intensity of ambient natural and artificial light constantly change the appearance and geometry of their translucent surfaces. (949-376-9994; peterblakegallery.com)

ATLANTA
Gordon Parks & Bruce Davidson 

Nov. 30 – Feb. 2, 2013;

Jackson Fine Art

The pioneering African American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks would have turned a century old this November. Exhibitions of his images documenting social conditions in his America will open at several galleries around the world, including Jackson Fine Art. Parks’ fearless work captured struggles and pains of poverty, segregation and urban life as well as the triumphant rise of the civil rights movement.

Parks was Life magazine’s first staff photographer, and he plied his trade at the publication for more than 20 years. He was never formally trained, but could see what he knew others needed to see and captured it with great poignancy. The New York Times called him a “humanitarian photojournalist.”

The gallery will also feature an installation photographs by Bruce Davidson, whose most recent exhibition, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956 – 1968,” was at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Davidson’s “East 100th Street” project famously documented a tough block of East Harlem—a series that New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited. He also knew found the city’s most beautiful perspectives, as he did in a four-year project photographing in Central Park. (404-233-3739; jacksonfineart.com)

MIAMI

“New Work Miami 2013”

Nov. 21 – May 12, 2013;

Miami Art Museum

The second installment of “New Work Miami” opens as art dealers, collectors, curators, critics, journalists and enthusiasts from around the world converge on Art Basel Miami Beach. The first show, in 2010, was a large survey that celebrated Miami’s abundance and exuberance. This show is more focused, with about 15 artists focusing on specific ideas and themes, such as the blurring line between design and fine art as it defines the local aesthetic and what it means in terms of geography, history and psychology to be a Miamian.

“Exhibiting the artists of Miami is integral part of our identity,” says Rene Morales, the museum’s associate curator. “We are very conscious of how the show will project Miami artists to the world during Art Basel Miami Beach.”

Morales and the exhibition’s co-curator, Diana Nawi, sought to capture the artist community’s collaborative spirit. Two artists, Consuelo Castañeda and Emmett Moore, created the environment where the rest of the artists’ work is showing. Incidentally, “New Work Miami 2013” is the museum’s final exhibition in its current building and symbolically initiates the countdown to its fall 2013 reopening at the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed space currently under construction in Museum Park. (305-375-3000; miamiartmuseum.org)

ASPEN

“Picasso to Pop”

Winter 2013; Galerie Maximillian

Galerie Maximillian could have titled its winter exhibition “Icons and Legends.” The show packs iconic (and some rare) etchings, lithographs, serigraphs and woodcut prints by some of the most important artists of our time. It’s a feast for the eyes and nutrients for the mind.

The show juxtaposes modern and postwar/contemporary masters—from Picasso’s iconic cubist works, Braque’s birds and flowers and Miró’s surrealist compositions to Takashi Murakami’s smiling sunflowers, Chuck Close’s pixelated, photorealist portraits, Jim Dine’s hearts and robes and even a classic Andy Warhol “Mao” portrait. (970-925-6100; galeriemax.com)