La Vie en Rose

It’s like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don’t make any sense to me. They’re being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.

opens tomorrow, Fri, May 16, 7-9p: “MARGINS”  Frank Webster   The Lodge Gallery, 131 Chrystie St., NYC (bt Delancey & Broome) Webster’s paintings depict post-industrial landscapes drawing on the aesthetic traditions of minimalism and realism. Summoning a sense of apocalyptic abandonedness, Webster’s compositions pair high-rise buildings with similarly scaled trees, liken barbed-wire fences and electrical wires to the creeping vines that entwine them, and present an urban ecosystem curiously devoid of inhabitants. - thru June 1

thru Sept 7: “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair” Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY The exhibition takes Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men as its single subject, addressing its creation and destruction and placing it in its artistic and social context by combining art, documentation, and archival material. 50 years have passed since an up-and-coming Pop provocateur named Andy Warhol sparked a minor scandal at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. As part of a prominent set of public commissions for the Philip Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion’s exterior, Warhol chose to enlarge mug shots from a NYPD booklet featuring the 13 most wanted criminals of 1962. Forming a chessboard of front and profile views, 13 Most Wanted Men was installed by April 15, 1964, and painted over by Fair officials’ direction with silver paint a few days later.

opens tomorrow, June 19, 6-8p: “Begotten, Not Made”  Nicola Samori   Ana Cristea Gallery, 521 W26th St., NYC More than a trick of the eye, Samori’s paintings treat their surface as a material skin transcribing the memory of their process. “Like the eye adjusting to darkness, adaptation is necessary upon entering Samori’s visual cosmos. The images stare at us in an effort of denied vision. With the icy gaze of a femme fatale warning us that she is beyond our reach, they block our penetration. The images feel us, smell us, judge us. They are watching, but they don’t see. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. And we see through a glass, darkly. Sometimes peering in, other times peeling back in search of the surface beneath the surface beneath the surface.”

just opened: “Gatekeeper”  Liene Bosquê, Sinta Tantra, Kate Gilmore   William Holman Gallery, 65 Ludlow St., NYC group show that explores ideas of access, and how the spaces we inhabit enforce or challenge the roles of gender, race, and economic inequalities within societies. Curated by Nicholas Cohn and Katie White pictured: Kate Gilmore, Wall Bearer, 2011, Performance Still

thru Sept 7: “Object Matter”  Robert Heinecken The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 St., NYC This is the first retrospective of the work of Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006, gathering over 150 works from throughout the artist’s remarkable career, many of them never seen before in New York—including the largest display to date of his altered magazines, which were the backbone of his art. Heinecken described himself as a “para-photographer” because his work stood “beside” or “beyond” traditional notions of the medium. He extended photographic processes and materials into lithography, collage, photo-based painting and sculpture, and installation. Drawing on the countless pictures in magazines, books, pornography, television, and even consumer items such as TV dinners, Heinecken used found images to explore the manufacture of daily life by mass media and the relationship between the original and the copy, both in art and in our culture at large. Thriving on contradictions, friction, and disparity, his examination of American attitudes toward gender, sex, and violence was often humorous and always provocative. 

1926

1926

1962

1914-1927

1925-1933

Stanley Kubrick (1999)

On 2001: A space odyssey set 

day 60. COLOURFUL ABSTRACT BOUQUET. almost spring. what an amazing winter its been