The Women, Part 2: The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read

The Women: Part 1: "Daughters . . ." at Pavel Zoubok

..
If I exhaled at Daughters of the Revolution, I was positively breathless at The Female Gaze, so welcome was it to see so much work by women in just two shows in Chelsea at the same time.
.
The curatorial conceit at Cheim & Read is to counter the notion of the male gaze by providing a group of works in which "the artist and subject do not relate as 'voyeur' and 'object' but as woman and woman.' " In this beautifully curated show, which spans over a century, 40 female artists--many from their own roster--turn the conventional male gaze inside out. Here there's pleasure in equality versus the longstanding idea of power over passivity.

What you see when you enter, above: a small cut-paper work by Kara Walker, Untitled, 1995 (foreground, under the exhibition title); and Deborah Kass, Double Red Barbara (The Jewish Jackie Series), 1993. The two photographic portraits below are also in this room

Starting chronologically with the sad and shadowed visage of May Prinsep and the confrontational stare of a very butch Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, the exhibition delivers a range of expression and emotion. The bodies are strong and beautiful, or fleshy and imperfect. The sex comes in several different flavors and positions. There's mystery, eroticism, humor, pain. In short, life. The installation delivers these from every angle.

Left: Berenice Abbott, Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, 1926-30, vintage gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches; right: Julia Margaret Cameron, May Prinsep (Head of Saint John), 1866, albumen print, 13 x 10 1/2 inches. Both images from the gallery website

Back in the foyer: another view of Kara Walker's silhouette and, over the desk, Mickalene Thomas, A-E-I-O-U and Sometimes Y, 2009, rhinestone, acrylic and enamel on panel, 24 x 20 inches (each); full view below. Both images from the gallery website

The three images below are what you see when you enter the main gallery. The vitrine with a Louise Bourgeois sculpture will orient you as we turn counterclockwise around the room. You can see these and all the works on the gallery's checklist. (These three images are mine; the gallery has many more.)

Sex, sex and sex: Louise Bourgeois, Couple, 2004, fabric and stainless steel, 11 x 28 x 14 1/2 inche, in the vitrine; behind that, Joan Semmel, Flip-Flop, 1971, oil on canvas, 68 x 138 inches .To the right: Lisa Yuskavage (hate it)

Below: Bourgeois's Couple

Above: Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Holzer, Maria Lassnig

Below: Kathe Burkhart, Bourgeois, Marilyn Minter, Katy Grannan, Lucas

In the smaller back gallery, from left: Hannah van Bart, Vanessa Beecroft, Lynda Benglis, Tracey Emin. Image from the gallery website

Below: Capture from Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973, video tape loop

With the video to your back, here's another view of the same back gallery: Victoria Civera, Judith Eisler, Beecroft, Ghada Amer. Image from the gallery website

Below: Vanessa Beecroft, Blonde Figure Lying, 2008, water resin coated with beeswax, human hair, 77 x 36 x 10 inches [when I saw this work in Miami it was not as yellow as it appears here; maybe it's an edition and this is a different work?]

Ghada Amer, The Woman Who Failed To Be Shehrazade, 2008, acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 62 x 68 inches

With Beecroft and Amer in the distance, we have now entered a third gallery looking at work by Ellen Gallagher, Hellen van Meene, and a large nude by—surprise—a young Joan Mitchell. Who knew this master of the lyrical mass painted such forthright figures early in her career? Image from the gallery website

Above: Gallagher, van Meene, Mitchell. Image from the gallery website

Below: Ellen Gallagher, Bouffant Pride, 2003, handmade collage, cutout, painting and photogravure on rag paper, 13.5 x 10.5 inches

Moving around the gallery we see a painting by Alice Neel similar in size to the Mitchell. Between them are photographs by Zoe Leonard (also below) and Catherine Opie.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Untitled, circa 1945, oil on canvas, 54 x 35.75 inches; Alice Neel, (1990-1894), Olivia, 1975, oil on canvas, 54 x 34 inches. Image from the gallery website

From the third gallery looking back into the main space, with the Bourgeois vitrine to orient you. On the wall: Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1988-90, gelatin silver prints, 6 x 9 inches each

The Female Gaze , is up through September 19 at Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25th. Go gaze.

If you can't make it to New York between now and then, the gallery website contains great installation shots, some of which I pulled and posted here (with attribution) and an image of every work in the show. My blog buddy Steven Alexander has written about the show, too.

Update 8.19. 09: James Kalm's video report on You Tube

..

Quick: Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read

.

Has Louise Fishman been lifting weights? These new paintings of hers at Cheim & Read are the most muscular I’ve seen. Fishman’s paintings are hard to love at first. They’re big and messy, and her colors tend toward the browns and grays. But spend some time with them, and you acquiesce to their power. What this second-generation abstracton expressionist does with paint, with gesture, is to assume control of the surface and the space around it and then draw you in. By the time you get up close, you're head over heels. These painting offer not just brawn but passages of sublime beauty.

I’m late with this report. The show is up only until tomorrow. If you’re in New York and haven’t seen it, hustle on over to 25th Street. If you can’t, click onto the gallery website for some great installation shots.

Here are a few I shot myself—along with with some ravishing details that are just under actual size. And by the way, Fishman is 70. An age stereotype shattered.

COncealing and Revealing, 2008, oil on linen, 87.75 x 70 inches

Below: Three details

.

. . . . .

All Night and All Day, 2008, oil on canvas, 66 x 57 inches

.

Below: Three details

.

.

On the Geometric Trail: Part Seven

On the Geometric Trail, in Chelsea

On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

On the Geometric Trail, Part Three: Isensee

On the Geometric Trail, Part Four: Two of a Kind

On the Geometric Trail, Part Five: McKenzie

On the Geometric Trail, Part Six: Zox and Martin

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg

and

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg: Installation view looking toward the back of the gallery

.

Harriet Korman’s solo show is no longer up at Lennon, Weinberg, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show you a few pictures. Her painting, with its hard edges, shifting planes and saturated hues, is geometric abstraction in a modernist vein. There’s a bit of the cubist composition in her work, with its loopy intersections and Matissean shapes, but her seemingly straight-from-the-tube color and strong graphic quality give the work a signature that is unmistakably her own: joyous but rigorous.

As an artist who works serially, I like to see how other artists explore or attenuate an idea. Here, two paintings with a similar composition-- and even some similar color passages--allow

you to eavesdrop on their conversation

.

Is it me, or is there a suggestion of landscape in these paintings?

New for me is the painting, above, in which patches of color are painted with roughly equidistant parallel lines. I like this rectilinear order. I want to say that I’ve seen this composition, or something like it, while flying over the country’s midsection at 30,000 feet, but that’s not quite right, for while I perceive something of a landscape in this work—in both paintings shown above, in fact—I’m not at all sure it was intended. I don't think Korman is making paintings that are about anything but painting.

Despite their almost playful color and composition, these paintings establish boundaries between themselves and the viewer. Maybe it's their mid-range size or relatively uninflected color. Or maybe it's that intellectual rigor. You step back to see these painting, and each painting seems to say, "You stand there." That's fine. I can dig them from a few feet away.

.

.

.

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read: Installation view taken from the gallery's website

Juan Usle’s paintings, on the other hand seem to whisper, "Come closer, mi amor." Maybe it’s their small size—his show, "Brezales," at Cheim & Read consists of fewer than a dozen small canvases (and two large ones)—but they exude something that just pulls you in. While there’s a new fluid line in some of the paintings, I’m fonder of the rectilinear compositions, patchworks of color and visual texture that are marvels of painterliness. The gallery’s press release describes the work as "organic geometry." That’s a good term, because the grid has been constructed block by block within the composition rather than imposed onto it; moreover, the color is fluid and the mark of the brush very much in evidence. (Usle uses pigment in a vinyl dispersion medium to get the streaked, almost textile-like surfaces of his color, and from the looks of the linearity of the application, I'd say he uses something like a squeegee as well as a brush. )

Juan Usle: La Camara Oculta, 2007, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 18 x 12 inches.

Above: installation view of the small front gallery, from the gallery's website

Below: Miron, 2006-07, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 12 x 18 inches.The gallery press release calls his work "organic geometry," and you can really see that here--the way the artist has dragged and pushed his pigment, creating lines that waver and vibrate

Juan Usle: Installation view of Cada Vez Mas Cerca, 2006-07, 24 x 18 inches, left; and Sone Que Revelabas (Tigris), 2007, 108 x 80 inches; both vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas. Installation shot from the gallery's website

"Brezales" is up through this weekend. If you’re reading this blog before March 15 and you’re in New York, log off and go see it.