April 21, 2006
Spring Fever Chelsea
Rob and I walk around Chelsea and see the Matthew Barney show at Barbara Gladstone. It has a spooky reference to the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII . I like Barneys' work but I think he's a Baroque conceptualist. There's a lot of money and high production values but I don't think there's any advance of artistic ideas. It's rather a Baroque articulation of conceptual and performance works done 30-40 years ago. We also went to see Sislej Xhafa at Galerie Lelong. This had a giant policeman's billy club made out of solid mahogany. I had Rob take a photo of me next to it for scale. We saw Stephen Westfall's gemotric paintings at Lenon + Weinberg. He's created a personal geometry that is so quirky that yoiu can feel his personality coming through. The must see show is a group of animations and still cartoons by Eunjung Hwang at Stefan Stux. THey are spooky, quirky Paul Klee dreamlike cartoon glyphs. They are informed with her oriental point of view fused with the generic global media language. Rob and I go by Tony Shafrazi gallery but don't go in. Instead we gossip about Tony Shafrazi, Vrej Baghoomian and Larry Gogosian.
Posted by gh at April 21, 2006 07:10 PM