A sweeping exhibition of Joseph Beuys multiples from the Reinhard Schlegl collection is currently on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York City. The show includes 500 works and ephemera spanning the 1960s to 1980s, with familiar forms like a felt-laden sled, a Fluxus violin, and Capri Battery, a lemon-powered lightbulb. An array of exhibition posters, manifestos, documents, and even a video performance projection create a view into Beuys’s practice that is unusually historically comprehensive for a commercial gallery exhibition.
Author Archives: Evan Moffitt
EXHIBITION: JANINE ANTONI AT LUHRING AUGUSTINE
In her solo show at Luhring Augustine in New York, Janine Antoni cast body parts and household furniture in wax, forming ethereal, surrealist combinations inspired by milagros, small devotional items left by Latin American worshippers at church altars. The show is on view at Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea location until April 25. The exhibition statement is prefaced by the following text by the artist, evocative of her poetic forms and recalling the centrality of ritual dance to her practice:
Throw back your head and sip from the bowl of your own breast. Wear your mother’s pelvic bones as a collar. Become a snake, intertwining your spine with another and crawl across a woven rug. Let your head melt through your lover’s chest and listen for their heart. Embrace someone so fully that your ribs weave to become one.
EXHIBITION: PARKER ITO AT CHATEAU SHATTO
Parker Ito’s show at Chateau Shatto, A Little Taste of Cheeto in the Night, is a fully-immersive, claustrophobic, phantasmagoric experience. The artist transformed a vast, multi-roomed warehouse behind the gallery with architectural interventions, punching holes in the walls and ceiling. Double-sided paintings hang from silvery chains and LED light strands, and the floors are haphazardly carpeted in astro-turf and red plush. Custom-made slippers, screen-printed buckets, ceramic figurines and action figures litter the space, sometimes in precise constructions, and at other times lying about in wait for a crushing step. Photos simply don’t do the show justice; go and see it for yourself before it closes on April 26.
EXHIBITION: BERNARD PIFFARETTI AT CHERRY & MARTIN
Bernard Piffaretti’s show at Cherry & Martin features a number of works in a signature style that the artist has used since the 1980s. He begins by dividing the canvas with a line of color, and the painting that results looks like a diptych duplicate, two versions of the same image sharing a canvas with the originary line designating their “personal space”, giving the exuberantly colorful forms a little breathing room. But Piffaretti doesn’t think of his painting halves as duplicates. Rather, they are half-answers to a question, negations that return the viewer to the starting block.
The exhibition statement quotes Piffaretti:
“A copy is made in relation to a final state.” Duplication is a postponement – a break in the action that allows the viewer to see both sides of the canvas. An uncanny pattern emerges in Bernard Piffaretti’s paintings as Arielle Blair has written, “the eye wanders back and forth attempting to unlock the puzzle of the self-contained meme and decode the artist’s experiments in variation.” “The principle rule of dividing the canvas,” provides “a platform while functioning as an anchoring device of each painting.” “Piffaretti’s duplicated paintings are neither exact copies of one another, nor are they independent images.” They “make us do a double take, defying the stagnancy of certain abstract painting.”