This week in Newly Reviewed, Andrew Russeth covers Léon Spilliaert’s brooding pieces, Betty Parsons’s restless forms, Adriana Ramic’s beetles and Ho Tam’s barbers.
Chelsea
Léon Spilliaert
In the most unforgettable picture in this thrilling show, the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert stands in a dimly lit room and stares straight at — or through — you. It is difficult to be certain because his eyes are shrouded in darkness, just washes of black. In a neat suit, with hair aglow, he is unworldly. It was 1908, he was 27, largely self-taught and ambitious, an illustrator now creating symbolically charged works on paper with ink, watercolor, pastel and the like.
Spilliaert lived in the seaside city of Ostend, where the painter James Ensor (1860-1949) spent most of his life. If Ensor was a master of manic anxiety (menacing clowns, mad skeletons), his younger peer was a specialist in brooding. His coastlines bend and recede until they disappear in lonesome, twilit beach scenes. In one, water laps at the feet of two girls, who are really just black silhouettes, far removed from the faint hotel in the distance.
The exhibition, curated by Noémie Goldman, of the Agnews gallery in Brussels, charts Spilliaert’s range with about two dozen works from the 1900s and ’10s. A brightly lit scene of a woman doing needlework harbors an array of virtuosic marks, while a large bottle is shadowy, unknowable. (A portrait of his perfumer father?)
Spilliaert’s world can feel at once Romantic, overwrought, gothic, proto-surreal and yet true to life. Doom is barely held in abeyance, sometimes not at all. Four bodies are strung up in a tree in a piece inspired by François Villon’s 15th-century “Ballad of the Hanged Men.” A putrid yellow sun is shining, and the tree’s roots are spreading in every direction.
Tribeca
Betty Parsons
As an artist, Betty Parsons (1900-82) has long been underrated. She is in the history books as a venturesome New York art dealer, championing Abstract Expressionists, a role that overshadowed her art practice. This taut show of nine paintings from the 1960s reveals another obstacle Parsons has faced: She was a restless talent, never settling into a major, signature style, like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock or her other luminaries. That makes her hard to market, but easy to identify with, and to admire.
Some of the pictures here are astonishing. “Reverberation” (1968) is a vertical wonder, nine feet tall, of loose, hesitant organic forms, with strange repetitions, asymmetries and hints of the body. A jazzy, amoeba-like small gouache, “Palm Beach Xmas” (1960) has Elizabeth Murray’s exuberance, while “Without Greed” (1960) is a deep burgundy field holding peculiar forms. The best work may be the rough-hewed “Sand With Shapes” (1966), populated by spectral beings or architecture.
“I’m always changing,” Parsons said the year before she died, referring to her art. “I never know what I’ll say or do next.” Her works exude a profound commitment to intuition. At a time when many artists (and dealers) chase trends, it would be nice to see a Parsons survey — including the charming painted driftwood pieces she made later in life — in a blowout retrospective, ideally at a museum in her hometown.
Chinatown
Adriana Ramic
It would not be out of place to view Adriana Ramic’s show while crawling, since most of the pieces hang a few inches above the floor. These are six long, thin wooden beams that Ramic adorned with numbered stickers that come with a popular Croatian chocolate bar, each depicting a different animal. (A toucan is 165, a frog, 100.) One has the sense of a child building a collection, trying to understand the world. Blank stretches await new acquisitions.
The main event is right on the floor, a video projected on slabs of dark glass: close-up footage of leaf beetles atop white ginger lilies. Luscious and mundane, the video becomes surprisingly dramatic as these little creatures navigate their minute perches. Will they hold on? Will they eat the smaller insects around them?
Ramic tinted the gallery’s windows so that they suggest the glass holding the beetles. Perhaps we are not so different from these bugs, trapped within their frames? There is a fruitful tension here between scientific, deadpan modes of viewing and attendant emotional effects.
Lower East Side
Ho Tam
Time for a haircut? Ho Tam has you covered. In 2015, Tam, who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Vancouver, published a photo book on the barbershops and hair salons of Manhattan’s Chinatown, titled “Haircut 100” (though he counted more). His lucid black-and-white images recall Eugène Atget’s desolate photos of early-20th-century Paris, but his focus is people relaxing, laboring and socializing — caring for one another. Spreads from the volume are displayed as mural, including texts he wrote from his research.
One remarkable establishment he visited, which also sold fish balls, is sadly gone from Henry Street, a gallery row these days. Tam’s project is a tribute to Chinatowns and so-called third places — social venues apart from home or work — which are increasingly scarce, and expensive, in some areas. I recently paid $12 for a slice of cake downtown, the price of a cut at some of these establishments.
See the February gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in March appeared first on New York Times.
