This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Aleksandar Duravcevic’s meditations, R.H. Quaytman’s veins of color and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s provocations.
Lower East Side
Aleksandar Duravcevic
Through July 31. Totah, 183 Stanton Street; 212-582-6111, davidtotah.com.
One of my arch undergraduate classmates used to quip: “In art history we don’t discuss the existence of God. We just examine his draperies.” (God was always a man in the old master paintings we studied.) However, drapery — like theology — can be infinitely more complex. Aleksandar Duravcevic demonstrates this in “The Fold,” his series of paintings and bronze reliefs at Totah.
The fold in Duravcevic’s work can be literal, like the close-up, carefully rendered creases appearing in a series of oil and acrylic paintings. Or it can be topological, like the rippling surfaces of his bronze reliefs, inspired by the mountaintops in his native Montenegro.
It can be spiritual, as in the undulating surfaces of minimalist works that use Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine religious icons as their starting points. Or it can be conceptual. One series here, made by treating stainless steel sheets with chemicals, turns an industrial surface into something spectral and miraculous: light folded into reflecting and refracting rays, and rainbows.
Overall, Duravcevic’s work is minimal and meditative, delicately restrained. It may be because he arrived in Italy in the 1990s from a disbanding Yugoslavia and studied art in Florence. The drapery folds of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Michelangelo clearly registered — but as something elemental and profound, compared with the interpretations of less sensitive viewers.
Lower East Side
R.H. Quaytman
Through June 28. Miguel Abreu, 88 Eldridge Street; 212-996-1774, miguelabreugallery.com.
At the top of the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp during the 2018 blockbuster Hilma af Klint exhibition was an installation of paintings by the contemporary American artist R.H. Quaytman. Why this pairing? One reason is that Quaytman organized the very first survey of af Klint’s work in the United States, at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 1989 (before it was MoMA PS1). Another reason is that Quaytman, who refers to her own bodies of works as interlinked “chapters,” was responding to a series of 10 books by af Klint.
Affinities between the two artists linger in Quaytman’s current show, “Ones, Chapter 0.2” at Miguel Abreu. Quaytman expands her celebrated conceptual approach — relying heavily on photographs and silk-screening — to painting freehand. Veins of modulated color snake across the panels, and Quaytman makes blurred, ghostly images emerge by swirling a mulling tool on the surface. More than a few forms in this “chapter” recall af Klint’s spiraling vegetal motifs (on view at the Museum of Modern Art right now.)
And the equivalences are more than formal. At the opening, according to the gallery, a viewer fainted while contemplating “Ones, Chapter 0.2” (2021-2025), a painting depicting a circle inside a square that uses tiny pixel-like squares to create moiré patterns (large-scale interference patterns) and prismatic effects. It’s a challenging, deeply retinal painting — for some, overpowering. Maybe it’s the moiré patterns, or, as af Klint’s proponents would argue, Higher Powers at work.
Chinatown
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Through June 28. Maxwell Graham, 55 Hester Street; 917-675-6681, maxwellgraham.biz.
In the 1960s and ’70s, magazines and newspapers became platforms for making art, with people like Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Lynda Benglis and Adrian Piper creating mass-media-inspired conceptual artworks.
Cosey Fanni Tutti took the project a step further: She worked as a pornographic model, then sought out the magazines in which nude photographs of her appeared and signed the magazine spreads as artworks. “Magazine Actions,” first exhibited in 1976 in an incendiary exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, titled “Prostitution,” are currently on view at Maxwell Graham.
What makes this art and not just porn? The lineage of Tutti’s gesture can be traced back at least to Marcel Duchamp signing a urinal in 1917 and calling it sculpture. Tutti’s work also dovetails nicely with 1970s feminism, as seen in essays by Laura Mulvey studiously analyzing the “male gaze” to identity-bending photographs by Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta and David Lamelas. At the Maxwell Graham show, Tutti appears as “Geraldine” or “Nanette,” and the anonymous texts read like a Greatest Hits of early gender studies.
Tutti is best known, though, as a member of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. In 1979 they released “20 Jazz Funk Greats,” an album whose famously devious cover image shows the band standing in a bucolic landscape. Only, the site happens to be a famous suicide spot in England.
Photography, in that case, was used as a means of tricking the consumer. Similarly, with “Magazine Actions,” Tutti wrote in her smart, funny autobiography “Art Sex Music” (2017): “I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation. I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes.” She added that she “was transgressing rules — feminist ones included.”
See the May gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in June appeared first on New York Times.
