This week in Newly Reviewed, Andrew Russeth covers Keith Haring’s rollicking murals, John Duff’s gritty inventiveness and a group show focused on the human body.
Chinatown
Keith Haring
Through Feb. 7. Martos Gallery, 41 Elizabeth Street; 212-560-0670, martosgallery.com.
In a time of ostentatious public art — Thomas Heatherwick’s vile “Vessel,” Anish Kapoor’s more endearing “beans” — Keith Haring’s approach represents a refreshing tonic. Working quickly and often spontaneously, he chalked drawings in New York subway stations and painted walls around the world, intent on delight.
In 1984, he sprayed a rollicking scene on 30 metal panels affixed to a fence in a Manhattan park along the East River, a roughly 300-foot-long mural visible from cars on the nearby Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive; 14 are now installed in a dazzler at the Martos Gallery.
Outlined in black, more than 50 of Haring’s trademark cartoon humans dance, flip, jump and fly (some sport wings, others pregnant bellies), accompanied by the odd dog, caterpillar or lightbulb. Everyone is going wild, and crisp red lines and squiggles punctuate their fluid movements. One figure is labeled “T.K.C.”: the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, who documented many of Haring’s pursuits. (Tseng died in 1990, at 39, a few weeks after Haring did, at 31, both of AIDS-related illnesses.)
Haring made far more intricate works, but this punchy party seems apt for drivers cruising or crawling along the highway near East 91st Street (a stretch of road that would still benefit from charismatic art).
Inside a gallery today, the joyous picture registers also as a moving artifact. Removed in 1985 and now dispersed, its panels are scrapped and bear graffiti. “Angel + Lisa 104 St,” one addition reads. (Where are they now?) The critic and curator Bob Nickas notes in an accompanying essay that, after Haring saw the weathered work in 1989, he wrote in his journal that it was “in really bad shape, but somehow that makes it look even better.”
It’s a convivial artwork about the pleasures of being together in public, and so it would be ideal if a museum would snap up these panels and reunite them with their peers.
Chinatown
John Duff
Through Feb. 28. Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 165 East Broadway; 212-477-5006, reenaspaulings.com.
If even a few more artists had as many off-the-wall ideas as the sculptor John Duff, art would be a much richer domain, and writers tasked with making sense of it would have a far more difficult job.
Born in 1943 and based in New York since the late 1960s, Duff is a contemporary of leading Post-Minimalists, but he bobs and weaves around sundry modes, wielding industrial materials like concrete, steel, rubber and fiberglass. His 21 works at Reena Spaulings — half from the past few years, the rest older — are united by a gritty inventiveness and a canny elusiveness. Class him with Robert Grosvenor and Lee Bontecou as a creator of objects that harbor secrets and then unfold them slowly.
From the start, Duff seemed to be challenging himself to see what he could do with the most cast-off, abject ingredients imaginable. Clamshells, painted green and strung with wire, become a constellation on one wall. The mystery hanging on another (a ritual object, a whip?) is a tree branch wrapped with black cloth tape and rubber.
Some recent pieces could be crude architectural maquettes, perhaps for an ancient amphitheater and a lunar lander. Others, built with Styrofoam, cement and screws, suggest complex abstract constructions that have been damaged by fire; they have craggy holes but are still solid.
And then there is the plain-spoken one on a pedestal: metal cans and bricks combined with slapdash concrete, a tiny empty liquor bottle at its side. Relics of the street outside? A model for a home? Like so much of Duff’s art, it’s ramshackle but quietly dignified.
Chinatown
‘Eruption’
Through Feb. 28. Jarvis Art, 96 Bowery; 929-320-9560, jarvis.art.
Uniting thematically related material by canonical figures and ambitious up-and-comers is a well-worn group-show conceit. But “Eruption,” organized by the Jarvis Art gallery and the art dealer Max Werner, does it with finesse and surprise, its 18 pictures portraying human bodies marked by mixtures of anxiety, lust and freedom.
The elders include Neo-Expressionists like Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl and Georg Baselitz, whose splotchy 2001 portrait of Joseph Stalin is enigmatic and upside-down. (A Baselitz quotation also provides the show’s title: “Art is visceral and vulgar; it’s an eruption.”)
But the most satisfying contribution is by the category-eluding octogenarian painter Sylvia Snowden, an oozing, smoldering 1978 near-abstraction from which two hands appear to be growing.
The young guns tend toward cooler, more restrained visions. (If they’re erupting, it’s inward.) Besuited men walk, downcast, through an eerie landscape in a Jan Eustachy Wolski work. Spectral people, here and not, populate wan paintings by Konstantina Krikzoni and Andrew Woolbright.
Alexandra Metcalf presents a femme fatale perched atop a couch, somehow merging with it, while a golden figure is camouflaged with the surrounding world in a beguiling 2026 painting by Osama Al Rayyan.
In a frightening Georgia Gray Gardner work, at least, a man is wailing, kneeling as he presses his hands together. Expressionism can provide catharsis, and this does, until you start wondering about the two men looming behind him.
See the January gallery shows here.
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