May 19, 2022 Arts & Culture Postcards from Ellsworth By Rebecca Bengal Ellsworth Kelly, Having The Time Of My Life, 1998. Collection of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. 1 Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art. Read More
May 17, 2022 Studio Visit The Distance from a Lemon to Murder: A Conversation with Peter Nadin By Randy Kennedy Peter Nadin’s exhibition, “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” is on view at Off Paradise until June 23. The painter Peter Nadin was born in 1954 near Liverpool, the son of a sea captain whose family roots stretch back centuries in northwest England. Nadin studied art at Newcastle University and moved to New York in 1976, a time of deep, consequential flux in the city’s art world, when the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism were giving way to new forms of experimentation, including a rebirth of interest in painting. Nadin plugged almost immediately into a downtown art scene that included young peers like Christopher D’Arcangelo, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Along with D’Arcangelo he founded the collaborative art site 84 West Broadway, an anti-gallery exhibition space located in his own Tribeca loft, in 1978. And he later became a founder of an unlikely artists’ collective called The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, whose members—including Peter Fend, Colleen Fitzgibbon, and Robin Winters—offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients. It was a social-practice practice many years (too many years, as it turned out) ahead of its time. When I first met Nadin, in 2011, at the insistence of the gallery owner Gavin Brown, a fellow Brit, he had already become something of a myth, having dropped completely out of the commercial art world for almost twenty years. He had become dissatisfied with the machinery of galleries and the limitations it imposed on his work. Instead of showing, he simply kept painting, mostly on a farm that he and his wife, the entrepreneur Anne Kennedy, had bought in the Catskills. Nadin also taught for many years at Cooper Union, and became deeply involved in the life of his farm and of the people who lived around it. I first visited him there to write a profile for The New York Times Magazine. The conversations that began then have continued with some frequency for more than a decade now, mostly in the summers, in the Catskills, looking at paintings, sculpture, plants, animals, mountains, ponds, and sky. After many years of rebuilding his thinking about painting through cycles of conceptual work, Nadin recently returned to what he called “painting from life,” the works heavily grounded in the greenhouse and immediate environs, much of the painting done during a concentrated period of pandemic isolation. A selection of the paintings is the subject of an exhibition now on view at Off Paradise gallery in Tribeca, titled “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” open through June 23. Nadin and I recently sat down in the living room of his home in the West Village to pick up the thread once again. Read More
May 16, 2022 Arts & Culture Basilica By Cynthia Zarin Giotto Di Bondone, “Mary Magdalene’s Voyage to Marseilles,” 1320s. LICENSED UNDER CC0 1.0. For a number of weeks one spring, I spent every afternoon at the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi. It was what we then thought was the tail end of a plague, and I had come to Italy to visit a friend who had lived for many years a few kilometers above Assisi, in an old schoolhouse. This turned out not to be the visit I had imagined, nor, I am sure, the one she had, and after a few weeks, I went to Rome. But before that, every afternoon, I drove down into town—I had rented a car—past the long flank of Monte Subasio, with its temperate oxen, parked on the escarpment before the gates because the switchback of tiny streets flummoxed me, and walked down to the basilica. Everything was off-kilter, as if a great wave had passed over us, and now, if we were lucky to be alive, we found ourselves stranded on the banks of our own lives or paddling furiously toward where we imagined the shore might be. I had been to the basilica and to Assisi many times over the years to visit my friend, and so I knew my way on the small strade that opened and closed into a series of piazze, as if the town had exhaled and then drawn breath again. Because you could not come with me, I was aware of seeing with your eyes, which in any case had become a habit, and as the streets diverged and reconnected, I thought of our long drives through the old mill towns of New England, where the houses press up against a communal idea—the church, the post office, the firehouse—and imagined your voice saying Incredible! as you paused at a crumbling viaduct or a ruined steeple. My route passed through narrow cobbled capillaries lined with bright flowers; the cafés were open but almost empty. The last time I had been to Assisi was several winters before. It was freezing, and a few days after Christmas, the piazza and the tilted streets were deserted. A huge blown-up reproduction of Andrea del Sarto’s painting of the Madonna with angels was still projected on the outside wall of the Church of Santa Chiara, and the façade was bathed in unfathomable blue-and-red light, as if the story of the Christ Child was too large for the apse to contain, and the church was wearing the mystery on its skin. Read More
May 16, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2019: Berkeley/Summit Hospital, Oakland By Joyce Carol Oates Photograph courtesy of Joyce Carol Oates. March 29, 2019 Berkeley/Summit Hospital (Oakland) It is not true that for all persons the essential question is: Shall I commit suicide? But it is true for the widow. The placating fantasy, that makes possible those countless hours of bedside vigil. The beloved husband is asleep, or, if awake, not so very aware of you as you would wish. You are forced to see, as in an ingenious torture, how, moment by moment, diminishing second by second, you are being erased from the beloved’s consciousness. When he looks at you without looking at you. For the widow there is one looming question: Should you outlive your husband? For Widows Who Have Considered Suicide When Surviving is Not Enough Read More
May 13, 2022 The Review’s Review On Watery Artworks and Writing-Retreat Novels By The Paris Review Jim Campbell, Topographic Wave II. Photograph by April Gornik, courtesy of Sag Harbor Church. “Empire of Water,” on view until May 30 at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, is well worth a wander out east. The exhibition, cocurated by the Church cofounder and artist Eric Fischl and the chief curator, Sara Cochran, features watery works from forty-two artists including Warhol, Ofili, Lichtenstein, Longo, and Kiefer, and an Aitken that delights. But the cake stealer is hiding in the back corner of the first floor: Topographic Wave II, by Jim Campbell. Tucked behind a partial gallery wall are 2,400 custom-built LEDs of various lengths mounted on a roughly four-by-six-foot black panel and arranged neatly in a tight grid, like a Lite-Brite for grown-ups or a work of Pointillism by robots with OCD. From a small distance, images appear as shimmering figures swimming through Pixelvision water. Walk closer and the picture dissolves into fragmented dots blinking some unrecognizable pattern. For a short time I paced in front of it, goofily leaning in close then stepping back. Distantly, I recalled an instruction to squint when viewing Seurat, so I did that, too. —Joshua Liberson, advisory editor Read More