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art reviews from around new york

A child was born in Gaza after her mother’s death, to an uncertain fate. Soon she, too, lay dead, I read in The New York Times, but what if she had lived, and what is it like to be a child in time of war?

To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, the question has become a staple of wartime journalism, with good reason. Articles like this one are crowd-pleasers—poignant, humane, hopeful, a bit of a cliché, and all too close at hand. So, too, is what I came to see, sculpture on the Met roof by Petrit Halilaj through October 27. He treats casualties of war not as numbers, but as budding lives and artists themselves.

Halilaj pictures not them but what they see, and he should know. Born in Kosovo in 1986, he was just five when a decade of Balkan wars began. He spent a year in Kukes II, a refugee camp in Albania, and an inscription along the base of one large work reads Return to Kukes. It is, though, the outlines of his remembered home, now destroyed. Sculpture since David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Gego has often boasted of “drawing in space.” And here a child’s drawing translates easily into slim, jagged lines of bronze and steel.

Halilaj, now based in Berlin, calls the show his Abetare, after an alphabet primer in Albania. On one trip home, he visited a museum of ethnology (a former museum of natural history) that had salvaged classroom desks from the Balkans, and he takes his imagery from what children had drawn or carved there, as children will. This is not just his home, but also theirs. Nor is it just his spider in a second sculpture, with the nasty smirk of a knowing child. Its shadows cling to the Met roof like graffiti, and so do smaller works, like one reading HERE. And here we are.

Other pieces include Batman (alas, not Spiderman), a proclamation that 2 + 2 = 5, a large flower, and a star, in what aspires to a child’s whole universe, but this is not just for children. Batman hangs upside-down like an actual bat, the math could be an act of rebellion or a refugee’s loss of years of school, the house looks near to collapse, and the giant spider owes a debt to Louise Bourgeois. (Her spider in Dia:Beacon was long my laptop’s lock screen.) Nor is the roof altogether suitable for children—not when it serves as a bar during summer. Art in past summers has been more site-specific, like table settings by Adrian Villar Rojas or a curved wall by Héctor Zamora, but Halilaj uses every inch he can. Two pigeons on the roof of the roof might have flown in from Central Park.

It pays to look up, all the more so because the Met has raised hedges atop the roof’s low walls. They add to the summer’s greenery and, just perhaps, public safety, but hide the view. And Halilaj is, at heart, always looking up. An angel poses on his spider, as if looking over its shoulder, and the pigeons could doves of peace. An eye could be a child’s or the ancient Egyptian symbol of prosperity and protection. The tilted house will survive as a work of art.

Still not quite ready to enter Central Park? A bright pink-purple missile defends the park entrance by the Plaza Hotel, as Parabolic Light. Fred Eversley through August 25 stands with the California “Light and Space” artists of the 1960s, like Larry Bell and Doug Wheeler, although he owes his translucent materials to more high-tech materials. Just hope he does not start a world war over who will inherit Minimalism. If he does, I am rooting for the spider. I am also set to leave Manhattan altogether in search of art, and I continue next time with Huma Bhabha in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Sometimes found art is better than the real thing. When it comes to art in the parks, how could it not be? It came in response to the park, in the form of blossoms and bird nests. Talk about site-specific sculpture.

So it was in Madison Square Park in spring, where yellow markers just off the ground rose to almost the exact size of the pigeons that moved freely among them. They could just have alit themselves, and their spare fabric or plastic could have been taking flight. Now if only they could have nibbled on what Rose B. Simpson calls her Seed, through September 22, and maybe they will.

Summers in New York, art sows its seed everywhere, including the first ever Harlem Gardens—but I leave that to a separate review. This year’s tour of New York summer sculpture runs instead from Brooklyn and Queens to the very tip of northern Manhattan, with stops along the way for Park Avenue, the High Line, City Hall Park, and Simpson in Madison Square Park, starting with an extra post tomorrow on the Met roof. What, though, could be nicer than the found art of the city itself?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

A typical summer show of a Lower East Side’s gallery’s roster had me fooled, at Magenta Plains through August 16. A curtain of white sweeps across an abstract canvas as if in motion, only to fall beneath before a more colorful field that gives the whole a greater sense of structure and care. It took a moment to see the artist’s characteristic verticals in a divided surface. Let me then, if I may, present a review of her work earlier this year that somehow never made it online.

When Jane Swavely calls a painting Silver OID, silvery it is. It does not need metallic paint or glitter, just oil on canvas to shine. It does not need shifting reflections as one’s eye crosses its surface or one’s body walks beside.

It attains that sense of visual and material substance with paint alone, the brush carrying pools of white as it will, covering and mixing with gray. It looked back to a time when painting pretty much meant painting in oil, for its ability to lend depth to a flat surface by holding in the light, through February 24—and I work this in with other recent reports on recovering women in abstraction as a longer review and my latest upload.

Not that everyone back in the day needed oil. Enamel and industrial paint were good enough for Jackson Pollock now and then, for their shine and low cost, but then he also threw in cigarette butts and coins. Still, Swavely looks back, in her scale and commitment to abstract art as well. Paintings can run up to ninety inches high, and the sixth in the series is ninety inches square. She likes how large paintings are that much more visual and material.

That version looks to a different postwar artist, too. A broad stripe descends the full height of the painting, much like “zips” for Barnett Newman. Swavely is thoroughly contemporary, and her paintings are brand new, but then the Jewish Museum has argued for Newman’s relevance to art today. Her zip, like his, cannot so easily stick to the edge or center of the canvas. Here its right edge falls just to the right of center. Still, it has fluid edges, much as Newman sometimes allowed his brush to show in a zip while keeping the background color seemingly untouched.

Hold on, though, for she is not just reworking the past. Blacks lend depth to that deep red vertical, much as whites lend silver to gray. The stripe is also more than a foot wide, like brushstrokes for David Reed, and another painting devotes roughly its left half to much the same rust and blood red. One could almost see the halves in collision, were the boundary not so loose and permeable. One could almost see the gray as background, were the brushwork on both halves or within the larger silver field and the stripe not so much the same. Other paintings defy the very thought of a zip, as one rich color climbs the right edge and crosses over the top.

They may look as if they date to the 1950s, but Swavely ls not history. Born in 1959, she has long exhibited with A.I.R., the women’s collective in Dumbo. Just starting out, she assisted Brice Marden and Lois Lane at that. One can see Marden’s equation of monochrome color fields with drawing in her abstract painting—and Lane’s New Image painting, like that of Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg, in her refusal of purity. The material nature of paint here is just that, a step into this world, not a higher calling. She might cringe at Newman’s “The Sublime Is Now.”

She fits with the present interest in overlooked women in abstraction, although she has exhibited regularly since the 1980s. She may still seem to fall between generations or run across them. Yet her work is a powerful alternative to the “everything goes” version of the revival of painting or, for that matter, to the zip. Past shows have presented a still greater depth, using dark, resonant colors with elusive outlines. There, too, she insists on that visual and material substance. It carries her from deep red against silver to color climbing the wall.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.