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art reviews from around new york

When a work takes over the gallery, is it site specific, or was the gallery an obstacle on the way to making art? For Leonardo Drew, the choices are inseparable.

He makes work so massive and diffuse that it stops at nothing—if only as a figure of speech. In real life, Drew stops for everything, only to keep piling it on. The result is untitled, for who would dare pin it down, at Galerie Lelong through October 19? The walls themselves are a breath of light.

Drew has been piling it on for a long time now. I first encountered him in what become one of this Web site’s first gallery tours, in early 1997, and again in 2001. I started the site with extended reviews of art’s deep history in museums, where my heart still lies. I had gone to galleries, though, and was just then seeing the departure from Soho in action. One dealer on the move, Mary Boone, had shaken things up on West Broadway with a scorn for late Modernism and a studied elegance, with such artists as Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, and David Salle. Drew, though, had little time for either elegance or scorn. He was trashing the place much as late modern art had done before.

Richard Serra had flung molten lead, at his own risk. Barry Le Va had broken glass, and Chris Burden had crawled across the wreckage. Artists have been sorting through the damage ever since. For Ilit Azoulay at the Jewish Museum, every loss is the bearer of memory in the Middle East. And one can look at Drew’s scraps a long time in search of something familiar, from his studio or his history. He is, after all, African American. He, though, has his eye elsewhere.

Another side of late Modernism nurtured the optical and physical qualities of nonstandard materials. Back when, Drew incorporated rust for its powdery texture and iron oxide glow. Now he combines wood scraps, glass and paint. They produce dark colors against the gallery’s freshly painted white. He also arranges them in square panels, hung on the walls much like squares for Ad Reinhardt. He asks to restore Reinhardt’s translucency, color, and approach to black while playing to the house.

Still, these are remnants, and he lets you know it. Back in the day, I saw a little too much theater. I saw a little too much theater. I compared the air of decay to the end of Planet of the Apes, the Statue of Liberty among the ruins, while less sure about what to curse. Drew can, though, be genuinely site specific, accepting what came before. When he turned to public sculpture in Madison Square Park at the start of the pandemic, he let the grass shine through. It was high time I revisited my own cynicism.

It is hard to dismiss outright work that covers the walls, nestles into a corner, and surrounds supporting columns. Scraps on the wall seem to rise as if from a single act of force, and the corner pile gives that force direction. Scraps on one column gather at top like a mushroom, while scraps on the other fall around the base. They look back to the artist’s studio while running free. They are anything but Reinhardt’s, but they still play with materials, darkness, color, and light. Theater or not, it is the show’s heart of glass.

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

Everything from Adam Pendleton seems to fly by faster than even he can comprehend it, including race. Everything, too, asks you to slow down long enough to ask what you are missing. But then what could oblige you to stop and to think more than abstract art? And I work this in with other recent reviews of the challenges facing abstraction as a longer review and my latest upload.

Pendleton is always politically aware, but never in a way that you might expect. He made his name with text paintings, quoting prominent black Americans or simply the word BLACK, like a history of America in graffiti and spray paint. Naturally he covered every inch of the lobby of the New Museum for a show of “Art and Mourning in America,” and naturally it was all but illegible. Could that make him the natural candidate for a full-bodied abstract art? For MoMA, the graffiti was gone, leaving only a video and a tenement fire escape running the height of the atrium. For the 2022 Whitney Biennial, text and a recognizable image alike vanished.

Pendleton is still thinking aloud, with “An Abstraction,” at Pace through just the other day, August 16. The smears remain, but as ghostly compositions. Colors echo the electric tone of black enamel. Diagonal partitions convert a prominent Chelsea gallery into a maze, with repeated warnings not to step too close. The work is coming right at you all the same, stepping into and out of time. Time itself may have tricks up its sleeve when it comes to racism. Pendleton at MoMA also captured the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond and its fall—and now a Virginia community is returning the names of Confederate leaders to its streets.

Another artist at age forty stakes his career and his sanity on black abstraction as well. And he, too, plays with proximity, distance, and the material reality of paint. Chris Watts may add wood slats to his work, suggesting if only for a moment a view of the stretcher from behind. Other works have dark wood frames and their echoes in brushwork. He adds enough layers of resin that the entirety seems under wraps. Five tall paintings fold into nearly a circle, but with an opening.

Even if you do not or cannot enter, their sheen might have enclosed you this sprig, at Galerie Lelong this spring through May 5. And that sheen is more than half the point. One series incorporates lapis lazuli for its brilliance. Another seems to paint the sky. Watts describes the work as in religious tones, with the precious stone an emblem of the spiritual. Maybe so, but it is painterly and physical.

These days anything can go into a painting, but not everyone is comfortable with “anything goes.” A painter and teacher whom I trust dismissed the show as “student work.” It comes down to a dilemma that I face in review after review here. My heart is still in abstraction, but I still struggle to know what of it is any good. Yet I also argue for proper criticism as about more than judging. Who cares about the “originality of the avant garde” anyway?

The dilemma takes on special urgency for abstract art, which necessarily turns questions of form into questions of value. If a show borrows from past art, is it merely “derivative“? If it does not, how can it foreground the elements of its art? A white artist, Suzanne McClelland has been asking touch questions for years and rewarding them with brushwork and beauty. Her latest, just recently at Marianne Boesky through June 8, made me think of Lee Krasner, with black structuring her colors into something close to tiling. How else could the rich repertory of painting contribute more than a formula or a mess?

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