How do you morph a white-cube gallery into a revitalized, post-industrial space? Try Matthew Darbyshire’s vinyl banners, based on an architect’s rendering of public space. They create a pleasingly anodyne setting, perfect to host Darren Bader’s conceptual art piece in which plants and people converse with each other (or in the moment captured here, huddle over an iPhone.) (At Lisa Cooley Gallery, Lower East Side, through Feb 3rd).
Boasting ‘one of the largest column-free spaces for exhibiting art in the city,’ Hauser & Wirth’s spectacular new Chelsea location even has an impressive entrance. Work no. 1461 by British conceptual art titan Martin Creed is a permanent installation consisting of 2-inch wide adhesive tapes whose vivid colors lend visitors the energy to climb the stairs. Check back tomorrow for a peek upstairs.
Eberhard Havekost’s painting ‘Ocean’ is once again on display as Chelsea’s Anton Kern Gallery reopened today, post-Sandy. It’s a standout in a show about Havekost as artist and consumer, who transforms an enviable body (sourced from a German ad) into a mottled obstacle to the paradisiacal scene behind. (Through Dec 15th).
Conceptual artist John Baldessari pairs song lyrics with images abstracted from canonical paintings in his latest series of paintings. The odd angle of this deer’s head gives its source away as an 1867 hunting scene by Gustave Courbet. The hunt looks more comical than gruesome in Baldessari’s version, though on reflection maybe both deer and fly should be spared. (At Marian Goodman Gallery, 57th Street, through Nov 21).
Alighiero Boetti’s gorgeous installation in the MoMA’s atrium defies Sol LeWitt’s oft-quoted 1967 remark about conceptual art that ‘all of the planning and decisions [for a work of art] are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.’ In ‘Mappa’ from the 70s and 80s (on the back wall) and kilims from 1993 (in the foreground) Boetti commissioned his artwork from Afghan craftswomen, ensuring that execution shares the spotlight with conceptual content while recalling Minimalist seriality and Jasper Johns’ proto-Pop.