Son a Thai diplomat, globe-trotting artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has traveled the world for much of his life. On tables covered in rich, purple felt, copper reproductions of the artist’s passports from throughout the years glint in the abundant sunlight of Gavin Brown’s Grand Street gallery like bars of precious metal. (On view through Oct 28th).
New paintings made in New York and North Carolina feature spring blossoms and mobile homes in Verne Dawson’s current show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. In the foreground of this bucolic but blighted landscape, Dawson portrays a pastoral scene of women bathing and gathering water, not from a sylvan spring but from a ditch. (At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise on the Lower East Side through June 24th).
Tiny ghoulish characters – a blue faced man with huge teeth, a sinister frog in a t-shirt – populate young Swiss artist Vittorio Brodmann’s paintings of brick walls. Two sided and hung in the window to show bricks both inside and out, the paintings suggest neighborhood decline but also offer the wall as (literal) canvas. (At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise through Nov 13th).
Brian Belott’s eclectic, messy collaged artwork pops up regularly in New York group shows; this month for Gavin Brown’s Lower East Side summer group show, Belott’s the organizer, having asked artist friends to contribute their own reinterpretations of iconic artwork. Among the standouts, Giva Beavers remakes Van Gogh’s Starry Night as if rendered in bacon and Melissa Brown brings Holbein’s Ambassadors up to date in paint and lottery scratch-off ink on aluminum. (Through July 30th).
