Tag: paula cooper

Eric N. Mack at Paula Cooper Gallery

Eric N. Mack calls himself a painter whose medium is fabric – new work at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea is mostly hung on stretchers that support not canvas but collaged fabric fragments.  Like painting, Mack’s work foregrounds color and pattern, but the artist doesn’t add these elements to the canvas, rather he encounters them as found materials.  Instead of creating transparency and texture from paint, these are qualities of the surface itself.  Sourced from divergent origins – Mack might use fabric from couture clothing or neighborhood markets – the artist collapses quality distinctions in his dynamic abstractions.  (On view through Dec 22nd in Chelsea).

Eric N. Mack, Strewn Sitbon, fabric on aluminum stretcher, overall: 41 x 34 ½ x 6 inches, 2023.

Sol LeWitt at Paula Cooper Gallery

Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings – some 1,200 sets of instructions for turning architecture into art – range from the simple (e.g. drawing lines in patterns going up, down and to the side) to the kind of full-room, immersive installation currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery.  Energizing but restrained, a matte, fresco-like orange tone dominates, setting off multi-hued, isometric pyramids of various colors that seem to float through space.  In the center of the gallery, white enamel on aluminum sculptures resemble tips of icebergs adrift on the gallery’s polished concrete floor.  Surrounded by angular geometries in the cavernous rectangle of the gallery, visitors inhabit a parallel universe governed by alternative rules of color and space.  (On view on 21st Street in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).

Sol LeWitt, Wall drawing #485 (detail), three asymmetrical pyramids with color ink washes superimposed, color wash ink, 1986. Sol LeWitt, Complex Form #6 (to the right, detail), enamel on aluminum, 1987/1988.

Veronica Ryan at Paula Cooper Gallery

In her solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery, Monserrat-born, England-based artist Veronica Ryan engages themes of global movement and trade with humble materials including fruits, seeds and other organic matter.  Ryan has pointed out that familiar foods bring people together to share meals and memories; she has also incorporated materials like ash from the Soufrière Hills volcano, which has covered the town in which she was born.  Pleasure and trauma also meet in this pile of stoneware cocoa beans, a product that brings happiness to many, sometimes at the expense of enslaved workers. (On view in Chelsea through May 28th).

Veronica Ryan, Cocoa Passion in Tandem, ceramic stoneware, pigment, volcanic ash, jute rug, overall: height variable x 70 7/8 x 70 7/8 inches, 2021.

Ja’Tovia Gary at Paula Cooper Gallery

Ja’Tovia Gary pictures the variety in Black womanhood in her new three-channel video installation at Paula Cooper Gallery with footage shot of the artist in Monet’s garden at Giverny intercut with video of Nina Simone’s 1976 performance at the Montreux Festival and street corner interviews with women of African descent in Harlem.  Through direct animation on archival film, internet footage and her own images as well as montage, Gary employs a variety of techniques to present a complex view of Black interiority. (On view in Chelsea through March 21st).

Ja’ Tovia Gary, installation view from THE GIVERNY SUITE, three-channel film installation, 2019.

Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery

The painting furthest from the door is the first to attract attention at Paula Cooper Gallery’s show of recent work by New York abstract artist Dan Walsh.   Glowing like a tower-top beacon, a stylized ziggurat resembling the pinnacle of the Empire State Building lures visitors into minimalist painting by a self-styled ‘maximalist.’ (On view in Chelsea on 26th Street through Feb 15th).

Dan Walsh, Expo III, acrylic on canvas, 110 ¼ x 110 ¼ inches, 2019.