Seattle-based ceramic artist Akio Takamori’s sleeping women rest in round bundles on low pedestals, their eyes open slightly, seemingly observing us while we’re spying on them in their sleep. Colorful and curvy like Matisse figures, it’s as if drawings have materialized in three dimensions. (At Chelsea’s Barry Friedman Gallery through Oct 30th.)
Akio Takamori, Sleeping Woman in Red Dress with Orange Hair, stoneware with underglazes, 2013.
Brooklyn-based artist Angel Otero adds towers of ceramic and steel to a selection of his trademark textured paintings created with oil skins in his latest body of work at Chelsea’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Lauded for suggesting ‘secrets unearthed,’ not ruins but ‘ideas to build on, models to live by,’ in a recent piece by The Village Voice’s Christian Viveros-Faune, Otero’s fired steel and glazed porcelain ‘Slot’ sculptures evidence a remarkable drive to alter his materials. (Through Nov 2nd).
Angel Otero, installation view, ‘Gates of Horn and Ivory’ at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Sept, 2013.
Tonight is the public reception for Richard Serra’s most recent New York sculpture show at Gagosian’s 21st and 24th Street spaces in Chelsea. Glimpses like this one of the installation, which has been ongoing since Sept at least, suggest that the exhibitions will be as impressive as ever. (Through Jan 25th).
Bali-based American artist Ashley Bickerton has long painted tropical paradise inhabited by corrupt, non-idyllic characters. Now, his nubile female stock character has morphed into a brightly made-up crone with a snaking tongue and necklaces of trash. As disturbing as she is, it’s a bold new direction for Bickerton, who ups the ante with even stronger contrasts between attraction and repulsion. (At Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side space through Oct 26th).
Ashley Bickerton, MV1, aluminum, oil and acrylic paint, hair, cement, 2013 (foreground). Ashley Bickerton, m-DNA_eve1, oil and acrylic on digital print on wood, 2013 (background).
Like graphic design come to life, Sven Lukin’s minimal abstractions involve sensuous, curving lines moving in surprising ways. Here, an anthropomorphic, flesh colored line pushes into the gallery’s corner like it’s trying to hide, through the title, ‘SNUG,’ suggests it’s happy to do so. (At Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 26th).
Sven Lukin, SNUG, enamel on Masonite and wood construction, 85 x 75 x 6 inches, 2010.
