Category: Don’t Miss

June 16th Tour (2-4pm) – Best Contemporary Art in Chelsea

Dana Schutz, Piano in the Rain, 2012, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.
Dana Schutz, Piano in the Rain, 2012, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group gallery tour (limited to ten or fewer participants) for an intimate exploration of New York’s best art.  At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!

Tours last two hours and take place regardless of the weather.  Advance registration is required to reserve your place and can be made by contacting Merrily at:  merrilykerr@nyc.rr.com.

Our itinerary will showcase eight of the most important and talked about exhibitions of the moment, including an energizing mix of artwork in different media by emerging talents and internationally acclaimed artists.

Meet at 508 West 26th Street. Tour departs at 2pm. $40 pp in cash or check on the day.

June 9th Tour (2-4pm) – Best Contemporary Art on the Lower East Side

 

Michael DeLucia at 11 Rivington
Michael DeLucia at 11 Rivington

Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group gallery tour (limited to ten or fewer participants) for an intimate exploration of New York’s best art.  At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!

Tours last two hours and take place regardless of the weather.  Advance registration is required to reserve your place and can be made by contacting Merrily at:  merrilykerr@nyc.rr.com.

Our tour will include exhibitions at veteran downtown galleries and outside-the-box projects, guaranteeing a lively mix of unconventional artwork and unique spaces.

Meet in front of 235 Bowery (The New Museum). Tour departs at 2pm. $40pp in cash or check on the day.


 

Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen

Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen
Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen

No artist stereotype is as persistent as the garret-living starving artist, but a runner up with a more contemporary feel must be the artist trapped in the studio, ruminating on his or her surroundings.  Bruce Nauman’s floor-pacing, wall-bouncing videos from the 60s and ‘Mapping the Studio…’ from ’01 give the artist’s space itself a role in the creative process.  Jeanne Silverthorne casts her studio floor as a means of ‘archaeology’ while artists like Ellen Altfest have created meticulous renderings of paint-splattered floors, plants and views from the window of her studio.

London-based artist Elizabeth McAlpine also reproduces scenes from the studio, but obscures their origins in ‘The Map of Exactitude,’ her first New York solo show.   The exhibition features mysteriously shaped sculptures combining organic and geometric forms and even more eccentric-looking framed images on paper that hint at architectural diagrams which, in a way, they are.  McAlpine’s sculptures are actually casts of the ceilings and corners of another artist’s studio, which she then made into pinhole cameras with multiple tiny openings.

Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen
Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen

Photosensitive paper folded to the dimensions of the casts’ interiors records multiple views that are often so abstract, they don’t really give much insight into a place that is intended for art making.  Instead, McAlpine puts the artistic process itself on display by exhibiting her tools and the resulting images – sculpture-like cameras – on equal footing.   Using the peculiarities of the space to make artwork about the space could be obnoxiously self-referential, but comes across instead as a thoughtful reflection on the process of pursuing ideas and discerning meaning in the studio.

Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen, 261 Broome Street, Show extended through July 1, 2012.

New Whitney Biennial Tour (4/29) and Chelsea Gallery Tour (5/5)

Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group tour of the biggest museum show of the season, the Whitney Biennial.  Find out why critics are calling ‘the show everyone loves to hate,’ one of the best ever.

In early May, Merrily will guide you to the best Chelsea gallery shows of the moment, including a jungle gym-like installation composed of crocheted netting and plastic balls by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and the late Richard Avedon’s monumental photo murals.

‘Best of the Whitney Biennial,’ Sunday, April 29, 2012, 11:30am – 1pm

“Artists are taking matters into their own hands,” says New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz, “…resetting the agenda, and fighting back against an art world that had been focused on selling, buzz and bigness.”  Join Merrily to find out what the buzz is about on a small group tour focusing on the visual art in a show dense with performance and film.

SPACE IS LIMITED to the first six participants to register with Merrily by email at:  merrilykerr@nyc.rr.com.  Meet in the lobby of the Whitney Museum, (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street). Please purchase tickets prior to the day of our tour at whitney.org or arrive at least 20 minutes in advance to purchase a ticket to this extremely popular show.  The museum opens at 11am and the tour departs at 11:30am. $40 pp in cash or check on the day.  Does not include museum admission ($18 general admission, $12 seniors 62+).

‘Best Contemporary Art in Chelsea,’ Saturday, May 5, 2012, 11am – 1pm
Our itinerary will showcase eight of the most important and talked about exhibitions of the moment, including an energizing mix of artwork in different media by emerging talents and internationally acclaimed artists.

With space limited to ten or fewer participants, Merrily’s small group tours are an intimate exploration of New York’s best art.  At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!

This tour will last two hours and take place regardless of the weather.

SPACE IS LIMITED to the first ten participants to register with Merrily at merrilykerr@nyc.rr.com.  Meet at 508 West 26th Street. Tour departs at 11am. $40 pp in cash or check on the day.

Matt Collishaw ‘Vitacide,’ at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Matt Collishaw, installation view. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Matt Collishaw, installation view. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Photos of Texas death-row prisoners’ last meals, giant prints of dead insects and sculptures of diseased flowers (titled, for instance, after a poem from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal or a U.K. waste-management company) confirm that original Young British Artist Mat Collishaw still traffics in sensation. Surprisingly, the most gratuitous subject—the last meals—proves to be the most thought-provoking, despite the fact that it, too, reflects Collishaw’s fondness for grotesquery.

Collishaw rightly calculates that our morbid fascination will attract us to these photos of french fries, steak, cinnamon rolls and other repasts, dimly lit to recall Dutch still-life painting, but mainly looking gray and unappetizing. Still, evoking this last moment of pleasure does create twinges of sympathy for the condemned, whose orders range from a dish of yogurt to a heaving pile of food.

Vitrines of waxy-looking, boil-covered, meat-pink amaryllis, lilies and other flora growing in toxic soil are so blatantly gross that they kill any such nuance of feeling. A video animating decaying flowers buzzing with flies in a comically misty dead forest does a bit more than the sculptures to suggest the dark enchantment hinted at in Baudelaire’s title, but setting the flatscreen behind an 18th-century altarpiece seems like a mere ploy to stir the pot with a tangential religious reference. Collishaw gets it right when he mines the contradictions in humanity’s capacity for base thoughts and actions. But when he simply represents it, he produces more of the same.