NYC Gallery Hopping

September 14, 2017

NYC Gallery Hopping

A bad head cold + bad rain kept me from attending the immigration panel discussion. Bummer. But, I was able to head to the city to go gallery hopping. In Chelsea, a number of the galleries will host their openings on Thursday nights, and the streets are packed with people going from one to the next. There were a number of fascinating exhibition openings. Here are glimpses of what I saw:

Some of Robert Motherwell's early paintings were on view at the Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Orange Personage, Robert Motherwell, 1947
Oil and sand on canvas

Orange Personage, detail
You can see the fabulous texture in this detail image here

Maya Lin had an opening of "Maya Lin: Ebb and Flow" at the Pace Gallery. It was too crowded to be able to get full pictures of her installations; many of them are huge and extend from floor to ceiling. There were guards posted throughout the gallery to protect the work on the floor. I asked one of the guards how all the marbles were adhered to the walls, and he said hot glue. I don't know if that's true or not but it gives me pause to think about finger burns and threads of glue if I had done it (but nowhere to be found here).

Detail, "Ebb and Flow", Maya Lin

I discovered a new-to-me artist that I found captivating: Nathalie Boutté. Her exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery called "Crossing-over" was amazing. From a distance, these works seem to be, perhaps, a woven textile. But no. They're collages made from tiny hand-cut strips of Japanese paper, individually assembled into rows, using the tint and text on the paper to create images.

L: The African Choir (9), 2016; Japanese paper, ink
R: The African Choir (11), 2016; Japanese paper, ink

Detail, The African Choir (11)

Detail to appreciate the complexity of these collage constructions

The James Cohen gallery featured, A Line Can Go Anywhere, a curated exhibition featuring seven Bay Area artists who use fiber as their primary material. It was a wonderful compilation of a variety of work dating from the 1950s to the present.