Curated by Alyson Baker, Mark Dion and Marichris Ty, State Fair is a group exhibition themed around American rural life and uses the platform of the state fair as a means to examine topics such as animal husbandry, specialized horticulture, small scale farming, culinary arts, and the pageantry within these fields that occurs at fairgrounds across the country. The show will also incorporate work that references traditional craft, and the myriad of amusements, rides, competitions and entertainment that are presented as part of state fairs.

Kansuke Fuji / Banana / 860 x 610 / Ippodo Gallery

I stumbled up the Ippodo Gallery today on 26th Street. A nice little space in the basement of the building that it shares with the Onishi Gallery. Kansuke Fuji’s work felt very still and serene. Strong negative shapes and visually pleasing surface geometry. While the work is representational, the pieces really move toward abstraction as the shapes and forms in themselves take on more importance than their identity as objects.
Kansuke Fujii @ Ippodo Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street, through July 3rd

Sat, May 17, 2008 | 3:00 PM
New Museum theater

In conjunction with the current exhibition by Tomma Abts, Kraus Family Senior Curator Laura Hoptman will moderate a discussion on abstraction as a method and idea with artists Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz.

Thomas Nozkowski is a painter who has had sixty-eight one-person shows. His most recent exhibitions include an installation of new work at the 2007 Venice Biennial, a midcareer survey at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, 2007 and the Fisher-Landau Center, New York, 2008, and a one-person exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2008. The New York Studio School presented a twenty-five-year survey of his drawings in January 2003. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Phillips Collection among many others. Currently, Nozkowski is the Bob and Happy Doran Visiting Artist at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is also Professor of Painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Forthcoming one-person exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and the Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, Canada.

Dana Schutz was born in Michigan in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York, Boston, and Paris. Schutz’s paintings have also been presented in a number of group exhibitions including “Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008; “USA TODAY,” The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 2007; “Fractured Figure,” DESTE Foundation, Athens, 2007; “Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation,” Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2007; “Closer to Home,” 48th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005; “Greater New York,” PS1, Queens, (2005); “The Triumph of Painting,” The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2005; and the Venice Biennial, 2003. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. Currently, a group of new work by Schutz is on display at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. In July, she will participate in “After Nature,” a group exhibition at the New Museum.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

The drawings and paintings are light and airy. The sculptures and installation pieces brought a smile to my face. Like a child encountering and fascinated by the surrounding world populated with birds, butterflies, and a myriad of other flying creatures.

Rebecca Horn’s exhibition will be comprised of both new large-scale paintings on paper and a group of signature sculptures. These important new paintings, the scale of which are determined by the extent of the artist’s physical reach, evoke personal, metaphorical, and metaphysical influences orchestrated through dynamic gesture. The new paintings on paper clearly relate to Horn’s seminal early performance pieces in which she sculpturally extended the body into space. In an accompanying catalog essay Doris von Drathen explains: “Against this backdrop, the paintings on paper assembled here under the title Cosmic Maps are more that just ‘recent works.’ As a group, these paintings from the last few years plot oscillations, for the first time opening out a pictorial space that hazards to sever all connection to topographical space ….”

Rebecca Horn, (born in Germany, 1944), is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Historically, her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including film, performance, installation, photography and sculpture, whilst addressing themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The employment of such wide ranging interests as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, the mechanical and the sensual, has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last three decades and has resulted in one of the most distinguished and individual oeuvres in recent memory. Horn has participated in the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions, she has had a retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and she is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions.

Rebecca Horn, Cosmic Maps, at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th Street through June 14th

Rachel Feinstein / Army of God / 2008 / Copper and wood / 12 feet 3 inches x 17 feet x 7 feet 9 inches / Marianne Boesky Gallery

The Rachel Feinstein show at Marianne Boesky Gallery was a nice surprise that I walked into yesterday. I had come down to Gladstone Gallery to see the Dieter Roth drawings show and seeing that I still had time before needing to head back to work I decided to pop in. There are 7 pieces in the show and each is a bit creepy. There is one, Puritan’s Delight that feels like a carriage out of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow melting into the floor. I almost felt as if I was standing in a swamp on a foggy moonless night. I was particularly struck by Army of God. This piece really disrupted my sense of space as I moved in front of it. The reflection of light and sound of the thin sheets of copper felt like it embraced me and shifted my sense of bodily awareness. I felt the ground falling away and the heavens opening up. Well…ok maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, unless of course you dropped a tab of acid before stepping up in front of it, but it was still impressive.

Feinstein’s new sculptures depict a variety of subjects including mythic and religious iconography, amorphous figures, and a broken carriage, altogether pursuing themes of beauty, fantasy and ruination. Inspired by images of Brancusi’s studio showing the range of materials, forms and scale in his sculptures, Feinstein undertakes a similar diversity in her new works. Utilizing plywood, resin, and for the first time cement and copper, the artist allows each sculpture its own unique finish.

A felled wooden carriage, finished in black stain and fitted with a working lantern, takes its inspiration from 19th century Austrian royal stagecoaches. A trio of wreathed minstrel-like figures, connected to one another by a length of rope, offer a multi-faceted, Cubist viewpoint with cutouts of flattened shapes and forms jigsawed together. Other sculptures reconfigure putti and centaur-like figures, abstracting them almost beyond recognition.

In the main gallery will be a large-scale wall relief rendered in cut copper. The work, inspired in part by 15th century tapestries, depicts an abstracted Saint Michael slaying the dragon amid a tangled mess of wings, lances and tails. With its super thin copper construction and jagged, unfinished edges, the work evokes a seductiveness through the extravagant materiality and tormented surface. Each of the Feinstein’s sculptures retains its autonomy with an individual narrative, ultimately relating to the juxtaposed one in terms of the positive and negatives spaces of its form.

Rachel Feinstein is on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street through May 24th