For almost five decades, Medrie MacPhee’s paintings have navigated the space between abstraction and representation. While architecture and demolition were primary references in her early collages and drawings, the artist has turned to the use of ordinary materials – second-hand and discount clothing with its concomitant buttons, zippers, and seams – pasted to the surface of stretched canvas. The result is at once anatomical and topographical: a plane of shapes, seams, and decorative details, unified by a wash of white gesso like a blanket of snow over the landscape seen from a plane window.

While MacPhee’s materials are modest, her ability to wield them is anything but. Her sharp instinct for scale and her obsession with preserving a sense of disequilibrium and off-balance tension in the final image reveal the surprising textural possibilities of flatness. She finds the sourcing, deconstruction, and reassembly of discarded clothing deeply satisfying – a process which results in collages steeped in memory, material history, geometric potential, and a quiet, overlooked poetry.

MacPhee is also Nicole Eisenman’s good friend and unofficial “paint doctor”. The two met in 2002 while teaching at Bard College, and during the long drives they shared from the city to the campus, they compared notes on the exhibitions they had seen that week. The artists began to trade studio visits, advice, and coffee, and the rest is history.

In this conversation for Elephant, MacPhee and Eisenman cover the false binary of abstraction and figuration, regret and purpose in life’s last chapters, what a world without signs might look like – and the violent acts of “painticide” they commit when a work doesn’t come out quite right.

marcdanielmayer

Medrie MacPhee’s show “The Repair” reconciles figuration and abstraction with great subtlety. Asemic compositions are formed of deconstructed clothes collaged to the picture plane and dissimulated under paint. Only spectral outlines and smothered textures survive of fabric cut to cover bodies. New structures are imposed and erratic lines drawn to put us off the scent of the figure. Abstraction’s encryption of appearances, its retreat from mimesis, anecdote, sentiment, temporality, and movement in space, is held tightly to these incidented surfaces. The work is taut, conceptually and physically, but also emotionally as we slowly distinguish ghosts. Clothes that once concealed bodies are themselves concealed, occulting the figure without obliterating its memory. Only a faint recollection remains—at a sentimental remove because these are not our clothes—of the sensual shapes and movements of an anonymous subject standing for us like a semiotic proxy. MacPhee recycles a random wardrobe for a new purpose, a redundant occultation not only of the figure, but of the landscape where it moves; a scene painted to distance us further from the figure and the animate maker of these pictures. Time and culture, the dating language of bodily adornment, are neutralised in the articulation of a space stripped of overt reference. These pictures are their own metaphor. MacPhee makes abstractions that remind us what was originally meant by the word, retracing its etymology algebraically, and exposing what was lost in the forward march of the idiom: “Abstraction of what?” is a question we no longer ask. Having reached the monochrome, or should I say submitted to it as one submits to God, or to psychoanalysis, the “what” is discarded like old clothes. Something is roiling here under the paint, flattened, stilled, silenced, but roiling.

The five abstract paintings in Medrie MacPhee’s “The Repair,” at Tibor de Nagy, have just enough indications of figure/ground and observed reality to evoke landscape, interior space, aerial view, blueprint. What also connects these paintings to the physical world, as we perceive it, are minor shifts of line, contour, or color that activate the surface and keep the paintings from being flat. While the paintings are large, all but one measuring 64 x 84 inches, somehow the small gallery doesn’t feel crowded. The colored shapes within each painting are similarly large, with a looming assertiveness, but also a matter-of-factness that can be disarming. Color is applied in uniform expanses and the same color can serve as both figure and ground and as simply a painted surface. And then there’s the way that clothing, which underlies it all, mimics the human form.

The Reluctant Genius of Rudy Burckhardt

The complexity of Burckhardt’s work is easy to overlook, because he calls attention to neither his mastery nor his labor.

Two decades have passed since the last exhibition devoted solely to the paintings of Rudy Burckhardt. Never one to toot his own horn, Burckhardt was a polymath whom the poet John Ashbery characterized as “unsung for so long that he is practically a subterranean monument.” The paintings are just one part of his diverse oeuvre, which also includes photographs, films, and the autobiography Mobile Homes (1979). Within each of these mediums, he explored multiple avenues. It is this multiplicity that makes him both memorable and elusive and why Rudy Burckhardt: A Painting Exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery is a must-see event. Through his directness, modesty, and scrupulous attention to detail, the artist’s representation of the oddness of the ordinary is unrivaled. 

The exhibition is comprised of 16 paintings — mostly Maine landscapes (1972–97) and New York cityscapes (1970–87), as well as a 1947 self-portrait and a 1968 still-life — accompanied by a group of paintings done on large dried, perennial mushrooms, arranged on a table. It’s works like these that have thrown people off when encountering Burckhardt’s art. He was a serious artist who never took himself too seriously. He painted manhole covers and lichen clinging to trees, things everybody saw but never stopped to look at closely, much less paint. 

Art writing is a terrible way to make money. By and large, so is artmaking. Anyone who’s good at math would tell you to at least apply some basic max-min logic to either process: Maximize your income while minimizing your output. 

Of course, that’s the kind of shortsighted cynicism people come to the art world to escape—or is it? You could argue it’s one of our basic instincts. We have so many expressions in praise of winnowing—of separating the wheat from the chaff, skimming the cream off the top, filtering out the noise. And from these clichés we’ve distilled even more words: sorting, screening, refining, purifying, condensing, et al. The word critic comes to us from an ancient root that means “to sift,” and the word tabloid began life as a trademark for pills and soon became a synonym for newspapers with short, condensed, easy-to-digest articles—encapsulations, if you will (and you will).

THE MOST FAMOUS drip painter you’ve never heard of is poised to make a comeback. “Janet Sobel: All-Over” is the first museum exhibition to highlight the abstract canvases for which Ukrainian-Jewish self-taught artist Janet Sobel won acclaim in the New York art world of the 1940s. Anchored at center by the superlative Milky Way, 1945—an edge-to-edge opalescent storm of plums, pinks, and creamy yellows now owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art—this tightly curated show is as bracing and brief as Sobel’s dalliance with fame during her lifetime.
The early canvas Disappointment, ca. 1943, sets the terms of Sobel’s provocative challenge to prevailing art-historical narratives that elevate the production of outsider artists while keeping them at arm’s length from the modernist avant-garde. Pressing against the foreground is an expressive, humanoid landscape in which gnarled tree branches twist into proto-drips encrusted with sand and fields of flowers claustrophobically enrobe haunting, disembodied faces. Sobel collapses figure and ground as motifs inspired by Ukrainian folk art meet a Chagallian, faux-naïf elegance. Is it primitive or modern? How do we choose, and do we have to? 

Sobel was a luminary of abstraction in the United States, and one of its primary innovators. Acclaimed in her lifetime for her skillful use of color and densely layered compositions, she was as voracious in her choice of materials as she was experimental in her methods of application. She oftencombined oil paint, enamel (likely harvested from her family’s jewelry-making business), and resin; mixed in sand to produce a gritty texture; and played with light by sometimes workingon panes of glass. Allowing the liquid pigment to form widewebs and pools, Sobel would then blow it with a pipette, marble wet colors together, and tip the support to manipulate the surface. Such was the level of her originality that Clement Greenberg, the famed critic of Abstract Expressionism, would later remark that Sobel’s output constituted “the first reallyall-over [effect] that I had ever seen.”
 

HOUSTON — In the fall of 1944, the gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim was confident that she’d found the next big thing. “Put Janet Sobel on your list,” she once wrote to a fellow gallerist. “She is the best woman painter by far (in America).” A year later, Guggenheim included Sobel’s work in a group show at her renowned New York gallery Art of This Century, which then hosted the artist’s solo show the following year. Covered in vibrant, dripping colors and web-like layers of texture, Sobel’s groundbreaking paintings attracted the attention of New York’s key critics and artists; in fact, Jackson Pollock created his now-iconic all-over drip paintings sometime after seeing Sobel’s work. But in 1947, at the height of her fame, Sobel left New York and its art scene. Soon after, American art history largely left her behind, too.

Janet Sobel: All-Over at the Menil Collection is a timely, captivating glimpse into this formative but nearly-forgotten figure through 30 of her paintings and drawings. Curated by Natalie Dupêcher and on view through August 11, the exhibition not only presents visitors with the rare opportunity to experience Sobel’s unique work, which broke the mold of mid-century American avant-garde art, but it also raises important questions about the ways that we remember and historicize artists who have long been pushed to the margins.

After I visited Surrealist at Tibor de Nagy, Jimmy Gordon’s debut New York exhibition, I did some research to learn more about who the artist was. The press release told me: “Gordon (1947–2022) was born in Lexington, Kentucky,” his “paintings [were] created between the 1990s to the mid-2000s,” and he had an “alter ego, whom he named La Jimberly” and sometimes lived in that persona for “weeks and months at a time. During these times, he always signed his artwork Jimberly rather than Gordon.”

For those of us with a soft spot for practical effects movies and guitar solos, the confluence of technique & material so unexpectedly encountered as to render novelty or discourse irrelevant to the virtuosity before you, Tibor de Nagy’s latest Jess (1923—2004) retrospective, Piling Up The Rectangles, is a total thrill. Their seventh solo showing of the Beat-era artist after nearly ten years and their first to confidently combine Collins’s painstakingly-crafted collages and paste-ups with his oracularly touched oil paintings, it showcases a breadth of techniques and densities that aren’t just aesthetically bonkers but genuinely get at why we’re so enraptured by art in the first place.

A San Francisco Art Pioneer’s Collaged Dream Worlds

With the layers of his collaged “paste-ups,” Jess pulls us into an oneiric world, at once delightful and perplexing, magical and sublime.

By John Yau

In the mid-1990s, I began visiting the reclusive artist Jess in the Victorian house in San Francisco’s Mission district that he shared with the poet Robert Duncan. During one of my first visits, Jess showed me two things that I have never forgotten. In a closet in the crowded but orderly parlor room, he showed me completed jigsaw puzzles that he had carefully stacked. The stack was at least six feet high, and each puzzle was identified by a note. That afternoon he also showed me his flat files, drawers full of carefully labeled envelopes holding images he had cut out and classified for his intricate “paste-ups,” which is what he called his collages. Each paste-up was composed of images — sometimes hundreds — from a wide range of sources. 

The ghostliness continues next door at Tibor de Nagy, who just opened Shari Mendelson’s Chasing the Deer, a series of small artifact-like sculptures cast in mineral shades one might consider off-white, light light-blue, light light-green, and pale gold. In her just-released memoir Everything/Nothing/Someone, Alice Carrière speaks about extremely thin drinking glasses that her mother, painter Jennifer Bartlett, had custom-made with the intention of being as close to nothingness as possible. A similar idea seems to be in play here with Mendelson’s sculptures, which are so light and ephemeral that they had to be glued to their pedestals with museum wax so they don’t blow over when the door opens. Mendelson draws from a disparate set of cultural references for her subject matter, including an ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seal in Chasing the Deer and an Instagram post of her friend carrying a goat in Ram Bearer (2023). Mendelson’s deft technique completely obscures the fact that all of these works are made out of regular plastic bottles, the socio-cultural and environmental implications of which are intriguing, creating a subtle interplay between ancient artifact-hood and throwaway consumer detritus.

The light is fading now, and a walk back across Sara D. Roosevelt provides a window to watch the nightly game of pick up soccer. After seeing a bunch of exciting new art, for a great evening of nearly-free entertainment, buy a couple tall cans of beer with a friend or two and watch these guys play in the evenings until it gets too dark and they start missing too many shots.

My memory of the moment, almost a decade ago, is indelible: the sight of a swimmer’s back, both sides equal—each as good and righteous as the other. An ordinary thing, and something I had never had, and still don’t have. To think of that moment is to feel torn—once again—about how I should respond to my condition: whether to own it, which would be the brave response, as well as the proper one, in many people’s eyes; or to regret it, even try to conceal it, which is my natural response.

The Elders, the debut exhibition at Tibor de Nagy (April 20–May 26, 2023) of the anonymous artist new.shiver, follows on the artist’s first, largely unheralded, similarly titled exhibition, New.shiver: The Elders, at Satchel Projects (April 21–May 22, 2022). After seeing this person’s posts on Instagram, exchanging a handful of brief messages, and seeing the actual paintings at Satchel Projects and, now, Tibor de Nagy, I am taken by the artist’s patience, which is not emphasized in the work. No overt signs of labor and struggle can be discerned in the exhibition’s 20 intimately scaled works — all between 4 x 5 and 11 x 14 inches, composed of different densities of paint — which have a tangential relationship to gestural abstraction. 

Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal
by John Yau
 

I remember Joe Brainard. I never met him, and when I first felt his
influence I had no idea who he was or where he came from, but the
influence went deep. It came across stealthily and through scattered
channels, apprehended in the corner of the eye, in cartoons that
appeared in The East Village Other or back issues of his own C Comics
(including an unforgettable and much-shared creation called “People
of the World: Relax!”) or covers designed for the work of poets such as
Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman or flyers for the St. Mark’s Poetry
Project.

My Travels in the Land of Winkfield

Trevor Winkfield’s modestly scaled acrylic paintings abound in puzzling, private symbols.

One of the deepest delights of Trevor Winkfield’s graphically precise, kaleidoscopic pictures is that they are visual rebuses with no apparent solutions. In the brightly colored world he scrupulously conjures, every part coexists in rigid isolation from the others. Think medieval heraldry, Victorian lamps, and Edward Lear (both writer and draughtsman) meeting and embracing Burgoyne Diller’s geometric abstractions and Joan Miró at his most fantastical. As visually immediate as Winkfield’s modestly scaled acrylic paintings are, they abound in puzzling, private symbols. 

For anyone truly interested in singular paintings that neither look like anything else nor fit into any art historical narrative, and that define an immediately recognizable country known among his devoted fans as “Winkfield,” I highly recommend pondering the works in Trevor Winkfield: The Solitary Radish at Tibor de Nagy (January 28–March 4, 2023). What other artist would choose this exhibition title, endowing that lowly vegetable with plaintive poignancy? The show’s 14 paintings (all from 2018 to 2023) have titles — such as “Montezuma, Found at Last” (2021) and “Plant Wrongs” (2019) — that are as unlikely as the contents of the paintings they name.

A

CLEAR

SKY…

THATS

WHAT IS

IMPORTANT

NOW-A-DAYS

IN BOSTON…

WHERE… …

“EVERYONE

OWNS A RAIN-

COAT!” BUT ME. (JOE)

This is text taken from a pencil-on-paper self-portrait by Joe Brainard from January of 1963, sized at 4 ¾ by 3 ¼ inches, featured in both John Yau’s Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, and Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works at Tibor de Nagy. It’s one of the first works seen upon entering the show.

ME. (JOE).

That parenthetical (JOE) is representative of much of Joe Brainard’s writing, assemblages, paintings, drawings, and miniatures (etc.). He was earnest about being himself on the page, but never assumed that we must necessarily know that self. He never considered himself to have attained stardom, and thought of others first—something much to be noted when discussing the man who wrote I Remember, whose subject was identifiably “himself and everything he touched, saw, or cared about—a world that was simultaneously private and public, personal and anonymous,” in Yau’s words.

Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, poet and critic John Yau’s new monograph of the artist and writer, is a love letter from someone who knew Joe to those of us who wish we did—who feel like we must have. John Yau’s 73-page essay is referential, personal, and context-heavy, illustrating and mirroring the nature of Brainard’s work and life, providing a framework for the nearly 150 pages of plates that follow. Throughout his essay, Yau focuses on individual works sparingly, extrapolating key points in the pieces to contextualize the trajectory of Brainard’s life and practice. The book was released alongside a show of Brainard’s works at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side, an early favorite gallery of the Tulsa cohort of the New York School, just eight blocks away from Joe’s first apartment in the city (a storefront on 6th Street that now functions as a dry cleaner’s). The show, Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works, was on view from October 22 through December 3, 2022, and included many of the drawings and paintings that are featured in the book, a majority of which have not been exhibited previously.

“Deep periwinkle, plumbago, or the electric blue of the gloaming hour from his native England”: Those are the words of a professor with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Peter Gizzi, trying to pin down the exact variation of blue in one of Trevor Winkfield’s paintings. What is it about Mr. Winkfield’s art, currently the subject of an exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, that makes his admirers wax poetic?

Perhaps it’s because so many of them are, in fact, poets. Mr. Winkfield has actively sought their company since arriving on these shores in 1969. Among his admirers, friends, and collaborators are a veritable who’s-who list of like-minds, including John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Barbara Guest, Harry Matthews, John Yau, and Mr. Gizzi. In 2015, Poets House in Lower Manhattan feted Mr. Winkfield with an exhibition underscoring his relationships with those of poetic mien. 

The art of Joe Brainard is having a moment.

Joe Brainard, who to some is better known as a writer and poet, was perhaps under appreciated as a visual artist. This tide appears to be turning. In October Rizzoli published Joe Brainard: The Art of The Personal, a beautiful monograph about Brainard’s visual art. In the past year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received a gift of 16 important works by Brainard, making the Met the largest public collection holder of Brainard’s artwork, with 42 pieces. Word on the street is that an exhibition from their collection of Brainard works is on the drawing board. In November three works on paper by Brainard came up for auction at Sotheby’s New York. The first, a mixed-media collage, with an estimate of $5,000–$7,000, achieved a winning bid of $44,100. Then two drawings, both with estimates of $2,000–$3,000, sold for $44,100 and $94,500, respectively.

If you were in New York City this fall, you also would have had a chance to see a lovely jewel box of an exhibition of Brainard’s work at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. The exhibition, called “Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works,” consisted of 68 artworks. As someone familiar with Brainard's work would expect, the items ranged from not too large to very small. The largest pieces in the show were two untitled cut-paper works, one 29 x 23 inches, and the other, 29 x 23 ¾ inches. In each, paper is delicately cut into botanical silhouettes, and then the silhouettes are layered into a frame to create something that is at once a drawing and, in a way, a sculpture. The light in the room as well as the viewer’s movement around the pieces create subtle shadows and motion. These works are vague monochromes when viewed in passing or from afar. But in his poem, “Out in the Hamptons,” Brainard puts things this way:

Shirley Jaffe is an outlier in the history of Abstract Expressionism. A member of the so-called “second generation,” she was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1923, and grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. In 1948, she saw the Pierre Bonnard retrospective at MoMA, which influenced a number of artists of her generation, and in 1949 she moved to Paris with her then-husband, Irving Jaffe. In Paris, she became part of a scene of expatriate artists that included Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Jack Youngerman, Ed Clark, and, later, Janice Biala, Kimber Smith, and Al Held. Unlike the other Americans in this group, Jaffe, who passed away in 2016, never returned to the United States.

Jaffe began exhibiting her work in Paris in 1956, but she did not have her first solo show in New York until 1989. For those who have followed her art, the work in Shirley Jaffe: The 1950s and 1960s, Works on Paper and a Painting at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (December 10, 2022–January 21, 2023) is largely unknown in New York. The show includes 15 undated pieces on paper, likely from 1958–60, and a vertical oil painting, “Dominos 2” (1962). 

By Deborah Solomon

Nov. 16, 2022

Joe Brainard sought to take up as little space as possible. He specialized in small-scale works — collages, drawings, and occasional paintings that relate more to the proportions of a writer’s desk than an artist’s looming studio. “There is something I lack as a painter that de Kooning and Alex Katz have,” he jotted in his diary in 1967. “I wish I had that. I’d tell you what it was except that I don’t know.”

However much he may have lamented his perceived shortcomings, Brainard was ahead of his time in acknowledging his feelings of marginalization. Unable or unwilling to advance the grand tradition of painting, he created a major body of work by questioning the prevalent belief that artists should have an instantly recognizable, money-in-the-bank style. And he understood how cheapo things (comic books, cigarette packaging, gift tags, restaurant receipts, etc.) can be an expression of authentic emotion.

“Joe Brainard: A Box of Hearts and Other Works,” a fascinating and substantial survey show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, arrives right on time. It coincides with the publication of a new monograph on the artist by the critic John Yau, as well as with the much-praised Alex Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, in which Brainard happens to materialize as an unmistakable portrait subject. There he stands on the Guggenheim ramps, in two painted sculptures from 1966, a rangy, slightly nerdy young man with curly brown hair, tortoiseshell glasses and an oversized shirt collar jutting from his V-neck sweater.

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Moving between photography and sculpture, Joy Episalla’s work traces the touches we leave behind on the fabrics of everyday life. A seasoned AIDS activist and member of the queer art collective fierce pussy, which advocated for lesbian visibility during the AIDS crisis and continues to explore timely issues around queerness today, Episalla has maintained a dedicated studio practice alongside their collective work. I had the pleasure of being in conversation with the artist on the occasion of their first exhibition with Tibor de Nagy gallery where they are exhibiting a series of foldtograms. A signature medium within Episalla’s multifaceted practice, foldtograms are photographic prints produced from the darkroom process of camera-less photography. In the interview below, we talk about these and a new video work.

—Ksenia M. Soboleva

by Adam Simon

Lately I find myself wondering what impact the ubiquity of cellphone cameras is having on the practice of fine-art photography. As frustrating as it might be for the serious photographer to see everyone and their cousin constantly taking and posting pictures, one salient effect could be a rising inclination to explore the limits of what defines a photograph. There has been a resurgence of interest in photograms and camera obscura for some time now, and Joy Episalla’s current show of works labelled ‘foldtograms’ on view at Tibor de Nagy are even further removed from the idea of capturing an image. What replaces it is a very physical interaction between the artist and the basic materials and components of photography – photo paper, chemicals, and light.

“Foldtogram,” a portmanteau of “folded” and “photogram,” is a term coined by this New York artist to describe their novel addition to the long history of cameraless photographs. The works on paper in Episalla’s enchanting new show, “crack fold burn bright,” have been crumpled, bunched up, draped, and otherwise sculpted, both during and after their exposure to light. The process also involves dipping the sheets of paper into chemicals—developer, stop bath, and fixer, although not necessarily in that order. Most of the results appear, here, unframed on the gallery’s walls. They’re inky abstractions, paintings of a sort, alternately pearly and smoky, with curtains of irregular mesh that suggest capillary networks. But the brittle, warped, broken, and wrinkled topographies may also call to mind ceramics, and skin—or unnameable mysteries encountered in some industrial factory or discovered on a forest floor. The largest piece in the show heightens the over-all air of enigmatic menace. Made from an entire roll of photographic paper, it unfurls to the ground, and, in keeping with Episalla’s process-driven approach, it appears to metamorphose along the way.

— Johanna Fateman

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1917, Louisa Matthiasdottir came to New York in 1942 and stayed, either in the city or upstate, until her death in 2000. Like her husband, Leland Bell, and other artists of their coterie, Matthiasdottir was a figurative painter, but one for whom the figure was as much a pretext for arranging blocks of color as an end in itself.

In “Hestar — Paintings in Iceland,” a strange and wonderful show at Tibor de Nagy, those color blocks are devoted to the stocky little horses (“hestar”) introduced to her native country by Nordic settlers. Rendered mostly in silhouette, without eyes, against glowing green heath and blue stripes of ocean and sky, these repeating figures might make you think of more recent conceptual painters like Ann Craven or Josh Smith. But Matthiasdottir’s compositions aren’t as simple as they look. A horse in a green field, with its bulky torso and narrow legs, is actually the perfect means of exploring the way solid objects distort our perception of their backgrounds. In “Black Horse With Pink Shirted Rider,” the animal’s feet are all level but the ground seems to rise, and change color, under its belly. The chestnut-colored equine in the glorious “Dark Horse, Yellow House, Red Roof I,” meanwhile, sheds golden light like an electric lamp. WILL HEINRICH

THERE ARE ARTISTS, THERE ARE ARTISTS’ collectives, and there is assume vivid astro focus. This entity (project? practice? platform? Its ontological status is purposely unclear) marks its twentieth anniversary this year, having been founded in New York City by Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack. From the first, avaf was a radically open-ended endeavor. Even the name came by chance. “Astro” was occasioned by a case of mistaken identity in a secondhand clothing store; Sudbrack later discovered there was a makeup artist in the city by that name, who did in fact resemble him somewhat. He picked out the other words from “The LP Show,” a 2001 exhibition of more than 2,500 record covers curated by critic Carlo McCormick at Exit Art. Sudbrack collaged “Astro” with parts of the band name Ultra Vivid Scene and the title of Throbbing Gristle’s album Assume Power Focus.

Assume Vivid Astro Focus

It’s been seven years since the duo known as Assume Vivid Astro Focus has had a show in New York. But this exuberant comeback effort, “Hairy What? Hairy How?” at Tibor de Nagy, is also a solo debut. Its four large semiabstract paintings and a painted table — all lavishly fringed with wool yarn and surrounded by numerous smaller unfringed pieces — are the work of the Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack, one half of Assume Vivid Astro Focus. He formed it in New York in 2001 with Christophe Hamaide-Pierson, a French artist. These days the pair functions as much independently as together, but always under the collective’s name. This confuses, yet makes sense: Both sensibilities are rooted in the hallucinatory, multi-style, multimedia environments they concocted all over the globe for nearly two decades.

The extravagant fringe expands the paintings, flowing from all four sides to the floor, conjuring craft, fashion, dance, ritual objects and over-the-top interior decoration. The yarn always matches the infectious palette of the percolating compositions — a mix of Walt Disney, Magic Realism and South American abstraction that somehow glows with freshness. The shapes can be solid colors or graduated, fading to white as if on the silver (or computer) screen. The transitions of color and shape cause sudden pockets of space and cloudlike levitation. Elsewhere body parts are more than implied. The show recalls the sensory overload of Assume Vivid Astro Focus environments past. Compressed into this jewel-box space, the works read as a whole, especially through the gallery’s all-glass front.

ROBERTA SMITH

In 1922, T. S. Eliot told us of April’s “breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land . . . ” and thus instantly doomed a robust tradition of serious modern artists making pleasant pictures of purple flowers. Or so one might think. For one bit of evidence to the contrary, witness the exhibition of paintings and watercolors of “Interiors and Flowers” by Nell Blaine, on now at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side. Blaine’s sunny still lifes can seem disarming at first, but extended looking will reveal how the Hofmann-trained ex-abstractionist brought a rare sense of formal aplomb and painterly liveliness to these placid subjects. —AS

In 2012, when this Canadian-born painter started a conceptual fashion line called RELAX—featuring bespoke garments stitched together from sweatsuits and similarly comfortable, affordable castoffs—she also discovered an innovative, collagelike structure for her abstract canvases. (MacPhee, who moved to New York in 1976, had previously been depicting surreally empty architectural spaces.) In the four new paintings in her current show, at the Tibor de Nagy gallery, blocky flatness and rugged surfaces rule. The big compositions’ irregular shapes are plotted out by the seams of deconstructed garments, like parcels of land on a map. In “Take Me to the River,” a commanding work in bright navy blue, an overlay of white lines suggests fragmented circuitry; “Favela” is a handsome crowd of mustard, crimson, burgundy, and blue trapezoids. Although MacPhee sometimes plays with the gender associations of the fabrics she chooses, such concerns feel secondary to her invigorating and magnetic formalism.

— Johanna Fateman

About five years ago, Medrie MacPhee began to rethink her paintings. She jettisoned her swirling, unstable compositions, whose tangled forms, derived from architecture, often hung, Surrealist style, in empty space. She found, as many painters do as they mature, that she could do more with less. She started collaging parts of cutup garments to her canvases, fitting them together like puzzles, letting their welted seams define taut shapes that now extend edge to edge. She replaced a familiar illusionism with an adamant, witty physicality. In so doing, she dramatically improved her work and took ownership of it.

Four new canvases form “Words Fail Me,” MacPhee’s impressive second solo show with Tibor de Nagy. They are powerfully flat, more literal than abstract. Their compartments of color are alternately solid, slightly brushy or wiped down to a pale transparency. The familiar details function formally while providing little shocks of recognition: not only seams, but also belt loops, waistbands and the occasional zipper or pocket. In “Favela,” belt-looped waistbands painted white divide blocks of red and brown; they are placed vertically, like ladders, which evoke the title and MacPhee’s affection for architecture. In the majestic “Take Me to the River,” the entire surface is a deep oceanic blue and the dividing seams are picked out in white. It suggests a sparsely lighted terrain seen at night, from above. But plenty of seams are left lurking in the blue, creating a ghostly infrastructure whose depths have a horizontal pull — perhaps out to sea.

ROBERTA SMITH

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

In a world where an artist is either a professional or an outsider, it is useful to consider these words by Rudy Burckhardt: 

I am enough of an amateur existentialist and Buddhist to believe that we actually just mess around because we’re alive and awake — working, playing, scheming, falling apart, getting it together again, but never in control.

Burckhardt’s statement, which is cited in the press release for the exhibition Rudy Burckhardt: New York Hello! Photographs and Films from the 1970s and 1980s at Tibor de Nagy (December 11, 2020 – January 23, 2021), emphasizes his love for “mess[ing] around” rather than pursuing financial recompense in an industry where auction prices are often used to measure one’s accomplishments. 

When he died of aids, at the age of forty-four, in 1993, the painter Jesse Murry left behind a number of canvases and works on paper in his New York studio that not only revealed a dreamy, lyrical talent but also hinted at the deeply detailed artist he would have become. In a small show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery (through Jan. 12), the artist’s beautiful color sense is on full display, as is his interest in abstraction as a kind of landscape filled with the splendor of the earth and the expansiveness of the sky. Murry’s works are not large in scale, but they promote big dreams: his terrain is the unfettered mind and eye. He draws you in with his liquid awareness of how paint works on canvas, and how color and form can and should be handled delicately, and with respect.

— Hilton Als

Those needing a dose of gaiety—both the festive and the faggy kinds—should make their way to “100 Works,” a survey of paintings, drawings, and collages by the late Joe Brainard(1942–1994). Most are no bigger than a notebook page, and the dense hang is perfectly in keeping with the artist’s aesthetic of accumulation. He was, after all, the author of I Remember (1975), an expansive inventory of memories ranging from sad to sexy, beautiful to banal.

May 2019

Minor Master or Master of the Minor?One reason Joe Brainard made so many small works was to convey that modesty and ambition were not mutually exclusive.

Joe Brainard’s last New York show in his lifetime was legendary because of the sheer number of works it included. It was in 1975 at the Fishbach Gallery and Brainard was in his early 30s. Rather than making large works, as did many of his contemporaries, he cheerfully did the opposite: within a period of a few years, Brainard made more than 3,000 tiny collages. The gallery managed to exhibit 1,500 of them, which was quite a logistical feat.

Brainard’s reason for making small, affordable works is revealing. Talking to Lee Wohlfert about his students at the School of Visual Arts and about his motivations for working small, Brainard stated:

Most of the students agree that the art scene has gotten too big, too serious, too sacred, too self-important and too expensive.Already a bad situation in Brainard’s lifetime, the art world’s self-importance has become appalling since his death in 1994. The triumph of obscene wealth, bulbous frivolity, and swell-headed immodesty is not something the art world should be proud of, yet it is. (Maybe it is time that critics start calling out curators who seem to chase and champion only financially successful artists who make large works.)

Beyond the fact that Brainard reveled in making art, I think one reason he made so many small works was to convey that modesty and ambition were not mutually exclusive. To this combination he added a large dose of relentlessness, heightened by his inclination to be thorough. He once wrote me that he was going to read all of Charles Dickens’s novels again.

Four nested heads, their features interlocking: the drawing, from 1966, could be the cover of a Love album or an Aldous Huxley novel. In fact it’s an illustration by the late San Francisco artist known as Jess (1923–2004) for a poem, “Surrealist Shells,” by Robert Duncan, his partner. It’s as good an entry point as any for Jess’s wide-ranging work. The exhibition “Jess: Secret Compartments,” which traveled to Kohn from Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York

”Why Famous American Poet John Ashbery Made Hundreds of Collages

In his 1975 masterwork Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the late American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017) meditates on Francesco Parmigianino’s painting of the same name. The emotional intimacy of the Renaissance artist’s sensitive, tender-hearted portrait captured Ashbery’s imagination: “The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest?”

The Childhood Innocence of John Ashbery’s Art

Ashbery’s primary subject matter concerns an alternate world where nothing goes permanently wrong, and where disasters are nothing more than pranks

Delia Brown

Through June 17. Tibor de Nagy, 15 Rivington Street, Manhattan; 212-262-5050, tibordenagy.com.

Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), a painting depicting prostitutes on a notorious street in Barcelona, has served as both a cornerstone of modern art and Exhibit A in arguments about women being objectified and exploited in Western art. But what happens when women turn the lens on themselves, posting similarly suggestive or sexualized images on social media? Delia Brown uses this idea as a springboard for “Demoiselles d’Instagram” at Tibor de Nagy.

Several paintings here feature women taking “gym selfies,” a subgenre of Instagram self-portraiture. Cute harp seals are neatly woven into the compositions, suggesting the wild disparities of social media feeds, and one painting roughly mimics the composition of Picasso’s “Demoiselles,” with its shifting, jarring perspectives and distorted figures. Ms. Brown’s titles, made up wholly or partly of emojis, are a nice touch, too.

Ms. Brown’s acrid palette and stylized, often grotesque figures signal a departure from her earlier, more sedate realism. In the same way Picasso cribbed from African sculpture to almost-invent Cubism in his “Demoiselles” (full-blown Cubism came a year later) Ms. Brown’s ladies echo the exaggerated femininity of Japanese anime; Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings; Dana Schutz’s reduxes of Willem de Kooning’s Cubist-inspired reduxes of Picasso; the graffiti aesthetic of Kenny Scharf; and the brilliantly weird figurative paintings of 20th-century outliers like late-Francis Picabia and Leonor Fini.

In the end, however, women representing themselves via social media do not fare better here than they did in Picasso’s misogynist universe. (And while competent and often clever, Ms. Brown’s exhibition doesn’t constitute a comparable, seismic shift in the history of painting.) Society and the beauty industry’s demands may shape these representations, but rather than “victims” of sexist body culture, the “Demoiselles d’Instagram” appear to be flagrant perpetrators.

Medrie MacPhee: Flat-out at Tibor de Nagy

The journey or the dream, the unavoidable movement from one domain to another, is one of the themes running through a number of the recent collages. In others, which use a game board as the ground upon which Ashbery has affixed various images, a terrain is re-imagined. We seem to encounter the most unlikely and ordinary things, all of which are mysterious portents of what lies ahead. The other thing that struck me about these works is how gay some of them are. For a poet who is notorious for writing opaque poems in which autobiography and transparency are dispensed with, a number of collages celebrate the youthful male body with an innocence that is touching, tender, and, frankly, poignant and sweet.

John Ashbery is eighty-nine. In the last two months, he’s published a new collection of poems, Commotion of the Birds, and launched an exhibition of his latest collage work, which appears through January 28 at Tibor de Nagy. 

What have you done in the last two months?

Much has been made of the notion that Ashbery creates his collages by accretion, as he does with his allusive poems. No doubt. Yet he also works as a curator here, selecting images and staging them to tug the viewer in unexpected ways.  All the more unexpected since the artist whose sly boyishness comes through in this new work is almost 90.

He places this figure where it will reinforce rather than disrupt the original composition, so that even as he is shading, psychologizing or interpreting the painting he’s chosen, he’s also letting it shine as it is.

The art of Fairfield Porter (b. 1907) might be more admired today than when he died in 1975. If so, it’s because he has given younger painters a way out of their own race with art criticism, academic theory, shopworn irony, heartless formalism, and mannered diffidence as if painting had no future. These are the artists who need to see Fairfield Porter: Things as They Are at Tibor de Nagy most. 

Please follow the link below to view the video:

http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2012/12/john-newman-nov-2012.html