Art We Saw This Winter – The New York Times

TRIBECA

Through Jan. 8. R & Company, 64 White Street, Manhattan. 212-343-7979; r-and-company.com.

A 20-year stalwart of Franklin Street, the design gallery R & Company (formerly R 20th Century) expanded in 2018, taking a space on White Street for exhibitions and its considerable design archive. Its latest offering there is a pair of shows connected by saturated color. One is a magnetic group of eight exquisite handblown vessels dating from 1991 to 2011 by the American glass artist Richard Marquis. The other surveys the prolific Danish furniture and interior designer Verner Panton (1926-1998). Marquis was the first outsider to be taught the millefiori or murrine technique carefully guarded for generations by the glassmaking families of Murano. Each piece is a breathtaking world of contrasting hues, translucencies and patterns, including scatterings of snowmen as well as stripes, checks, wood grains and even paint splatters.

Pantons resonant colors and clean geometric shapes personify 60s Pop. This large selection includes his well-known Cone Chair (in wire) and Split-Cone chair, bowllike Easy chair, bulls-eye shag rugs and sundry textiles and light fixtures, most notably the bright orange Flower Pot chandelier. Today, Pantons designs seem more institutional than radical, an effect perhaps of seeing them undiluted rather than as unforgettable high notes in mixed interiors. Exceptions include the 1965 S-chair, which is a curvaceous bentwood version of Gerrit Rietvelds angular Zig-Zag chair (1934); a 1971 coat rack that is a mannequin-like cylinder of red wire painted with a pinched waist and a 1963 sofa in aluminum tubing that toggles between Paul McCobb and Wiener Werksttte. ROBERTA SMITH

Through Jan. 8. Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, Manhattan. 212-257-0033; ortuzarprojects.com.

Jacqueline de Jong is the rare artist who engaged with radical politics in her youth and whose work, more than half a century later, still crackles with committed activism. De Jong, a Dutch artist, was associated with the Situationist International, which started in the late 1950s and combined elements of Dada, Surrealism and Marxism to confront postwar capitalism and the burgeoning spectacle of the mass media. Border-Line is her first solo show in New York in more than 50 years; an exhibition surveying her career is currently touring Europe.

At Ortuzar, de Jongs bright paintings filled with jagged figures and forms depict migrants in refugee camps or trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Works like Locked In and Out (2021) and Sous Terrain (2021) suggest the horror and dread of migrants caught in deadly situations while the world observes them through the insulated lens of the mass media. (As a teenager, de Jong, who is Jewish, fled from the Nazis.) The Border-Line paintings are drawn with the crude, pre-punk energy of Art Brut, as well as the Belgian artist James Ensor or the Danish artist Asger Jorn (de Jongs erstwhile partner).

In the 1960s, de Jong edited The Situationist Times and participated in a Parisian protest movement that nearly toppled the French government. If young radicals are characterized by their idealism, old ones like de Jong display resilience and longevity as the American activist philosopher Donna J. Haraway reminds us, staying with the trouble rather than running away or retiring from it. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

TRIBECA

Through Jan. 8. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan. 212-226-3970; artistsspace.org.

Milford Graves was a percussionist who treated drumming as something more expansive than merely establishing a rhythm or tempo. Graves, who died this year, was also a botanist and herbalist, a professor at Bennington College, a cardiac technician, a visual artist. Percussion connected with the human heartbeat and the energy flowing through plants, and made its way into art objects, as you can see in Fundamental Frequency at Artists Space, easily one of the best shows in town right now.

Gravess sculptures, assemblages and diagrammatic drawings are the most visually captivating. His Yara Training Bag, from around 1990, incorporates painted boxing gloves, punching bags, a samurai sword and an acupuncture model elements from Yara, Gravess invented martial art form. Other sculptures include gongs, tribal sculptures, medical and astronomical diagrams, videos and printouts of electrocardiogram readings.

This show follows a survey at the ICA Philadelphia (and an excellent documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis, from 2018). The gallery handout includes Gravess Herbal Chart, detailing the effects of various herbs on the human body. All these elements combined offer an excellent introduction to Gravess remarkable practice and worldview, in which art, medicine, plants, human perception, the nervous system and the cosmos are all connected. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Read the rest here:
Art We Saw This Winter - The New York Times