M The New York Art World ®"All You Need To Know."
M The New York Art World ®"All You Need To Know."
 

art reviews

 

 

Aya Takano
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin >>
By Rachel Hoffman

Sasha Bezzubov
The Front Room Gallery >>

By Mary Hrbacek

SOFA NEW YORK
Anatomy of an Art Fair >>

By Michael MacInnis

 

              


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Aya Takano
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin

By Rachel Hoffman

 

Inspired by Yume No Shima Island, an island made entirely from a gigantic heap of trash in Tokyo Bay, Aya Takano's solo exhibition, Wild dogs, hawks, owls, cats, a landfill the size of 44 and a half Tokyo Domes, the stratosphere is about "Garbage". This gritty subject matter is, however, masked in the beautiful colors and imagery employed by Takano. The Japanese pop artist was trained in a style called “Kawaii”, which means “cute”. Her titles are long, slightly absurd, and poetic. Dark and sexual undertones are hidden in complex, feminine pictorial worlds rendered in the visual language of popular futuristic manga cartoons.

Takano is associated with the “Superflat” movement; a term invented by the artist Takashi Murakami. She is a member of his collective and art company called Kaikai Kiki which was formed in 2001 to represent and promote a select group of young artists by producing merchandise and organizing events. The other members of this collective include, Chiho Aoshima, Mr., Chinatsu Ban, Mahomi Kunikata, and Rei Sato.

In a painting entitled She saw the liquid through the thin rubber, three mischievous large-eyed nymphets, clad in almost nothing but cotton panties, frolic on a bed. The one in the center stretches gracefully across the mattress on her tiny tummy, revealing her bare bottom with two symmetrical blue dots. The shapes are ambiguous; they could be read as tattoos or dimples. She fumbles with a white liquid-filled condom over a trash can. A pair of slender feminine legs with falling socks, sanguine knees, and white under shorts, frame the foreground in a triangular “A” form. The hands of this figure grasp the waistband of the undergarment, either gesturing the act of pulling them on, or taking them off. This mystery, along with the cropping of the head and upper torso invite the viewer to try to complete the figure. One can only surmise that the androgynous waif, who glances coyly to the side, probably just made use of the condom. Golden hearts and spheres float in the upper right hand corner, perhaps referencing the kind of drawings that children make in playful narrations. In the accompanying wall text, Takano notes, “I wanted to capture the moment that something becomes garbage.”

There is an apocalyptic feel to a painting called The wind came. The vast sky was a light blue. She sees a world that envelopes the entire stratosphere. In the center foreground, an elegant and slender feminine figure in white boy shorts confronts the viewer. The corners of her simplified cartoonish mouth turn down as she maternally cradles a wounded dog. Her rose-pink shoes are adorned with black bows that look like menacing eyes. A blue cat in profile sits on her head. Similar to how layer upon layer of garbage can be piled in a trash heap; Takano buries imagery and meaning in the pictorial space. There are elements that seem random, like they could have been edited out, but the artist seems determined to rescue every symbol here, taking care not to discard any possibility. Behind the central figure, a bulldozer cradles white bundles of garbage topped with a reclining nude girl who strikes the kind of supine pose we associate with fashion magazines. A grouping of red clouds in the top left corner is shaped like a sinister and sadistic smiling face, which simultaneously looks down upon the circumstances of the painting, and outwards towards the viewer. A mother dog, with many babies in tow, moves from the outer right side of the painting toward the center. Although there is flatness to the work, this painting has a kind of Renaissance perspective in that everything, including a sense of past, present, and future, seems to freeze and revolve around the center of the canvas.

Flying bananas, grapes, a bitten slice of watermelon, a fruity drink garnish and a tube of lipstick all appear to defy gravity in a painting called She heard that this dust chute connects to a furnace. She drank too much wine. These items could possibly be traveling towards or away from a dust shoot in the bottom right corner of the picture plane. Two girls with the characteristic reddened knees and large eyes also float in the canvas, with no true horizon line, tell-tale shadow or sense of grounding. Their faces seem to imply that some sort of accident has occurred. They are mostly naked, but with socks and jewelry. The central figure wears a colorful blue and pink scarf decorated with drawings. Her large eyes don’t have pupils, but the left one has a simple drawing of a ghost-like shape inside, while the right eye reflects a star. It seems that all of the works in the show have paintings and drawings within the paintings. Everything is overflowing and rich, and upon long meditations new things are revealed. There is a bottle of wine and a sink full of dirty dishes between the two young ladies. Over-indulgence is a possible theme in this particular piece, but although many complex devices and narrations occur in the work, the viewer can take a certain comfort and even delight in Takano’s ability to strip things down, to simplify.

Countless layers of ideas are hidden in the facets of this work; they are often disguised on the surface by a bubbly, childlike and innocent appearance. Though these paintings have a futuristic, Sci-Fi feel, there is more than a hint of the spirit of the Fauves of early 20th Century France. It’s easy to get caught up in the sparkle and alure of such colorful narratives; indeed, Takano shows the viewer an entrance to subversive content, the doorways to our own reflections.

 


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Sasha Bezzubov
The Front Room Gallery

By Mary Hrbacek

 

The most striking aspect of Bezzubov’s mega-sized photographs of nature’s darker moods is the spectrum of warm, glowing earth tones that meld with the misty light of a new day dawning. The moral of this show, Things Fall Apart, may simply be that a new day will come, even in the aftermath of monumental destruction. There is not a single person in sight, nor any structures left standing in these images that document the strangely calm period just after natural disasters strike. A series of five disasters is presented here, starting in 2001, that includes tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes and a tsunami. These pictures focus on that humbling period of resignation when the traumatic event has passed, when harmony and unity once more abound. Bezzubov employs a large format camera to create images of great detail and poignancy. These moving, heart-wrenching scenes are menacing in their ultimate message; these are after all real events. Whether it is the scene of an earthquake in India, a wildfire in California or the devastating path of a tornado in America’s Mid West, the result is eerily similar.

In terms of scale and sudden loss of life, the tsunami is the most daunting of natural disasters. The word “tsunami” removes some of the sting from the English term “tidal wave.” There is nevertheless a macabre aesthetic to such overwhelming destruction. Presented in dyptichs and trypdichs, the horizontal formats of these photographs makes it easy for the eye to scan the works, gliding over landscapes in which every building or tree has been dismembered and transformed into delicate piles of rubble.

In the only vertical diptych, the black upstanding trees create a branching grid-like barrier that partially obscures the remnants of ruined stone foundations where homes once stood. The panoramic views, where houses can be discerned on the horizon, reveal the scope of the damaged terrain.

To be sure, the show also draws criticism for seeming to aesthetisize human suffering, but such arguments miss the point. The cycle of destruction and regeneration, of death and birth, is a reality that is not subject to human contravention. The sun does not discriminate; it shines equally on everything, beauty and ugliness alike. Despite the muted palette, these pictures present stunning vistas of natural wreckage that mirror man-made war zones. The vastness of the devastation is at once appalling and breathtaking.

 


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SOFA NEW YORK
Anatomy of an Art Fair

By Michael MacInnis

 

We take for granted today the symbiotic relationship between art, fashion and design; both Vanity Fair and W Magazine have had their respective art world covers proclaiming the era of the fashionable art collector, and the venerable Art Basel Miami Beach art fair has had its “Art Loves Design” party from the very first show in 2001.

But in 1993, when the Chicago based artist sculpture, Mark Lyman, had the idea for an art fair that would give the decorative arts the same respect normally reserved for a traditional fine art fair, he was something of a maverick. Dubbed SOFA CHICAGO, (Sculpture Objects and Functional Art), the first fair was held 1994 in the Sheraton Hotel and Towers, which appropriately enough is located within walking distance of both the Chicago Art Institute and “Magnificent Mile”, that city’s upscale shopping thoroughfare.

The fair was an instant hit, drawing some 14,000 visitors to its roster of 58 galleries. The following year SOFA CHICAGO, produced by Lyman’s company, Expressions of Culture, moved into Festival Hall at Chicago’s Navy Pier, the same venue which hosted Art Chicago in its heady heyday. Billed as the largest and longest continually running art fair in Chicago, last year’s SOFA CHICAGO drew 34,000 visitors and featured about 100 international galleries.

Lyman’s Expressions of Culture launched SOFA NEW YORK in 1998, setting up shop in the Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Compared to its formidable Chicago based sibling, SOFA NEW YORK has more of a boutique feel; its debut attracted a respectable 9000 visitors, and last year’s show topped out at reported 13,500 visitors.

Despite its large scale productions in two world class cities; with SOFA CHICAGO taking place in early November, and SOFA NEW YORK in early June, Lyman’s Expressions of Culture remained essentially a mom and pop operation, with just six full-time employees and some part time help. As such, the company was subject to the same seasonal cash flow issues that preoccupy decision making in all such businesses. But all of that changed in 2005.

DMG, a subsidiary of London's Daily Mail & General Trust, with revenues in in the hundred of millions, purchased SOFA CHICAGO and SOFA NEW YORK in 2005 for an undisclosed sum. Now the Chicago based artist sculpture, turned entrepreneur, Mark Lyman, is back in the creative seat once again. Is there a SOFA LONDON on the horizon? Stay tuned.

 

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