Even as the season winds to a close, galleries are pulling out all the stops. For starters, London-based Chinese contemporary art dealer Michael Goedhuis has crossed the Atlantic to curate an extravaganza of Chinese art and culture in the sumptuous 10th floor galleries of Sotheby’s New York.
“China without borders” is a splendid opportunity to become acquainted with 30 established artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Hawaii, Paris, London and New York. It boasts settings by four modish fashion designers, Han Feng, Peter Som, Zang Toi and the ultra-hip Vera Wang, as well as the architect Calvin Tsao. In addition to couture and design, the exhibition incorporates trends launched by Chinese music and film. Mr Goedhuis presents a range of work here, from the modern calligraphy of Gu Gan, to the installation and performance of New Yorker Gu Wenda, to the paintings of Gao Xingjian, last year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature.
Prices range from $4,000 to $400,000.
Coinciding with the SOFA fair early this month is an exhibition at James Graham & Sons of new works by London-based ceramicist Vivienne Foley. Her vaguely zoomorphic, white polished porcelain, funnel neck vases, although abstract, recall swans with elegantly arched necks and are shown with her black magnesium-glazed vessels. Prices range from $650 to $2,600.
“Art with an agenda” at Galerie St Etienne explores the enduring question “What is art for?” It’s a sprawling show that engages the tangled dance of politics and ideology that marked European art of the embattled first half of the 20th century. This gallery specialises in German and Austrian art of those decades, and the usual suspects are all on view: George Grosz, John Heartfield, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, and Egon Schiele. The revolutionary drive also made its mark on applied arts and works by co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Mosler. Prices range from $750 to $75,000.
An artist and graphic designer of more recent vintage is Robert Overby, for whom design was a lucrative day job: his 1977 logotype for Toyota is still in use today. This month, Fredericks Freiser Gallery in Chelsea shows Overby’s ACX Series of the 1970s, so named because he painted on the “bad” side of ACX plywood (the lowest grade of plywood). Overby was an experimenter, and considered something of an outsider. Like a visual art version of Glenn Gould, he abruptly decided, in the late 70s, to cease exhibiting altogether. His—rather pornographic—work is in the collections of MoMA, LACMA and the Whitney, among other museums.
Joan Washburn, who represents the estate of Jackson Pollock, has for some time championed the work of Pollock’s lesser known New York School cohorts. This year, her gallery remembers Conrad Marca-Relli, who died last year at the ripe age of 87, with an exhibition of 20 pieces dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Marca-Relli’s medium of freely-cut abstract shapes in canvas, burlap, metal and vinyl was unique among the New York School. Prices range from $12,000 to $13,000.
Collectors often form fast friendships with the artists they favour, and through those connections amass spectacular collections. Witness “Pop Art: the John and Kimiko Powers Collection” at Gagosian. The Powers were close pals with Warhol and his Pop peers. “Pop Art” is a museum-quality show, stocked with paradigmatic pop pictures and objects. Nothing is for sale in this non-commercial show, unless you count the hefty $80 catalogue, which includes essays by a mixed bag of pop artists and enthusiasts, among them Jim Dine, Germano Celant, and hipster critic of the moment Dave Hickey.
The comprehensive exhibition and catalogue of Spanierman Gallery are the fifth in a series of shows of works on paper by American artists of the late 18th- to late 20th-centuries. The drawings run the gamut in style and mood from the stormy nocturnal seascape by Thomas Birch of 1827 to the delicate, lyrical vision of Passmaquoddy Bay by Martin Johnson Heade, 1858-62. The selection of watercolours, pastels, and drawings from 81 artists reflects the many transformations that American art experienced during these two centuries. Prices range from $8,500 to $85,000.
Adelson Galleries shows a narrower slice of American art in “American Impressionism and Realism.” Included are a number of gems, such as Hassam’s charming “Red Mill, Cos Cob” of 1896, particularly timely in light of the travelling exhibition “The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore” currently at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Prices range widely, from $15,000 to $6 million.
Davis and Langdale Gallery’s exhibition of recent acquisitions by Bloomsbury Group artists has become something of an annual event. The gallery has been dealing in Bloomsbury artists for nearly 30 years. Paintings by Vanessa Bell, as well as pottery by Bell’s son, Quentin and textiles by Quentin’s daughter Cressida Bell are included in this show, along with works by the lesser known portraitist Henry Lamb and even lesser known London potter Sophie MacCarthy, granddaughter of Desmond MacCarthy. The gallery is New York’s one reliable spot to find quality works by Bloomsbury luminaries.
The 20 abstract paintings by Pat Adams, all new work ranging in size from 1 to 10 feet, are on view at Zabriskie Gallery. Virginia Zabriskie has represented Pat Adams since the gallery opened in 1954. Prices range from $3,500 to $35,000.
Marie Aimée Grimaldi’s first American solo exhibition is at Barry Friedman. The title, “Masques de verre” represents a recurring theme throughout Grimaldi’s work of the last five years. Her sculptures of fragmented profiles, masks, and now three-dimensional skulls incorporate abstract elements in pâte de verre and are inspired by primitive art, as well as the Russian painter Alexej Jawlensky. Prices range from $6,500 to $15,500.
Running concurrently in an adjacent gallery at Barry Friedman is a solo exhibition of another contemporary sculptress working in glass. Thirty works by Laura de Santillana are blown and shaped into architechtonic and colourful tablets, with prices from $8,500 to $16,000.
An exhibition, organised by Knoedler & Company in collaboration with Baumgartner Gallery, of the abstract sculptor John Duff, is entitled “Elements, integrals, intervals”. The early works, 1969 to 1975, can be viewed at Knoedler, while the recent pieces from 1997 to the present are at Baumgartner. The sculptures are priced from $30,000 to $50,000.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Goedhuis going great guns'