The Crack-Up at Room East

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Room East
41 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
June 28 – August 15, 2105

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One of my favourite galleries in the Lower East Side, Room East, is hosting a group show called The Crack-Up, alongside a solo exhibition downstairs full of amazing and provocative illustrations by the artist Ebecho Muslimova. The former is filled with some fantastic pieces, but Robin Cameron and Dario Guccio steal the show with their respective ceramic and leather creations. The theme of the exhibition revolves around an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, something you can read more about in an article on Mousse magazine's website linked below. With only a few days left, if you're able to find the time, I highly recommend a visit to the gallery before the show closes.

—Room East
—Mousse

Pace Gallery Summer Group Show

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Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
July 15 – August 21, 2015

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Pace's uptown New York location is currently hosting an impressive group show, featuring an array of revered figures. With an emphasis on somewhat smaller works, the exhibition juxtaposes the likes of Alexander Calder, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold and Richard Tuttle from the gallery's own stable, with Jackson Pollock and Fernand Léger, to create an engaging examination of modern artistic practice.

—Pace Gallery

America Is Hard to See

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Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014
May 1 – September 27, 2015

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The Whitney Museum of American Art is currently holding the inaugural exhibition at their new building on New York City's High Line. It runs until September 27th and is bound to resonate with anyone who has an interest in 20th century painting, sculpture, photography and filmmaking. Acting as an historical survey of the major events in American art during this period and a record of the Whitney’s acquisitions, there are more than 600 works on show, separated into 23 distinct chapters which group together like-minded artists from concurrent eras. As is often the case with such ambitiously assembled exhibitions, not everything on show will be to everyone's taste, but it does feature important pieces from all movements and a number of lesser-seen works. The Scotch Tape chapter particularly appeals to me, with contributions from Bruce Conner and Al Held, as well as Jay DeFeo’s more than 1500 pound sculptural masterpiece, The Rose.

—Whitney Museum of American Art

Akio Nukaga at Heath LA

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Heath Ceramics
LA Studio & Showroom
7525 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
July 11 – August 9, 2015

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Heath have brought back Japanese potter Akio Nukaga for another exhibition of his outstanding ceramics at their Los Angeles studio and showroom. Visitors will be able to view new works from his Mashiko kiln, including pleated vases, cups and teapots which evoke his customary style, as well as new techniques like the indigo glaze utilized in his Blue Band Collection. Be sure to pick up the richly textured, longer neck Bud Vase he produced with Heath as a collaborative piece, since I’m sure supplies are very limited.

—Heath Ceramics

Brion Gysin: Unseen Collaborator

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October Gallery
24 Gloucester Street
Bloomsbury
London WC1N 3AL
July 2 – October 3, 2015

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I was aware of the role Brion Gysin played in creating the incredible Dreamachine light sculpture, but until reading William Burroughs’ latest biography, Call Me Burroughs, I didn't know how innovative an artist and thinker he really was. Having introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique, it’s hard to say where one of the most famous beat writer’s careers may have gone without him. "Neo-calligrapher, master of line, multimedia revolutionary and cultural historian, Gysin’s experiences in New York, Tangier, Paris and London influenced his seminal artistic productions." Judging by the imagery online, this seems like an outstanding exhibition, and a welcome return for an artist who had his first solo show in the UK at the very same gallery.

—October Gallery

Boo-Hooray and Gavin Brown's Enterprise present A Living Collage

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Gavin Brown's Enterprise
291 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
July 8 – July 31, 2015

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While last weekend saw the final show at Gavin Brown's downtown, West Side space (he's moving the Enterprise to a former Brewery in Harlem, close to where he lives) this week saw the opening of one of the best exhibitions I've seen in a while, at his East Side project space in Chinatown. A Living Collage: The Living Theatre, Judith Malina and Julian Beck 1947-2015 opened on Wednesday evening, and gave a glimpse into the paper-based world of the legendary American experimental theatre company through flyers, posters, programs and prints. Many of these same pieces are offered for sale, or in the case of some of the smaller items: for free, or whatever donation you felt inclined to make. All this gave an unprecedented look into the history of New York theatre, music and arts through the decades and eyes of two of the city's pioneers and patrons in these fields. The fact that you could take some of that home with you was simply mind-blowing. Not to be missed.

—Boo-Hooray
—Gavin Brown's Enterprise
—The Living Theatre

What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present

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Matthew Marks Galleries
502, 522 & 526 W 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
July 8 – August 14, 2015

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"Focusing on four groups of artists practicing away from the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, What Nerve! presents an alternative history of American art since the 1960s. As the exhibition’s curator, Dan Nadel, has written, 'When confronted with a system that seems impenetrable, outsiders tend to band together.' 

The Chicago-based Hairy Who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. Its members were Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. Funk Art took root in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and is represented in the exhibition with works by Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, and Peter Voulkos. In Ann Arbor, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw formed Destroy All Monsters as students in the 1970s. Forcefield members Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and Ara Peterson, active in Providence from 1996 to 2003, created fictional personas complete with pseudonyms and elaborate garments.

This exhibition reassesses the artists associated with these four groups, providing a new understanding of their influence on contemporary art history. Distinct as their artworks are in style, period, and place, the artists all share a common set of concerns. Inspired by a wide array of influences including folk art, advertising, primitive art, comic books, and fetishism, they all favour figurative imagery that diverges from the predominant artistic style of the time.”

—Matthew Marks Gallery

New York Painting at Kunstmuseum Bonn

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—01. Love Boat by Joe Bradley, 2013.

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"After the genre of painting had been declared dead for several decades, it has been enjoying an impressive renaissance with a generation of artists at its base that accept no dictation of what to do and what not to do. It is without reservations and with every confidence that especially those artists born in the 1970s and early 1980s experiment with the medium of painting, which is why the show in Bonn will put its focus on this generation. The exhibition will include recent and latest works by eleven artists, ranging from the painterly experiments of Matt Connors, to the wild post pop painting of Eddie Martinez, to the neo-conceptual approaches of Antek Walczak and Ned Vena. Without prioritizing one painting style, the show will document the panorama of the genre of painting that has left its ideological battle for its existence behind and returned to playing a major role in art again today."

—Kunstmuseum Bonn