New York’s art season opens with a vengeance

Article
With Labor Day arriving a bit late this year in the US, New York’s fall art season seemed to have arrived hesitantly at first, but ultimately landed with a big bang. As the summer heat held on, galleries and museums across the city opened dozens of exhibitions with great fanfare — and with throngs of seemingly art-starved New Yorkers braced for things to get moving again. (The fact that New York Fashion week and the US Open were happening at the same time only compounded the frenzy).


Openings on Wednesday the 9th and Thursday the 10th saw packed streets in Chelsea — as if every gallery had an event after hours. Even the pouring Thursday rain couldn’t keep people away, though umbrellas piled inside gallery doors left assistants visibly worried and the security guards at Gagosian none too pleased.

The return to New York

Jeffrey Deitch made his return to New York (to his former Deitch Projects space at 76 Grand Street) after a somewhat awkward departure from Los Angeles, opening a show of risqué drawings by Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel. Though it appears the gallery’s namesake wasn’t even present for the event. That first Wednesday also saw « Carl André: In His Time open » at Mnuchin Gallery, and Sue de Beer’s video The Blue Lenses at Marianne Boesky.

 

The galleries compete with the institutions


The next night, as the rain fell, things really got into full swing. 24th Street mainstays Matthew Marks and Andrea Rosen opened their doors (with sculpture by Ron Nagle and paintings by Josiah McElheny, respectively). Larry Gagosian held court at the entrance to his Chelsea space, greeting his VIPs as they came in droves to view Roy Lichtenstein’s Greene Street Mural - on view for the first time since its initial, temporary creation at Leo Castelli’s infamous Greene Street gallery in 1983. The monumental piece, which will once again be destroyed after this show closes, drew audible gasps as attendees rounded the corner into the gallery’s main space. Leave it to Larry to remind us that his is perhaps the only commercial gallery in the world that could produce such an audacious, if historically poignant, spectacle.  


Paul Kasmin opened three shows in one night: Will Ryman: Two Rooms, Tai Xiangzhou: Celestial Tales, and Frank Stella: Shape as Form — the last of which is particularly prescient in its timing, with the Whitney debuting a Stella exhibition, the first retrospective show in its new building, on October 30.

HAPPENINGRyman’s excellent show of new sculpture was feted at an after party at Asia de Cuba on Lafayette, where the artists looked pleased, and slightly relieved with how the evening was going. (A private viewing of the Stella show had taken place the night before - a gesture surely deserved). Christian Marclay debuted a new video, Suround Sounds, at Paula cooper, and Enrique Martinez Celaya opened his first show at Jack Shainman Gallery. The list really could go on and on…

MoMA makes way for Picasso

But, of course, we’d be remiss to forget MoMA’s new show, Picasso Sculpture, which opened to much acclaim on the museum’s fourth floor galleries. Billed as “a broad survey of Pablo Picasso’s work in three dimensions, spanning the years 1902 to 1964,” the exhibition is comprised of some 140 works via loan from collections around the globe, including 50 sculptures from the Musée national Picasso in Paris (the MoMA’s partner in crime for this exhibition, the largest assembly of Picasso sculptures to take place in the US in almost fifty years). And this presentation certainly took some maneuvering. MoMA’s curators had to devise a new installation of vast sections of its permanent collection to make space for the show, though many have agreed that a little shift in presentation would be a welcomed change. And it was well worth it.

So, it would appear not everybody was sunning themselves in the Hamptons in August; surely a few people must’ve stayed behind to prep for a real whirlwind of a season opening. Now that we’ve all got our bearings, and the New York art world’s found its groove once again, we’re excited to see what’s on the horizon. And you know we’ll be here to bring you what’s H A P P E N I N G next!



Images: Sue de Beer, Untitled (Still from The Blue Lenses) (2014) Digital metallic c-print @ Marianne Boesky Gallery/