I've Seen Things

I've been traveling quite a bit lately, seeing lots of art, but haven't been able to balance studio work and blogging: ahh these times. A few weeks ago I was in L.A., and thanks to a trusty GPS system in my rental car, gallery hopping was fairly easy. The only glitch was that Chung King Road, the heart of the China town arts district, is a pedestrian walkway and I circled several times before figuring it out (duhh). Now that I have my L.A. gallery bearings -- Chinatown, Culver, Santa Monica, downtown -- the next trip out I'll have my wits to even write about it.


Meanwhile, back in the East, I made a quick swing through Chelsea this past Tuesday and got to see the gigantic Mark di Suvero sculpture inhabiting the main gallery at Paula Cooper: it's a beauty. The spiraling center piece, kind of channeling Frank Stella, was cut from a solid steel plate and expanded with a crane in his studio; that's old school macho cool. I have lots of pictures and video of two smaller sculptures with moving parts on my Flickr site.


Neo Rauch has returned to David Zwirner. Still as mysterious as ever with his imagery and as inventive at moving your eye around the canvas. I don't care for Kerry James Marshall's new paintings at Jack Shainman, but I think the boat installation, covered with photos in medallions, is a very powerful piece.


Schroeder Romero has a gallery full of Charles Browning's reinterpretations of a Romantic 19th century we may be familiar with. Browning is a skillful painter with a sharp sense of humor: he made my day.

In the coming weeks I hope to post about a few exhibits that look interesting here in Baltimore. One is Paper Airplane at Paperwork Gallery and the other is Cottage Industry, which has installations spread around town via The Contemporary Museum, by Fritz Hoeg and Andrea Zittel, among others.

Difficult to find Baltimore based artists? Paperwork Gallery's co-director and artist, Cara Ober has recently gone online with The B-list, a soon to be comprehensive list of area artist's personal websites. Now there is one more way to browse and spend that huge rebate check!