Mornings are usually sparse with people in gallery-land but today it felt particularly barren (cue tumbleweeds).
Some thoughts:
- Mala Iqbal’s “Washed Away” show was chocked full of deliciously trippy canvases at PPOW;
- the “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” exhibit at Von Lintel has some good satirical work (like the one pictured above) but also some lame-duck work that brings down the group show of 13 Afro-American artists;
- Eric Wesley’s “Spa-ference Room” installation at Bortolami is cute and that’s it…it is composed predominantly of a ginormous terry cloth bathrobe hanging/haunting a cubicle-like (well, kind of) jacuzzi;
- Pop-great Tom Wesselman’s shaped paintings from the 80s are up until Jan. 12 at Yvon Lambert and filled in a huge void in my knowledge of his work post-60s…I’d never seen nipples rendered in so many unique positive-negative configurations before; and
- Christopher Wilmarth’s sculptures at Betty Cunningham were so boring and banal that I thought about impaling myself on one of their steel corners but I feared that would generate interest.
I wonder if the weather is keeping everyone away from the galleries today? Or maybe everyone is still partied out from New Years Eve.
Photo caption: Renee Cox, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben (1998)