I jumped the pond for a few days and tackled as many exhibitions as my jet-lagged brain would allow. There’s really much too much to see in London in three days but I gave it a valiant effort. The highlight of my trip was Bridget Riley The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014 at David Zwirner, the Henri Matisse Cut Out exhibition at the Tate Modern, Adrian Ghenie’s Darwin Room at Pace London, early Jim Hodges at Stephen Friedman, and BANKSY at Sotheby’s. And I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the lovely little Mayfair shops and pubs and enjoying all of the old-world charm London has to offer. Including a few pints of Guinness.
Galleries
Postcards from London
July 1, 2014
The Magical Worlds of Tara Donovan and Sterling Ruby
June 19, 2014
If you want to feel as Alice did when she fell down the rabbit hole, experience the installations of Tara Donovan and Sterling Ruby. Both artists create larger-than-life works, of all media, that allow you to momentarily escape this world and enter another.
Tara Donovan hypnotizes you by the sheer scale of her work. For her sculptures, she takes a simple, everyday, material – pencil, button, styrofoam cup, tape – and then multiplies the quantity by, like, a million. With the abundance she stacks and compiles until the accumulation of identical objects is transformed into something biomorphic.
Spring into Chelsea
April 18, 2014
Perhaps it was the warm sunny weather and the reintroduction of color into my New York world, but on a recent stroll through Chelsea galleries I couldn’t help but notice all the vibrant large-scale paintings on view. If they were Rorschach tests I’d probably see palm trees and sailboats. They emanated warmth. In all seriousness, I saw alluring new works by artists who engage with painting by layering various materials and methods. While these four are not the first to mix ingenuity with painting, they are a strong bunch to keep on your radar. Here’s a highlight: