Socrates Sculpture Park isn’t like any other arts institution in New York City. It has an ad-hoc, relaxed humanism that contrasts sharply with the crisp white galleries and grand museums across the river. It feels like a laboratory for art—a place where creation is as important, if not more important, than presentation.
Charline von Heyl’s new exhibition at Petzel finds the artist furthering her engagement with semiotics. She is an abstractionist, albeit one who eschews the categorial delineation between the representational and non-figurative. Von Heyl’s pursuit is markedly distinct from the reflexive investigation of the conditions of painting’s possibility qua painting, prompted by the American abstractionists of the twentieth century.
IF YOU HAVE EVER taken the stairs at what used to be the Whitney Museum of American Art Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist masterpiece on New York’s Upper East Side you have almost certainly encountered the work of Charles Simonds, though you may not have realized it. One of only two pieces in the Whitney’s collection that did not head downtown when the institution moved to the Meatpacking District in 2015 (the other being Nicole Eisenman’s Exploding Whitney Mural, 1995), Simonds’s permanent installation huddles unobtrusively above the stairwell’s only window. It is a miniature village, an apparently
WRITING IN 1973 for Art International, Douglas Crimp reviewed Blythe Bohnen at New York’s A.I.R. (Artists in Residence Inc.) Gallery, the landmark women’s cooperative that opened in 1972, of which the artist was a founding member. That same year, she completed her MFA at Hunter College and was included in the “Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Brushstroke,” the near-taxonomic series that Bohnen had started in 1968 and which included 48 Brushstrokes, 1971, a matrix of gesture, instantiated and recalled, that was reproduced on the announcement