Today, in true Art Girls fashion, we squeezed in as much art as possible before boarding a plane back to Los Angeles.
First stop: The Museum of Modern Art's presentation of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938. MoMA provides special early-morning viewing hours for members, and we arrived promptly at 9:30 in order to avoid the crowds. Many of Magritte's paintings are on the small side and are filled with detail, factors which necessitate up-close viewing.
René Magritte was at the heart of the Surrealist movement, and the artist developed key strategies and techniques to "defamiliarize the familiar" and make "everyday objects shriek aloud." Photography was not permitted, so I clipped a few samples of Magritte's iconic paintings from MoMA's website.
Next up: the Christopher Wool retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Christopher Wool is a celebrated contemporary artist who began his career in the 1980s, a time when many considered the medium of painting to be outmoded and irrelevant to "avant-garde" artistic practice. In the subsequent decades, Wool forged a highly-focused and successful painting career. The artist uses stencils, patterned rollers, rubber stamps, silkscreen, ink, and turpentine (in addition to actual paint) to make his paintings. Most are large-scale and black and white although there were a few pops of color. Some are text-based, although the text is fragmented and viewers often must struggle to make sense of the letters; others are composed of repetitive patterns, contain overlapping flowers (taken from clip art) or are pure abstractions.
I was familiar with Wool's works as the artist is included in MOCA's collection and a number of my current clients own his works; however, viewing such a large amount of work at one time fostered a greater understanding and appreciation of his oeuvre.
Finally, we made the trip across the East River to P.S.1 and the largest exhibition to-date of the work of Mike Kelley. P.S.1 is a unique exhibition space - it is a converted public school building.
Mike Kelley is regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time. Over his 35 year career he worked in every conceivable medium - drawings, performances, video, sculpture, music, photography, prints, and painting. His work deals with subjects as wide ranging as repressed memories, educational spaces, American pop culture, religion, class relations, childhood trauma, and Kandor (the capital city of Superman's home planet). Given the diversity in Kelley's output, it probably comes as no surprise that we loved much of the work, found some pieces difficult to engage with, and just plain did not "get" other works.
Born in Detroit in 1957, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his tragic suicide in 2012 at the age of 57.
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| MoMA purchased this installation earlier this year for over $4 million. |
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| Many of Kelley's works incorporate found stuffed animals. |
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| A sculpture of John Glenn made from debris drudged from the Detroit River |
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| Sonja admires an installation from MOCA's collection that I installed in Amsterdam during my tenure at the museum. |
Kelly's "Memory Ware" series is named after a genre of Canadian folk art in which everyday objects are decorated with numerous small items (e.g., shells, beads, buttons, jewelry). The artist's "flat" Memory Ware pieces are giant mosaics of everyday items and keepsakes. Innumerable specific objects can be recognized, but none is the central focus of the composition.
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| Jackie poses in front of one of her favorite works. |
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| Detail from the "Memory Ware" series |
Kelly's "Kandors" are scaled-down versions of the fictional capital of Krypton, Superman's home planet.
Three museum exhibitions = three huge art-filled bites of the Big Apple!
For more information on the above exhibitions, visit these links:
René Magritte,
Christopher Wool,
Mike Kelley.
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