Review: What’s Doing in the Chelsea Galleries

Deborah Solomon

WNYC News | Dec 15, 2017

By the way, if you’ve been meaning to see Yayoi Kusama’s “Festival of Life” at the David Zwirner Gallery, on West 19^th Street, you have all of one day left. It closes on Saturday, after weeks of generating lines around the block. Kusama, who can fairly be called the first artist since Seurat to make the form of The Dot her own, is a figure of daunting originality. But her popularity has begun to work against her. Her mirrored and kaleidoscopic “Infinity Rooms,” one of which forms the heart of the current show, remind me of the department-store dressing rooms of my girlhood and the surprise of seeing my body multiplied in unending reflections. At Bloomie’s, the mirrors held secrets, but crowd control at the gallery limits the time you spend in Kusama’s Infinity Room to all of one minute — long enough to snap a selfie, but hardly sufficient for devotees of close looking.

A photo from Yayoi Kusama's exhibit, "Festival of Life," currently at the David Zwirner Gallery.

(Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner)

Happily, you can linger for as long as you’d like at Elizabeth Murray’s superb show at the Pace Gallery. It brings together 16 large-scale paintings and a handful of drawings from the ‘80s, when Murray pioneered her famous shaped canvases —those funky, chunky, quasi-abstract works that led countless artists to abandon the rectangle. Murray, who was born in Chicago in 1940, died of cancer in 2007. She spent most of her career in New York. When she arrived here, Minimalism was the reigning style; artists were turning out metal cubes and tilting rhomboids that they claimed exemplified some pared-down Platonic essence. But Murray had no use for purity. The longer you look at her paintings, the more you see that still-life objects are tucked into their overlapping planes — especially wooden tabletops with spindly legs and shapely coffee cups of the sort that come with saucers. With their twisting edges and split-down-the-middle cracks, her paintings exploit hefty physical forms to convey a message that feels remarkably intimate and psychological.

I also enjoyed the quietly subversive drawings and collages of Geta Bratescu, a Romanian artist of 92. She is currently having her first solo show in this country, at Hauser & Wirth, on West 22^nd Street. One reason she is not better-known is that her career was rudely interrupted by 42 years of Communist rule in her country. Another reason is the variegated nature of her output. The show includes everything from Surrealist-inflected drawings done with her eyes closed to playful homemade videos. Among the standouts is a sculpture entitled “Mume” (“Mothers”), in which eight minimally decorated heads are stacked into a 7-foot-tall totem. The piece, like many others on view here, is made from paper, cardboard and tempera paint, the kind of materials you could find in most any desk drawer. As a whole, the show captures the urgency of making art even when there is almost nothing to make it from.