This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Art Gets Back to Business

Director Jay Scheib is staging a production of Chekov’s Platonov, twice. Throughout January, Scheib will put on his version of Chekov’s previously unpublished play while at the same time a video-editing crew sits in the back of the Kitchen, streaming the performance live to movie theaters around the city including AMC Empire 25 Cinema in Midtown and he Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn.

Drop by any time during James Fuentes Gallery’s open hours and you’ll get to see Andy Warhol’s iconic 8-hour-long film Empire. It’ll take some endurance to watch all of it, but we’re sure it’ll be done—remember MoMA’s Twitter-marathon from 2011?

Boobs melting from ice-cream cones, a ghostly head balancing a bowl of fruit, and vaginal flower heads  abound in Jessica Stoller’s weirdo brand of ceramics. They’re kitschy, but delicate. It seems the beautiful grotesque is alive and well—like Paul McCarthy squeezed full of femininity.

Let’s face it: If you’re in Chelsea for one opening on Thursday, you’ll eventually end up at several of them throughout the night. Zach Feuer’s show of paintings by Stuart Hawkins looks worth it: Her surrealist-inspired paintings of the mundane show just how strange the world can be when perspective is fl gets flipped, shortened, or blown up. Nice.

Artist and writer Mira Schor curates this group exhibition exploring what “home” means for women today. It’s a tough issue: Do we even want to address spaces as gendered? Is it a fiction to imagine them as such? Or is gender permanently stuck to be associated with the home?

See what the highly-selective Gowanus printmaking residency has produced over the last six months, with work by Zefrey Throwell, Ann Agee, and (AFC board member) Saul Chernick.

Agee’s last show in Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery makes me very curious for an update; that one was a knobby porcelain explosion of genitalia, plumbing, bell jars, and colonial ceramics. I’m not sure that show came with a clear message, so much as a feeling of a women’s lib parade crammed into a kitchen. Let’s see where she goes next.

Sweet Baby Jesus there are too many openings happening this week. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience they happen to be close to each other. Most of the 27th Street galleries seem to be having openings on the same night, so thank them for that. We’ve got some trompe l’oeil and float-y sculpture at Foxy, paintings made from nearly anything but paint with Jesse Greenberg at Derek Eller, and poetry-inspired (that could mean almost anything?)-work at Wallspace.

Objects and Thin Air: Sam Anderson, Stephen Lichty, and Michael Wang at Foxy Production

Jesse Greenberg and David Dupuis at Derek Eller Gallery

The Retired Architect: Katinka Bock, Ned Colclough, N. Dash, Ben Gocker, Isabel Nolan, Julia Rommel, Curated by Nichole Caruso at Wallspace

Two of the best draftsmen I know of (and AFC friends) Armando Veve and Edo Rosenblith are coming to New York (from Philly and St. Louis, respectively). Given the dominant trends here, it’ll be hard not to see their epic murals as a welcome break from the dominant trends of casual formalism and neo-Modernism.

Rosenblith’s Low Spectrum, for one, is an answer to Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum II; he fills each of Kelly’s reductive color blocks with “problematic imagery” like eyeballs, noses, cans, band-aids, and more. I’m also very excited to see Veve’s new six-foot graphite drawing; even his smaller microscopically-detailed stipple drawings take a lot of time, so this will be no one-off. For a small taste of what I mean, check out a recent illustration in the Sunday Times.

I’m really into the premise of this exhibition: Show small artworks by artists. It’s actually a big “Take tha!” n an art market-dominated era of art, when the big and flashy usually garner more at auctions and the fairs. Comprised mostly of doodles and the stuff stored away in boxes, these drawings are the kind of works that’re made when nobody’s watching.

Artists include: Ellen Altfest, Donald Baechler, Balthus, Brian Belott, Jake Berthot, Katherine Bradford, Brice Brown, Charles Burchfield, Valerio Castello, Vija Celmins, Joseph Cornell, Carroll Dunham, James Benjamin Franklin, Suzan Frecon, Ted Gahl, Robert Gober, Glenn Goldberg, Philip Guston, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mary Heilmann, Alfred Jensen, Bill Jensen, Don Joint, John Lees, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Joan Mitchell, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Tal R, James Siena, Ross Simonini, Kiki Smith, Myron Stout, Richard Tuttle, Dan Walsh, Chuck Webster, John Wesley, Michael Williams, and Terry Winters

“Is the ball or the person being hit?” More or less, that’s what we know about P!’s latest show, which references ping-pong. But we tend to like the conceptual bustle they show, so we’re up for the game.