The Hole: press photo for "Portrait of a Generation"
We’ve compiled a list of openings happening through Sunday. Summer has started and dOcUMenT(a) is on, which means gallerists are catching up on some Netflix. This week heralds the return of the sexy summer show (bright colors!), big, friendly group shows, and a city-wide test-drive for emerging curators.
Thursday, June 7
The Hole
Portrait of a Generation
312 Bowery St, 6-9PM
Here’s an opening that looks unappealing just for its sheer size, but we’ll probably show up anyway. We want to see what a show of 100 artists making portraits of each other looks like. All sorts of famous artists here: Bruce High Quality Foundation, Ryan McGinley, and Yoko Ono, to name a few. Worst. Press Release. Ever. Winner Olivier Zahm will be participating. We can’t wait to see what artists will do with his portrait!
The other show is André Saraiva building tinytown. The Hole tells us it’s his “first major solo show”; Olivier Zahm tells us that it’s “not only the most important exhibition that André has ever done in the United States,” but in fact “the ultimate realization of his vision and of his artistic universe.” Yeah, sure.
Team Gallery
NO, Global Tour and Sorry If I Got It Wrong, But Something Definitely Isn’t Right
83 Grand Street and 47 Wooster Street, 6-??
Known for work that’s aggressive, inflammatory, and uncompromising, Santiago Serra has created a fourteen-foot-wide steel sculpture of a sans-serif NO, flew it around the globe, and videotaped it. Compared to much of his earlier work, like the most controversial “245m³” and “Los Penetrados” (the orgy video that was at Team back in 2010), this is pretty enigmatic.
Showpaper box at Printed Matter
Printed Matter
Launch Party for Showpaper’s Brooklyn Shelf Life project.
195 Tenth Avenue (at 22nd), 6-8PM
If you’ve noticed the melting ice cube news box outside Printed Matter, it’s part of a curated project of independent publications, distributed through sculptural newsboxes throughout the city. We’re excited. Printed Matter is hosting a launch party tonight for the project’s curators Showpaper, with a performance by Jeremy Smoking.
Meulensteen
Young Curators, New Ideas IV
511 West 22nd Street, 6-9PM
Everyone’s a curator— or, at least, almost a third of the people involved in this curatorial balooza. 12 emerging curators curate the hell out of of 29 emerging artists in the fourth edition of this 7,000 square foot exhibition, in what seems to be a series of mini-shows. Again, a press release almost exclusively lists curator names, but in case you were wondering…you may recognize artists such as collaborative duo Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden of contemporaryfeminism.com, and Adam Parker Smith, whose work was recently at Storefront’s Bushwick Basel space. A handful of these artists and curators have spent time in Austin (Sterling Allen, Rachel Cook, and Ryan Lauderdale) and Chicago (Brookhart Jonquil, Josh Reames, and Robin Juan), so there’s bound to be something at Meulensteen you probably haven’t seen in Bushwick lately.
Friday, June 8th
Jack Hanley
Megan Whitmarsh: Revolution is a Circle
136 Watts (between Greenwich and Washington), 6-8PM
We’ve never seen Meg Whitmarsh’s work in person, but her wall paintings, collages and totems look promising. The work employs a melting-pot sensibility, bringing together feathers, alien heads, pride rainbows, and chains. There are also a lot of music references, so we’ll be interested to see what, if any, sound elements make it into the show.
Klaus von Nichtsaggend Gallery: Zachary Leener, Penguin Cafe, 2012 oil pastel on paper in artist's frame
Klaus von Nichtssagend
Cosmo
54 Ludlow Street (at Grand), 6-8PM
“Cosmo is a summer group show that explores the abstract representation of things undeniably hot.” With a PR description like that, I don’t know if I should expect tabasco, sideboob, or paintings slightly warm to the touch. Abstract painters and sculptors Graham Anderson, Polly Apfelbaum, Anya Kielar, and Zachary Leener sound like a dynamite combination, and the beer likelihood is high.
Pocket Utopia
Ellen Lechter: Photo Still
191 Henry Street (between Clinton and Jefferson Streets), 6-9PM
If you haven’t been to the Bushwick gallery’s new space yet, Pocket Utopia reopened on the Lower East Side back in March. This month, the gallery will show the work of Ellen Letcher, co-director of the now defunct Bushwick gallery Famous Accountants, and artist in her own right. In her work, she pastes photos, laser prints, and unprimed canvas to collaged magazine and book pages. Then she paints over that.
Saturday, June 9th
White Columns
Do Your Thing
320 West 13th Street, 6-9PM
Curated by Rub N Tug, two bro-ish DJs who are into “music and having a drink and a good time,” this show sounds too cool for school: it’s the second show on this weekend’s listing that includes Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. The only thing I’m looking forward to is seeing what Gavin Brown made for the show, because isn’t that cute: a dealer made some art!
Sunday, June 10th
Thierry Goldberg
Its Endless Undoing
103 Norfolk Street, 6-8PM
There’s a group show at Thierry Goldberg about how absence is the essence of reality; who knows what that’ll look like. This might boil down to a really long press release, but if you like art that’s serious, this one might be for you. What else could you expect from PR that focuses on “attention to form” and the “idea of representing by absence”?
On Stellar Rays
JAŠA: Apnea’s Rhapsody
133 Orchard Street, 6-8PM
This nauseating video probably tells you all you need to know. The press release makes this out to be some kind of mytho-perceptual gesamtkunstwerk, but we’re attracted to something else entirly: the promise of references to “Koschei the Deathless, Baby Jaga [sic], Tugarin Zmeevich and Zmeu Gorynich”, who are presented in the press release as Slavic sky myths but sound more like awesome DJs. Yes, please. The opening will also involve a performance of some kind.
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“Portrait of a Generation,” accompanied by NetGen icon “the Parked Domain Girl,” includes Renee Ricard, Donald Baechler and Raymond Pettibon, demonstrating that a generation is as elastic as a gallery needs it to be.
Ha. No kidding.
Heads up that the Sierra show is apparently sticking to a strict screening schedule, even though it isn’t listed on their website. I tried to go on my lunch break and after watching 5 minutes was basically asked to leave the gallery, as the loop that had just restarted wouldn’t end in time for the next scheduled screening (at 1, nearly 40 minutes away). I kind of get it, but it also kind of sucked.
kathy greyson is a slut
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