Art is always supposedly in the midst of some crisis of aesthetics; the critics say we’re just rehashing the past. Leave it to artists themselves — new, old, and at the margins — to prove them wrong. There were so many great shows this past year in New York that it was hard to choose just ten.
Most of the fast action was in galleries large and small. At Zwirner, the belly of the Cheslea mega-gallery beast, Dana Schutz took on all of art history and her own demons. Tracey Emin gave us pain, love, and universal suffering at the new White Cube Gallery on the Upper East Side, while the young Agata Slowak, a Pole, created surreal paintings filled with desire in the teeny-weeny Fortnight Gallery on the Lower East Side. Museums flexed, too: Witness the Whitney’s monumental Henry Taylor show, full of wildly rendered images of life and race in America in the 21st century.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zwirner Gallery
On the last day of this exhibition, at five minutes to six, with the gallery full of viewers, I saw something that blew me away. Two young people bent over and moved an entire triangular section from Untitled (Public Opinion), Gonzalez-Torres’s floor sculpture made up of candies in metallic-blue wrappers. Before I could inform the gallery of this transgression, everyone else began carving into the sculpture, taking it apart, rearranging it into a new piece altogether. A giant psychic hole opened up, revealing how art can change before your astonished and grateful eyes.
Matthew Barney, “Secondary,” Matthew Barney Studio
Perhaps the grandest American artist to have emerged in the last 30 years (art is subjective, people), Barney was at the top of his game in this multimedia installation ostensibly about football, but really was an opera-ballet myth of violence, epic violence, dance, and giving glances. His use of coded color and materials like plastic is next to none.
Agata Slowak, “Time Is Love,” Fortnight Institute
This young Polish master creates very small, highly realistic, deeply perverse images of sex, blood, stolen love, and abject acts. Her style of painting is an otherworldly yet spot-on commentary on contemporary sexuality.
Miyoko Ito, Matthew Marks Gallery
Ito makes surreal, abstract images and has a touch as soft as muffling cotton. Her textural surfaces resemble skin with goosebumps, infused with muted tones of pure color, transporting viewers to dreamlike interior spaces full of peace.
Xiyadie, “Queer Cut Utopias,” The Drawing Center
A middle-age man married with children from provincial China came out as gay — and in so doing found his voice, making magical cutouts of himself having sex, stealing kisses, hiding from Chinese police, and finding liberation and healing in art.
Myrlande Constant, “Drapo,” Fort Gansevoort
Captivating beaded tapestries made by a group led by this visionary Haitian artist, depicting characters of daily life, dancing figures, demons, staring death, and more. This work deserves a museum show soon.
Hilary Harkness, “Prisoners From the Front,” P.P.O.W.
These gorgeously nonnarrative, quasi-historical paintings told tales of transgenderism, race-switching, and Civil War–era romance. Also on view: beautiful portraits depicting Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas (as a passive-aggressive power bottom), and a decapitated Hemingway.
Dana Schutz, “Jupiter’s Lottery,” Zwirner Gallery
It was amazing to see Schutz reach visionary heights in this eye-burning exhibition. There were gigantic narratives of struggle between cosmic social forces, lurid spirits, ghouls, twisted beings, monsters, and babies — with the brave artist at the still center of it all.
Tracey Emin, “Lovers Grave,” White Cube Gallery
Powerful, scrawled, half-mad, brilliantly rendered images of Emin, in bed, opening herself up, being blown apart by unseen forces, reconstituting, and making love, in rooms filled with ghosts and coffins. Emin is our Edvard Munch, with a profound seer’s soul.
Henry Taylor, “B Side,” Whitney Museum of American Art
With a sweeping grasp of history, art history, and everyday life in this country, Taylor provided a Whitney retrospective that channeled rage, pain, love, and suffering — the long American night done in vivid color and bold strokes.
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