One of The City’s many facets – vibrant, almost technicolor, always dramatic. No color-correction at all, I actually had to tone it down a bit, to make seem more ”real”.
8:10pm
1st Ave & 58th str.
September 3rd, 2016
Category: Chrono
Rain of Light
My title, not the artist’s. The artist left it untitled so I thought, what if I call it ”Rain of Light”, isn’t it more fitting? Presumptuous may be, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw it illuminating the stairwell, making it an integral part of the museum rather than a solely utilitarian feature. I instantly thanked myself for choosing to take the stairs instead of the lift.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
”Untitled” (America), 1994
Twelve light strings, each with forty-two 15-watt lightbulbs and rubber sockets, at the stairwell of The Whitney Museum of American aRt.
September 10th, 2016
Lengthy Symmetry
There can be balance between extremes. It’s just a matter of finding the right proportions.
East 57th St.
September 11th, 2016
Melting away Standing
Larger than Life.
Day in Night out.
Recast and lit anew – the cycle of Life.
Caption accompanying Standing Julian:
Standing Julian is a portrait of Urs Fischer’s friend and fellow artist Julian Schnabel. The massive sculpture is also a wax candle: lit every morning and extinguished each night, Standing Julian will slowly melt over the course of the exhibition. Although this candle will eventually burn down and be discarded – a process that evokes the inevitable transience of life – the sculpture can also be recast and lit anew. As Fischer explained, his waxworks allow ”materials and images take on their own life.”
That was Julian, captured in September. Is there anything left of him today, I wonder. Is he still turning into a puddle of soft wax? Has a new Julian taken his place?
Would I know if nobody told me?
Standing Julian, 2015
Wax, pigment, steel and wicks
Urs Fischer
September 10th, 2016 at The Whitney Museum of American aRt
Dreamscape
Manhattan
September 5th, 2016
It snowed
And the City woke up in a haze. Dreaming still.
Meanwhile, at street-level, business as usual.
Real life was going on.
With a touch of salt, melting the snow and turning it dark brown with patches of grey.
Just another Saturday in winter in the City.
January 7th, 2017
Woman with Dog
Whichever way you look at her she seems as real as the woman next door. Well, perhaps not Manhattan next door but a smaller city or town like, for instance, my other adoptive home Brussels. She could definitely be the lady that runs the bakery on the ground floor in my building in Brussels.
And yet, although the artist worked on real models making casts directly from their bodies, his sculptures are not really images of specific people. For example, the letters on her lap are addressed to Minnie Johnson, but the model was someone else who lived near Hanson’s studio in Florida. Woman with Dog is therefore a hyper-real figure constructed from different features and, because of that, doubly real in my eyes.
Duane Hanson
Woman with Dog, 1977
Acrylic and oil on cast polyvinyl with clothing, hair, eyeglasses, watch, shoes, upholstered wood chair, dog hair, leather collar, woven rug, postcard, letters, and envelopes
The Whitney Museum of American Art
September 10th, 2016
Waiting for Q Broadway Express
Times Sq-42 St Broadway, going uptown to the new 2nd Avenue stations.
January 8th, 2017
Talking about subway art
Granted, beautiful artwork adorns many of New York’s subway stations, but the works featured at the newly opened Second Avenue Subway are our current darlings – and with very good reason!
Just look at these fabulous life-size mosaics at the Second Avenue-72nd Street by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. Based on staged photographs of people he knows, some ordinary, some made-up, others well-known Muniz named this series “Perfect Strangers” because that’s what people waiting for the train are: perfect strangers getting together for a brief moment before going about their separate ways.
On to Second Avenue-86th Street station, where the walls are adorned with Chuck Close’s ”Subway Portraits”, 12 large works based on his photo-realistic portrait paintings, transposed into mosaics or tiles.
Here are the portraits of the artist himself, artist Sienna Shields (whose identity it took me some digging to discover being unfamiliar with the local artistic milieu) and Lou Reed:
January 08th, 2017
No Sex, No City: Miranda
Steward Uoo
No Sex, No City: Miranda, 2013 (detail)
Polyurethane resin, epoxy, ink, pigment, acrylic paint, wires, cables, clothing, accessories, ferrofluid, razor wire, steel, feathers, human and synthetic hair, makeup, glitter, synthetic eyelashes, maggot cocoons, flies, dust, and other materials
When the unrelated, the unexpected and the repellent get together to form a thing of beauty.
At the Whitney Museum of American Art
September 10th, 2016
The Humble Fabulist 