8 minute read
ALCHEMY OF BEAUTY
JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, CLAIRE DORN; INSTALLATION VIEW, THOMAS GARNIER, BOTH COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PERROTIN, © JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL/ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH Jean-Michel Othoniel’s magical water sculpture The Beautiful Dances (2015) at the Château de Versailles is the first original work to be added to the historic property’s André LeNôtre-designed gardens in 350 years. Opposite: the artist with his 2020 canvas, La Rose du Louvre, which was acquired by the Parisian museum last year.
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Art is everywhere you look this summer. Angela M.H. Schuster rounds up some of the best on view both in the city and on Long Island’s East End
JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: WILD ROSEBUDS
Perrotin 130 Orchard Street Through August 13
“F or me, beauty is something that brings you to another level of contemplation, and fills you with a profound sense of joy,” says Jean-Michel Othoniel. Chatting with Avenue from his Paris atelier, the French conceptual artist has been putting the final touches on a suite of new flower-inspired paintings and decadently beautiful works in blown glass, which were unveiled at the Perrotin gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in June.
Blown glass sculptures in particular, he explains, are the product of a violent creation process where the material is often “wounded” in the creation of his work, which he sees as a “metaphor for the beauty and sadness that exist within human experience as well as nature.”
For the past three decades, Othoniel has been experimenting with his alchemical wonders, initially executing intimately scaled works, which, in time, led to a host of monumental commissions that have graced the grounds of Versailles, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, and, later this year, the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. All the while, he has pursued an obsession with flowers and their infinite symbolic associations. “Flowers allow us to explore our concerns with ephemerality and permanence, life and death, figure and ground, form and color.”
In recent years, the artist has found himself in high demand by luxury brands, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, which have tapped him to collaborate on a host of projects. Such collaborations, he says, have been a natural outgrowth of the personal relationships he has built with those who collect his oeuvre. It was Bernard Arnault and his daughter, Delphine, for instance, who invited him to create the iconic J’Adore bottle for Dior, and starchitect Peter Marino, who commissioned a suite of important works for Chanel’s flagship stores around the globe.
For the New York exhibition, Othoniel is presenting ten paintings and seven sculptures in mirrored glass inspired by the chrysanthemum flower, or kiku in Japanese, a symbol of joy, pleasure, and eternity. The sculptures represent a continuation of artist’s “infinite knots” series, which he embarked on a decade ago in collaboration with Mexican mathematician Aubin Arroyo. Each of the resulting glass constructions is “based on a mathematical theory used to calculate the infinities of reflections contained within one sphere of mirrors.”
Gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin says of Othoniel’s work, “It is monumental yet delicate, baroque yet minimal, poetic yet political. His contemplative forms, like oxymorons, have the power to reconcile opposites. With a capacity to harmonize people with their environment, his art invites viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.”
The exhibition runs through August 13. A retrospective of Othoniel’s work will open at the Petit Palais in Paris in September.
Jean-Michel Othoniel
BLOOMERS Bouton Rose, a 2020 ink and gold leaf on canvas, and opposite: KikuAyameiro (Iris color) (2020), a sculpture in mirrored glass and stainless steel.
ALMA ALLEN ↑
Kasmin Sculpture Garden 509 West 27th Street Kasmin Gallery 514 West 28th Street Through August 13 T his summer, visitors to the High Line are being treated to trio of large-scale outdoor works in bronze by American sculptor Alma Allen, presented by the Kasmin Sculpture Garden amid a “rewilded” urban meadow on the rooftop of its West 27th Street space. The exhibition continues with more than two dozen “small bronze talismans,” some studies for larger commissions by the artist, who casts and finishes sculptures at his on-site bronze foundry at his studio in the hills of Tepoztlán, Mexico.
INSTALLATION VIEW, © ALMA ALLEN, CHRISTOPHER STACH/COURTESY OF KASMIN GALLERY; ALMA ALLEN, PIA RIVEROLA
BRONZE AGE Alma Allen with a monumental bronze at his studio in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Opposite: the artist's rooftop installation at Kasmin Sculpture Garden in Chelsea.
TOMASHI JACKSON: THE LAND CLAIM →
Parrish Art Museum 279 Montauk Highway Water Mill July 11–November 7
It had been a whirlwind year for Tomashi Jackson, coming off the 2019 Whitney Biennial with a six-week ARCAthens residency, followed by a solo show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, followed by commitments to produce a grounds-encompassing show at the Parrish Art Museum, when the pandemic hit. “Fortunately, I'm feeling over the moon with gratitude right now, with all of the generous artistic and intellectual support I have received during this crazy time,” the artist tells
Avenue, speaking from her studio in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. There, she has been wrapping up her presentation at the Parrish Art Museum— postponed from 2020—as well as preparing for a fall exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, where she is a fellow.
Her multilayered narratives tackle the fraught subjects of race and identity—the relationship between political systems and cultural conceptions of personhood—and how the past continues to impact the present, with contemporary policies heavily influenced by the backlash to “great society” policies. A case in point, she says, is Brown v.
Board of Education and how its legacy of resource deprivation persists at the intersection of tech policy and civil rights. If anything, the pandemic brought into stark relief the disparities between the haves and the have-nots when it comes access to education and the necessary tools for remote learning.
Yet, for the Houston-born artist, who lives and works in Cambridge and New York City, her visually stunning work is anything but one-sided; her compositions exploring all facets of the deeply complex stories they tell.
For the PAM project, Jackson has developed a new body of work based on deep archival research that includes large-scale paintings, site-specific drawings, and an outdoor sound installation. Its collective focus: the historic and contemporary lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families on Long Island’s East End, and how issues of housing, transportation, livelihood, migration, and agriculture have linked them.
Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim is presented as part of the museum’s Platform series, which, according to exhibition organizer Corinne Erni, offers “an annual invitation to an artist to consider the entire museum as a site for works that transcend disciplinary boundaries, encouraging new ways to experience art, architecture, landscape, and community.”
HER STORY Below: Tomashi Jackson's 2020 mixed media work Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved (Red and Black), includes Pentelic marble dust, soil from an Ohio Underground Railroad site, and American electoral ephemera. Opposite: the artist in her Brooklyn studio.
, © TOMASHI JACKSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND TILTON GALLERY, NY; TOMASHI JACKSON, CHRISTOPHER GREGORY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX IS ANYBODY GONNA BE SAVED?
Marc Glimcher
PLAYTIME From top: an installation view of Robert Nava's Pace show in Palm Beach this past winter and Lightning Keeper, Kiss of Death, a 2020 acrylic and grease pencil on canvas.
Pace 68 Park Place East Hampton August 12—29 “Robert Nava’s work reveals a new contemporary mythology with his chimeric beasts, part children’s fantasy, part expressionistic composition, exploiting the intersection of the playful and the threatening,” says Pace president and CEO Marc Glimcher. This summer, his gallery is presenting a solo exhibition featuring new paintings and drawings by the Brooklyn-based artist, who recently joined the Pace roster in its East Hampton space.
Often created to the vitalizing beat of deep house music, Glimcher explains Nava’s large-scale paintings “conjure a realm awash in magic and possibility, where beings are always seemingly on the verge of transmogrification. His images of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.”
GAME DAY Untitled, a 2018 acrylic on canvas by Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor. HENRY TAYLOR ↑
Hauser & Wirth 9 Main Street Southampton July 1–August 1 F or his first solo exhibition in the Hamptons space, Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor is presenting a focused selection of recent paintings and sculptures, including many created during his residency and show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Among the highlights is a suite of paintings from his Jockey and Caddy series, including Untitled, an acrylic on canvas from 2018.
“The works on view reflect Taylor’s interest in the full breadth of the human condition, and the social movements and political structures that have shaped it,” says Iwan Wirth, adding that his highly personal visual vocabulary is rooted in depictions of the people and communities closest to him, layered with broader cultural references.
