Kips Gallery
New York, Chelsea
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
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212 242 4215
kips@kipsgallery.com
Gallery Hours
Tues-Sat, 11 -6 Pm
The Three Exhibitions
As chance will have it, on the same block on 25 Street in Chelsea, New York, there are currently three exhibitions by three different artists where the iconography, syntax, and a way to apprehend and translate a certain artistic vision has much in common.
Of the three, Joan Mitchel showing at Lennon Weinberg Gallery 514 West 25thstreet, is obviously by far the better known. An abstract expressionist, her work has been widely exhibited and written about since her death in 1992.The work by Milton Resnick, who died four years ago can be seen in an extensive show at Cheim & Read 547 West 25th Street. While a contemporary of Pollock and DeKooning, Resnick’s work is internal and restrained. Like them, he was looking for a way to unite foreground and background in order to achieve an unity of theses opposites. As compared to his contemporaries, he never received the recognition he deserves. This show will certainly contribute to a reassessment of his work and long career.
Haessle’s exhibition at Kips Gallery 531 West 25th street, a young start-up gallery, while coming from a very different background and experience than Mitchel and Resnick, nevertheless has strong affinities with them. In his late 60’s, he is a French expatriate, who lives and has worked in New York City for the past 40 years. There is an aspect of the work by Mitchel (especially her large blue paintings series) which heralds her beloved Monet. Similarly, Resnick seems to have viewed intently Seurat or even Klimt. In the Haessle show, a large work titled: “In flow”, executed in 1987, associates the intensity of early DeKooning with an exquisitely refined sense of color and touch echoing the impressionist masters.
One could make the point, that while Mitchel went to France and spent the major time of her career living and working close to Giverny, Haessle’s move to New York City in 1967 is paralleling somewhat, in reverse, her experience. The “French” lushness of his colors, combined with the muscular energy of his American side, makes for a decidedly interesting experience.
The three shows being so closely located is an opportunity to get their full benefit by viewing them at the same time.Art in Chelsea J. White
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Fay Ku
When Fay Ku was a child, her parents used to tell her fairy tales with horrible rather than happy endings—it was their way of introducing their daughter to the dangers of the world. Ku, who moved to America from Taiwan at the age of three to be with her parents (her grandmother had raised her after birth), responded sensitively to the troubled narratives her parents entertained her with: she became an artist whose work incorporates children and adolescents in situations that emphasize the sheer strangeness of childhood. Not unlike the fantastic, whimsical artist Henry Darger, Ku refers to a mindset populated by children who undermine confidence in the world as it is. She prefers to present disturbing tableaux, in which young girls pull each other’s hair or regurgitate snakes, so that the scenes become meditations on transgressions that make no sense, that seem to come out of nowhere.
Ku is invested in secrets, the kind of intimacy that occurs when something private is told privately. It is an intensely female world, whose idiosyncratic habits do not lack for aggression. The viewer hopes for a key to the eccentricities of the imagery, but none is offered—we must make sense of the uncanny aggression Ku’s subjects submit to. While not all the girls are engaging in destructive activities, even the supposedly benign drawings emphasize exotic situations, with the girls’ bodies caricatured in poses that are humanly impossible to carry off. For example, in Secret (2007) two attractive young women are head to head, transmitting secrets—the figure on the right cups her hand to her ear in order to hear better. Both figures are being violated by sexless personages—we do not see their faces—who wear striped clothing and seem to peer at the subjects’ genitals. Regularly, Ku invites us into a world where nothing seems right.
Sometimes the images deliberately seek provocation—in the erotic sense, where the young women are both vulnerable and sexually available. In Nightcrawlers (2007) a naked post-adolescent girl, lying on a bed, is covered with large worms; they are attracted to her breast (which she also covers with her hand) and her sex, hiding the pubis. A worm is found at her lips and in her hair, and the figure’s expression is troubled, as if she were enduring her condition for the sake of someone else. The masochism becomes even more apparent in Thorny (2007), in which a nude young woman remarkably like Ku herself is enveloped in thorns, which wrap her hands, enter her mouth, and curl under to her genitals. These two images both suggest psychological as well as physical pain, yet we don’t know why the artist has portrayed her subjects as she does; the enigma of their existence turns on the experience of suffering, but the vivid conundrums of Ku’s drawings show only the effect and not the cause.
One of the more affecting drawings pictures a young girl with a short haircut, in a print blouse and shorts, walking off toward the left. Titled Didn’t Feel a Thing (2005), the subject has left five bloody footprints; her right foot is steeped in blood. The young girl’s profile reveals a somber demeanor, while the title of the work only emphasizes her predicament. Again, pain is key to the painting. In general, Ku’s art is excruciating to the point where it doesn’t make sense, resulting in a surrealism whose physical aches stand in for another kind of suffering. Although Ku describes girls and young women in raw circumstances, the hurt seems to be self-induced. This poses a seemingly intractable puzzle: Why should they do this to themselves? The answer to the mystery isn’t all that clear, but what results is an extraordinary range of scenarios whose close familiarity border on frankness. We may not know the secrets, but nonetheless we are taken in by them; our bemusement results from the girls’ unsolvable quandaries.
http://www.artcritical.com/goodman/JGKu.htm
Review by By JONATHAN GOODMAN
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David Geiser
It would seem that installation art, as it is understood today, is a misnomer. The museological use of the term refers to the way an exhibition is mounted, how it is presented, and how it determines (to a large extent) the relationships between the paintings within the gallery space. David Geiser’s paintings suggest the kind of urgency that used to occupy artists before the advent of “installation art.” Geiser’s recent exhibition at Kips Gallery—one of the smaller, more intimate spaces in West Chelsea—consists of a sequence of enlarged microorganisms and painterly floral forms on separate panels. Rather than incorporating the overall space, Geiser is interested in what happens within the paintings themselves: layers of pigment that accrue during the painting process, generating a mixture of muted earth colors and textures that relate directly to the vitality of the brushwork.
Geiser’s biography as a painter is unusual. In 1969, after attending the University of Vermont, he decided to drive his VW bus to San Francsisco—where the action was happening. Once settled in the Mission District, he met Grey Arlington, founder of the San Francisco Comic Book Company. Within months Geiser became part of the underground comics scene, which included designing posters for rock concerts at the Fillmore. His mentors were R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and the poet Jack Micheline. Over the next six years, he produced a chain of countercultural comic books, culminating with the publication of Pain (1975-76) through the Bagginer Press in Paris. At the peak of his reputation as a comic book artist, Geiser’s career took a different turn. He married, had a son, and focused almost entirely on painting. Then, after several cross-country trips to New York, he finally decided to settle here in 1981, taking odd jobs with Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine and occasional op-ed gigs with The New York Times.
In a ramshackle, live-in New York studio, Geiser became obsessed with painting, literally working day and night, searching for a point of view less involved with the trends of the eighties than with a vision of reality that would lead him in a new direction. He was interested in finding what he called “the gritty substance.” Finally, he discovered it. His forms turned toward organic specimens and fossils, but always from the vantage point of a personal abstract vocabulary. In his recent exhibition, we see intense ultramarine blue with gold leaf beside brilliant yellows over crusty earth tones, built up layer upon layer. Geiser does not date his paintings because he does not remember exactly when they started. He only knows that they ended sometime in the past year, and even that is conditional. In each case, the paintings are highly textural and densely packed with pigment and natural substances, including various species of tree bark and fungi. For Geiser, wild mushrooms are simply another collage element projecting from these free-form shapes.
These mystifyingly unrecognized paintings occupy a place totally within the realm of eccentric painting—not in the outsider sense, but in the way they congeal rationally in relation to their materials. They belong to no school or movement. They are difficult (but not impossible) to locate in the art market. As a painter in his own world (where such painters belong), Geiser is less interested in trends than in imbuing painting with pre-linguistic memory, in how far these inscrutable panels of fossilized pigment can carry his ideas into the future—a future that he wants to steer in the direction of the tactile moment before it is lost to the lust for fashion, stardom and money that currently rules the world of contemporary art.
The Brooklynrail
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/03/artseen/geiser
Review by Robert C. Morgan