Follow Friday: Five Galleries You Should Know
This week’s Follow Friday includes something for every art audience, from representational Southwestern painting to post-minimalist sculpture.
While Odon Wagner Gallery specializes in 19th- and 20th-century art, its contemporary counterpart boasts its own 5,000-square-foot exhibition space in Toronto and is home to a diverse roster of artists. Among its offerings are John Ballantyne’s pastoral softly lit American scenes that echo Edward Hopper and Claude Hazanavicius’ bronze figures that give off a Kafkaesque air of lonely modern malaise. The gallery is also responsible for the estates of impressionistic landscape painter Don Resnick and ethereal figurative sculptor Gary Weisman. A recent exhibition of photographer Lucien Clergue, Chairman of Paris’ Academy of Fine Arts for 2013, was titled “La Lumiére Transcrit” and included a series of photographs of a reflective Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau.
Representing more than 50 contemporary artists primarily from the Southwestern region, Manitou Galleries is currently in the midst of a show highlighting painters Kim Wiggins and William Haskell. Wiggins prefers daylit compositions of the rich sun-drenched colors of Western heat waves and wind gusts, while Haskell’s work has some dark and foreboding overtones. Manitou also represents sculptor Joe Cajero, who draws from his Pueblo Indian heritage to create spiritually rich pieces playing with human and animal forms, and Fran Larsen, whose psychedelically geometric Southwestern landscapes have an extraterrestrial quality.
This Brooklyn-based gallery has a unique specialization in reductive abstract art and contemporary minimalism. Currently on view is an exhibition of German artist Hartmut Böhm’s wall works. Böhm is one of the most influential post-minimalists of his generation and has had more than 70 solo and two-person exhibitions since 1964. Also on the Minus Space roster is Mark Dagley, a painter rooted in the Op Art tradition but not confined to it. His works have a fractal quality to them and challenge the viewer while also inducing them gradually into a trance state.
As a site-specific experimental curatorial project, NYC-based TURF seeks to, “appropriate the arbitrary notion of Africana in the digital age,” and, “explore how far the constant flow of people, goods, art and design across porous border and the Internet has re-defined the myths surrounding human identity.” Rooted culturally in Africana, TURF exhibits work that challenges notions of labels or definition. Nathalie Mba-Bikoro, whose work was included in TURF’s booth at cutlog New Yorkin May, employs the storied medium of lithography in combination with the newer technology of electro-etching to produce silhouetted works that echo both faded newspaper images and street stenciling.
Having founded the art and design collaboration firm Cumulus Studios in 2008, Nathalie Karg opened this Noho space earlier this year. With a uniquely lofty high-ceilinged location on Great Jones Street, the gallery shares a wall with downtown favorite Karma bookstore. Karg works closely with her artists to ensure cohesive exhibitions; on view now are new works by mixed-media artist Ohad Meromi. Included is the video Worker! Smoker! Actor!, in which Meromi combines a variety of vignettes following the life of a cigarette factory worker. Also included is an intriguing variety of sculptural works and installations.
