David Nolan New York
527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001
t: +1 212 925 6190
f: +1 212 334 9139
info@davidnolangallery.com
By PETER PLAGENS
Richard Artschwager
David Nolan Gallery, 527 W. 29th St., (212) 925-6190
Through Dec. 3
Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) is one of the last living American artists to have served in World War II. He studied with pioneer modernist Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. All through this oddball grizzled veteran's body of work, varied in form but consistent in tone, he's remained against the grain. It's a lot easier to say you like Mr. Artschwager's grudgingly figurative, defiantly homely paintings and sculptures than it is to actually do so. (He paints a plank of wood with a cartoonish wood grain, for instance.) Liking them, however, has its rewards—such as prying open your jaws of taste just a little bit further than you're used to.
Nolan's main room is occupied in part by several pastel drawings in basic landscape configuration—a road leading in perspective toward an across-the-page horizon, which is topped by a narrow layer of sky. Technique: antimastery mastery. Color: foggily intense. Mood: red-state melancholy. Unsolved mystery: In one picture, a giant leg sprouts from the ground.
On the far wall hangs "Roofline," a big painting on Mr. Artschwager's preferred rough surface of celotex, a fiberboard material used in residential construction. It depicts a pitched plane of brick-red roofing tiles and a pinkish furrowed field (or maybe a weird sunset cloud formation). Separating them on a diagonal is a purplish rain gutter. I don't know what it means. But the work has been semipleasantly bothering me ever since I walked out of the gallery.
By Roberta Smith
In the last several years Richard Artschwager’s art seems to have lost some of its usual cool, and this is a good thing. Colors have warmed and a degree of direct observation has softened the intense artifice, grounded in an idiosyncratic fusion of Pop Art and Minimalism, that is so basic to the wide-ranging Artschwager brand.
Most of the recent works here depict desert landscapes similar to those the artist knew and loved in his youth. They are pastels on paper or acrylic on his trademark Celotex fiberboard, although its ersatz brush-stroke textures seem to have lost their satiric edge. In “Landscape With Rosettes” the textures add body to a field of tumbleweed that basks in the palpable, quietly electrifying sheen of a yellow moon. In “Untitled (Roofline)” the textures are outdone by color: a wedge of red shingles and a wedge of striped pink that could be tilled field or streaky sky. These areas meet along a gray diagonal that is probably a gutter, but what matters most is their woozy, tilting glow and the irreconcilable spatial ambiguities.
Perhaps in an attempt to show that the give-and-take between observation and artifice enlivening these works is not really new, Mr. Artschwager includes a dozen small landscape drawings in combinations of watercolor, pastel and graphite from around 1950. Their improvisational shorthand — unexpectedly reminiscent of Milton Avery — is full of scrolling tangles, scratchy lines and staccato marks that telegraph the desert’s sage, chalky strata and distant buttes. They suggest that Mr. Artschwager has not so much lost his cool as reclaimed an earlier part of himself.
By Valerie Gladstone
When artists enjoy long lives, their fans reap tremendous advantages. This thought came to mind when looking over Richard Artschwager’s new works at David Nolan Gallery. Born in 1923, he has never fit into any category for very long, passing through styles that superficially resembled pop, minimal and conceptual, all the while confounding critics who have tried to pigeonhole him.
A painter, sculptor, photographer and carpenter—he even made altars for ships in 1960—Artschwager’s consistent concern seems only to be investigating the illusions of perception. Though he did employ utilitarian objects and showed himself ingenious with geometric forms, they always served less of an immediate purpose than to comment on themselves. Full of ideas, yes, but not nearly as cool as most conceptualists.
In some recent works here he returns to the region of his childhood, Las Cruces, N.M., with atmospheric landscapes that capture the openness and rawness of that part of the country. “Landscape with Rosettes” shows a yellow sun or moon hanging in the sky over the rust-brown earth, its surface dotted with green shapes arranged in an irregular formation. The circular arrangements of leaves seem out of place—growth from a richer, wetter climate.
Two yellow lines cut across a square of brown earth in the middle of overgrown vegetation in “Landscape with Median.” The sky fades to blue-green in the distance. Because the lines—the median—go nowhere and serve no purpose, stopping almost as soon as they start, they give the impression of a dead end or of a futile human intervention into the wild.
In older works from the ’70s, Artschwager uses charcoal pencil and pastel when drawing on ivory laid Strathmore paper or paper handmade from crushed sugarcane pulp. By employing these textured surfaces, he gets the sculptural effect that he always seems to be after. Fittingly titled “Weave,” the drawings of crisscrossing gray and black lines look like window frames or even the bars of a cage. They are reminiscent of Franz Kline’s black-and-white abstractions and are endowed with the same fierce, insistent angularity.
To give a sense of his range, the gallery also includes “Arch,” a silver-painted wooden sculpture from 2007, a dynamic totem. A particular favorite, “Abstraction,” painted in 2004, looks like a Cézanne landscape with its geometry, the green and blue bands of color going off to the horizon. A maze as well, the work has the depth and two-dimensionality that Artschwager strives for. How wonderful that he never stopped at any of his dynamic stages, allowing us to see where they would eventually take him.
Richard Artschwager
Through Dec. 3, David Nolan Gallery, 527 W. 29th St., 212-925-6190, www.davidnolangallery.com.