Relying heavily on a dose of influence from his Pop art predecessors but injecting it with sensibilities based in hip-hop hype, skater style and graffiti guerilla warfare, Ryan McGinness has pioneered a new territory in the realm of high art.
In his debut solo exhibition, at Toronto’s tiny but edgy and inspiring Le Gallery, di Genova offered ink and ‘cell animation’ paint on mylar drawings that displayed his attention to artists like Twist, Futura, and DALEK.
I caught up with Altmejd for breakfast on the roof of the Armada Hotel in the old Sultanahmet sector of Istanbul the day after the opening of the Biennial. In the shadow of the Blue Mosque with a panorama view of the Bosphorus we spoke about energy generating werewolf heads, studio visits with Matthew Barney, the relationship between art and commerce, and what it means to be a French Canadian artist working in New York City.
It was already dark and all I could see to match the aggressive growl were two headlights speeding towards me at a terrifying clip, now less than a block away. As I leaped onto the curb the 1968 red Cobra flew past, the driver’s blur of blond hair swishing in the wind.
The sublime torment of Stipl’s demented figures resembles nothing so much as the stoic, hardened, drunken peasants trapped in Hieronymous Bosch’s purgatories. And like the prime-time reality-television programs we all deny watching, these grotesque miniatures at once repel and attract our gaze, making us at once slightly nauseous yet terribly compelled to keep looking.
The inventive and delightfully serendipitous drawings, sculptures and dolls in this show derive from a collaborative practice by the eight members of the group: Michael Dumontier, Hollie Dzama, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Myles Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams.
It’s a Tuesday night in Lower Manhattan. Race night. I’m at Tom Sachs’s production facility on Hester Street, three blocks from his studio, two blocks from his home. Chinatown. This giant factory is on the third floor of an ancient building that once housed the New York City Police Department’s mounted division.
Since Pope Gregory the Great first posted the seven deadly sins on the Christian internet in the sixth century, they have been creative fodder for an incredibly diverse group of artists.
Alexis Rockman sauntered up to our meeting spot on Canal Street, the sanguine spring in his step belying the bizarre state of Broadway, deserted except for about twenty police officers wearing flak jackets and carrying machine guns. The natural history painter’s studio is located in an area of Manhattan that was closed off to all nonresidents in the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11, Black Tuesday, and he arrived exactly on time to escort me into the war zone.
Walking into Ryan Humphrey’s solo show at Caren Golden Fine Art was like walking into Valhalla; a place where the holy relics of my childhood heroes retired for eternity.