LOOK at NY ART

06/13/2024

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05/04/2024

A wonderful Saturday doing what I love, leading two tours of incredible works of art at NYC art galleries. I am grateful for the sold-out tours today and for the wonderful feedback. I am convinced that this is what I was meant to do.

We started at David Zwirner on East 69th Street and moved North along Madison, starting with Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, followed by a superb Dubuffet and Giacometti show at Nahmad Contemporary, Anselm Kiefer photography at Gagosian, and then Cara Nahaul paintings at Alexander Berggruen (and it was lovely that Alexander came out to see us and chimed in), an incredible group show at Mnuchin, then new paintings by Eric Fischl at Skarstedt and finally Wayne Thiebaud's delicious paintings of sweets and snacks at Acquavella.

www.lookatnyart.com

12/26/2023

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. Start your New Year with a private New York City tour for friends or work colleagues exploring art galleries in TriBeCa, one of the hottest neighborhoods exhibiting Contemporary Art. Join me as I brief you on emerging artists having their first NYC retrospective. For instance, we will explore and discuss Constanza Schaffner's first solo show at Luhring Augustine. Born in Argentina and now a NY-based Contemporary artist, Schaffner's paintings explore the intersection of the poetic and rational, abstract and figurative.
Private tours are a full two hours, include 7 to 8 galleries, and start at $350 for groups of up to 10. It's a perfect group outing, team-building activity or gift for Valentine's Day. Clients say I bring art to life, making it accessible, and providing insights on why it's important or valuable.
Contact me at: www.lookatnyart.com

11/29/2023

In New York City, we are surrounded by the sculptures and astonishing legacy of six Italian brothers.

The masterly Piccirilli brothers set up a shop in the Bronx and used hammers and chisels to create some of the most important public sculptures in the city.

11/10/2023

TBT.
Pets are not just adorable companions.
For those of us without kids, they give us tremendous purpose.
My life has never been quite the same since Chico left me.
I know there is a little creature out there who will benefit from my love and care again, and who will bring me a great deal of purpose.
I am enjoying a break and travel, but they will arrive in 2024.

I find myself missing an enormous part of who I was and I understand how much love and care I can offer.

11/06/2023

At Look@NYArt, we know that art can bring people together, enable combined and careful looking, and spark new ideas and engaging conversation.
Contact me to arrange a NY-based customized art-focused team-building experience for your work colleagues, clients, and alumni association or club, or family and friends.
Ideal for groups of up to 20, I will customize an art gallery walk that meets your group's schedule, timeframe and interests. I will brief you group on all artists and discuss and guide a conversation on key works. We will include up to 7 to 8 galleries in NYC gallery-rich neighborhoods including Chelsea, the Upper East Side, TriBeCa, or the Lower East Side. I recently led a group for leaders at an international consulting firm who aimed to look at art that could spark creative forward-thinking. I have equally led tours for local alumni associations in NYC or can arrange a private tour if you will be visiting NYC.
If you are NYC-based, don't get stuck with the same ideas for holiday team outings or team-building outings. We can work with you to arrange an art gallery walk and a nearby drink or dinner gathering or even wine-tasting add-on. We can also arrange a visit to an artist's studio.

Visit us at www.lookatnyart.com

10/09/2023

Studying Picasso's body of work from his Summer in Fontainebleau, 1921. Among many other works, he painted two version of his Three Musicians, considered the culmination of his prewar cubist style. One is at MoMA in NYC and the other in Philadelphia.
A rather well-accepted hypothesis is that the three musicians represent:
1) Picasso himself as the Harlequin at center
2) his friend the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire as Pierrot (a French Pulcinella) on the left
2) and his friend and poet Max Jacob as a jolly drinking monk on the right, who had recently just moved into a monastery.
Picasso depicted harlequins often and early on as they were frequent characters in popular culture. Picasso had actually designed costumes and sets for Igor Stravinsky's 1920 Pulcinella, a ballet based on commedia dell'arte.
MoMA's director Alfred Barr Jr. fought to acquire Three Musicians since 1936 when it was on sale for $10,000. He described it to Museum Trustee's at "really one of the greatest 20th Century paintings...which would distinguish our collection and above all would remove immediately the stigma of our not being sufficiently modern" Having been unable to raise the funds, Barr described his failure as the worst disappointment in his 7 years as director. It was finally acquired for MoMA in 1949 and described as "the culminating work of cubist, the most important movement in art of the first quarter of the century"

09/27/2023

October is usually a beautiful Fall month in NYC. This one is particularly special for me. Given that it's Hispanic Heritage Month, yours truly gets to lead two MoMA member tours on Saturday October 14th that will specifically focus on Latin American, Spanish and American Latinx artists across the MoMA collection. I will be offering two member tours on October 14th, one in Spanish and one in English. Please join if you can. Members can join group tours at special discount prices.
I get to include works by Mexican muralists including José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Surrealist objects by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Frida Kahlo and abstract works by Uruguayan Joaquín Gonzales Torres, Venezuelan artists GEGO and Jesus Rafael Soto, and Argentinian's like David Lamelas and Yente. We will look at and discuss photography by Mexican artists Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Gabriela Iturbide. I also get to speak to work by American-born contemporary Latinx artists. These includes Cuban-born Felix González-Torres, Peruvian-born Milagros De La Torre and Joey Terrill, a self-described gay Mexican-American Chicano from LA who arrived in NYC in 1981, spent time in Fire Island, and couldn't find tortillas anywhere. I confess I took the liberty to write to him today. I wanted him to know I love his work and thought we shared a great deal.
Please join MOMA to be able to attend one of these and get the discounted price. Group tours are usually for groups of at least 10 or more and start at $450. This is your opportunity to join other members and get a great tour through masterworks of the collection that are Latin American and Spanish.

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, join us for a guided tour of masterworks by Latin American and Spanish artists across three floors of MoMA’s collection galleries. We’ll look at the ways in which these artists explore cultural identity and consider the influence of groundbreaking art m...

09/27/2023

The years before WWI were a time of some of the most radical and forward-thinking art of all time. This included Picasso and Braque's Analytical Cubism, Malevich's Russian Suprematism, Mondrian's earliest abstracted grids, Kandinsky's early abstract paintings and the recently-discovered work of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.
Here is the thing: WWI was a much longer, more deadly and entirely more traumatic war than originally expected. Not only that, it largely coincided with a Russian Revolution. Art significantly changed after that war.
The Return to Order was an artistic movement after WWI which brought about a return to more traditional approaches toward art and a rejection of the extreme avant-garde trends leading up to the war. There was a post-war sense that it was best to hold on to tradition and to stop pushing boundaries.
To share a great example of this trend, I offer you a comparison of Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-1912) and Picasso's Three Women at the Spring (1921). In 1911, Picasso was deeply committed to challenging how figures and space should be depicted. His Analytical Cubism explored how figures might look if we were to get rid of traditional notions of perspective, seeing them from every single direction, front, side and back. In Ma Jolie, we can just barely make out his lover Marcelle Hubert. By 1921, Picasso presents us with this group of significantly more classical muses by a Spring. While he has given them an overly voluminous and weighty presence, he presents them in a way that is readily readable in a more traditional style.

09/25/2023

One of the late artist Ashley Bickerton's most iconic works is his Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) from 1987-88. I was coincidentally studying this particular work at MoMA when Gagosian announced a retrospective of his work (having gained representation by the gallery and having died of ALS the same year, 2022)
Bickerton was one of the four main artists who made a big splash and were deemed "the next best thing" when presented at Ileana Sonnabend's SoHO gallery in the late 80s. They went on to be described as Neo-Geo, "Masters of Hype" and more. Some art critics thought this was brilliant and others thought it was garbage.
In this three-dimensional assemblage and portrait, made with an industrial signboard, Bickerton is referencing Van Gogh's tormented self-portraits at Arles. But, he does not use oil on canvas. He has created a work covered in logos that suggests that a portrait is best displayed as a series of consumer brands that someone drifts toward. Are we really our face or are we best represented by the ci******es we smoke, snacks we eat or gasoline we put in our car? Not only that, the portrait is not his own but rather that of his alter-ego brand, Susie. He created a brand called Susie, with its own logos and signatures on the works. Given his use of readymades, I find his use of an alter-ego a potential homage to Marcel Duchamp's alter-ego Rrose Selavy. There is something to be said for the structure appearing like a shield.
While artists like him reference consumer products like Pop Art did, earlier artists first elevated consumer goods to the level of art. At this time, these artists are essentially making these part and parcel of who we are, stating that they have taken over our life, critiquing them, mocking them as ubiquitous and kitschy in the case of Koons.

09/25/2023

If you've ever seen sculptures by the late Pop Artist George Segal, you will recall that they are usually life-size and often white. In 1961, the husband of one Segal's students worked at Johnson & Johnson and asked him if he could explore whether their new plaster bandage material for broken bones might prove useful in art projects for children.
Segal went home with these and placed the plaster bandages on his own body, essentially molding them to appear as himself. It is in this way that Segal created his first-ever sculpture, Man at a Table (1961) a white life-sized self-portrait. This would be the beginning of a life-long career devoted to plaster-based life-size sculptures that were often shown in Pop Art circles but which focused less on the consumer products (like Warhol or Oldenburg) and more on the consumers themselves in realistic tableaus.
There is a significantly deeper read to his sculptures and the material he uses. His placement of bandages on human bodies is not only a practical way of creating sculptures.
Segal was born in 1924, the child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father would go on to lose all of his brothers to the n***s. Upon placing them, bandages protect and hug humans. He went on to create "bandaged" sculpture memorials to honor both the people who fought during the Stonewall Riots in Gay Liberation (1980) as well as Holocaust (1982), for a commission for a park in San Francisco.
Join me on a tour of Chelsea galleries to view and discuss Segal sculptures currently on view: www.lookatnyart.com

09/19/2023

This late afternoon, I took notice: the natural light coming through my window illuminated my sculpture by The Recycle Group, "Breaking News," making it even more haunting and spectacular than usual.
Russian artists made their sculpture series using strong but malleable plastic mesh, normally used to protect trees from insects. Their figures wear elaborate robes and make us recall brilliant Baroque sculpture by Bernini and the stories and aesthetic of biblical time. Yet, they surprise us with an anachronistic and contemporary twist with the three figures eagerly look at the breaking news on their I-Pad and smartphone.
I love this work because it's beautifully crafted and became it it provokes so many thoughts and possible reads. Has WiFi taken over spirituality? Would biblical figures be on their smartphones if they were with us now? Has the never-ending news cycle at our fingertips become our new religion?
If you want to know more about the artists, here is their page https://recycleartgroup.com/info/biography/
And here is my shoutout to Richard Taittinger Gallery because Richard Frerejean Taittinger represents incredible artists and it's been a pleasure to collect a few wonderful works from him throughout the years.