vernissages NYC | William Kentridge "More Sweetly Play the Dance" at Marian Goodman Gallery

Immersion is the first word which came to my mind while the elevator opened to the Marian Goodman Gallery, where the multi-channel film installations More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015)  & Notes Toward a Model Opera  (2015) opened yesterday. The two installation are 2015 works by the South African artist William Kentridge (1955): More  Sweetly  Play  the  Dance was commissioned   by   the   EYE   Filmmuseum   Amsterdam   and   the   Lichtsicht- Projection  Biennale,  in  Bad Rothenfelde (Germany) and Notes  Toward  a  Model  Opera,  was firtst shown  at  the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing fin June 2015.

 

 

More Sweetly Play the Dance is defined by the gallery press release as "an eight-screen danse macabre,  reminding  one  of  the  medieval  tradition  which  summons  diverse  vestiges  of  humanity  in  a paradox  of  revelry  and  mourning.  Kentridge  presents  us  with  part  carnival,  protest,  and exodus:  a 45 metre caravan traversing in a sphere around us with figures in procession, a form the  artist  invoked  in  his  1999 Shadow  Procession." 
The  three-screen  film  installation Notes  Towards  a  Model  Opera is  part of series of works which according to by  Kentridge   “ respond unwittingly  to  the  despair  at  the  end  of  utopian projects.”

 

vernissages | Juan Muñoz at Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery is hosting impressive and immersive large scale installations of sculptures from the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz (1953-2001).

Many Times (1999)

Figure Hanging from One Foot (2001)

Walk total length: 5.4 km

Vernissages | NYC, Soho, Chelsea & Upper East Side, January 11-15

January 11: "Between the Lines at Tanya Bonakdar

January 11, "Mandala: Locus of Thought" at Tibet House

 Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman Gallery

January 11, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

 January 15: Josephsohn at Hauser & Wirth

Vernissages | John Baldessari "Double Play " at Marian Goodman Gallery

camminando & vernissage | Midtown and Uptown Vernissages: a Feast of Sounds Images Colors

While the sunlight hours get shorter as we approach the fall equinox, important exhibitions open all over town. After gazing the last daily sun rays in my walk through Central Park I arrived at  Hauser & Wirth, where "A Visual Essay on Gutai", featuring works in several media, opened. Yoko Ono's visit seemed to animate the gallery

Yoko Ono visiting "A Visual Essay on Gutai" at Hauser & Wirth

Sunset sky from skyline viewing from Madison Avenue

My meandering continued toward midtown, to the Austrian Cultural Forum featuring several site specific installations on the theme "Against the Specialist: Contemporary References to Arnold Schoenberg in Image and Sound" The quite specific title says it all...Thought provoking and eye catching, I believe the best exhibition I have ever witnessed at ACF.

 "Against the Specialist: Contemporary References to Arnold Schoenberg in Image and Sound"at the ACF

Divergent narratives and media were also present in another remarkable exhibition which opened in the same night:  Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Gallery. The exhibition featured Strip Paintings, 2012 and a thesculpture, 6 Standing Glass Panels 2002/2011. The large scale digital Strips Painting are based on a rigorous generative system, where "complex system of rules for a new game of chance which imposes on the painting an extreme vertical fracturing of the space... As his plan develops a life of its own, it generates a process of mirroring, repetition and multiplication of ever more reduced sections, until finally a display of more than 4000 patterns are formed, as if the digital process had now assumed the role of sorcerer."

Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Gallery

Walk length: 7km