Exhibitions NYC | "Savage Beauty": Trans-Human

“Savage Beauty”, the Alexander McQueen retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, is a must see.
The majority of McQueen’s designs shown at the exhibition are not wearable —as they do not perform the utilitarian function of clothes. His fabrications are often extension of the human body, which metamorphoses into snakes, trees, sea creatures; a reality which transforms nature into a fantastic world, where unicorns, butterflies, mussels and bones —among many other nature artifacts— become prosthesis of the human body in a surrealistic dark vision.
Romanticism is the recurring theme in many different versions, from the darkness of gothic to the more ethereal
McQueen’s design production was extremely prolific, often at the borderline between fashion and art. His fashion shows were real performance art experiences, including multimedia non only as enhancement of the fashion items presented, but as expression of his visionary thinking and designing. The movies shown are best representing of this thinking, as they can best communicate the itinerary taken by the designer in his creations.
The exhibition was somewhat disturbing but made me think.

And if you seek "grounding" visit the roof installation by Anthony Caro, very much down to Earth, compared to the surreal worlds of Alexander McQueen.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 4, 2011–August 7, 2011

Exhibitions | New York, Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures"

For one who has followed Anthony Caro’s recent sculpture, the current show at Mitchell Inness and Nash is a moment of summation. Caro, the master of open drawing in space, whose drawing creates fresh awareness of space; who, starting in the 1960’s, could make air seem like mass through the play of steel lines and planes in relation, became in recent decades a more monolithic, even figural sculptor. The new large-scale floor pieces in Chelsea have the solidity and grand presence of Caro’s recent works that refer to a figurative language.

However, in this show, when you walk into the gallery, it is the charged air, the sense of the space itself as a presence, that makes the viewer alert.

The ‘negative space’ is transformed by Caro’s inflection of it: don’t just look at the steel sculpture but feel what form can do to the rest of the gallery.

Caro has said that since abstraction is no longer a struggle, a revolution, he now feels free to experiment with figuration. His experiments in a more figural mode allowed him to play off his teacher, Henry Moore, and to engage with the in-the-round history of sculpture through his no-holds-barred approach to large scale work. His recent almost decade-long project, the Chapel of Light, the sculptural transformation of a 12th Century church in Bourbourg, France, (the largest art project in a religious setting since Matisse’s Vence Chapel) was of a piece with this exploration.

The Chelsea exhibition seems to me Caro’s expression of delight in returning, after Bourbourg, to the frankly industrial nature of his life-long medium: steel.

The pieces are made of tons of recycled machine parts, transformed into space smashers and air expanders; caressed by grinders into eye sliding, grandeur-tinged antidotes to the tinniness of so much of our built up world.

Jill Nathanson

Vernissages | NYC, Chelsea November 4

Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures' @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Larry Poons "Radical Surface: 1985-1989" @ Loretta Howard

FAILE "Bedtime Stories" @ Perry Rubenstein

Erwin Wurm "gulp" @ Lehman Maupin

Tomas Saraceno "Cloud Cities" @ Tanya Bonakdar