AL HELD – BLACK AND WHITE PAINTINGS

This exhibition focuses on the unique series of paintings Held began in1967, in which various geometric forms, arranged in multiple perspectives, are rendered within the strict confines of a black-and-white palette. Perhaps inspired by the India ink drawings of lines, circles, triangles, and squares that he made in 1966, Held had already begun moving away from the flat, boldly-colored shapes of his earlier work. Using charcoal and white acrylic directly on canvas, he started sketching multi-dimensional, interlocking configurations, surrounding them with colored ground. In late 1967, this experimentation yielded to an increasingly graphic, complex, and illusory space. While compositions were still worked out on the canvas, often in several iterations, Held’s soft-edged charcoal was replaced by the sharply defined contours of uniformly painted forms, their thick black outlines positioned against a stark white field.
The paintings featured in this exhibition encompass the initial phase of this new body of work. The “B/W series” is comprised of Held’s first fully realized canvases in his new style and limited palette, while works from the “Phoenicia” series are more explicit in their development of multiple perspectives and vanishing points, resulting in evermore ambiguous spatial relationships. As with his earlier work, Held painted on a monumental scale; the majority of these canvases measure over nine feet tall.

Exhibition runs through till March 26th, 2016

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
10001 New York
USA

www.cheimread.com

YEHUDIT SASPORTAS – VERTICAL SWAMPS HAMAKOM

The exhibition will include a group of works on paper, the video piece The Light Workers, based 150 manual drawings, and a series of large 3 dimensional / sculptural drawings. Yehudit Sasportaas work with unusual landscape drawings which function as maps of mental data outlines. Data from her personal life become anonymous fragments of information integrated into a wider and more complex sphere. The body of work itself deals with the meeting of the physical, structural, material and the weightless, ethereal and metaphysical dimension. One dimension merging with the other is an essential part of Sasportas’ artistic attitude. The new Vertical Swamp works, created for this exhibition, consists of large drawings on wooden planks. Particles of a foreign material have penetrated and imprinted the surface of the works, representing a penetration of subconscious or foreign information from an invisible sphere into a visible. Yehudit Sasportas wishes to place the spectator in a both reflexive as well as conceptual mirror field which exposes the structure of the personal conciusness and it placement within the collective sphere.

Opposite – Cosmic Rifts #15, 2009

Exhibition runs through till March 19th, 2016

Galleri Bo Bjerggaard
Flæsketorvet 85 A
DK-1711 Copenhagen
Denmark

www.davidzwirner.com

ANNA OSTOYA – SLAYING

The original painting depicts the story of Judith, a Jewish widow who saves her people besieged by the Assyrian army. With the help of her maidservant, she plies Holofernes, the army general, with alcohol and then beheads him in his drunken state. In these new paintings, Ostoya inspects the crime scene, analyzing it through geometrical abstraction. She substitutes Judith for Holofernes, in Judith Slaying Judith, and Holofernes for Judith, in Holofernes Slaying Holofernes. Each figure attacks itself. These large canvases are accompanied by smaller ones where the artist further analyzes the scene.
In Slain Trances, a series of black and white photomontages, Ostoya’s investigation becomes more associative than analytical. She transforms the original painting through surrealist juxtapositions. Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes collides with other examples of her work as well as with a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, a sculpture by Pablo Picasso, a still from Possession, a snapshot of Ostoya as a teenager, a propaganda leaflet, a war photo, and images of a robot, an African mask and the gallery. Some photomontages are scraped and painted over, then re-photographed to generate yet other photomontages.

Opposite – Judith Slaying Judith, 2016

Exhibition runs through till April 23rd, 2016

Bortolami Gallery
520 W 20th Street
NY 10011 New York
USA

bortolamigallery.com