Chelsea Highlights

A few more highlights of Chelsea art viewing from New York City last week:

At Sikkema Jenkins, Leonardo Drew’s exquisite wood constructs were spectacular:

Photo courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins

A few selected views:

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And at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery, Oliver Arms paintings knocked me out. Here’s a florid (but satisfying) description from Western Project:

Continuing his visual cacophony, the artist confirms his place as a master of contemporary painting. Each work in the exhibition is grand in scale, built up of multiple layers of oil paint, sanded and repainted dozens of times over months in his studio. Every gesture and every square inch is considered; as a surgeon works, exacting and emphatic. Arms’ art is not in the labor, but in the historic vision he creates. It is poetic, alarming, compressed and florid; it mirrors our culture of information and visual overload. He uses retinal contradictions: assault and fecundity, toxic and ravishing, momentary and endless, depicting immense densities and atmospheres. Each is a kind of micro/macro hallucination, a psychic, social, and spiritual tale, of epic landscapes of miasma. It is a vocabulary akin to Pollock and Lao Tsu; the finite and infinite, the internal and eternal exposed and unapologetic.

Photo courtesy of Western Project

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And as a close: This shot below is of the High Line in winter. It’s hard to believe, but we really are just weeks away from the verdant revolution that is spring. This view was a sobering reminder to me that this grand journey through space continues, that there is movement even though about now I am almost convinced the planet got stuck and can’t get back in its orbital flow. Not true, not true.