Alex Katz, Matthew Barney, and Jamian Juliano-Villani face the darkness.
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What a great exhibition title: The Bitch.It describes so much and says so little.
Thisis a two-person show ofAlex Katz, 97, andMatthew Barney, 57.
With her cohort Billy Grant, Juliano-Villani has operated OFlahertys at two other Lower East Side locations.
A dead tree trunk dominates the space, a staircase curling around it.
It gives the venue a haunted air of dead memories.
Three distinct artistic sensibilities merge into one.
Barneys modus operandi is endless preparation, numerous assistants, and a penchant for the spectacular.
The result is explosive.
Katz emerged in New York in the early 1950s, then the height of Abstract Expressionism.
He pushed back against this trend, painting representationally and demurely.
His images of people and things are silent screens made with uninflected brushstrokes.
I was never much of a fan, but Katzs bland sublime is forever undead among younger artists.
His newest abstractions are rendered in unambiguous neon orange.
In one, there is a long, receding highway beneath a leafy canopy road.
Barney and Katz were represented by Barbara Gladstone, who died this summer.
Under a group of directors, Gladstones gallery is now trying to extend its lifetime.
This sort of raw hubris is welcome in an art world filled with familiar aesthetic conceits and credentialed elitism.
He ascends, holds his large brush, steadies himself, and makes a mark.
He steps down to consider it.Barney treats Katz as a specter-exemplar, a living gladiator-athlete still at work.
The film is a harrowing journey into creativity.
Walking through The Bitch makes us feel we are inside the body of art.
