Autumn in New York, Part 8: An Afternoon in Bushwick

Part 1: Fiction (With only Daylight Between Us) 

Part 2: Louise Bourgeois at MoMA  

Part 3: Soft Shapes, Sharp Angles 

Part 4: Shape, Gesture, Surface 

Part 5: Blanc et Noir   

Part 6: Eccentric Domesticity     
Part 7: Stitched, Stapled, and Tacked

Panorama of Brenda Goodman: In a New Space at David & Schweitzer Contemporary 
(September 8-October 1)

Every one of the artworks included here would have fit appropriately into one or another of the Autumn in New York posts already published, but I saved them for this one. I wanted to show some of the splendid and diverse work being shown in Bushwick (note to out-of-towners: a relatively recent Brooklyn outpost for artists to live, work, and exhibit). We start in the gallery building at 56 Bogart Street with the brilliant Brenda Goodman at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, drop in to a few other galleries on the ground floor, and then walk a few blocks over to Odetta on Cook Street. Come with me.

BRENDA GOODMAN

What'd You Say, 2016, oil on wood, 72 x 80 inches
Detail below

BRENDA GOODMAN
Installation view with What'd You Say at your right shoulder

Foreground: Lickety Split, 2017, oil on wood
Far wall and below: Watching and Waiting, 2017, oil on wood

Much of Goodman's new work features a densely linear surface that seems almost filled in with a 
Much of Goodman's new work features a densely linear surface that seems almost filled in with a light application of color. This is a big change from her earlier paintings whose surface was dense with textured oil paint. In his catalog essay about Goodman's work, Thomas Micchelli describes the way the artist achieves her new surface: "She takes a linoleum cutter and incises it in random, spidery loops, horizontals, verticals, diagonals, and curves." The cut-up surface thus becomes "a playing field upon which paint must negotiate and sometimes surrender to a pre-existing condition."

BRENDA GOODMAN

View of the wall opposite What'd You Say

On it, Siblings, 2017, oil on wood, shown below

. . . . .

LEN BELLINGER

Partial view of his solo show, also at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Thugs, Miscreants and Recent Extractions (September 8-October 1)

Far wall: kkp.plutusred, 2015-17; oil, metal, staples, fabric on canvas

LEN BELLINGER
Installation of works on paper (this wall is on the other side of Goodman's Siblings)

Individual drawing below
Book pages serve as substrate, ground, and palimpsest for these small works, which reference--and paint over--images of altarpieces, religious iconography, the geometry of architecture and art history

LEN BELLINGER

Installation view of the wall opposite the works on paper

LEN BELLINGER

Miscreant, 2017; oil, acrylic, charcoal, staples, archival glue on repro mounted on wood; 19.5 x 19 inches

LEN BELLINGER

Choir (for Tom Black),2016-2017; oil, acrylic, etching ink, plexiglass on homosote; 19 x 15.5 inches

LEN BELLINGER

No. 9 On the Plan, 2017; acrylic, watercolor, staples, archival glue on repromounted on wood; 22.5 x 16 inches

. . . . .

DARLA BJORK

Darla Bjork: Sanctuary at SoHo 20 Gallery (September 7-October 8)

The first floor of 56 Bogart Street is home to a number of galleries. Positioned near the entrance to the building, SoHo 20 Gallery offers a dramatic view of each exhibition when viewed from the end of a long hallway, and Darla Bjork's painting could not be more dramatic in that setting. Bjork's brand of gestural abstraction consists of hue and texture built up via layers of color and mark. And that deep, dark background exerts its own particular power.

DARLA BJORK

From the Garden I, II, 2016, encaustic and oil stick on a double panel, 80 x 28 inches

DARLA BJORK

Peek into the smaller side gallery with Garden Mist and Green

Below: Garden Mist, 2017, encaustic and oil stick on panel, 24 x 24 inches

. . . . .

ERIC BROWN
Installation view of Punctuate at Theodore Art (September 8-October 22)

Brown wrests powerful paintings from a reductive geometric vocabulary and a deceptively simple palette. His surfaces are lightly painted and relatively uninflected, though in some of the paintings there are underlayers suggesting how the work took shape.

ERIC BROWN

Ground Game, left, and Ground Game II, both 2017, oil on linen, 10 x 8 inches

You can see these paintings on the wall in the installation shot above

ERIC BROWN
Installation view, opposite wall

Below: Cinch, 2017, oil on linen, 18 x 24 inches

. . . . .

COLORMANIA at Odetta Gallery (September 8-October 15)
With Paul Corio, Ken Weathersby, and Robert Otto Epstein

Gallerist Ellen Hackl Fagan brought together three painters whose work focuses on color relationships that push the retina beyond its comfortable parameters of perception and/or challenge the viewer with the illusion of structure and space.

PAUL CORIO

Baby Zip I and Baby Zip II, each 2017, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 

KEN WEATHERSBY

240, 2015; acrylic and graphite, wood;  73 x 16.5 x 16 inches

KEN WEATHERSBY

149 (gdp), 2006, acrylic on canvas with inset panels, 16 x 14 inches

ROBERT OTTO EPSTEIN
Installation view

ROBERT OTTO EPSTEIN
Josh, 2017, acrylic on panel, 30 x 24 inches

Detail below

More on Bushwick Galleries

. Bushwick Gallery Map
. Arts in Bushwick
. Wagmag with a special section for Bushwick
. Art-collectiong.com with a special section on Bushwick