A Visit to Chelsea

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Chisato and I are on our first spring visit to Chelsea. It’s a gorgeous 72 degree day and we leave our jackets in the back seat of the car we parked on 27th Street. I’m carrying a crisply folded list of exhibitions that I had compiled a couple days before from viewing gallery websites on the net.

I’ve been a gallery hound for many years beginning in Soho, 57th Street and the East Village in the 80s. As an artist, I have found the experience of viewing new art, first hand, enjoyable, stimulating and essential to my own work.

On my list, I jotted down more than a dozen “must see” shows for this month: Jacqueline Humphreys at Greene Naftali, Michael Raedecker at Andrea Rosen, Dana Schutz at Zack Feuer, and Louise Fishman at Chaim & Read among several others. There have been plenty of painting exhibitions lately and my list is primarily comprised of works by painters. No matter the vanguard, as much as such exists, people will always paint, look at paintings and hang them on their walls. There’s so much talent out there.

We start at Greene Naftali and board the old elevator, instructing the operator to raise us to the 8th floor. The scissor, then steel, doors open to reveal one of the loveliest galleries in Chelsea. Light floods across a sprawling space of large pillers and aluminum silver abstractions. Chisato and I exit the elevator and take in the work.

I am an easy audience for dense, painterly, gestural images, however after viewing much of the work, I come away a bit uneasy as the paintings remind me of the glossy pages of the Metropolitan Home magazine I flipped through at the Laundromat the day before, depicting the interior designs of the rich and complacent. Nonetheless Jacqueline Humpreys’ paintings are savvy, seductive and polished. It’s generally a good start for our gallery tour.

Chelsea is a rather large neighborhood located on the lower west side of Manhattan above Greenwich Village. Until the early 1990s it was mainly comprised of taxi depots and warehouses. Now it is the setting for most of New York’s major galleries exhibiting the works of artists from Brooklyn to Bejing. Chisato and I generally stay within the area between 18th and 27th Streets, 10th and 11th Avenues where the majority of galleries are concentrated. There’s easily a days worth of viewing here.

Our tour does not disappoint. I’ve known the work of most of the artists on my list for some time. Some are younger: Dana Schutz (a whimsical painter and marvelous manipulator of surface and color juxtapositions) is still in her early 30s. Louise Fishman, whose gestural abstractions of broad, thick, richly colored strokes of oil on canvas would surely make DeKooning hum and rock back and forth in admiration, is of my parents’ generation.

Michael Raedecker (originally from Amsterdam) composes his images with various types of thread deftly drawn over subtle washes of muted color. They are gritty yet superbly delicate and nuanced. Chisato and I greet the work at the entrance with a harmony of “Wow’s.” Although I’ve seen his work in a previous show, his restlessness and innovation continues to impress.

In addition to following my itinerary we look in the doors and windows of additional galleries and discover some unexpected gems. Chisato and I are sucked into a group show at Betty Cuningham and view some lovely abstractions by Susan Frecon among other terrific works by artists including Jake Berthot and John Lees.

At 5:00 we decide to conclude our tour as we have seen much and the day has seemed to pass quickly. Hunger gets the best of us and I’ve become impatient to return to my own work with a head full of big ideas that I would like to realize before their luster fades. We are an hour and a half from home and with a stop at the deli on the corner near 10th Avenue and 25th Street for a quick sandwich – Cabo Rojo, incidently, is a Spanish joint next door that serves an ox-tail stew with rice and beans that is not to be missed – we head to the car with satiated tummies and full minds.

The galleries in Chelsea are generally opened from September through June, Tuesdays through Saturdays during regular business hours. My source for links to individual gallery websites is Art-collecting.com.

-Steven DiGiovanni, CAW Department Head of Drawing & Painitng


Steven will be hosting a Tour Through Chelsea trip during the Summer Session at Creative Arts Workshop. Look for details in the Summer Brochure, which will be available in mid-May.