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COURTESY THE ARTIST / PETZEL
The American painter Joe Bradley first made his mark two decades ago,
with a wily non-style that might be described as painting in spite of itself.
He arranged colorful monochrome panels into configurations whose
associations toggled between Minimalist abstraction and eight-bit video
games; they landed in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Then came “Schmagoo,”
a pictographic series in grease pencil on big, stretched raw canvases. Those
scruffy black-and-white works demolished the line between painting and
drawing, stripping the figural language of comics (the Superman logo was
one motif ) down to its essence with a macabre wit that Philip Guston would
surely approve of; MOMA, which exhibited them in 2014, certainly did.
Even when Bradley’s approach became more brashly gestural, it remained
somewhat calculated, as seen in compositions that were stitched together,
Frankenstein style. Part of what makes “Bhoga Marga,” the artist’s first
exhibition in New York City in six years—and his first at the Petzel gallery,
where it’s on view through April 30—such an exhilarating surprise is how
expressive it is. Bradley’s new pictures (including the twelve-foot-wide
“Jubilee,” above) look as smart as ever, but also more expansive, with mean-
dering white lines that suggest inroads to the unknown.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
is canny in terms of your enjoyment, which
increases as you go. The teeming complexities
that mark Kandinsky’s late phase are numb-
ingly hermetic. A middle range, from about
1910 to the early twenties, seethes with the
artist’s excitement as he abandons figuration to
let spontaneously symphonic forms, intended
as visual equivalents of music, enthrall on their
own. Finally, we are engulfed in cadenzas of
hue that may be the strongest art of their kind
and their time, relatively crude but more vigor-
ous than the contemporaneous feats of Matisse,
Derain, Braque, and other Parisians whose Fau-
vism anchors standard accounts of modernism.
The mining heir SolomonR. Guggenheim met
Kandinsky in 1930 and began collecting him
in bulk, advised by the enthusiastic German
baroness Hilla Rebay, who also recommended
Frank Lloyd Wright as the architect of the
museum’s hypermodern whorl, which opened
in 1959. Kandinsky lingers in the ancestral
DNA of the museum, and his equivocal majesty
haunts every visit to a building that cannot
cease to amaze.—Peter Schjeldahl (Guggenheim
Museum; through Sept. 5.)
Kathy Ruttenberg
Think of this New York-based ceramicist as
the un-Disney: in Ruttenberg’s sculptural
vignettes, themes of sex, violence, and meta-
morphosis play out in an enchanted wood pop-
ulated by mythic figures and magical fauna.
One rotating, motorized statue in this fantastic
show, titled “Sunshine at Midnight,” depicts
a woman, in dishabille, with a bird emerging
from the back of her head; she embraces a tree,
surrounded by a ring of human-faced deer.
Whether the herd’s intention is protective or
menacing remains unclear. Ruttenberg started
out as a painter in the East Village scene of the
nineteen-eighties, when expressive figuration
was the dominant mode. Twenty years ago,
she moved to the Hudson Valley, where she
developed her surrealist-fairy-tale style and her
glazed-ceramic technique, in which intricate
(and often very large) sculptures are fired in
sections before being assembled. Here, the
elaborate tableaux spill beyond the gallery’s in-
terior and onto its small patio, where a fountain
in the form of a towering daisy pours water into
tary piano, flourishes on intimacy—her singing
seems to bypass the ear and insinuate itself
directly into a listener’s head, podcast-host style.
The songwriter, who now makes dreamlike pop
songs that live and die in a self-contained world,
headlines Carnegie Hall a few blinks ahead of
releasing her album “Home, before and after,”
which finds her grappling with matters both
divine and mundane. On the track “Becoming
All Alone,” God, a recurring Spektor character,
invites a forlorn narrator out for beers. “We
didn’t even have to pay,” the singer gushes of her
date. “Cause God is God, and he’s revered.”—Jay
Ruttenberg (Carnegie Hall; April 11.)
Tim Berne Trio
JAZZ That Tim Berne’s name rings a bell to few
outside a devoted coterie doesn’t make him any
less of a jazz hero. Since putting down New
York City roots, in 1974, this audacious alto
saxophonist, composer, and bandleader has
never strayed from a path of his own making,
hewing to left-of-center forms and unfettered
improvisation. Berne originally drew inspiration
from such second-generation avant-gardists as
Julius Hemphill; he’s now a patriarch of sorts
to a new generation of similarly risk-taking
players. United in a compact trio with the gifted
drummer Nasheet Waits and the guitarist Gregg
Belisle-Chi, Berne flaunts skills that are as pas-
sionate as they are exploratory.—Steve Futterman
(Soapbox Gallery; April 7.)
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Richard Diebenkorn
This trove of drawings and paintings on paper,
made between 1946 and 1992, is one of many
exhibitions planned this year to celebrate the
centennial of this inimitable Bay Area painter,
who died in 1993. Whether a Diebenkorn piece
is abstract or figurative, black-and-white or
in color, geometric or gestural, it is always an
etheric-architectural articulation of space, a fact
that is underscored here by the installation of
an untitled charcoal drawing, dated 1988-92,
between a pair of arched windows. The piece
depicts clean lines and a play of light in Die-
benkorn’s studio in the Sonoma Valley, but his
touch renders the interior as if it might dissolve
into a landscape glimpsed through an open
window at the center of the composition. On
the exhibition’s second level, a vitrine is lined
with ephemera, including a handwritten ten-
point list titled “Notes to myself on beginning
a painting.” Among its sage aphorisms is the
command to “tolerate chaos,” which might
help to explain the exciting flux and the un-
fussy moments of order uniting his lifetime
of work.—Johanna Fateman (Van Doren Waxter;
through April 23.)
Vasily Kandinsky
Some eighty paintings, drawings, and wood-
cuts by Kandinsky, the Russian hierophant
of abstraction, line the upper three-fifths of
the Guggenheim’s ramp, in the retrospec-
tive “Around the Circle.” The show’s curator,
Megan Fontanella, recommends starting at the
bottom, with the overwrought works of the
artist’s final phase, and proceeding upward,
back to the simpler Expressionist landscapes
and horsemen of his early career. This course
