Miami: Ones I Liked, Part Two

Some more quick hits on artists who caught my eye in Miami. Not reviews or anything of the sort -- just my open-to-the-public notebook of what I saw. Part One was here.

Bojan Sarcevic at Carlier | Gebauer and BQ: Sarcevic's sculptures, on view in a couple of ABMB booths. was sparse and absorbing, as if minimalist needed to be more minimal. Sarcevic reminded me of Martin Puryear, only with post-industrial materials and different forms. In other words, uh, he's not like Puryear not at all. So why was I thinking that? Elegance, I guess. Sarcevic's sculptures never seemed to be trying very hard and were the better for it.

Alois Kronschlager at Plus Ultra: Kronschlager is one of a number of artists whose recent work pokes at some of the apparent tidyness of minimalism. The work on view in Miami started with Frank Stella's palette, his pinstripes, and then crinkled them up, as if to say that Stella's early work is now irrelevant. Is the work a little bit too obviously Stellan? Yes. But as a starting point...

Dannielle Tegeder at Bodybuilder & Sportsman and others: What are these networks and why are they abstracted? Are they maps? Traffic patterns of the future? The law of interconnected monkey-business in visual form? Some of the fun in Tegder's Mark Lombardi-goes-abstract works on paper is their mysteriousness. They seem vaguely familiar, like they come from some kind of grid or system that impacts our daily lives. But do they?

Beate Gutschow at Produzentengalerie: Despite showing at a gallery with a completely annoying website, Gutschow's Photoshopped images of unliekly modernist urbascapes, often strewn with some kind of post-chaos debris, are eerie in a way that seems both distant and possible.

Kees Goudzwaard at Zeno X: There's some kind of fragmentary structure in Goudzwaard's paintings and I can't tell if those pieces are falling apart or coming together. The paintings are slightly disorienting, like a painted Barry Le Va after a few martinis.

Jeffrey Milstein at Paul Kopeikin: Planes, perfectly centered on white backgrounds. Flying above. Right above. Seeming to be frozen. Hovering. Not moving. Both documentary record of types of planes and paint schemes, and scary.

Johnna Arnold at Traywick Contemporary: Architectural photographs are sexy. Great architectural photography, like Julius Shulman's or Ezra Stoller's, is mildly pornographic. Engineering photography is none of those things. Structural engineering photography, which made up most of Arnold's work at Traywick, is usually so deathly dull that it doesn't make it out of textbooks. That's why I liked Arnold's photographs: They made the dullness of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, and the like) interesting.