Niborama

letmypeopleshow:

Kosher Squid:

Call them data visualizations, rhetorical drawings, or, as he does, graphic narratives, Ward Shelley’s paintings are mesmerizing, mind-boggling, and infinitely debatable. His obsessively researched timelines chronicling cultural phenomena—Frank Zappa, science fiction, teenagers, the very concept of the avant-garde—inhabit the art-chart spectrum somewhere between the playful mappings of Saul Steinberg and the paranoid diagrams of Marc Lombardi, though the paintings, executed in a Seussian palette, have a more biomorphic quality, as though history could be rendered as a giant squid.

Shelley’s newest obsession is the history of the Jews. Starting with Ur and Canaan, his painting The People of the Book traverses Samaritans, Gnostics, Kazars, marranos, Karaites, the Bobov, Jabotinsky, and the Kabbalah Center. One version was at Pierogi Gallery’s stand at the Armory Fair last weekend; two other versions are in Shelley’s current show through March 18 at the gallery’s Williamsburg headquarters. 

Read more in my story in Tablet.

People of the Book v.1 (detail), 2012, oil and toner on mylar. Courtesy the artist and Pierogi Gallery.

letmypeopleshow:

Keep Your Eye on the Ball:

Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl (2011), a digital c-print offered at Jack Shainman’s booth at the Armory Show. 

Here’s Our Fence Post:

Riffing off of Robert Barry’s 1969 show at Sperone gallery in Turin—which consisted of a sign announcing that the gallery was closed—Chilean-born artist Iván Navarro has caused a buzz at New York’s Armory show with an enormous neon fence on the site where his gallery, Paul Kasmin, would normally have its stand. In a venue where space is at a premium, the blocked-off area is perhaps the most exclusive site at the fair, a place no one can get in—unless, of course, you buy the piece, in which case you can presumably use it as a playpen or for any other purpose. The full fence costs $360,000, according to the gallery, but buyers can also pick up 7-foot sections for $40,000 each. Meanwhile, there are more of Navarro’s neon light sculptures—spectacular plays of mirrors and light that are modeled on the plans of skyscrapers and appear to extend to infinity—at his solo show in Kasmin’s Chelsea space, which opened last night.