Chelsea Openings of 1.30.25
We're all wishing for warmer weather
I hope you’re all doing well and staying warm. This week I went to several galleries in Chelsea. The scene was bustling, every opening was seemingly packed. I guess we’re all getting tired of staying inside. Below is the list of galleries I was able to visit this round.
Out of the openings, an exhibition of works by Bo Bartlett at Miles McEnery, and a collection of works by Randy Klinger at Prince Street caught my attention.
Prince Street is presenting twenty of Randy Klinger’s works. The work is showcased in two categories: self-portraitures and Vermeer-inspired genre scenes. Klinger’s self-portrait series caught my attention.
This series of portraitures documents entering the fourth season of life as one’s body begins to look and feel unfamiliar. Rather than rejecting his form or allowing it to wither away in obscurity or society’s peripheral, he rejoices in the body that has carried him through life. He embraces his form and renders his figure with graphite. He uses minimal tones and places his body in a garden of light; the abundance of lighter tones causes the works to feel engulfed in a luminescent glow.
This series captured me; seeing an aging body elevated in art is uncommon. The matured body is regularly used as a foil, often to highlight youth or denote a lesson a youthful protagonist must heed. Klinger’s vulnerability to the viewer is a tender gesture to be acknowledged, understood, and befriended. As he befriends himself through this series, as stated in the press release, “Looking at all that I disliked about my physical self and, finally, accepting this self as I entered the fourth quarter of my life, restoring my relationship with myself, I activated a message that came to me two decades ago: ‘You are the Friend that you have been waiting for.’”
Through him, may all the viewers be kinder to themselves and become the friends they’ve been waiting for.
The show will be on view until February 22, 2025.
Miles McEnery presents works by Bo Bartlett; this exhibition combines work from two series: an earlier series titled "Home" and a more recent collection titled "Summer." I've taken a work from (I assume) both collections; Home is featured above, and Summer is shown below. McEnery style is reminiscent of the golden age of American Illustration. His work presents itself as a bright landscape; I was so taken with this visual style that I almost missed the layers of visual narrative that loom over the work's colorful exterior.
Within School of the Americas, the four figures lay still in a field; their bodies are askew and injured, with eyes closed. Blood is present on the body of most of the figures. To extract the apparent narrative, the work is a commentary on the violence that is present in American schools, and the bodies within the piece are causalities from a horrific incident.
Though it's difficult to contextualize the size of Bartlett's work in the images I provided, the pieces are large enough to fill a gallery wall. In such large works, the details are often only revealed after the viewers spend time exploring the piece's content. Bartlett masterfully composes his figures to lead the viewer's eyes so that the narrative of the work gradually reveals itself.
This show will be on view until March 15th, 2025
!Bonus!
Camille Henrot, “A Number of Things”, at Hauser & Wirth
The great Harvard Art Historian, Joseph Leo Koerner*, as read your review: "Congratulations on this very sensitive review!"
*Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Chair, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Just noticed: When one clicks on "Prince Street" on the list on the first page of your review, "First Street" gallery's landing page comes up. They'd be most obliged if you could correct that. Many thanks! Randy