In what has quickly become a New York tradition, yesterday dozens of galleries stayed open late for the biannual Gallery Night on 57th Street walk. Whereas this gallery-goer noticed eerily empty corridors during the last couple of rounds, the fall 2012 event seemed to have all the markers of success: sardine-can packed elevators, side-step-only passing through select exhibitions, and lots of people everywhere carrying little gray maps. Measuring by the yardstick of personal taste, a few artists and shows really stood out:
- D. Wigmore Fine Art, Charming Observations: Modernism of the 1930s and 1940s: including several canvases by the American painter Doris Lee, at once deeply contemplative in their monochromatic abstraction and delightfully charming in their subject matter
- Pace Prints, Santi Moix: silkscreen monotypes with hand-coloring; bursting with spontaneity, a dynamic and visually striking series with infinite layers of line, shape, and color
- Nohra Haime Gallery, Olga de Amaral: Places: large fabric compositions seductively dancing with light from afar and shimmering glamorously up close; metaphorically, like evening jewelry for the wall
- Bonni Benrubi Gallery, Abelardo Morell: Rock Paper Scissors: featuring “tent camera” landscapes photographed simultaneously with the grassy patches of ground beneath the camera itself, seamlessly combining two views into one deliberately confusing but beautiful experiment in texture and context