Talking shop with Claire Oliver

Karen Halverson, “Furnace Creek, Death Valley, California,” 1996, from the current exhibit at the Getty Museum, “Where We Live Now: Photographs of American from the Berman Collection.”

Talking shop with Jeff Bailey Gallery

By Shane McAdams

Packed snug among a teeming crowd of art junkies at a recent opening at Jeff Bailey Gallery, I realized I’d been attending his receptions regularly, but could not remember my first one. It was as if his space had always been around, and I had always stopped by. At the reception for his latest exhibit, “Hard Times,” I approached Mr. Bailey for the real creation story. He said that he’d been up on the eighth floor of the 539 building on W. 25th St. until moving to his current second floor space less than two years ago, and things had fallen into place nicely since. Bailey would deny having leapfrogged his gallery’s teen angst period, but he seems to have reached maturity without having to go through an embarrassing adolescence. According to almost anyone you talk to, Bailey’s artistic program is wise beyond its years.

This reputation is largely due to the type of work he shows. The gallery’s sensibility resembles that of fashionable, youth-oriented art galleries that emphasize drawing, naïve figuration, eclectic imagery, and self or synthetic mythologies. But Bailey’s gallery is perceived as being somewhat of a sensible, respected older brother to this crowd. The work he shows is edgy and current, it fits the described bill, but does so with a resolution and confidence that is often lacking at other spaces. When I walk into an opening at Bailey’s gallery, everyone seems comparatively lucid and engaged with the work, staring at the art instead of looking over each other’s shoulders.

Bailey’s repertoire consists of mostly clean, eccentric, and inventive flat works, with a few equally tidy sculptors to round things out. Martin McMurray’s loosely painted, sooty, Easter-Island-ish characters are perfectly balanced between yearning drama and naïve comedy. Like the primitive statues they resemble, the figures freeze all who step in front of them. Another artist drawing interest from ambiguity is Chris Duncan, whose work seems to be influenced in equal parts by modernist design, traditional craft making, and the readymade. Both Duncan and McMurray balance contradictions so that they energize the art directly without having to scream out which opposites they are trying improbably to resolve.

Even more subtle are Louise Belcourt’s painted geometric forms. Her recent show took the idea of stark, geometric forms and dragged them back into a figure/ground, cartoon realm. Likewise, Christian Maychak, one of a few 3-D practitioners at Jeff Bailey, invests geometry with something more organic and flourishing than what we normally associate with geometrically-minded predecessors such as Tony Smith and Donald Judd. A bit of a departure, Bailey’s current show, “Hard Times” is a topical look at imagery that refers to the sources of violence in our culture.

Often, the art at a gallery is sometimes a projection of a dealer’s personal identity, and it’s easy to predict what a gallerist will like. With Bailey, however, the contradictions that make his gallery so interesting also had me guessing about what to expect from him.

Here’s what Jeff Bailey is looking at these days:

Desert Escape

I was recently in Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Near Palm Springs, I went to Joshua Tree National Park. It is a landscape that at first seems barren until your eyes adjust to the subtleties of the desert. We drove through it for a few hours, stopping occasionally and looking at what seemed to be an endless terrain of mountains made of boulders and thousands of Joshua trees, framed by huge expanses of bright blue skies. The park is vast and immense, covering over half a million acres. It may be warm in New York this winter, but there is nothing like desert air and light.

“Where We Live Now: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection” at the Getty Museum

In Los Angeles, I saw a few museum shows. At the Getty [through Feb. 25] is “Where We Live Now: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection.” It was an interesting contrast to the unspoiled landscape of the desert: photographs of people and the many buildings they use and inhabit. It made me think of what the country might look like in 100 years, given population growth, and highlighted the importance of America’s National Parks to preserve unspoiled landscape. The exhibition seemed to cover most regions of the country and featured photographs of the shopping malls, gas stations and abandoned buildings that dot the American landscape. William Eggleston, George A. Tice, Mitch Epstein, Joel Sternfeld, William Christenberry and Stephen Shore are some of the photographers who have work in the exhibition.

Wolfgang Tillman at the Hammer Museum

I enjoy visiting the Hammer Museum: for its focus on emerging artists and its 19th and 20th century collection. The size of the museum is such that you can take it all in, focus, and not feel overwhelmed. There was a Wolfgang Tillman’s exhibition: a large survey that really gave a sense of his practice. Like the Getty show, it featured numerous photographs of people in bland and generic settings, but imbued with a simple and forthright dignity.

“Glitter and Doom: German Portraits of the 1920s” at the Metropolitan Museum of At

Back in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum, I saw “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits of the 1920s.” The paintings and drawings in this show are intense, biting, satirical and provocative. They vividly question authority, power, greed and social mores. The aftermath of World War I and relaxed climate of Weimar Germany set the tone for an anything goes atmosphere in Berlin. Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and others captured it, and made their focus sharp.

“Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” at MoMA

With politics and power on my mind, at MoMA I saw “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian,” which brings together three of the paintings and other works by Manet depicting this subject. Emperor Maximilian, abandoned by the French government that crowned him and sent him to Mexico, is shot by firing squad on the orders of Benito Juárez, the previously displaced Mexican president. The large paintings depict the gruesome execution and cool detachment of the executioners. If these works show how an artist interprets violent political events of his time, one can’t help but think of recent historical events and executions, and how an artist might interpret them today.

“Hard Times”
In that vein, I’d like to mention the current exhibition at the gallery, “Hard Times.” It is a meditation on violent acts, both historical and current. The exhibition features works by Paolo Arao, Chris Hammerlein, Martin McMurray, Mike Peter Smith and George Grosz.

Paolo Arao’s diptych, “C,” is a drawing of a summer 2006 Daily News front page, showing the victim of a stabbing on New York City’s C train. The pose of the victim echoes that of Christ in “The Entombment” by Caravaggio, the left drawing of the diptych. “The Rut,” a series of paintings by Martin McMurray, is a grouping of fictitious magazine covers. In stark black and white, against the red and white “Rut” logo, scenes from a Middle Eastern conflict unfold. Mike Peter Smith’s sculpture is a life-sized skull upon which a small village resides. The small town is at odds with the morose skull, a traditional vanitas symbol of life’s brevity.

The earliest work in the exhibition is a George Grosz drawing, “Street Scene with Hanged Man,” 1912. A narrow German street is filled with people and activity, while a hanged figure hovers above. The crowd seems oblivious, whether out of fear, shame or guilt, and it is unknown who has been hanged, or why.

Jeff Bailey Gallery is located at 511 W. 25th St., No. 207 (212-989-0156; baileygallery.com).