WEDNESDAY
NYC
* Robert Irwin "Dotting the i's & Crossing the t's" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. Irwin's new site-conditioned installation, incorporating the gallery's upper-floor windows, is the first of a two-pronged exhibition—the second part occurs at Pace's boxier 510 W 25th St space in September. Look: anytime this sublime interventional artist unveils something NEW, it's a guaranteed must-see.
* The Weeknd @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/SOLD OUT. Did you luck out and score tix to Canadian crooner The Weeknd's (né Abel Tesfaye) first proper NYC show? Or were you skeptical b/c he hadn't "performed live yet"—stateside, anyway—and you slept on it? Guess what: Tesfaye and band totally blew up Coachella. Dude can sing. You lucky ticket-holding readers: prepare to perspire tonight.
AUSTIN
* Fusebox Festival 2012 @ multiple venues. Since moving to Austin last summer, I've had to acclimatize myself to "how things work" in the South, from the gallery scene to indie film releases and local bands. The usual LIST stuff. I've been on the search for unique cultural opportunities and Fusebox Festival is definitely that, an annual gathering of international and Hill Country pan-media artists, programmed by the Austin "idea engine" Fusebox. The fest itself runs thru May 6, so check back for my picks (tagged as "Fusebox Festival"). Full schedule here. Now get to it.
* Fusebox Festival: The Coathangers (ATL) @ Fusebox Festival Hub / 1100 E 5th St, 10p/$5. Dude(tte): way to kick off this year's Fest w/ Atlanta's deliriously irreverent grrrl-punks The Coathangers, whose latest LP "Larceny and Old Lace" is girly when it needs to be but refreshingly in-your-face, too. Stoked!
TOKYO
* Makiko Tanaka "Aurora vs Portrait" @ hpgrp Tokyo / B1F 5-1-15 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (Chiyoda/Hanzomon/Ginza Lines to Omotesando Station. The Tokyo-born artist expresses the feeling of air and the aurora over the world in a series of pencil and gesso works.
* Eikoh Hosoe @ BLD Gallery / 2-4-9 Ginza, Chuo Ward Tokyo (JR Yurakucho Station, Marunouchi Line to Ginza Station). "Killed by Roses" or "Bara-kei" is among Hosoe's most famous photo series from the early '60s, darkly erotic images of the male figure, with Yukio Mishima as model. That Mishima would later follow up those fantasies with ritual suicide in 1970 makes them that much more impactful.
* パスピエ @ Shimokitazawa GARDEN / B1F 2-4-5 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku (Keio Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station, S. Exit), 7p/2800 yen. The magnetizing Tokyo quintet PASSEPIED won me over back in December, channeling a distinctly Japanese "Twin Sister" in their heady cocktail of electronics, rock accoutrements and songbird Natsuki's soaring vox. w/ Heavenstamp
THURSDAY
NYC
* Domenico Gnoli @ Luxembourg Dayan / 64 E 77th St. Eighteen late-period creepy-ass paintings by the "Italian cult figure" Gnoli who, like his countryman Piero Manzoni, died way too young (aged 36 in 1970).
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Spare swooshes of color against arctic-frigid backdrops elevates Moser's latest series into possibly my favorite-est ever from the NY-based gestural abstraction painter. Stellar stuff, this lot.
* Shay Kun "Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Kun's evocative and vibrantly colorful landscape paintings are all somehow…wrong, somewhat off…which doesn't prevent your gaze from locking deep into 'em.
* "4 Films: Adrian Paci, Luisa Rabbia, SUPERFLEX, Su-Mei Tse" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. Feat. Paci's "Inside the Circle", Rabbia's "Travels With Isabella", SUPERFLEX's "Modern Times Forever" and Tse's "Vertingen de la Vida" (w/ Jean-Lou Majerus).
* "Profondo Rosso/Deep Red" (dir. Dario Argento, 1975) screening @ MAD Museum / 2 Columbus Circle (CE/123 to 59th St/Columbus Circle), 7p. An Argento-worthy giallo classic. Think music teacher (played by David Hemmings!) turned detective, creepy-ass music scores (courtesy Goblin!), and strains of general insanity!
FRIDAY
NYC
* Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen "Theater and Installation 1985-1990" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. One huge facet of the consummate NY modernist's oeuvre that I am just not that clued into: his collaborative stage performances with long-time partner van Bruggen. The exhibition includes an installation of enlarged costumes and props used in "Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife)", performed by Oldenburg and van Bruggen on the Campo dell'Arsenale in Venice, plus "The European Desktop", their 1990 installation and finale as a duo.
* "Loughelton Revisted" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The artist Barbara Bourghei curated this group exhibition, named after the namesake East Village gallery she co-founded with Amy Lipton in '86. Expect works originally exhibited at Loughelton Gallery, incl. John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, and Annette Lemieux, plus works by artist/curators connected to the institution, like Peter Nagy (Gallery Nature Morte) and Colin deLand.
* "Opera" (dir. Dario Argento, 1987) screening @ MAD Museum / 2 Columbus Circle (CE/123 to 59th St/Columbus Circle), 7p. What is it about opera houses that elicit bloodshed? Argento did it in "Four Flies on Gray Velvet", and he amps the intensity like a million times here by having the killer bind our heroine, pry open her eyelids w/ needles and, in a subversive twist to "A Clockwork Orange", force her to watch the murders take place!
AUSTIN
* Fusebox Festival: Max Warsh & Vanesa Zendejas @ Sofa at Rosewood / 1319 Rosewood Ave, 7p. NY-based Warsh pairs photography to LA artist Zendejas' sculpture, as the pair investigate abstraction and built spaces. I am poring through "RUINS" (edited by Brian Dillon, part of Whitechapel Gallery's "Documents of Contemporary Art"), and find the timing of this exhibition just perfect. THRU MAY 6
* "Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance" (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2002) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11:30p. Park may be best known in the Western filmic world for "Oldboy", the second iteration of his bracing Vengeance Trilogy, but the first chapter, "Sympathy…", is as dark and bloody, plus it's more emotive in its cunning use of off-kilter humor. Starring Shin Ha-kyun as a green-haired mute so desperate to save his dying sister that he dives deep into the black market organ trade; and a super-serious Song Kang-ho ("Thirst", "The Host") seeking closure and the title's word over his missing little daughter. ALSO SAT
TOKYO
* Saya Kubota "Melting Monster" @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR lines etc to Shibuya Station). The young Tsukuba graduate's developing style of singeing paper and rusting metal takes a deeper context here, as she compresses time and history in works relating to archeological finds. Sounds dope!
SATURDAY
NYC
* Sherrie Levine "A Dazzle of Zebra" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. What in the hell does this exhibition title mean? Who knows! Something about the duality b/w the real world and Levine's set-piece installation. The cerebral meta-artist just had a phenomenal survey at the Whitney, and now she unveils new "encounters", works made of glass, bronze, or handmade paper.
* Holton Rower "Pour Paintings" @ The Hole / 312 Bowery. This ain't your dad's AbEx pour paintings, son. This child of the psychedelic '60s creates tectonic rainbows of flowing paint and small pours of multicolored "hats" over wooden protrusions — think the aurora, distant nebulas, undersea creatures, and the best acid trip you ever had, all at once.
* Pier Paolo Calzolari "When a dreamer dies what happens to the dream? @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St and The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. Pretty dope: the two galleries will be temporarily conjoined in hosting an in-depth historic exhibition of the Arte Povera artist, featuring his "activated" materials and temporal achievements.
* "Tenebrae" (dir. Dario Argento 1982) screening @ MAD Museum / 2 Columbus Circle (CE/123 to 59th St/Columbus Circle), 7p. Tied w/ "Phenomenon" (aka "Creepers") for my favorite '80s Argento film. This time, it's an American writer of violent horror novels tracking a razor-wielding killer whose modus operandi mimics the author's books! The whole vibe is clinically slick, like Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville", only a giallo!
* Jeff Mills @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 11p/$15. What, so you didn't get score tix to The Weeknd, either? No sweat (yet), just put that money towards Detroit wünderkind Jeff Mills, whose furious sets of icy-cold techno will keep you moving all night.
* The Weeknd @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/SOLD OUT! Readers, see my effusive compliments toward Canadian crooner Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye" under WED. Because he rocks live.
AUSTIN
* Eleanor Friedberger (NYC) @ Frank / 407 Colorado St, 9:30p/$12. Friedberger, the beguiling songbird half of NYC psych-pop duo The Fiery Furnaces, graces my favorite gourmet hotdog joint for an evening of transcendent vox. w/ Brooklynites Hospitality
TOKYO
* Jaye Moon "Luminous" @ Gallery MOMO / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). This exhibition highlights the NY-based artist's recent Plexiglas and Legos—yes, really!—series "Mirrors", "Mondrian Corners", and "Lunchboxes".
* MoRpHO @ Shibuya Milkyway / 3F 4-7 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 7p/3000 yen. The busily named visual-kei electro rockers MoRpHO make Milkyway their "Theater" tonight.
* Pines Mines @ Basement Bar / B1F 5-18-1 Daizawa, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu/Keio Inokashira Line to Shimo-kitazawa Station, South Exit), 7p/2000 yen. I usually take the indie-rock or noise route when mining local live acts, but paisley-proud trio Pines Mines do a pretty fine Doors rendition, only w/ sunny coed harmonies. Hell, I'm impressed. w/ snap
* deNOISE 4 @ Super Deluxe / B1F 3-1-25 Nishi-azabu, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station), 5:30p/2800 yen. First night of a two-night sonic feast courtesy Feedback Tokyo and LUFF does TOKYO is a doozy. Local noisicians Hair Stylistics and PAIN JERK claim sets w/ the notoriously evil Rudolf Eb.Er (aka Runzelstirn und Gurglestock) + Swiss hardcore "pyro-acoustic" Dave Phillips (ex Fear of God).
* "XXX Fest" @ Heaven's Door / B1 1-33-19 Sangenjaya, Setagaya-ku (), 5p/3000 yen. "Explosive carnivorous girls!" That's the tagline for this huge lineup of grrrl-fronted and all-grrrl rock. Feat. Red Bacteria Vacuum, マジョ, Jinny Oops!, The Harpy's, ヒーヒズヒムイズム、ザリガニ＄ etc. What else do you need??
SUNDAY
NYC
* Vlatka Horvat "Unleveling" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. I was WAY into Horvat's subtle intervention at MoMA PS1's 2010 Greater NY. Her debut solo exhibition at this LES gem should provide deeper insight into Horvat's processes, incl. relating figures and ground, reconfiguring objects excised from previous works in new ways, and shifting visitors' movements via installation. Very cool.
* Tom McGrath "Profiles in Fugitive Light" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. Spanking new moody, nocturnal abstract oil paintings from McGrath, whose last solo was at Mexico City's Zona Maco.
* Michael DeLucia @ Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St. Just off an eye-opening group show "In Practice" at Long Island City's SculptureCenter comes DeLucia's reductive housepaint-on-plywood sculpture, inaugurating Eleven Rivington's newly expanded space at 195 Chrystie St, around the corner from the tiny gallery.
AUSTIN
* Fusebox Festival: "Night Sky" @ Fusebox Festival Hub / 1100 E 5th St, 9p/$5. Church of the Friendly Ghost – the local sonic pioneering co-op whose electroacoustical voyages light up the Hill Country approx monthly – presents Alison O'Daniel's film "Night Sky", like a desert-set dance-off, set to the live musical accompaniment of Ethan Frederick Greene. Followed immediately by "So We Got That Going For Us – Which Is Nice", a half-hr of sound and movement courtesy Henna Chou, Justin Sherburne, and Lindsey Taylor. And yo: O'Daniel participated in PERFORMA11 (screening "Night Sky") and the critically acclaimed "Pacific Standard Time" at LA's Blackbox.
TOKYO
* deNOISE 5 @ Super Deluxe / B1F 3-1-25 Nishi-azabu, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station), 5:30p/2800 yen. Just to rub salt in the wound, here's night 2 of Feedback Tokyo/LUFF does TOKYO's deNOISE fest: 非常階段 (that's Hijokaidan, the legendary noise rockers!)+ HIKO (Gauze), Jim O'Rourke + Norbert Möslang, plus Dave Phillips + ASTRO (Hiroshi Hasegawa, ex CCCC).
MONDAY
AUSTIN
* Fusebox Festival: Jenny Larson & Sterling Price-McKinney "Dream Cabinet" @ Eponymous Garden / 1202 Garden St, 10p/FREE. A site-specific video projection and choreographed show (plus, erm, haunted house), written by Price-McKinney and directed by Larson, leading the audience through an early 20th c. dreamscape.
TUESDAY
NYC
* Lucian Freud "Drawings" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. The modernist figuratist's acclaimed drawing show at London's Blain/Southern (co-organized by Acquavella) now moves to NYC. The sheer range of styles and mediums here—from pencil and watercolor emotions of animals to crayon landscapes and Freud's signature gooey human studies in charcoal—well, it's all just incredible. A must-see ahead of Frieze NY.
* "Science on the back end", selected by Matthew Day Jackson @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The space-tinged artist Jackson makes it clear in H&W's press release that he's not a curator—rather, he selected five artists who inspire him and left them to their own mechanics in creating this pretty neat show. Each artist gets a room: Larry Bamburg, Marc Ganzglass, Rosy Keyser, Erin Shirreff, and Nick Van Woert; each does what they want with that room. Will there be cross-chamber communication? Cross-pollination, if you will?
* Charlene Kaye @ Gramercy Theatre / 127 E 23rd St (6 to 23rd St), 8p/$10. I am bonkers proud of NYC chanteuse Charlene Kaye, who celebrates her 2nd LP "Animal Love" release party tonight. Be enamored. w/ Alicia and Theo Katzman
AUSTIN
* "Don't Go in the House" (dir. Joseph Ellison, 1980) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. I would suggest doing as the title says – only see the damn film, it's got that charm that only early '80s American horror carries. Low budget as hell, think "Psycho" with a pyromaniac, trapping PYTs in his modified incinerator/crematorium boudoir!
TOKYO
* Electric Eel Shock @ Shelter / B1 2-6-10 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku (Keio Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station, South Exit), 6:30p/2500 yen. Punk is bunk, in a tongue and cheek way, to these rip-roaring metalheads. If Motörhead were Japanese and Lemmy a mop-topped guitarist, they might look and sound a bit like Electric Eel Shock. w/ local noise-rockers Lagitagida
* SUNDAYS @ Shinjuku Marble / 2-45-2 Kabukicho, Shinjuku-ku (JR etc to Shinjuku Station, Kabukicho Exit), 7p/2500 yen. SUNDAYS frontwoman Fuyumi Kobayashi is like a much cuter, female version of Iggy Pop, sashaying about the stage while shouting her vocals and flinging sweat into the mouths of adoring fans. Who's harder-core than SUNDAYS? A: in Tokyo? Nobody. w/ 青春スカトロジー
CURRENT SHOWS
AUSTIN
* "This Is It With It As It Is" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. LA-based artist Eve Fowler created the titular work behind this four-person exhibition, a poster-sized panel of glittering, asphalt-colored letters on fluorescent yellow. The words are derived from Gertrude Stein, but the lettering design was determined by the poster-making company: so Fowler's hand in the work is more that of guiding rather than dictating. I sense a little of her in the other three showing here, all youngish cross-media Los Angeles artists who either know or have worked with Fowler in varying degrees. Probably her closest neighbor is multidisciplinary artist Math Bass, who collaborated on a performance/sculpture/photography project with Fowler at Easthampton's Fireplace Project last year – though Bass eschews her own text-derived work in favor of these sphinxlike, watery ink drawings. Their ambiguous portraiture gives up almost exactly zero, but they hint at Bass' overarching oeuvre and her upcoming performance for Fusebox (MAY 4, check back!). Likewise Barry Macgregor Smith's objects and painted banners, both taking on different modes than their initial intent. I found Dashiell Manley's two-sided framed works the linchpin to the show and the antipode to Fowler's text paintings. While Manley's contributions – painted canvas on one side, painted and smeared glass on the obverse – are covered in numerals, many of the silvery digits are flipped into their mirror images (like they're seen from the painting's opposite side) and as a result resemble roman letters. It is this breakdown or blurring of language and communication, like Bass' representational transience, that I find really super interesting.
* Leif Low-beer @ Okay Mountain / 1619 E Cesar Chavez. I was pretty stoked to hear that Brooklynite Low-beer—who I'd met at Astoria, Queen's Socrates Sculpture Park last May (his array of brightly colored objects and forms was a highlight of that group exhibition and turned notions of "public sculpture" on its ear)—was inaugurating Okay Mountain's new space. I was doubly stoked when I arrived and found one of Low-beer's beguiling arrays (I think titled "Olive pit pedestal") crowning off an exhibition including sculptural/mixed-media hybrids and works on paper. Agglomerations including painted bead-like stacks, geometric interventions and what resembles Haim Steinbach's signature "dog chew-toys" rearrange themselves depending on POV, retaining the artist's presence and hand much as his collaged drawings and spatially distorting photography.
* "Memento Mori" @ Grayduck Gallery / 608 W Monroe Dr. I've been working off a mortality tip in these Austin-area galleries. First Tiny Park, now Grayduck. This group exhibition, w/ Suzanne Koett (photography), John Mulvany (painting), and Cherie Weaver (mixed media), features local talent adept at locking humanity in a historical context. Mulvany, Irish-born and Texas-based, achieves this by painting figures from the Irish Civil War as beatific spirits looming over the sun-bleached Hill Country landscape. Retaining the figures' sepia-toned palette against the vistas' blues, greens, and earth-tones—plus the ornate retablo/devotional halos crowning them—Mulvany comments on the cyclical presence of his subjects. As in: the recurrences of war and religious movements. Weaver utilizes a ton of vintage cabinet cards in her ageless works, but they tend to be linking points or jump-offs to larger or multi-part dialogues, like the almost titular "Momentum Mori" and its pools of sumi-e echoed in the photograph's checkerboard floor, or her composites on translucent unstretched linen. I first began digging Koett's photography at this Austin-area artist group show at Gallery Black Lagoon last year, thanks to her bracing "Sabbat" series. She includes works from "The Study of Aloneness" here, ghostly composites of same-looking girls levitating in a forest's fog ("Power For Power") or in a Brutalist garage ("Rejoice, We Made the Right Choice"). It's like her "twins" are the guides for this exhibition's ideas and imagery, ushering us between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, to contemplate our respective existences.
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Corinne Wasmuht @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. I had a mild acid flashback when experiencing the Berlin-based artist's 2008 solo at the gallery, covered with her huge, brightly colored and varnished abstract paintings on wood. Believe me, it was a good feeling. She returns to NYC after a series of exhibitions in Berlin and Nürnberg, celebrating her catalogue "Supracity".
* Henning Bohl "Namenloses Grauen" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Massive Bohl fan here, considering his discreetly engaging solo "Psyc Holo G yHe Ute" at the gallery in 2009 and Bohl's recent architectural installation at Johann König in Berlin. Here, he screws with monochromatic paintings—sorry: "conceptualizes" them—with Japanese tape dispensers shaped like doughnuts, and other things.
* Kim Dingle "still lives" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. The Cali-born painter of compelling and creepily faceless dolly-sized figures hasn't had a solo here since 2007, and her tongue-in-cheek press release announcing that "if what is depicted makes the artist laugh then all the more fun for the artist and maybe for the viewer, too – but it is usually an accident", sounds properly beguiling.
* Michelangelo Pistoletto "Lavoro" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Pistoletto staged this new series of mirror "paintings" at London's Simon Lee Gallery last autumn, which features his signature mirrors overlaid w/ elements of construction, dust, and rubble—not exactly out of place within W. Chelsea. This show will draw mad crowds (tourists love taking photos of themselves w/in a Pistoletto mirror), but you can't really miss it either, right?
* Stan Douglas "Disco Angola" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. I dug Douglas' "Midcentury Studio" installation in the gallery last year, but I think his assuming the role of a fictional photojournalist amid NYC's roiling early '70s disco underground sounds even doper. He includes works from Angola (considering saxophonist Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa", widely considered the first disco hit) and NY, plus the historical, political and cultural moments encompassing them.
* David Lyle "Misbehaving" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. Classic Americana imagery warped and contextualized to with contemporary influences. That's only the tip of the proverbial artistic iceberg, though, as Lyle's methodical layering and removal of oily black veneer to his "grayscale" paintings adds a startling vintage sheen.
* Jacqueline Humphries @ Greene Naftali Gallery / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Some of the most…damn gorgeous kinetic abstract paintings you've ever seen, washes of oil paint, drips of enamel, sometimes silver and glitter for multiple-POV effect. Humphries hasn't had a solo stateside since 2009, and she's pretty prolific, so I'm stoked about this new body of work.
* Caio Fonseca @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Embellishments and extraneous elements have evaporated in Fonseca's latest series of large- and intimately-scaled paintings, which remain refreshing in their bold, reductive forms.
* Ron Gorchov @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. A recent selection of concave and convex shaped paintings by this "perennially emerging artist" (so writes Robert Storr in a 1990 catalogue essay). The curved works' innate sensuality and pleasing color combinations are traits of Gorchov's signature awesomeness.
* Peter Saul @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Who'dathunk Peter Saul—he of the acid-toned, hypnagogic-subject palette of The Hairy Who—would be getting all this buzz? Yet the grandmaster of bad taste agitprop had both a stunning solo at David Nolan Gallery in 2009 and a superb career survey at Haunch of Venison in 2010. Now Mary Boone showcases new paintings by the artist, who hasn't dialed down the lurid colors nor subject matter an ounce. Considering Occupy Wall Street and other contemporary excesses, Saul has a LOT to work with.
TOKYO
* Takashi Ishida @ Taka Ishii Gallery / 5F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). This isn't quite Anthony McCall—in Ishida's "drawing with 16mm film animation"—but I am pretty totally stoked for the artist's debut solo at the gallery.
* Ikko Narahara @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). A two-part exhibition of the Fukuoka-born artist, focusing on two distinct bodies of work. The show opens with Narahara's portraiture as the theme "Sights of Civilization". Beginning Apr 17, the gallery switches to photographs of the urban landscape.
* Junta Egawa "Forgetting the new world seen a while ago, and the moment of seeing again" @ eitoeiko / 32-2 Yaraicho, Shinjuku-ku (Tokyo Metro Tozen Line to Kagurazaka Station, Toei Oedo Line to Ushigome-kagurazaka Station). In the Kanagawa-born artist's third solo at the gallery, he internalizes his paintings to meditate was what lost in the Tohoku earthquake.
* Yoko Oyama "Melody of Mephisto" @ Gallery TOSEI / 5-18-20 Chuo, Nagano-ku (Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line to Shin-Nakao Station, Exit 1-2). Oyama's latest series of atmospheric photographs were taken in Hungary and bear influence of Bartok, Liszt and other composers on the artist.
* Yuichi Higashionna "Apparition" @ Yumiko Chiba Associates / 2F 4-32-6 Nishi-shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (Toei Oedo Line to Tochomae Station, JR etc to Shinjuku Station, West Exit). I credit NY's Marianne Boesky Gallery for exposing me to this mid-career Japanese artist, whose loopy, fluorescent light sculptures and refreshingly neo-Op installations have been wigging me out since 2008. He's created a mostly new array for this exhibition.
* Yu Siuan "Greenhouse-Program" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station). The Taipei-born artist echoes Belgian Surrealist master Rene Magritte in his painterly, decaying objects.
* Trevor Brown "Toy Box" @ Span Art Gallery / 2-2-18 1F Ginza, Chuo-ku. (Yurakucho Line to Ginza-Itchome Station). Cutie-pie and devious, Brown's new series of gorgeous paintings are like children's "Golden Books" illustrations w/ sinister undertones. His wife contributes some adorable stuffed teddybear poppets as HippieCoco. (ENDS SAT)
TOKYO
* Aki Yamamoto "Cut" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (JR Lines etc to Shibuya). Yamamoto returns to the gallery with her abstract color acuity, incorporating collage into her paintings to reconstruct particular worldly observations.
* Hisami Tanaka "NOSELF" @ waitingroom / 4B 2-8-11 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station, West Exit). New jagged mixed-media paintings and drawings by the Kanagawa-based artist, in his debut at the gallery. I saw a little preview of Tanaka's work at waitingroom's booth at New City Art Fair in NYC, and guess what: it's dope. (ENDS SUN)
