Pulse NY 2015
If you make the time this week to get to the Metroplitan House on 18th St. to see Pulse, there are a few exhibitions to be noted. At Rick Wister are graphite and acrylic works by Alyse Rosner. She makes the work on Yupo, a synthetic paper which she takes onto the terrace at her studio and rubs and scrapes graphite over it before applying acrylic. The result is a dynamic and fluid composition that press a tension between figure and ground.
Quite in another direction are the conceptually based paintings by the Russian-American artist Yevgeniy Fiks whose work is at the booth of Parisian gallery, Galerie Sator. The images focus on the famous Prouns of El Lissitsky in the early 1920s, one shown here.
Fiks has recreated them and added the signature of Lissitsky in Yiddish calling attention to the conflict artists in the constructivist movement had between and international focus and a cultural identity.
El Lissitsky had a body of work that was referred to as his Jewish work that was considered less mature.
These works he signed in Yiddish, while his Prouns remained unsigned. Fiks, no doubt, relates to Lissitsky's conflicted nature as to his identity, and his work reminds us of the tension that still exists in the world today between the universal and the ethnically particular.
The most exhilarating piece I saw at Pulse was at the Transfer Gallery by Carla Gannis, titled "The Garden of Emoji Delights",
a huge recreation of the legendary work by Hieronymous Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"
She proves, without a doubt, that emojis can be just as terrifying as any fantasies humans have come up with throughout history.