Wednesday 26/11/08

We started with a late breakfast and a walk around Chelsea before embarking on numerous visits to commercial galleries in the Chelsea District. At 11am, the class met at the Gary Snyder Project Space, where the exhibition New American Abstraction 1960 – 1975 was on display. Gary Snyder talked to us about the space and the collection, which consisted of colour-field, optical art and systematic paintings. It was really interesting to see these pieces and hear that they were from the 60's and 70's era, as I personally thought they looked quite modern. After this, a small group of us went around to other commercial galleries that we found such as Luhring Augustine, Mary Boone and Andrea Rosen Gallery. We also stopped in at Metro Pictures which was displaying a collection of Cindy Sherman photographs. Sherman’s photographs are self portraits displaying distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging; with each photo looking like different models due to the make-up and dress. The photos leave the artist unrecognisable to the audience and it’s only after close inspection, that you realise it is in fact the same person in every photo. I also really enjoyed the Hiroshi Sugimoto: 7 Days / 7 Nights exhibition held at the Gagosian Gallery. The exhibition comprised of fourteen black and white photographs of sea scapes, which were amazing to see.

We met back with the class for more commercial gallery talks, next was with Peter Haffner who discussed the gallery operations at the Charles Cowles Gallery. Peter talked about the efforts of the gallery to work with/for the artists they take on board and to promote their work as best they can. Next was a talk by Margaret Murray at the Murray-Guy Gallery, which had two video art installations on view. The main installation questioned the perceptions of space and time, in a virtual reality. The last commercial gallery talk was at David Zwirner to discuss the Stan Douglas and Tomma Abts shows, which were also brilliant and interesting, however I was extremely tired from a long day, so it was hard to take in a lot of the works at this last gallery. Home after another long day, we got to have free pizza at the Hostel, which was so good and tucked in for a good night’s rest.