Scandinavians are awfully cavalier about their treasures. The Munch canvases in Norway’s National Gallery are displayed near rooms with open windows. (More about the rooms, and the paintings, later.) The Danish crown jewels, on display in the basement of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, a royal residence from the seventeenth century, are crowded in vitrines that tourists squeeze through and photograph without supervision. In any other country (which is to say, in the United States), pieces this precious would be secured with armed guards and bulletproof glass in a bunker.

While they’re appropriately dazzling, the Danish crown jewels aren’t as formidable as the English or as fairytale-wondrous as the Russian. By comparison they are, like the security, remarkably informal. What struck me most was how so many of the designs steer away from abstraction and incorporate flowers and figures. It gives them a fizzy, Pop-Art sensibility. There’s a charming chain strung with elephant charms, a small lion bowl, and several pieces with skulls in them. This seventeenth-century chalice has a porcelain skull with glittering stone eyes. It’s kooky and Gothic, and calls to mind both Hamlet and Damien Hirst. The official English-language museum text reassures us that the skull is a symbol of “eternity” rather than mortality. Graced with diamonds and emeralds and set in gold, with a dramatically flaring base, it possesses a seriousness that so much contemporary skull imagery, which adorns everything from oxford shirts to baby clothes, just doesn’t. It’s grave.

June 19, 2012 by Nalina Moses

January 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving. Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next. In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma. My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery. The proportions make for a special dynamism. But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular. Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings. They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots. The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.

It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks. But the Spot Paintings are all about painting. The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas. Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas. The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant. When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape. But the spots are random and no figure emerges. Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success. And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field. Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting. Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.

Image credit:

Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

December 05, 2011 by Nalina Moses

In 1996 Damien Hirst displayed two sliced-up cows at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. It was an act of art world bravado I believed would remain unmatched. I was wrong. Sculptor Maurizio Catellan, who’s career-ending installation All is on view at the Guggenheim now, tops it. Catellan, who also publishes magazines, says he’s done making art. So in lieu of a mid-career retrospective he’s suspended “140 or so” of his existing sculptures from the rotunda of the museum. It’s both audacious and enchanting. In taking over the rotunda he’s bludgeoned the iconic architecture and, at the same time, made perfect use of it. If he’s attempting, metaphorically, to hang his artistic self, he’s failed. Dangling in the air like this, his work looks terrific.

Catellan’s pieces, like that of the pope being hit by a meteor, have an appealing impishness. They’re not just political, they’re also weirdly personal. So statues of an elephant in a Klu Klux Klan robe, a kneeling Adolf Hitler, and a topless Stephanie Seymour, are funnier than you’d expect. Some of his works, like figures of horses, and boys in nooses, were meant to be hung. Some of them, when hung, take on an elegaic air, like JFK lying in an open coffin, and corpses draped with white sheets. You need to walk up (or down) the spiraling ramp to get a look at each piece and with every few steps the view shifts dramatically, pulling you along. The outer walls of the museum are left empty and visitors focus inwards, which makes absolute sense. There’s always been something odd about mounting artwork against the rounded, sloping walls of the Guggenheim, while the enormous space in the center remains empty. I think Catellan’s installation might have begun as an attack on Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. It’s really a magnificent salute.

April 14, 2011 by Nalina Moses

The Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street is a great space to begin with. Like many Chelsea galleries, which are converted warehouses and garages, it’s a broad, clean space. But the Gagosian is twice the size of neighboring galleries and, when properly choreographed, a fantastic backdrop for contemporary art. I saw Damien Hirst’s first New York show there, dazzled by the formaldehyde tanks holding a shark and (in transverse slices) a cow. And I saw Richard Serra’s 2003 show there, thunderstruck by the grandeur of the immense, curved steel forms.

The current exhibit of painter Rudolf Stingel’s work is a similar kind of knock-out. Not the art, mind you, but the exhibit. Stingel’s paintings, all super-sized, aren’t memorable but they have richly textures surfaces. The large entrance gallery, which features three portraits on three separate walls, is boldly unnerving. The largest gallery, which contains seven gold color-field canvases, has a lyrical, romantic feeling. And passing through the narrow back gallery lined with silver carpet paintings feels like a giddy, Pop Art daydream. Say what you will about their curatorial efforts; the people over at the Gagosian know how to put on a show.