Winner Takes All at Marianne Boesky Gallery

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What a title for gathering similar art, it sounds like a highlander battle,"There can be only one!" Like there's going to be blood. Who will win? Who will be cast as the ornament of history. Stay tuned to find out on Winner Takes All. 

Cosima von Bonin at Marianne Boesky

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The commodity is the form we now think in. The variations of fish getting more and more micro, they blur together, or are these just the same sculptures as before?  Which may be the point, the purchaser isn't buying the particular product on the shelf but the idea behind it. This store's Scotch-Brite® Non-Scratch Scrub Sponge might be pink and the one in the commercial is a more regal yellow, but you are not any longer buying the sponge for its color, you're buying it for what it can accomplish in your home.


Se too: Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa, Cosima von Bonin at Friedrich Petzel

Anthony Pearson at Marianne Boesky

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A lot of art makes the process of getting paint onto the canvas itself the problem of art. Going back to Stella's auto-flex on the canvas, an excuse for the painting. Reason without reason. Simply was. Which was the point then, but however many decades later we suddenly had "process orientated abstraction" whose own tautological reasoning spread infectiously as a means to manufacture object meaning. Pearson - who has been around longer than the process dead - has been inventing all sorts of means to get art to semi-auto-materialize. The "paint" here is poured and peeled, and the others grated with rococo lines, etc. So what you see is what you see, a process in getting the materials to self-expose. But the image is beside the point, the point is simply materialization, sediment something that is elegant, pretty, capable of walls.

Frank Stella at Marianne Boesky

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People love to invoke Walter Robinson's quote: "I admire Stella because he is making the ugliest art it is possible to make today.” Which, maddeningly cannot find the original source for this quote since the padding around it seems to matter. Because admittedly, the staggering asininity is their joy. They are like a clown exploding diagrammatically, intestines like silly string. The clown dies. But Stella's are essays in permanence. Matthew Strauss grammed all the various bird shit/piss on these that they will weather, because there isn't anything you could smear on these to make them better or worse, like a clown. And also like a clown, if a tumor is unchecked growth of a body, Stella's seem the unchecked growth of "creativity." Moles everyone has an opinion on whether we need them checked out. Which pretty sure is like a clown. Which pretty sure is a metaphor the these, some type of unchecked growth, clowning. These belong in the banks lobbies you see them in, absurdifying the notion of taste, of unchecked growth, all the clowns they let past security.

Julia Dault at Marianne Boesky

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The process oriented abstraction that gave us so much overwrought and gentle wallpaper whose blandness that proved its conceptualism takes itself a little less self-justifying here and more somewhere between no two Charlene von Heyl paintings looking quite the same meeting Sarah Morris's every painting looking the same in a Bernard Frieze like system where the means only somewhat justify the ends: a programmatic delivery of a consistent experiment, not inventing new processes but new designs for that product, not quite responsibility evaporated but chance fun.