Defining Space with String, and Miscellaneous Selections of Quirkiness: A Review of the Barbara Krakow Gallery
September 14, 2007
Tucked away on busy Newbury Street, amidst stores like Burberry and DKNY, lies the Barbara Krakow Gallery. Unlike its flashy surroundings and fancy building exteriors, the gallery greets visitors with an unpretentious white space. Though plain and quite stark, the art make up for the plainness of the rooms.
Tucked away on busy Newbury Street, amidst stores like Burberry and DKNY, lies the Barbara Krakow Gallery. Unlike its flashy surroundings and fancy building exteriors, the gallery greets visitors with an unpretentious white space. Though plain and quite stark, the art make up for the plainness of the rooms. The elevator ride takes its time, but the art pieces waste no time making a statement. You either love small figurines like sculpture, or yarn hanging from ceilings, or dislike them—strongly. Once in the gallery, bright clerestory and studio lighting greet the visitor, as well as some intriguing art pieces in the main room and two secondary rooms. Unfortunately, hardly any seating is available in the main space for proper viewing, and the circulation of the space makes it inconvenient for interaction with the art pieces. Nevertheless, the carpeted floors, unadorned walls, and wonderfully lit space are great for viewing exhibitions.
The fantastic thing about Barbara Krakow Gallery is that it offers something for a variety of viewers; well, modern art viewers, at least. It will appeal to the viewer who enjoys something different and quirky. Works at the gallery require acceptance or understanding, as the artists introduce many new ideas. Fortunately, the people working at the gallery are willing to explain an artist’s vision or brief history, if you are willing to ask.
This gallery differs from others not only in its art selection, but in the artists that are featured. They are not mainstream oil painters; they are unconventional inventors. They invent new ways of looking at art, and investigate its essence. Installation artist Liliana Porter uses art as a humorous way of connecting the real and unreal. Using found miniature figurines, she sets them in realistic human situations. They can be seen as adorable toys in delightful displays or as serious pieces highlighting the real world and the imaginary. For example, Barbara Krakow displayed Porter’s “Forced Labor,” featuring a small man with a wheelbarrow in the middle of great piles of black sand, understood as gravel. The surreal aspect of viewing this world-within-a-world is an experience, and its placement at eye-level heightened the effect. Porter’s ability to give life to inanimate objects and make them interact with the viewer is not to be missed. She will soon have a solo show at the Barbara Krakow Gallery.
Across from this endearing display hangs a flat screen television, showing different industrial settings created by Peter Downsbrough. The scenes of roads and construction sites unfortunately failed to pique my interest. However, this shows that Barbara Krakow does have an interesting mix of media and artistic style.
An art piece that really caught my eye was a pair of portraits by Julian Opie, hanging next to Porter’s installation. They were a set of unconventional portraits of man and wife, facing each other. Slightly resembling the marriage portraits of the renaissance because of their stiff profiles, Opie gives it a great modern twist by using bold black outlines against a white background, maximizing contrast. Trained as a sculptor in London, Opie brings his attention to precise lines and beautiful form into his work. The holes in his figures give hair and clothing texture, and his use of lasers to cut these holes give it a very clean feel, almost as if it were painted. Opie’s works are not solely confined to small-scale art. In fact, he was asked to create a massive background display with LCD technology for one of U2’s concerts. His other works include gigantic wall murals, window prints, graphic life-size installations in parks, and giant lightboxes by the roadside, making our urban jungle his canvas. His work can be viewed in the gallery and online at www.julianopie.com.
Those secondary exhibitions were truly one-of-a-kind, but the main exhibition was of pieces by Fred Sandback, a well known modern sculptor. He was educated at Yale, alongside another great sculptor, Richard Serra, who had a retrospective at MOMA this summer. It is surprising to see that the sculptor’s work differs so much from Serra’s, especially since they graduated in the same class. Serra focuses more on industrial materials like steel and sculptural forms with weight, concentrating on the way people interact with the piece, or the way the piece fits the site. Sandback looks at the tangibility of space, investigating what creates space: would certain forms be possible if a certain wall or corner did not exist? He questions not so much what is there, but rather, asks what would be different if something was not.
Viewers are not supposed to interact so much as to ponder. Sandback uses elastics and cord to connect corners, or to link floors to ceilings. It is an articulation of his perception of space, down to a bare minimum. It is about things you notice or do not notice. One of his elegant pieces included one of two acrylic cords connecting two walls adjacent to a corner, with their shadows reflected many times on the wall, articulating the structure of the corner. His work appreciates what the building or space offers in a subtle way. At first glance, his work just looks like ropes and threads of yarn, but his thought behind it gives it meaning. This goes for much modern art: background and intention should be known before viewing the work. His exhibition continues until October 17.
The Barbara Krakow Gallery is a destination spot for anyone who is curious to get a glimpse of the modern art movement from a wide range of perspectives, and of course a must-see for anyone who loves art, who creates art, and wants to be inspired. But remember that the pieces that the gallery features require an open mind, and a desire to let your imagination run wild.