Jonah Groeneboer, Gordon Cheung

[papeetepatrick]

http://www.bellwethergallery.com/current_01.cfm?fid=483 (includes links to reviews in New Yorker, et alia)

This is by far the best of the two, and anyone who wants to see it has to go tomorrow. I wish I'd seen it before now, as it's been there awhile and I often go here. But this is just sensational. The string sculptures do play with space in such a way that in two of them it apparently breaks it up, breaking it and re-shaping it, before you can focus on what is literally there. The most spectacular one is one of these, but a less assuming one is even more provocative: A smaller string sculpture is suspended in a black room, but is lit in such a way and the materials and design so carefully chosen that you first see the central wire shape as being against or on the wall; a few seconds later you find that it had taken control of your eyes and made it possible to see that this central figure is suspended in the center of the room. Dynamite stuff, and definitely one of the best gallery shows I've seen in many years; a conspicuously refined eye is at work here.

The other is a group show at Wooster Projects, always a lovely gallery on West 15th Street. The most striking thing here is a painting by Gordon Cheung. Old Financial Times pages have paintings on them, but you can't tell whether these egg-shaped figures have been glued on or painted directly onto the newsprint. Since it's crude to touch work, I asked the owner Michele Mack, and they were painted--I would have guessed the opposite. This will be there another few weeks.

http://woosterprojects.com/gordon_cheung.htm

The painting I was struck by is the second on the immediately above site.

[dirac]

Thank you for posting on this. No time to look at the links now, but I will. Cheung's name rings a bell but I'm not familiar with his work. I hope others will be able to go.