Weekend Reviews: Enzo Cucchi at Vito Schnabel, Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive at White Columns, Pop Art Silkscreens at Terrain Gallery

 Installation view of Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 at White Columns, Meatpacking District (on view through May 10, 2025)

By LIAM OTERO April 16, 2025

Over this past weekend, I frequented quite a few exhibitions across Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and SoHo. Of the ten or so exhibitions I visited, three standout shows merited a glowing commentary based on the following criteria: intriguing narratives, engaging curatorial direction, and outstanding execution.

 *The exhibitions are listed in order of earliest closing dates*

1. Surface to Begin With - Silkscreens of the 1960s: Steve Poleskie & the Artists of Chiron Press at Terrain Gallery / The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, SoHo (on view through April 19, 2025)

The Terrain Gallery at The Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923 - 1997), Aspen Winter Jazz, 1967, screenprint.

This is the final week to see Surface to Begin With at the Terrain Gallery, an exhibition space inside of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the philosophies of its founder Eli Siegel (Latvian-American, 1902 - 1978) on the need to develop a heightened understanding and respect for other people, culture, and reality. In keeping with its philosophy, Surface to Begin With examines the history of Chiron Press, the first-ever screenprinting studio in New York (and possibly the rest of the United States) that functioned purely for artistic rather than commercial ends. Steve Poleskie (American, 1938 - 2019) was a painter who founded Chiron Press in 1965 as an avenue for artists, particularly fellow painters, to experiment with screenprinting as an extension of their practice. Silkscreen images are typically characterized as having vibrantly bold colors, hard-edges, and surface flatness; this latter detail inspired the theme of this exhibition as it engages with the Aesthetic Realism Foundation's tenet on beauty: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Essentially, this accords with the Foundation's beliefs that surfaces - literal and conceptual - possess an inner power that naturally filters through. 

Installation view of Surface to Begin With - Silkscreens of the 1960s: Steve Poleskie & the Artists of Chiron Press at Terrain Gallery / The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, SoHo (on view through April 19, 2025)

A selection of silkscreen prints from the 1960s by Poleskie and a coterie of prominent modernists with whom he collaborated - Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Alex Katz, Robert Indiana, et al. - line the walls of the gallery. There is an exhiliration to the choice of works as each seems to beckon one's attention over another, be it the rhythmic musicality of Roy Lichtenstein's Aspen Winter Jazz poster (1967), Allan D'Arcangelo's formal economy of means in his minimalist Arrow with Rear End (1967), or the maximalist frenzy of colorful strokes in Elaine de Kooning's Untitled, among the rest of the prints on display. Since screenprinting was singularly associated with advertising until 1965, one could understand how the silkscreen's capacity for enticing spectators with its flashy appearance could work on an artistic level. Though each artist in this exhibition are wholly inimitable in their styles, a common denominator that unites their work here with the Aesthetic Realism Foundation's philosophy is that they discovered a new way of seeing the world (and, resultantly, beauty) through the simple, foundational elements of color, line, and form. Shadow, depth, and perspective were totally unnecessary and extraneous in this regard, and so these prints have clearly been just fine without them. Plus, the choice of the Terrain Gallery at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation as the exhibition venue for Surface to Begin With is very appropriate as Poleskie exhibited with the organization on numerous occasions and recalled many fond memories of his relationship with them.

2. Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 at White Columns, Meatpacking District (on view through May 10, 2025)

White Columns

Installation view of Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 at White Columns, Meatpacking District (on view through May 10, 2025)

As New York's oldest non-profit gallery dedicated to cutting-edge experimental art, White Columns's current exhibition is an archival window into the beginnings of the grafitti art movement in early-1970s New York based on the voluminious photography archive of artist Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943 - 1978), who co-founded the gallery in 1970. A socially-engaged artist whose life was steeped in downtown New York, Matta-Clark's penchant for multidisciplinary artistic practices was the catalyst for his immediate embrace of graffiti as an art form, which was concomitant with the work that was underway in establishing White Columns (then called 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street until 1980). Matta-Clark's color & black-and-white photos present the unique typographies and glyphic figures that adorn the sides of derelict brick buildings, speeding above-ground subways, and banal advertising signage across the boroughs. Multiple display cases are chockablock with vintage spray cans, newspaper clippings commenting on the emergence of graffiti, and artworks by the individuals who formed this early cohort of street artists, including: Futura 2000, WICKED GARY, SNAKE 1, LEE 163rd, STAY HIGH 149, et al. The inclusion of the disembodied remnants of grafittied truck parts and a tagged garage door bring the raw realities of urban street art into greater focus. Additionally, Graffiti Photoglyph (1973), a hand-colored photographic print of a subway covered in graffiti scrawls is hung at an elevated position with part of the car wrapping around the corner of the gallery. This was a strategic curatorial decision as it simulates what it would have been like to see a heavily-tagged subway car pass through a station; this is the second time in White Columns's history that this monumental work is being exhibited, the only other time being when it was first created in 1973.

Display case from Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 at White Columns, Meatpacking District (on view through May 10, 2025)

Moreover, this exhibition is incredible because it offers viewers a glimpse into the city's graffiti culture before it became more established through the interventions of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Fab 5 Freddy in the late-1970s & early-1980s; even Matta-Clark's photos predate the documentary work of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant who emerged later in the decade. In the roughly one year span of 1972 - 1973, Matta-Clark took over 2000 photos of graffiti created by predominantly African-American and Hispanic-American teenagers and twenty-somethings who were operating totally independent of the mainstream New York art scene. A sense of community empowerment naturally comes through in the exhibition as it demonstrates Matta-Clark's and White Columns' committment to utilizing art toward positive social change, but it also gave voice to the graffiti artists themselves who conceived a street-smart, witty, and sophisticated visual lexicon that went on to become a core facet of the New York cityscape.

This exhibition was curated by Roger Gastman and Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.

3. Enzo Cucchi - Mostra Coagula at Vito Schnabel Gallery, Chelsea (on view through May 22, 2025)

Vito Schnabel Gallery

Enzo Cucchi (Italian, b. 1949), Untitled, 2024, oil and ceramic on canvas.

Vito Schnabel is the proud venue exhibiting the first major New York show of Enzo Cucchi (Italian, b. 1949) in over 20 years (the last time his work was shown in the city was a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1986). Cucchi is one of the original members of Transvanguardia, the Italian equivalent of Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s whose members included Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia. Mostra Coagula was curated solely by Cucchi himself, a striking similarity to how his 1986 Guggenheim exhibition was carried out. The exhibition's Italian title translates into English along the lines of "Coagulated Show" or "Show Coagulates", an apt choice considering blood - the liquid most commonly associated with coagulating - is a recurring motif. Recent paintings, ceramics, and marble sculptures are on view as part of Cucchi's probing into the highly complex terrain of human emotions. These surrealistic works are rich with European art historical references that have been inflected with a contemporary flair. Take the human skull as one example, a time-honored subject that was especially relevant in Renaissance & Baroque art as a symbol of memento mori, the transience of life and the harsh truth that death comes to all. For Cucchi, skulls appear in painted and sculptural iterations, sometimes together as one of his Untitled works on canvas features three painted skulls floating inside golden orbs whilst seven miniature ceramic skulls are attached to the lower right of the canvas - it is death within the artwork, but also spilling out into the physical space in which we, the viewers, stand.

Enzo Cucchi (Italian, b. 1949), Untitled, 2022, pink marble from Naples.

Though skulls appear frequently in this exhibition, other works go into far more convoluted directions that feel as though one were receiving a visualization of an uncomfortably passive dream or an opaquely ominous nightmare (particularly one in which you sense something is amiss, but are unable to identify what that could be). Sculptures of putti, winged cherubs that appear in much religious art of the Old Masters, have been tainted by the specter of death as their faces turn skeletal and bodies convulse in abject pain. But then in the more subtle works, there are instances in which a red house or barn is the locus with the presence of ghostly cat-like creatures surrounding the structure or elsewhere a faceless darkened figure with eyes over its chest is situated along a white wall in an indiscernible room. Cucchi's exploration of human emotions, or perhaps, the subconscious, raises more questions than answers, but it effectively considers the gamut of the ugly side of where one's emotions can lead. WM