5 of the Best Artworks to Be Found at the Armory Show, From a $210,000 Livestream of the Sun to the ‘Amazing Black-Man’

With anxiety over the coronavirus almost palpable in
New York, this year’s Armory Show could have been a disaster, with
collectors seeing the large-scale gathering of an art fair as a
heedless risk. Instead, it was something of a triumph.

People were crowding the aisles, confabbing about
their awkward new handshake replacements—bows were popular—and,
somewhat miraculously, buying a good deal of art. Red dots
proliferated, particularly at lower-priced booths like that of
Dubai’s Carbon 12, where the Austrian artist Philip Mueller’s
antiquity-meets-punk-rock portraits—priced between €700 and
€8,600—created something
of a low-level frenzy.

Huge credit here is due to Nicole Berry, the director
of the Armory Show, whose sangfroid in the face of calamity was
demonstrated when one of the two piers on which the Armory Show
sits was deemed unsafe last
year (her first year!). At this year’s opening, she could be
seen racing the floor with a steely smile and phone to her ear. But
credit should also go to the art community, which kept hysteria at
bay and gamely kept calm and carried on, ensuring that the economic
bite would not be too dire on artists and their galleries, at least
not yet.

Here are some of the most notable works on view in
what was also a unusually strong fair.

Raul
Mourão
X # 05, 2020
Galeria Nara Roesler – São Paulo, Rio, New
York
Price: $100,000

At the booth of Brazil’s Galeria Nara Roesler, two
massive sculptures of Corten steel see-sawed back and forth like
some kind of mesmerizing and slightly menacing magic trick. When a
crowd gathered, wondering what high-tech device powered the
sculptures, a gallery dealer smiled, walked over to the sculpture,
and gave it a push. Physics.

Created by the Rio-based artist Raul Mourão, who
forged the half-ton sculptures in Philadelphia to save on
transportation costs, the works are intended to express the beauty
of equilibrium—something Mourão feels is sorely lacking in this
moment as the world is pulled to the extreme right and radical
left. Left to their own devices, his artworks always eventually
find their balance… and then require the brute force of a strongman
(or woman) to again set them akilter.

While the massive sculptures, made from Richard
Serra’s signature material, are meant to be displayed outside, the
artist has also created domestically scaled versions ($10,000) so
you can marvel at the mechanics of the universe at home over a
bottle of wine (literally).

Celeste
Rapone
Phantom Him, 2019
Josh Lilley – London
Price: $20,000

On the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White
Heat, Lou Reed recites a short story called “The Gift” about a
man who folded himself up into a package to mail himself to his
girlfriend as a surprise—with tragic results. (She opens the box
with a sheet-metal cutter, killing him.) Something similar but far
less tragic seems to be going on in the paintings of Celeste
Rapone, whose intricate portraits seem to show women going about
their daily lives, only folded up into a box and steamrollered flat
for good measure.

Rapone’s paintings often show private moments of
repose, but they can also be curiously voyeuristic, in particular
the one at the fair that seems to a flattened and foreshortened
image of a nearly naked woman jump-roping while a man below keeps
time. No matter what, each canvas requires a good deal of unfolding
on the part of the viewer, sussing out which limb goes where and,
say, how those bedazzled jeans pockets fit into the
equation.

A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago who now
teaches there, Rapone has also seen her career unfolding rather
quickly these days. Her second-ever solo show, at Josh Lilley’s
London gallery through March 26th, sold out quickly, and the
gallery says it is having trouble holding onto any of her work for
long.

Kumasi J.
Barnett
The Amazing Black-Man, 2016-2020
Lowell Ryan Projects – Los Angeles
Price: $2,500 apiece for the comic books, $20,000 for the
neon

For anyone (like yours truly) whose first exposure to
the world of collectible visual art was via superhero comics,
Kusami J. Barnett’s solo booth in the fair’s Focus section might
seem almost too good to be true. Relevant, socially incisive
artworks made out of actual collectible comic books? Great
Krypton!

Of course, the subject of Barnett’s art is not fun at
all. What he’s done is detourn Spider-Man as “The Amazing
Black-Man,” hand painting jeans and a grey hoodie over the
webslinger’s costume and reimagining our hero as fighting for his
survival against a slew of foes that include “Police-Man”
(sometimes Venom, sometimes other characters), “The Media’s Thug”
(formerly the Incredible Hulk), a racist Captain America, Congress,
the Democrats, and a version of Shazam whose magic word is… the
N-word. In all, there are 100 comic adapted books—each responsibly
encased in a polybag—hanging on the wall beneath a glowing neon
sign. Some of the originals are (relatively) valuable, in
fact.

Born in Baltimore, Barnett teaches at the Art
Institute of Chicago, and has a show coming up at the Children’s
Museum of the Arts in New York. Will his work ever make it into
the Marvel Cinematic
Universe? Only time will tell.

Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer
Recurrent Anaxagoras, 2020
Galeria Max Estrella – Madrid
Price: $210,000

A little while ago, when NASA released astonishing
close-up images of the sun’s pulsating surface, we at Artnet News
scrambled to find an art angle on the story. Now, the new-media
wizard Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has offered one up on the high-tech
equivalent of a silver platter: tapping into a live feed from the
Solar Dynamics Observatory, the artist has made a hypnotic digital
work that allows you to watch the surface of the sun as it bubbles
and flares, in real time, in the comfort of your own home.

Lozano-Hemmer has named this work after Anaxagoras, a
5th-century BC Greek scholar whose theories about eclipses make him
a forefather of modern cosmogony. But the artist’s interest in
monitoring the sun is also related to an incident of the more
recent past: the solar storm of 1859, known as the Carrington
Event, where a solar flare unleashed a massive geomagnetic storm
that knocked out telegraph systems all over the earth.

Should something similar happen again—and a flare
narrowly missed the planet in 2012—Lozano-Hemmer believes it would
have a catastrophic impact on our digitally reliant societies.

Adelaide
Cioni
Go easy on me, one pink with red stick and Go
easy on me, one red with pink stick, both 2020
P420 – Bologna
Price: $10,000 apiece

The Bologna-based artist Adelaide Cioni has developed
a simple and soothing signature style, hand-stitching canvases with
sheets of dyed wool fabric that she cuts into pleasing familiar
shapes: a Popsicle, twinkling stars, a checkerboard. It’s a bit
like Pop art but with the cynicism replaced by an ingenuous
childhood sweetness, and, in such anxious-making times, her work is
a very welcome sight at the fair.

One imagines it would be doubly welcome in Cioni and
her gallery’s hometown of Bologna, where schools have been closed
for weeks as northern Italy wages war against the coronavirus, and
the city’s famous hospitals are under strain. Now the Italian
government has said it will temporarily ban public kissing to
combat the virus’s spread, putting a cap on Italians’ inborn
gesture of amore. They should all get one of Cioni’s
paintings in exchange, for a healthful little dose of kindness.

The post 5 of the Best Artworks to Be Found at the Armory
Show, From a $210,000 Livestream of the Sun to the ‘Amazing
Black-Man’ appeared first on artnet News.