 
Five years after it helped inaugurate the merger between the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Greater New York exhibition has once again taken over the latter. Filling every nook and cranny of P.S.1's former school building, the show spotlights over 160 young and emerging artists from the New York area who've been voted Most Likely to Succeed by the show's six curators.
Well, sort of. If the number of artists and curators doesn't already give it away, the show is more of a widely-cast survey that documents and reports rather than providing a strong point of view (it comes, after all, with no curatorial statement). And so the artists perhaps haven't been voted Most Likely to Succeed—though many of them are—as much as they've been simply deemed Most Popular.
Not that there's anything wrong with popularity. The exhibition—as exhaustive as it is sometimes exhausting—does a good job of summing up what the cool kids are up to. For one, it's richly layered with the lavish patterns, allegorical references and ornamental flourishes that characterize the romanticism (whether ironic, tongue-in-cheek or somehow earnest) of so much current work. For his Lakeside Lovers, for example, Kent Henricksen mounted embroidered Fragonard-like scenes of eighteenth-century couples on a wall covered with a graphic toile in Madame Pompadour pink. Kirsten Hassenfeld's Sweet Nothing sculpture transforms the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International into an illuminated paper wedding cake festooned and embellished to the nines.
Throughout the exhibition, there are dark paintings populated by wolves, stags and other creatures of the night, and enough sequins and assorted shiny objects lying around to scare them away. A fair amount of psychedelia brings out an ongoing infatuation with the 1960s and 70s, while the political activism of that era comes through in works like Dominic McGill's room-size timeline of recent world history, represented by an explosive jumble of revolutionary slogans, headlines and drawings, all in graphite.
There are also videos—Christian Jankowski's 16mm Mystery, a chilling conflation of destruction and the modern image, comes to mind—as well as rooms populated by furry monsters, Ian Burns's rickety train (which visitors can actually ride) and Jamie Isenstein's Magic Fingers, a framed oval niche within which a real hand (with, presumably, a person hiding underneath) performs a range of gestures. Meanwhile, David Ellis's Granny (Drum Painting Project, Version 5.0) is an elaborate contraption with drums that automatically beat every half hour, bringing a sense of measure to a lively and cacophonous show.
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Donna Karan has turned the studio of her late husband, artist Stephan Weiss, into a part-time gallery. But, if the first exhibition is any indication, she's doing it full-on. Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh, which was first shown at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and will travel to Florida's Naples Museum of Art from April 17 to July 1, includes work by conceptual designers from Martin Margiela (pictured here), Hussein Chalayan and Viktor & Rolf to Boudicca, Bernhard Willhelm and Under Cover. Whether with large-scale photographs and videos, experimental fabrics selected by the trend forecasting guru Li Edelkoort or garments that alter the architecture of the body or the construction of its identity, the show presents its theme in a range of complexions.
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The partnership of Andreas Grimm and Adrian Rosenfeld, Grimm Rosenfeld has been a closely-watched Munich and New York-based gallery without a home in New York. However, a year and a half after opening its doors in Munich, it's bringing its primarily emerging artists to a new project space in Chelsea. Go Figure, the inaugural show through April—which is by appointment only ("Though just knock," Rosenfeld invites)—includes figurative work by gallery artists like Cornelius Völker, Dasha Shishkin and Katarina Burin, as well as Katharina Sieverding, the veteran artist who was the subject of a P.S.1 show earlier this year. As a project space, it will focus on four solo exhibitions a year, with the next one, featuring Burin, opening in May.
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Shoptart
You might think, given his collaboration with leather-goods house Schott, that Jeremy Scott is going butch. After all, Schott created the biker jackets worn by Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no, that manly legacy is given a swishy twist, like this rococo tea print of treasure trolls in pastoral repose. Also this month: Marni, Stella McCartney, Tom Binns and more.  Hint Shop
If Rad Hourani were writing this blurb, it would be over already. That's because, for the soon-to-explode French-Canadian designer, it's all about extreme minimalism. Thus, the concept behind this one-size-fits-all, unisex, sleeveless T-shirt—printed with the dates and times of a calendar—is that it can be worn by anyone, anytime. Message Boards
"Madonna starves herself on a raw macrobiotic kosher vegan kaballah diet and works out three hours a day to maintain the physique of a 12-year-old gymnast boy, and then has the cheeks of a 300-pound woman implanted into her face. And her forehead is like a plastic baby's bottom. It's like Nicole Kidman's forehead at the height of her botox addiction, and we all remember how unfortunate that era was." |
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