Top Exhibitions Opening This Week

TUESDAY

Anj Smith at Hauser & Wirth
January 15 – February 23, 2013
Opening: January 15, 6-8PM
32 East 69th Street
The eerie, luminous, compact portraits and landscapes of London-based artist Anj Smith are exercises in extravagant meticulousness.

WEDNESDAY

Brian Clarke: “Between Extremities” at Pace
January 17 – February 16, 2013
Opening: January 16, 6–8PM
598 West 25th Street
An exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and a new stained-glass installation by Brian Clarke, an artist who has pioneered new possibilities for the medium of glass and has collaborated on major installations with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and other leading architects worldwide.

McDermott & McGough: “Suspicious of rooms without music or atmosphere” at Cheim & Read
January 17 – February 23, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6–8PM
547 West 25th Street
David McDermott and Peter McGough in the 80s were known in New York City’s East Village art scene for their self-immersion in the Victorian era, their lives and art strictly defined by the early 1900s.

Don Bachardy: “Portraits From a Canyon: Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s: Selected by Jack Pierson”  at Cheim & Read
January 17 – February 23, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6–8PM
547 West 25th Street, New York, NY
The portraits selected for this show are a remarkable collection– among them Warren Beatty and Richard Deacon, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, and Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and a youthful Elton John, artist Ed Ruscha and writers Joan Didion, Anaïs Nin, and James Baldwin.

THURSDAY

Song Dong: “Doing Nothing” at Pace
January 18 – February  23, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6PM–8PM
510 West 25th Street
A new installation by the artist, expanding on his project for Documenta 13.

Brice Marden: “Red, Yellow, Blue” at Gagosian
January 17 – February 23, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6–8PM
980 Madison Avenue
This is the first time that all four paintings comprising the historic group have been shown together.  The spirited variations within each primary trio (where red can range from cadmium to almost black, or blue from azure to indigo) are rich with interpretative possibility, like musical chords in major and minor keys.

“How to Tell the Future from the Past” at Haunch of Venison
January 17 – March 2, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6-8PM
550 West 21st Street
This exhibition examines the work of five artists who present the trajectory of humanity not as a refinement but as an endless return to a base nature.  Artists include: Yang Jiechang, Justin Mortimer, Patricia Piccinini, Eve Sussman, and Joana Vasconcelos

“This Is THIS” at Zach Feuer
January 17 – February 16, 2013
Opening: January 17, 6–8PM
548 West 22nd Street
This Is THIS is an exhibition of work by Darren Bader, Alex Da Corte, Nick Darmstaedter, N. Dash, Mark Flood, Brendan Lynch, Grayson Revoir and Zachary Suskind.  This exhibition explores a selection of works engaging the potential of commonplace objects.

SATURDAY

“Frozen Lakes” at Artist Space
January 20 – March 24, 2013
Opening: January 19, 6–8 PM
38 Greene Street #3
In his essay accompanying the 1977 exhibition “Pictures at Artists Space,” and in a subsequent text published by October in 1979, the art historian Douglas Crimp introduced the work of a generation of artists, and their use of “quotation,” “excerptation,” “framing,” and “staging,” that has since become synonymous with the postmodern relationship to pictures.  Frozen Lakes examines the prominence that these artistic strategies have for a generation of artists born after “Pictures.”  Contributing artists: Shadi Habib Allah, Ed Atkins, Banu Cennetoglu, Aaron Flint Jamison, Tobias Kaspar, Metahaven, Ken Okiishi, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Slavs and Tatars