Whitewall’s Guide to Armory Arts Week (March 6 – 10)

Luigi Ghirri: “Kodachrome” at Matthew Marks
March 6 – April 19
Opening: March 5, 6-8PM
526 West 22nd Street
The exhibition consists of 53 vintage color photographs included in Ghirri’s seminal 1978 publication and exhibition of the same title.

Rita Ackermann: “Negative Muscle” at Hauser & Wirth
March 5 – April 20, 2013
Opening: March 5, 6-8PM
32 East 69th Street
In Rita Ackermann’s art, the systematic and the accidental are kept in a state of constant dialogue and debate. Balance and the effort to achieve it have become the main focus of her process, and a kind of magical flux has become both the subject and condition of her art. Nowhere is the alchemy of Ackermann’s work more vivid than in the group of seventeen paintings made between the years of 2010 and 2013 and presented in Negative Muscle.

WEDNESDAY

Bennett Simpson: “Why Contemporary Art Gives Me the Blues” at the Whitney Museum
Opening: March 6, 7PM
945 Madison Avenue
In conjunction with the exhibition “Blues for Smoke,” curator Bennett Simpson, from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, discusses the vitality and innovation at the core of the blues tradition as a major catalyst for experimentation within modern and contemporary art.

“Chicken or Beef?” at The Hole
March 6 – April 20
Opening: March 6, 6-9PM
312 Bowery
This show is a museum-style Transatlantic survey of figurative painting in Europe and America, named after the ubiquitous question posed on transatlantic flights. “Chicken or Beef?” is assembled by Danish curator Jesper Elg. Over 30 participating artists including: Barnaby Furnas, Bjarne Melgaard, Cecily Brown, Dan Attoe, Devin Troy Strother, Erik Parker, John Copeland, and Keegan McHargue.

THURSDAY

Mike Brodie: “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” at Yossi Milo Gallery
March 7 – April 6
Opening: March 7, 6-8PM
245 10th Avenue
A “Period of Juvenile Prosperity” depicts the gritty youth subculture of freight train hoppers and squatters. From 2004 – 2009, Brodie created a prolific body of work which introduces viewers to an alternative lifestyle based on the constant movement of train travel across America. The gallery will present 30 photographs from Brodie’s series.

Adrian Ghenie: “New Paintings” at Pace Gallery
March 8 – May 4
Opening: March 7, 6-8PM
534 West 25th Street
Pace’s first exhibition of the young Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie, known for his meticulously-crafted, often brutal paintings that build upon the darker moments of European history, particularly social and political abuses of power, his personal history, and the collective memory of society.

F(RE)E PLAY at Stadium
March 7 – April 6
Opening: March 7, 6-9PM
548 West 28th Street
The works presented investigate the cognitive experience of beauty. According to Kant, the difference between ordinary and aesthetic cognition was that in the latter case there isn’t a definite concept that fixes our intuition. Thus our imagination is granted a harmonious “free play” to understand what is beautiful, and find within it a message that please ourselves. Artists include: Conor Backman, Andy Meerow, Landon Metz, Jordan Tate, Keith J. Varadi. Curated by James Michael Shaffer, Jr.

Alexandre Singh in conversation with The New Yorker’s Andrea Scott at The Drawing Center
Opening: March 7, 6:30PM
35 Wooster Street
In conjunction with Singh’s exhibition The Pledge, The Drawing Center opens from 6-9PM for SoHo Night.

FRIDAY

Mary Beth Edelson: “22 Others” at Suzanne Geiss Company
March 8 – April 20
Opening: March 8, 6-8PM
76 Grand Street
“22 Others” is a conceptual art project created by Mary Beth Edelson between 1971 and 1973 with the intention to both expand the artist’s connections with her community by inviting others into her art making process and experimenting with Carl Jung’s construct of the collective unconscious. Forty years after Edelson’s initial installment of 22 Others in Washington D.C., this historical exhibition is restaged for its New York debut at the Suzanne Geiss Company. Organized by Tim Goossens.

SATURDAY

Sverre Bjertnes: “If you really loved me you would be able to admit that you’re ashamed of me” at White Columns
March 10 – April 20
Opening: March 9, 6-9PM
320 West 13th Street
The exhibition will focus on a recent group of new paintings and works on paper by Bjertnes, but will also include a discrete number of Bjertnes’ earlier works (made between 1999 and 2008), establishing a historical context for his practice. Orchestrated by Bjarne Melgaard.