Martos Gallery Keith Haring exhibition reviewed by the New York Times.

Closing Tomorrow                                       Click here to read full article  Final Day Keith Haring’s  FDR Drive Mural, 1984 With fourteen of the thirty panels which composed the original work, created on site in the fall of 1984, spanning some 300 feet alongside the highway and the East River, on view for nearly a year. The sheet metal panels on which the artist painted were already in place, hung about 4 1/2 feet off the ground, and their installation for this exhibition follows. The FDR mural, now more than forty years later, remains one of the artist’s major public works.    The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by critic and curator Bob Nickas, which follows. That whispered hiss when paint sprays from an aerosol can’s nozzle, paint on an atomic level, accompanied by its distinctive pssssst, a finger poised, held in place assuring a steady stream, the arm directing a fluid line as an extension of the body in motion. For viewers, moving past the panels comprising one of Keith Haring’s major works, the frieze-like mural he created on site in 1984, spanning some three hundred feet of New York’s FDR Drive, we imagine that sound, its faint echo. Faint for the distance this work has traveled to reach us here and now, as well because it would only have been audible to the artist himself in proximity to the moment the work was brought to life. And it’s still alive. Haring’s distinctive, vibratory line animates figures that float, fly, somersault, and exuberantly defy gravity, movement from dancing, breakdancing and the sense that bodies can transcend physical limits. The staccato red marks around black outlined figures represent bursts of energy that are joyous, spontaneous, celebratory. A winged figure soaring upwards into space, an oversize lightbulb aglow, a dog barking. It’s all there in the mural, which we can think of—and it’s true for all Haring’s work—as an amplifier, delivering a message, graphically bold, visible from a distance, pitch perfect in volume, the artist’s voice yet echoing. That pssssst, which might be the sound of a secret about to be passed, in its amplification, meant for all to hear. Whoever was listening.    Consider the mural’s original site, the length of highway defining the city’s eastern edge, with the East River flowing in parallel, cars moving in both directions. There would have been a constant low hum or a whoosh of velocity as they passed by, depending on how well traffic was moving, or not. The speed limit is forty, but when cars slow to a crawl there’s another sound: impatient drivers leaning into their horns. Though it did give them a chance to see what Haring was creating for whoever went by, although he wasn’t widely known at the time. The promenade of Carl Schurz Park is there, as a straight line between East 90th and 91st Streets, so there were cyclists, joggers, people walking dogs, some who would stop to watch the artist at work, and speak with him.1 Haring’s audience was the public at large, day and night. (Imagine cars driving by after dark, the mural illuminated by passing headlights.) When traffic moved smoothly, this frieze, frame by frame, was a panoramic movie, a linear, urban zoetrope, not unlike the graffiti that could be seen in subway tunnels in the late ’70s and ‘80s, a film flickering as trains rumbled between stations, underground movies which Haring would have seen as well.2 We all did, at least those of us who rode the subway; the first time was startling, as it must have been aboveground along the FDR Drive in 1984.   In a number of photographs taken by Haring’s friend, the artist Tseng Kwong Chi,3 we see him with a portable cassette player in the bend of his arm; in another it’s raised up on his shoulder, small, bright yellow and red. (As nearby traffic slowed, the sleek, sinuous funk of a Grace Jones song may have reverberated, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” as it does now just thinking about it, in the ‘home movies’ we call memory.) He’s holding a can of spray paint in his right hand, wearing a tight t-shirt with his image of a winged, dancing TV set. Haring listened to music when he was working; it was a big part of his life, a continuous soundtrack.4 He frequented clubs downtown—Club 57, Danceteria, Paradise Garage, the Mudd Club, and Area. There was always music in the street at the time, more forty years ago than today, it seems, and of course the street was often his studio, and gallery, open seven days a week. Keith Haring’s art was a democracy of sorts, an ongoing engagement with public address, particularly in that auspicious year by way of George Orwell’s famous cautionary tale, 1984. "In a time of universal deceit,” Orwell had observed, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In a curious inversion, though it may not have been coincidental at all, the book had mostly been written in 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a period that had witnessed an unprecedented surge of political propaganda amid great sacrifice and loss. What was true in 1948 held true almost forty years later, with Ronald Reagan in his second term as president, having won by a landslide—which we didn’t know would end up burying so many, our own period of loss about to unfold—buoyed by his slogan “Let’s Make American Great Again” (sound familiar?), and, for our misfortune, that story foretold seventy- five years ago remains true today.    1984 was the year the first Macintosh personal computer came onto the market. Prominently, for some controversially, it was announced with a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, who presented a dystopian world inspired by Orwell’s 1984, which was strategically aired during the Super Bowl, with an audience of nearly eighty million. Bleakly lit, the ad begins with a line of grim-faced inmates, heads shaved, in uniform gray scrubs, being marched into an airless hall. The air is being sucked out by Big Brother, projected on a giant screen, proclaiming in messianic tones that “a garden of pure ideology” awaits, that “We are one people, with one will, one cause.” These scenes are intercut with a female runner, an Olympian, carrying a heavy hammer, pursued by police in riot gear. She enters the hall and, in slow motion, hurls the hammer at the screen, and it shatters and explodes dramatically. A printed text, read in a measured, soothing voice, follows: “On January 24th, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.” Then the bright, colorful Apple logo appears on a deep black ground. Just under a minute has elapsed.5   To watch the ad today, knowing all that has followed, well aware that we are fully captive to technology, that it hasn’t saved us from tyranny and surveillance, we can be sure of one thing: the Orwellian 1984 has been on continuous loop since 1948. And Apple, “big brotherly” to the core, as Orwell would have surely predicted had he lived to see the Internet, may have never been meant as part of the solution, or how and for who?, but rather a normalized means for invasively expanding social control. The ultimate monitor. Today, at least one in every home, in every phone, everywhere, all across the globe. Haring pictured, in numerous paintings and drawings, a caterpillar with a computer for a head, at times being ridden by a headless (signifying brainless) figure, with images on the screen that include a monkey-like creature held tightly by its tail, a figure crucified upside down, and a dollar sign, the earliest of them dating to 1983—none of which would have been lost on Orwell. In the photo of Haring cradling the tape player, we see behind him, inching its way across the murals’ tenth and eleventh panels, a caterpillar with a giant plug-like head—in search of its outlet?    There can be no doubt that as soon as Haring saw the long line of white sheet metal panels that had been put up against the fencing by the FDR Drive, he saw his canvas and went at it, quickly as always. The improvisatory nature of his way of working is evident, the energy he imbued his figures with, in parallel to his own. He believed in individual expression, in human interaction, and in how art has the power to bring people together, particularly outside galleries and museums, in public, freely available to all. A force of nature, his art flowed directly from his hand, his eye, and his mind. Haring would encounter a number of the panels some years after the mural had been disassembled, or in his words “rescued,” and although he said they appeared in bad shape, he thought that “somehow this makes it look even better.”6 The panels were weathered, worn from nearly a year exposed to the elements, but they had survived: art and urban archaeology. If we consider the FDR Drive mural in the time of its creation as an antidote to a sense of future dread —from the past, 1948/1984—and we think about where we find ourselves today, Keith Haring’s work remains so: an antidote, hopeful, joyous, alive.   —Bob Nickas   Notes: 1. I am indebted to a first-hand account from Steve McHugh, who was 16 in 1984, knew Keith Haring casually, and rode his father’s bike over to where the artist was working to see for himself. The great coincidence in connecting McHugh with Haring after so much time had passed is that he now works for an art shipping company, and had been contacted about transporting the panels to the gallery. His recollection also points to the artist’s generosity. As he wrote in an email: “I knew Keith in the ‘80s and was there hanging out with him one day when he was painting these panels. I grew up in New York, and at that time I lived on 85th Street and East End Avenue, just six blocks from FDR and 91st. “I also knew Keith from the Lower East Side and the trains. I was in a rock band called Hidden Scream, and we had a rehearsal space on Saint Marks Place and 2nd Avenue in the East Village. It was a very different neighborhood back then, and Keith was just a guy we knew that did graffiti. “That day that he was doing the FDR mural, I was wearing a denim jacket, and he drew a picture, of me behind my drum kit, on the back of my jacket with a magic marker while I was wearing it. I still have the jacket.”   2. It’s important to note a public art project from that time, Bill Brand’s MASSTRANSISCOPE, a series of animated drawings that were installed in a subway tunnel in 1980 (reinstalled in 2012 as a permanent work), which can be viewed from the Manhattan bound Q or B trains departing from DeKalb Avenue.   3. In the left corner of panel #5, a figure bent over backwards is identified as T.K.C.— Tseng Kwong Chi.   4. Many of Haring’s mixtapes have been digitized, tapes he made as well as those made for him by DJ Juan Dubose and Larry Levan across the ‘80s. They provide a soundtrack to his art, still today—including songs by Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Herbie Hancock, ESG, Grace Jones, Madonna, Prince, Sylvester, B52s, Talking Heads, Section 25, Mantronix, Trouble Funk, the Beastie Boys, and NYC Peech Boys—for whom Haring did the cover artwork for their album, Life Is Something Special, in 1983.   5. The commercial is available to be seen on YouTube.   6. “The next day I go to Galerie Beaubourg with Gil to discuss show of mural from New York (91st) FDR Drive Mural (1984), which has been “rescued” and shipped to Paris. It is in really bad shape, but somehow this makes it look even better.” From Keith Haring Journals, first published by Penguin Books, 1997, and in a deluxe edition, 2010, p. 358.t. Martos Gallery  41 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10013 ------ +1 212 560 0670  martosgallery.com shootthelobster.com Martos Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM - 6PM -----------------------------------------------------                                        Thank you Keith Haring!

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Christopher Astley: Terrain, Installation View, Martos Gallery, New York, 2024 Christopher Astley: Terrain On View Through March 16, 2024   Martos Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Christopher Astley from his Terrain series (2020, ongoing), along with a selection of works from Seven Years Below (2017 - 2019). The exhibition runs from Feb. 15 to March 16, 2024. In the Terrain paintings (2020, ongoing) Christopher Astley’s picture-making can be described by way of a persistent visual language, not only in relation to a recognizable vocabulary of forms and their collaging, which gives them a sense of heightened spatial dislocation, all within a consistent chromatic range, but in terms of a subject that may be thought of as camouflaged. Appearances, however, are deceiving. What are readily identified as landscapes, albeit fractured and free-floating, metaphorically serve this artist’s concerns, both rendered and non-pictorial. As hybrid abstract-representational scenes, the paintings suggest fields and forests, clusters of bushes and trees, hills and pathways, a world alternately natural and artificial. This, of course, is the fiction of painting, connected to our abiding need to make sense of the world around us, and no matter how disordered it initially appears, or especially when it doesn’t at first cohere. For many viewers these paintings will register as “landscape,” and yet they are not primarily meant to represent nature. Rather, it is the nature of verbal articulation and comprehension, how human thought is expressed and received, how information is retrieved, how speech can be lost, and memory becomes unreliable, that chiefly concerns this artist, and through which painting is his preferred mode of translation. The routes we see crisscrossing his paintings might as well be the neural pathways along which ideas and fears travel. When speaking about these paintings, Astley recalls working in college with individuals who had suffered head injuries and how this affected verbal and visual comprehension; family and friends who have dealt with memory loss and cognitive disintegration. All this underlies how he apprehends the world-as-image and thus reality itself, a set of circumstances always subject to change, often unpredictably. At the same time, he is a painter, someone who finds ways to understand who he is through the invention of images. The collage aspect of these paintings, what we might call their visual stutter, clearly reflects the fragmentation of modern life and the impact of technology. When considering them we may well wonder, Has this terrain been surveilled by drones? Does the imaging, alternately blurred and high definition, overlay Impressionism and computer rendering, calling to mind video games, satellite imagery and observation en plein air? That the artist produces these works in a windowless studio also underscores a distance on those painters who aimed to capture the ephemerality of nature as it is. Astley returns over and again to life as it feels, and not without trepidation, to mental precarity, human mortality, and uncertain times. Another green world? Haven’t we been here before, though not quite in the same way? The already buoyant Chinese landscapes of the 10th century come to mind, further unmoored. As well as Cubism, though flattened, its facets and multiple perspectives superimposed as a compressed topography. Perhaps surprisingly, or not, Astley is a fan of the cartoonist and pioneering animator Winsor McCay, famous for the character Little Nemo. In one story, he has to make his way through a dense forest of towering mushrooms, inadvertently causing them to collapse on top of him. Startled awake, he realizes that he had only been dreaming. (Astley might interpret this as a flash-back to a psychedelic experience.) In a McCay cartoon that pictures a young boy about to sneeze, the very frame around the illustration’s final panel is shattered by his convulsion. For Astley, this would seem to confirm that accepted reality is conditional, that art has the power to expand and transform consciousness: drugs without having to take them. The paintings that comprise the series Seven Years Below (2017 - 2019), represent battles in a way that captures the chaos, simultaneity, and utter irreality of war. Astley has referred to the relationship between opposing forces as “hallucinatory, calling into question the nature of the perception of time and space, and, by extension, our conception of history.” These scenes, particularly those featuring masted warships and cannon, appear to be set in conflicts from the distant past. They explode in kinetic bursts of flame and destruction. The soldiers are hazy, faint figures, appropriately enough, apparitions, ghosts in these troubles times haunting us still. These are history paintings for Astley, “where the subject is not a particular event or cast of historical figures but rather the mechanism of history itself.” —Bob Nickas Martos Gallery  41 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10013 ------ +1 212 560 0670  martosgallery.com shootthelobster.com Martos Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM - 6PM ----------------------------------------------------- #matrosgalleryart#foneartmagazine#artfun

Martos Gallery, Show closes Sat. June 3rd.

From left to right: Giulia Messina, Cherry Jello Cheesecake, 2022, Marker and ink on paper, 19 x 14 inches (48.3 x 35.6 cm) framed, Giulia Messina, Red Boy Checking Homemade Pickles, 2022, Marker and ink on paper, 19 x 14 inches (48.3 x 35.6 cm) framed   Martos After Dark Presents Giulia Messina: Narcissus Abduction May 11 - June 3, 2023  Closing this Saturday, June 3rd.

Martos Gallery  41 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10013 ------ +1 212 560 0670  martosgallery.com shootthelobster.com Martos Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM - 6PM #martosgalleryart#fineartmagazine#fineartfun

Martos Gallery, exhibits Tyree Guyton, I AIN'T PLAYIN March 30 - May 13, 2023

Tyree Guyton I AIN'T PLAYIN March 30 - May 13, 2023  Opening Reception - Thursday, March 30, 2023 6 to 8PM For this immersive installation Tyree Guyton has transformed the gallery space into a specific subsect of the original Detroit neighborhood that he has developed and cared for over the past (nearly) 40 years. Guyton produces work through the divination of a spiritual world, in service of a broader community, He allows his collected objects to speak to him, after which point he works to create new assemblages and paintings that speak back to his world. Tyree Guyton (b. 1955 Detroit, MI) studied at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan; he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from the College of Creative Studies in 2009, and an Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in 2016. In 2018 he was the recipient of the White Columns/ Shoot The Lobster Award. He currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.    Select exhibitions include: “Love, Sam,” Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2019); “2+2=8: Thirty Years of Heidelberg”, MOCAD, Detroit, MI (2018); “Paradise”, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2018); NADA Miami, FL (2018); “What Time Is It? Tyree Guyton, New Work”, Gallery DAAS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (2015); “Spirit”, Inner State Gallery, Detroit, MI (2014); and “Faces of God on Fire”, Cue Foundation, New York, NY (2013)   Select public collections include: the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Perez Museum, Miami FL; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

Tyree Guyton I AIN'T PLAYIN March 30 - May 13, 2023  41 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10013 ------ +1 212 560 0670  martosgallery.com shootthelobster.com Martos Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM - 6PM ----------------------------------------------------- #martoesgallerynyc#fineartmagazine#fineartfun

Martos Gallery exhibits Arnold J. Kemp's, STAGE is extended through January 14, 2023

Arnold J. Kemp's STAGE is extended through January 14, 2023  Visit our website for more information about the exhibition

Arnold J. Kemp, Darror, 2022, permanent ink, aluminum foil and etching ink on canvas, 78 x 59 inches     Arnold J. Kemp, Jjujum, 2022, permanent ink, aluminum foil and etching ink on canvas, 78 x 59 inches    We will be closed December 22nd - January 3rd.

Martos Gallery  41 Elizabeth Street New York, NY 10013 ------ +1 212 560 0670  martosgallery.com shootthelobster.com #martosgalleryart#fineatmagazine#fineartholidayfun