Personal recommendations: First Thursday in DUMBO
These personal recommendations are going to be a regular slot here on A Sky filled with Shooting Stars. Thursday evening I visited 111 Front Street in DUMBO to see the show at Klompching that I’d recommended in my January preview on ARTINFO, and to take in some of the neighborhood’s First Thursday openings. There are so many galleries crowded into a single corridor there that the effect is rather like a small art fair; and maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe it’s just the exchange rate between Manhattan and Brooklyn, but prices seemed pitched between the extremely reasonable and the absurdly cheap. Everything here gets my personal recommendation, which is to say that if I had any money, these are the sort of things I’d be collecting:
- Jennifer Wroblewski, “Slave to Love” (2009), $7,000.
Tucked away at the back of a three-person show at Artists in Residence, I came upon a little – though grandly titled – group of works by Jennifer Wroblewski. “New Monuments to the Anti-Concept” comprises remarkable large-scale drawings on paper, mostly tricked out with objects. I prefer this one: the biggest, object-free, and (something I’ve never written in all my years of writing about contemporary art) rather reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci …
- Michelle Provenzano, “Learning to Baah” (2007), $250.
In a very mixed show called “Clamoring to Become Visible” at Brooklyn Arts Council I particularly liked a couple of quirky drawings by Michelle Provenzano. Apparently these drawings are what she makes while she’s drinking coffee and warming up for the “real” work of her studio day. Whatever, at this price, they’re a positive steal. As Ms Provenzano pointed out to me, at some galleries you’d pay $250 for the frames.
- John Delaney, “Nomad Girl with Falcon” (2007), $2,400
At Farmani, there’s a quite stunning show by John Delaney, an artist already enjoying a pretty impressive recommendation: he’s the 2008 International Photography Awards”Discovery of the Year.” His show’s title, “Golden Eagle Hunters of Mongolia”, is perfectly self-explanatory though his images evoke some mythic otherworld.
