New York dealer Sonia Dutton has snagged an 8,200-square-foot former meatpacking facility across the street from the new Whitney Museum of American Art for a pop-up show, with an opening party Thursday night. On view are fine paintings by two Brooklyn-based artists, Samuel T. Adams and Daniel Noonan. It’s at 100 Gansevoort Street, in the former Meatpacking District of Manhattan, and the show is up through the end of the month.
The unrenovated space itself is striking, with a view across the West Side Highway to the Hudson River, as well as a wall that is shiny with what Dutton says is calcified animal fat from when butchered carcasses hung from the ceiling. The contrast with the elegant galleries across the way is highly satisfying (see Brian Boucher’s 10 Reasons To Be Excited About The New Whitney Museum and Ben Davis On Why The New Whitney Museum Is So Visually Pleasing But Worrying For Art).
Sonia Dutton’s pop-up gallery at 100 Gansevoort Street, with work by Samuel T. Adams.
Photo Ruiqi Liu.
Adams is showing shaped paintings, some of them made up of several panels, that he creates with a labor-intensive process involving wooden structures he builds to channel watered-down paint onto the canvases, often resulting in various perforations. He then un-stretches the support and re-stretches it with the weathered surface showing. The composite works take shapes that sometimes recall upright ladles.
Adams’ show is titled “Agape Agape,” after the final novel by postmodern literary cult favorite William Gaddis, who lived a block away from the pop-up gallery. (Jonathan Franzen titled his breakout novel The Corrections in tribute to Gaddis’ The Recognitions.) The novel takes the form of “a monologue delivered from a cantankerous dying artist on the brink of madness,” according to the press release.
Australian-born Noonan’s show, “That of my there,” consists of pale-hued paintings that might at first seem abstract. Study them for a minute, though, and figures emerge, in hazy environments, as if Noonan was Brooklyn’s own Pierre Bonnard. They sometimes bear funny titles, though, like Neneh Cherry & friends at home, and the artist is partly inspired by offbeat subjects like surfer George Greenough.
Check out this amazing space before it becomes a high-end retail venue, where the lessor will likely pay a couple hundred dollars per square foot. By contrast, everything in this show is priced under $10,000.
When artnet News visited, the visitors were streaming in and out of the Whitney, but it was quiet at Dutton’s gallery, maybe partly because, as she explained, a bunch of white trailers were parked out front for a video shoot by comedian Aziz Ansari.
Dutton, a Detroit native who spent some time in New Zealand and went to graduate school in Australia, used to run Champion Gallery, in Austin, Texas, and has been in New York since 2001. She’s organized numerous pop-ups as well as taking part in art fairs including Untitled, in Miami, and NADA New York. She also had an impressive presentation at March 2015’s SPRING/BREAK Art Show (see Spring/Break Art Fair Is Bigger, Flashier, and Scrappier Than Ever).
Sonia Dutton’s pop-up gallery at 100 Gansevoort Street, with work by Samuel T. Adams.
Photo Ruiqi Liu.