BWW Reviews: Exhibitions of the Week with Oleg Vassiliev at the Zimmerli, David Hockney at Pace

Oleg Vassiliev: Space and Light at the Zimmerli Art Museum (Until December 31)

The fact that Oleg Vassiliev was a Russian artist, living through a time of special turbulence in Russian culture and politics, may need a little emphasizing. Born in 1931, he was of the same generation as Komar and Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov, and Erik Bulatov--all artists who drew from and caricatured Soviet propaganda. Oleg Vassiliev: Space and Light offers only the faintest traces of politics--at least upfront. Formal excellence--space, light, personality--can be its own form of rebellion against state-sponsored banality, and of course a keen technician like Vassiliev is closer to Komar and Melamid than to whoever was making all those statues of Lenin and Stalin. As organized by Zimmerli Associate Curator Julia Tulovsky, this retrospective focuses on Vassiliev's output all the way from the 1950s to our own decade. This "first retrospective of this seminal artist in the United States" is a quiet, stunning exhibition, light on talking points and unforgettable in tone and mood.

But spend some time with the works on display, and you might start to feel that Vassiliev is really as Russian as they come. Russia has so often been imagined as a land of unfathomably wide natural spaces and ineffably grand natural lights; this is the impression left by the works of Chekhov and Pasternak, and the impression that just might linger with anyone who visits the Russian countryside today. This landscape is where Vassiliev's own vision finally settled. By the last decade or so of his life, he had worked his way through all sorts of experiments in hue and tone, through visionary canvases such as Diagonal: Self-Portrait (1997) and Remembrance of Things Past (1993), and arrived at a mode of realistic painting more rich in atmosphere than anything a Socialist Realist--or a more flippant avant-gardist--could have produced.

Personally, I find Vassiliev's abstractions both mesmerizing and underwhelming: they have much of the allure of Op Art and even more color, but they are more like oversized studies in symmetry and shading than like fully realized, fully satisfying canvases. For me, the later realism represents Vassiliev at the height of his powers. His fascination with space and light still operates broadly in these-those skies, those atmospheres, those softly throbbing rainbow colors. Yet the same talents are also focused and redirected; he turns out be photo-realistically good at drawing windows and trees. The late landscapes that Tulovsky has gathered for her final gallery are a peaceful, haunting send-off to this show. Instead of only looking at these, you almost hear them crackle and whisper and echo from a world beyond.

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring at Pace Gallery (Until November 1)

Are popular technologies enhancing art or simply encroaching upon it? That is the question that, know it or not, a few recent exhibitions have set out to answer. There were Richard Prince's Instragram portraits, which graced the Gagosian this fall. Then there is David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, which uses enough technology to prod your interest, but never so much technology (as the Prince show certainly did) that you wonder whether you are looking at anything remotely resembling art. One of Britian's most venerable living artists, Hockney has crafted interrelated sets of landscapes for this Pace Gallery showcase of recent work. All of them depict parts of East Yorkshire that Hockney knows well; some were crafted using charcoal and paper, others were drawn on an iPad and intended for enlargement.

Although those iPad pictures will take some time to get used to--a couple visits? a couple years?--they roundly demonstrate that Hockney is not technology's stooge. Pixels or no pixels, his colors are overripe and his trees are off-kilter, loaded with personality. I only wish that The Arrival of Spring had indicated more of what Hockney can achieve at his technological best--had shown Hockney excelling by adapting to electronic and video formats, rather than distinguishing himself in spite of them. There is a work of video art on display--the nine-screen Woldgate Woods, November 26--and what it does it does with efficiency and with just enough pathos. But Woldgate Woods lacks the humor, the miscellany, the melancholy, and the sheer can't-stop-watching-it quality of Hockney's The Jugglers, a video installation that graced the Whitney Museum a few years ago. On second thought, I'm happy that The Jugglers isn't at Pace, lined up against works that are more provisional and much more activated by the tension between old and new. Hockney already has a video masterpiece; The Arrival of Spring demonstrates that, even after a lifetime of accolades, he still has an intriguing learning curve.

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