These days, it can sometimes seem like the line between gallery shows and museum shows is blurring. As museums try to shed their image as lofty temples of culture and capitalize on the excitements of contemporary art, galleries seek gravitas and substance. Occasionally, galleries mount exhibitions that are so substantial they can fairly be described as museum-quality. Two such exhibitions can now be found at the David Zwirner Gallery (537 West 20th Street) in Chelsea, and together they remind us that the history of post-war art is being revised as we speak.
A large, smolderingly handsome show of Ad Reinhardt’s “blue paintings” occupies the ground floor of the gallery. Reinhardt, who was born in Buffalo, N.Y., and died tragically early in 1967, at the age 54, was officially an Abstract Expressionist – a misleading moniker. His art was 100 percent abstract, but 0 percent expressionist. In place of “action painting,” he favored quietly contemplative geometric abstractions that helped spawn the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. A self-styled art monk, Reinhardt is best known for his austere black paintings, which consumed the last 13 years of his life. His blue paintings – the subject of the current show – preceded the black paintings, and are feats of sensuality by comparison. They’re less of a renunciation of form than a cerulean annunciation. Their overlapping rectangles of blue (and sometimes violet and green) give off a gentle radiance that defies explanation.
A second show, occupying the upstairs of the gallery, offers New Yorkers our first in-depth look at the art of Ruth Asawa. She is not nearly as well-known as Reinhardt, but this show is likely to earn her an instant and enduring place in the pantheon of American modernist sculpture. Asawa, who died in San Francisco in 2013, was a Japanese-American artist who grew up on the West Coast and was held captive during World War II in a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas. The current show offers, among other things, a bewitching installation of her abstract wire sculptures, light-as-air versions of Brancusi’s endless columns. Most of her sculptures hang down from the ceiling, looping and curving as they go. At first, they can put you in mind of the biomorphic shapes of mid-century design, but as you look longer, Surrealist-like personages appear. I had a sense of embryos replicating, of birth scenarios. It is no doubt relevant that Asawa, who knew the indignity of living in a camp, encircled by barbed wire, seized on wire as her main medium. In her work, she re-invents wire as a vehicle for release and liberation.
Both of the shows remain up through October 21, and admission is free.