New Art

I started out last Saturday at Salomon Contemporary for Meghan Boody's 47th birthday party, congratulating Linda Yablonsky on her stirring reportage from Tokyo for Artforum and comforting Meghan's son Toby, whose pet frogs she commandeered for the centerpiece of the birthday cake table, placing them in a tiny bowls next to live mice in cages, a definite discouragement to one's sweet tooth.

I grabbed a couple of artists, Ryan Oakes and Gerri Davis, Cooper Union alumni both, and James Salomon's assistant Laura Migdon, and we journeyed over to the lounge at Winkleman Gallery, where we chatted up one of my favorite people, Jimbo Blachly, always bursting with joy, and watched a couple of elderly collectors from New Jersey snap up Jimbo's tiny painted jewels of Saturn, the Long Island coast and abstract geographical points in between. Ed Winkleman never knows his own prices, but I figured out that you can still get a Jimbo for $900, $1,100 or $1,500, depending on the weather.

My entourage (young people indulging a geezer) helped me cab it up to the flea market near the Lincoln Tunnel, where I purchased a ring for artist Kika Karadi, whose show “Dark Matter” we visited at AMFA Gallery, a double space on 39th Street complete with garden. Kika paints dark silver wormholes that remind me of the Borg continuum. John Good of Gagosian Gallery had just been over there and apparently approved.

Then it was off to Bushwick to see Gerri Davis's brilliant new painting Bordel, which uses a healthy aging nude model to send up Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon. The model, John Holly, is a part-time East Village actor and a regular naked poseur in Cooper Union's studios. I emailed Klaus Biesenbach that he had to show this piece at MoMA PS 1 and sighed that someone as brilliant as Gerri Davis was keeping Pablo relevant, especially by employing John Holly, a dead ringer for the aging master in all his nude Basque glory.

Someone called a car service and soon I was snoozing in a traffic jam on the Williamsburg Bridge. One of these go-rounds a month is my current speed, so maybe I'll hit the streets again in May.

Jimbo Blachly, “Languidity,” Mar. 25-Apr. 30, 2011, at Winkleman Gallery, 621 West 27th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001.

Kika Karadi, “Dark Matter,” by appointment (212 961 7848), AMFA Gallery, 409 West 39th Street, New York, N.Y. 10018.