Kelley Walker © Collection Charles Riva
Having explored the West Coast in a previous exhibition, “California”, the French collector Charles Riva – 80% of whose acquisitions have been of US art – now moves to the East, presenting a selection of thirteen works “Made in New York”, by nine artists born between 1954 and 1980. The exhibition looks at how that generation absorbed the direct legacy of Warhol, the pope of pop art, and the indirect legacy of the adopted New Yorker Marcel Duchamp. As in the art of those two imposing patron saints, this exhibition includes thoroughly banal everyday objects “elevated” to the status of works of art. In The Edge of Night, for example, John Miller, the doyen of this collective show, crams together plastic fish, children’s toy guns, fake pearl necklaces, a toilet plunger, and high-heeled shoes, all coated in gilt paint, to create a somewhat baroque tondo that offers a tasteful celebration of the fake. Nate Lowman’s stretcher (framework for a canvas) has the jagged silhouette of one of those Magic Tree deodorants you stick on the inside of a car windscreen. Using an industrial vacuum process, Seth Price traps a jacket or a piece of rope simply thrown onto a canvas at random. Operating somewhere between pop art and minimalism, Christopher Wool repeats in black on white a motif from a wrought-iron balustrade that, presented on a large surface, could almost serve as a design for wallpaper. In Black Star Press, Kelley Walker also goes in for repetition: three times, he uses the same image of a race riot in which a white policeman and his German shepherd dog attack a black man. In each section of this triptych, the press photograph is covered in wild strokes and drips of...dark and white chocolate, while in the top right corner one can recognise the logo of Coca-Cola, so often used by Warhol. Overall, this is an impressive, coherent exhibition.
Made in New York > 19/7, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 13 > 18.00, CHARLES RIVA COLLECTION, Eendrachtstraat 21 rue de la Concorde, Elsene/Ixelles, 02-503.04.98, www.charlesrivacollection.com
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