Casey Kaplan
10 Galleries to Visit in Chelsea
April 16, 2015
By Roberta Smith
No gallery scene is static, but lately Chelsea’s has been especially in flux.
Its maze of galleries — New York’s most populous — now has the new Whitney poised on its southern edge. Yet towering apartment buildings are rising on nearly every block and rents are escalating, along with rumors. This makes it hard to tell what the future holds for galleries that don’t own their spaces — which is most of them; already some have closed, others have merged or moved. And one of the anchors of the neighborhood, the commodious brick building at 548 West 22nd Street that once housed the Dia Art Foundation, and recently played host to art fairs, is now slated for development. And yet, the neighborhood can still feel like a perpetual art fair — in a good way — with galleries of all sizes and orientations sifting through past and present in exciting ways.
The pressure on galleries is reflected in Casey Kaplan’s relocation inland, to West 27th Street east of Seventh Avenue. The current show at the new address is Sarah Crowner’s third solo in New York — and her best yet. Working with a flexible geometric vocabulary, she produces paintings whose taut visual clarity is the result of meticulously sewing together contrasting pieces of painted or raw canvas. Ms. Crowner’s shapes are usually scavenged, suggesting that reality is rife with potential abstraction. A recurring pair of arabesques echoes a design used by the artist Ray Johnson in a backdrop for a 1957 fashion shoot in Harper’s Bazaar. An especially strong blue and white work magnifies a fabric pattern by the Austrian modernist Koloman Moser (1868-1918). In some new works, Ms. Crowner fragments her found shapes for greater complexity, a promising development.