Designed by Foster + Partners — the British firm led by Sir Norman Foster, who gave London’s financial district the most pointedly phallic skyscraper in modern architecture — the eight-floor, 20,000-square-foot building is a sleek, slim, eight-story shaft thrusting its metallic black, milky-glass way up from a narrow lot between Stanton and Houston Streets, half a block north of the white-shoe-box pile that is the New Museum.
Credit Nigel Young Foster + Partners
Credit Nigel Young Foster + Partners
Talk about a padded room. Try the elevator inching between the second and third floors of the new Sperone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery. The 54 child-size mattresses clinging to the walls of the 12-by-20-foot cell not only muffle sound but can make you feel crazy — for the art of Guillermo Kuitca, the Argentine artist whose neo-Cubist paintings inaugurate the building.
“A big white box we’re not,” said Angela Westwater, the gallery’s owner along with the Roman dealer Gian Enzo Sperone. The two business partners are celebrating their 35th year in New York and their shop’s first real street presence, most desirable to art galleries. (Its previous two locations were on upper floors.) She must be given to understatement. The building’s narrow footprint, curving walls and obstructing portals make for some awkward passageways, but they are likely to encourage artists to create work that could actually fit in a person’s home, instead of requiring them to build a whole new wing and hire a crane to install it.
Kuitca is known for diagrammatic abstractions of city streetscapes and opera house interiors. The cascading planes and peekaboo geometries of his recent, nearly monochromatic gray or brown canvases take a page from Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” but are all about urban density and gridlock as well as movement and stasis. They are installed at a tasteful minimum NCAA JERSEYS, a few on each of three floors, in this slip of a building.
Except for the red exterior of the Foster building’s elevator gallery, which shows through the glass facade, the architecture is so understated that when I walked to the gallery’s opening the other night I didn’t pick it out of the darkness right away. The building’s verticality is even more pronounced within. The whole place felt like an ascending elevator drawing me upward at every step, as if I had suddenly become a marionette on a string. That was partly because of the double-height ground floor and curving glass balustrade on the mezzanine above it. But when the walls are closing in, there’s nowhere to go but up.
The close quarters make for intimate viewing of Kuitca’s complex paintings, which seem to increase in depth the longer you look. “Lontano NCAA JERSEYS,” a new painting in a back gallery on the ground floor, a Casbah-like structure of shifting geometric planes allow the eye to see up and down NCAA JERSEYS, inside and out, and around corners all at once, perfectly complementing the surrounding architecture. The bright roadways and half-seen skyline imploding at the center of an untitled abstraction on the mezzanine add up to a metaphor for an overcrowded city gasping for air — and getting it.
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