Last Call - Hannes Schmid's Cowboys, Beatrice Wood Makes Artistic Whoopie, and Richard Serra at Lord Gaga's

Hannes Schmid, Cowboy, 1999

Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich

Hannes Schmid: Cowboys at Edwynn Houk Gallery through October 29



Swiss-photographer Hannes Schmid (b. 1946) is a media-mediated mythmaker. The creative eye behind those hunky Marlboro Men who ride, rope and sell cigarettes.  Back in the day .. .  Schmid’s concept of hardcore masculinity entered our consciousness through the tiny television screen at home or loomed large on highway billboards.  The Marlboro theme song (can you still hum it?) transported us to a glamorized West.  These rugged wranglers silhouetted against the open sky joined with other faux cowboys -  Bonanza’s Cartwright family, Roy Rogers and Bat Masterson – to wrest right from wrong.  They were our flannel and jeans supermen (albeit invented by urban Mad Men trapped in gray cubicles between lunchbreaks and commuter rides to the suburbs). 

The Best Things in Life Are Free: Robert Lobe's "Nature in Nature," Prospect Park through November 2011

Robert Lobe, Invisible Earth. 2007, heat-treated hammered aluminum, 9 x 5.5 x 13.5 feet

Following up on my last blog post about the high cost of museum admission, let's celebrate the Fall Art Season with an art exhibition that is free and open to the public. Today I want to shine a spotlight on Robert Lobe's magnficent installation of three sculptures in Prospect Park, Brooklyn: Nature in Nature (through November 2011).  Here three graceful works made out of Lobe's famous repoussé method elide our concepts of abstraction and realism.

The chief experience derived from Lobe's eloquent work is a meditation on the existential nature of nature itself in terms of matter, time and context. "Each tree tells a story," Lobe wants us to know and see in Nature's Clock (2006), Invisible Earth  (2007), and Antique Jenny (2011).

Robert Lobe, Natures Clock, 2006, heat-treated hammered aluminum, 11.5 x 9 x 14 feet