What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

Jan. 23, 2019

‘Under Erasure’

Through Jan. 27.
Pierogi, 155 Suffolk Street, Manhattan
646-429-9073, pierogi2000.com

Loren Munk’s “An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg 1981-2008,”
from 2008-2011, in the show “Under Erasure.”
Credit Loren Munk and Pierogi

More than 80 artworks, by as many artists, use erasure and deletion as positive techniques in “Under Erasure,” curated by Heather and Raphael Rubinstein at Pierogi Gallery. Text pieces range from Tom Phillips’s “A Humument,” an elaborately painted-over found novel that the artist has been reworking since 1966, to Jen Bervin’s “Nets” (2004), which grays out most of the words in Shakespeare’s sonnets to create spare new poems like this one, from Sonnet 14: “Pointing to each/ constant/ from/ this/ date.” Visual art analogues, many of which also use text, include Samuel Jablon’s scribbly red painting “Half Destroyed,” in which the piece’s title is reduced to a set of free-form wavery lines, and a small abstraction by Charline von Heyl that finds a muddy new color in a hasty smear.

Erasure is protest in Ariana Boussard-Reifel’s “Between the Lines,” for which the artist individually excised every word from a white supremacist book called “RaHoWa,” and it stands for gentrification in Loren Munk’s “An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg 1981-2008.” But the piece that best captures this encyclopedic show’s central insight — that creation is inseparable from destruction, because you can’t get one thing without losing another — is Ms. Rubinstein’s canvas “Painting as a Non-Professional Experiment.” In it, she repurposes Mr. Rubinstein’s similarly titled poem about the solitude of writing by painting over the word “poetry,” whenever it appears, with “painting.”  WILL HEINRICH

The entire review appeared online here