With the title “Size Does Matter”  for his debut show as a curator, one has to wonder if Shaquille O’Neal is talking about the size of one’s wallet, connections, ego, or one’s preference to bra size.   With the opening of the show at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation the famous basketball player, actor, and rapper can now add “art curator” to his ever-expanding resume of accomplishments.   The exhibition includes work by 39 different artists, or “artstars” to be more accurate, whose works explore the myriad ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art.  The scale theme is extremely fitting: weighing 320 pounds and standing 7′1 atop his size 22 shoes, Shaquille O’Neal has described his own size as “monumental” and he has the ability to dwarf just about everyone in his presence.

O’Neal made sixty-six selections for the show, which features works ranging from the ginormous billboard-sized Andreas Gursky’s photograph Madonna I to the microscopic work of Willard Wigan.  It is rumored that the works were chosen from over 200 images that FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach showed him over dinner after a game.  O’Neal has also admitted that he is a great friend of Donald Trump who has four or five Picassos on his plane that O’Neal likes to look at when flying with him.  And with that, viola, a curator is born.  Describing the process of picking the works to include in the show, O’Neal explains, “Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it.  It’s what you feel.  I picked those things because they were beautiful.”  With this criteria in mind it is not surprising that another theme of the show could be “half-naked women,” or “ginormous breasts,”  as pieces by Richard Patterson, Dr. Lakra, and Lisa Yuskavage graphically illustrate.  O’Neil also plays the role of the muse for the show inspiring works like Willard Wigan’s  Micro Shaq,  Mark Wagner’s Shaq by Marq and Peter Max’s Portrait of Shaquille O’ Neal. These pieces embrace the famous basketball player’s happy-go lucky attitude, goofy grin, and larger than life attitude.

“Size Does Matter” is on display from February 19, 2010-May 27, 2010 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea. Shaquille O’Neil is best known as a center for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Cleveland’s controversial best-selling author James Fray, who has written extensively on art, has an accompanying book for O’Neal’s art show that features installation images and an essay.

Opening this evening at Freight and Volume in New York City is the exhibition Decomposing in the Land of Paradise, new work by New York based artist Russell Tyler. The exhibition marks the first solo presentation of the artist’s work, as he is currently a graduate student at Pratt Institute of Art and Design. The exhibition promises to be filled with twelve luscious oil paintings that literally dissolve on the surface, rendering each subject in a semi-abstract manor where the paint simultaneous exists as material and image. Figuration is consistently explored through each of Tyler’s paintings, clearly referencing formal qualities utilized art historical giants Phillip Guston and Willian De Kooning.

Decomposing  in the land of Paradise will be on view through March 20th, 2010. Russell Tyler has exhibited in recent group exhibitions including Surreal Landscapes at DNA Gallery in Provincetown, MA and Giver at Union Gallery in NYC.

Send Me Through is the title of a new exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Ryan Schneider. The body of work is presented as the third solo exhibition for the artist at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in New York City. Send Me Through continues the artist’s exploration into notions of the self, human experience and pursuit of a fundamental truth in life. Existential in nature, these paintings employ a faux-naive style to unearth an ambiguous and understated notion of the self, where physical human presence may or may not be found.

Formally, Schneider utilizes bold colors, flattened space and dense patterning to compose his works. The mainly large-scale paintings also embody and quiet and distant emotion that is created by placing the viewer slightly outside the realm of the subject as if allowed to observe from the sidelines or quietly from a corner of the room.

Schneider is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and has completed recent exhibitions at Eighth Veil in Los Angeles, Artcore in Toronto and I M Art in Seoul, Korea.

Eric Ogden, untitled (penelope cruz), 2009

Currently on view at Hous Projects in New York is the exhibition Versus—a unique sort of survey featuring 18 seminal photographers of our time. Curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel, whose work is also exhibited in the show, Versus pairs these emerging and established contemporary photographers with one another according to similarities—and striking contrasts—in subject matter, theme and aesthetics. The photographers explore ideas of ideal beauty, subjects of idolatry in America, relationship dynamics, juxtaposing stages of life and architectural and environmental moods. Some of the comparisons and contrasts between the paired photographs are more subtle, while other times the images seem to mirror one another. The visual motifs presented by the photographs on view are equally striking. Deep shadows conceal some scenes while others employ repetitive pattern to contrast with meek looking portrait sitters.

Jen Davis, untitled, 2005

The full roster of pairings includes: Mickalene Thomas VERSUS Nadine Rovner, Hank Willis Thomas VERSUS Cara Phillips, Jen Davis VERSUS Eric Ogden, Brian Ulrich VERSUS Alex Leme, Amy Elkins VERSUS Molly Landreth, Matthew Pillsbury VERSUS Kris Graves, Zoe Strauss VERSUS Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Phil Toledano VERSUS Elizabeth Fleming and Michael Wolf VERSUS Gina Levay. Selected work from Versus was also recently on view at Photo LA in Los Angeles, courtesy Hous Projects.

Phil Toledano, Looking at the Sunset, 2008

Bortolami Gallery in New York City is currently featuring works by London based artist Peter Peri.  Peri’s show, which includes drawings, sculptures, and paintings, revolves around three figurative themes:  head, seated man, and reclining woman.  Although Peri uses these themes in each medium, his execution in each material is startlingly different.  The level of obsession and detail in the fine drawings which are created through a congestion of graphite lines on unbleached paper hint at a larger interpretation.  Upon further investigation the viewer discovers tiny obscure writing, miniature cartoon-like doodles, and his charming “Odalisque” drawing is a mirror-image rendering of Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres‘ painting with the same title.

The three sculptures in the show, however, have an element of precariousness about them.  Each is an engineered replica in steel of objects Peri originally composed using mundane objects from his home: rolls of masking tape, cassette boxes, chess sets, and calculators.  Unlike the drawings, there does not seem to be any secret code or arcane meaning in these sculptures.  The basic geometry of each of these objects serves as the most obvious choices for Peri’s figurative assemblages; circles become breasts on a reclining woman, thick rectangles serve as a man’s body topped by a circle for a head.

Peri’s paintings successfully combine both the obsessive mark-making in his drawings with the spontaneity of his sculptures.  Described as “skewed mappings of an unknown atmosphere” by the gallery, these gloomy canvases are broken up by razor-sharp line work and tonal highlight.  The background is full of haphazard drips and variations of grays, silvers and blacks, while the geometry of the lines call to mind the mathematical rigor of artists like Jack Tworkov and Sol LeWitt.

Peter Peri received his MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in London and his BA in Design at Central St. Martins School of Art and Design.  His show at Bortolami Gallery in New York is open until February 20, 2010.

Originally published on: July 2, 2008

Os Gemeos, which translates to “the twins” in Portuguese, are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who began break dancing at an early age and later moved on to the visual arts. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo transformed Brazilian street art and have since exhibited at museums all over the world including their first solo exhibition at The Luggage Store in San Francisco in 2003. Their influences include hip hop culture, American street movies, and Sao Paulo protest art. Their subject matter ranges from family portraits to commentary on Sao Paulo’s political and social affairs as well as Brazilian folklore.

On June 28th, the brothers opened Too Far Too Close at Deitch Projects in New York. For the exhibition, they will be transforming the gallery space into a fantastical cityscape, complete with passages, houses, and doors. Their signature imagery includes characters, background, and letters, and can range from graffiti tags to complicated murals. This exhibition will include new paintings, sculpture and installations that build upon a group of work created for the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. Os Gemeos have been reviewed by the New York Times in 2006 which referred to their style as “sort of Dr. Seuss on acid.” Their work has an appealing and universal quality that has drawn the attention of fans including cult figure Barry McGee and Nike C.E.O. Mark Parker.

Too Far Too Close will remain at Deitch Projects until August 9, 2008.

Kara Walker: A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Currently on view at James Cohan Gallery in New York City is the exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, which runs through February 13, 2010. The show features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen international artists, most of whom are widely known for their work in other media. Included among the artists whose work is on view are: Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Shahzia Sikander, Jaime Gili and Peter Blake. The artists were commissioned by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, to create the tapestries specifically because the medium is so far removed from their usual practices. In the catalog that accompanies the exhibition–which includes an essay written by Sarah Kent–each artist discusses their unique approach to the unfamiliar medium in an interview.

Shahzia Sikander: Pathology of Suspension (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The subjects explored in the tapestries on view range from American race relations, such as is seen in Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, to an investigation into the tradition of so-called “craft” or “decorative arts,” as seen in the imagery in Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension. Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at James Cohan marks the exhibition’s first showing in New York; it was previously on view at The Dairy in London and at Design Miami.