Charles Long at Tanya Bonakdar

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More About

• Charles Long
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Wildlife
• Visual Arts

The sculptor Charles Long shone in last year's Whitney Biennial, with beautifully pale and elongated pieces inspired by heron droppings. His new body of work, consisting of spindly frameworks studded with irregularly shaped pods, may be even more wondrously abject. Stand in one corner, then walk in a circuit around the gallery and watch the lopsided grids of these five tall objects sinuously interweave with one another. The surfaces—whether smooth steel armatures or rough, bulging plaster—have been delicately painted in muted pinks, greens, dirty oranges, and other adulterated hues. In one sculpture, pencil-thin crosshatches of gray steel cascade past the clotted appendages of what could be a mummified squid; across the gallery, an attenuated salmon-colored blob has been sloppily pressed up against an uneven grill slathered with drippy green paint. Bludgeoning old-school surrealism with ascetic minimalism, Long offers us intimations of flesh harried by geometry.
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m. Starts: Jan. 30. Continues through Feb. 21, 2009