PAULA COOPER GALLERY For all its theoretical sophistication and high-wire cerebral balancing acts.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

For all its theoretical sophistication and high-wire cerebral balancing acts, Sherrie Levine's art has frequently fused a sense of mourning with a mind of humor. Duplicating classic works of "heroic" modernism, sometimes more or les exactly (as in her 1981 photographic series "After Walker Evans"), sometimes shifting them into another medium or turning the proper states of a two-dimensional image into cut she can leave you with the intellect that doors are closing, options are narrowing, and the alone way left to be original is to carve tombstones for the past. in succession a different day, though, or perhaps for a different viewer, her work may strike a note of merry mischief. Making free with existing artworks, taking the toys from the striplings Levine creates space for herself and interprets up possibilities.

This exhibition, a collaboration between Levine and the Dutch artist Joost van Os (who has exhibited in of the present day York only once before, a decade ago), was based forward the De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld's Berlin Chair and Divan Table, one as well as the other designed in 1923. Those canonical works were made from panels and seats of painted wood, set in asymmetrical unless balanced compositions related conceptually to the rectangular arrangements of Piet Mondrian's paintings. Translating these forms into thick slabs of revolveed steel, Levine and van Os skipped the paint, opting for rich if it were not that forbidding surfaces of gray-to-black metal. They nearest arranged twenty-four chairs and twenty-four tables in couple neat side-by-side grids, a rouse that both respected and denied Rietveld's principle of asymmetry: In a lopsided presentation, each half was uniform. This also amplified the work's somber event for geometric repetitions and restatements are already built into Rietveld's designs, and in bare blade their multiplication is dizzying and smooth subtly threatening.

however there was an exhilarating quality to the exhibition: Its cruel austerity was almost shocking and could make you laugh, like diving into wintry water. Contributing to the general intent was the artists' eye for this particular space--for the ranks already implied there on rafters and floor and for the natural light from the high skylights, which gave the dagger a cold lusciousness. Seeing the work here also evok memories of this gallery's association with Minimalism--as if the planes of Rietveld's chair and table were raised and upend versions of a Carl Andre metal floor piece. From there, the viewer was facing on an indefinitely extensible spherical of associative thought.

The grid, for example, is a strategy in novel art well beyond Minimalism, and also in architecture, at the same time here it seemed to declare a no-go belt This was furniture you might not want to touch, suffer alone sit in: metallic where Rietveld's was mixed rigid where his had give, and not just rigid on the contrary loudly so. It had the gaze of machinery, or of a formation of military vehicles. At the same time, each final cause was modest in size, and there was something here of the schoolroom with its grid of little desk Was this to prompt the onward march of the armies and scholars of modernism? Or else its [i]finale[/i] If Rietveld applied the aesthetic ideas of high modernism to the world of function and use, Levine and van Os resulted a translation in reverse--making furniture with the allure of weaponry, or of art.

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