“There’s some razzle-dazzle things and then more quiet ones,” explained Marlborough Chelsea director Pascal Spengemann, discussing the 10 works that are part of “Broadway Morey Boogie,” a public art installation organized by the gallery that spans the breadth of the Broadway Mall in New York. (The title is a mash-up of Mondrian’s famous painting and the Morey boogie board brand.) The six-month exhibition, overseen by Spengemann and Marlborough principal director Max Levai, does indeed hit both ends of the spectrum: Devin Troy Strother’s ecstatic, glittery women are the razzle-dazzle to Paul Druecke’s whipsmart text-based intervention, or Davina Semo’s imposing concrete-and-CorTen-steel behemoth. Tony Matelli has placed “Stray Dog,” a realist canine, at 73rd Street (rumored to be a replacement for the initial choice, the artist’s controversial sleepwalker sculpture, which is currently trudging along in its underwear on Marlborough Chelsea’s second-floor patio). Lars Fisk abstracted the design of a Con Ed truck into a sphere dropped at 79th Street — and no, the utility company didn’t sponsor the project, nor did they explicitly bless it. There’s an interactive, kid-friendly piece — Dan Colen’s “Jazz and Leisure,” up at 137th Street, which includes actual boulders painted the colors of M&Ms, as well as park benches warped into cartoonish semi-circles. (You can sit on both.)
Semo’s “Everything Is Permitted,” which the artist said she imagined as a cross between a security booth and a bunker, is a somber contrast to Colen’s sugary sculpture, its pigmented-concrete surface roughed up, chiseled, and weather-degraded. And Sarah Braman’s “Another Time Machine” is a similarly Minimalist monument, albeit one in transparent, tinted glass that casts rich purple and blue shadows onto the sidewalk — inviting new ways of looking at the surrounding buildings and traffic, and engaging in an oblique way with the angles of Philip Johnson’s 1999 public work, “Timesculpture at Lincoln Center,” which stands next to it.
