OPENING
Car Culture: A Chelsea gallery revisits its oil-stained former life.
By Karen Rosenberg
Before the art dealers arrived, far West Chelsea was a neighborhood of taxi garages and truck depositories, one of Manhattan's only car-centric areas. With Some Exhaust, Lehmann Maupin executes a reverse transformation, playing host to some 40 specially created works by more than a dozen artists inspired by the multipurpose American garage: site of makeshift studios and meth labs, cold storage and carbon monoxide. All of it sits in an enormous temporary structure, created by curator Matthew Lusk, that masks the gallery's Rem Koolhaas/OMA—designed interior. John Gerrard's animation of a car engine fills an LCD screen with virtual exhaust, while Caroline Allison's photograph of the garage where four New Jersey teenagers committed suicide in 1987 (pictured) casts a pall over the most banal of suburban shelters.
(August 13 through September 25; see "Galleries: Group Shows—Chelsea.")