China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

Again a beautiful day. I am so happy I have a bike and can cycle through Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The bicycle paths are nicely marked.

It is great that they have installed bicycle paths on all the bridges to Brooklyn. I took the Manhattan bridge and this is the view towards northern Brooklyn and Queens.

I am so amazed to see so many people on bikes. And I do not mean like professional cyclists. No it seems that a lot of people in New York use the bicycle in daily life. Also I was happy to see the amount of girls and woman cycling.

I was also happy to see a huge amount of people wear a helmet. It is not mandatory in New York (but it is in New Jersey where my friend got a ticket for cycling without a helmet).

And many bikes have these huge baskets on the front. That makes it really practical for carryingstuff or groceries.

I met the actor and director Kris Chung who I know from Beijing in Brooklyn for lunch. It is nice how many of my Beijing friends now live in NYC. Also Elisa is now in New York. And funny enough she was taking care of a bicycle painting exhibition from Taliah Lempert called „The Right Bike for the Right Situation“

„Taliah Lempert paints bikes and transforms something so prevalent as to be almost totally unremarkable – there are an estimated 1.1 billion in the world –into sumptuous and forthright yet veiled portraits of these ubiquitous two-wheeled mechanisms. Of the object itself, the bike, and by extension, its owner. The bicycle is everywhere, the readymade that inspired the readymade. It is a tool, a work of art, a gratifying and enjoyable rolling machine depicted in two-dimensions, lushly, lovingly rendered and suffused with vibrant reds, oranges, greens, pinks, and blues. A beast of burden, an omnipresent contraption ridden in every country in the world by all walks of life, the bike equalizes. These paintings lure the viewer into looking at bicycles in a way they never have before while simultaneously bringing home the crucial importance and widespread influence of these widespread things in our lives. A machine, standardized, but with an infinite variety of delineations: big, small, tall, fast, slow, double, kid’s, fixed, gears, cruiser, and so on and so on. Brakes, tiers, spokes, headsets, seats. Lempert’s thoughts on her favored subject are both straightforward and worth quoting: “Bicycles are important, beautiful, and worth a close look. Most bikes I paint are, or have been, used daily for transportation, recreation, messenger work and/or for racing. I paint bikes that are part of someone’s life, or have been, or are intended to be. The bike they ride around, race, present themselves with. How they chose it, how they use it and how they care for it. How each bike looks, develops because of a person, says a lot.”

„The world opens up. Moving through the neighborhoods, the sites and people on the way. Fast, often faster, than any other way around town and always more fun. Watching the city lights while rolling over the bridge. The right bike for the right situation. Worn when ridden, locked, or crashed. Grimy, sometimes cleaned, sometimes not. Finding the frame in a basement, fixing it, some brazing, a new tube, stripped and painted. Do it up with style and parts gathered. In Lempert’s paintings the vessel of motion is paradoxically shown at rest, the dormant features of a kinetic machine painted from observation caught at standstill. Blending saturated Bay Area-hued lyrical abstraction in her backgrounds with acute attention to detail in the foreground representation, Lempert channels Manet, Hopper, Hockney, and Warhol on the way to charting her own singular course. That is, intimations of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series in the abstract setting and George Stubbs sans steeds and Thiebuad without pies in the front with a dollop of pop while completely transcending those lodestars to achieve anatomically correct, poetical, and ravishing portraits of pedal-powered workhorses.“

This exhibition was presented with the cooperation and support of the Tinneny family and Macro-Sea and it was held in the Elk Gallery in Brooklyn. I really loved the idea that it was a“ride-in“gallery, so youcould cycle up to each painting. It is the bicycle version of a drive-in.

Then I continued to cycle through Brooklyn.

I stopped by to an institute for pop-action and aerial disciplines (that Kris showed me a flier of) to sign up for a class, but the next one was only on Sunday.

Then i went back to Manhattan using the Williamsburg bridge.

This entry was posted on Donnerstag, Juni 17th, 2010 at 11:17 and is filed under Art, Cycling, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.