New York Gallery Walk: Chelsea and Upper East Side, January 2007

In January 2007, a walk through Chelsea galleries revealed Tony Matelli's hyperrealist sculpture 'Old Enemy, New Victim' at Leo Koenig Inc., depicting three chimpanzees in a violent struggle as a metaphor for social malaise. At Marianne Boesky Gallery, Jacco Olivier showed hybrid digital-painterly DVD animations that layer post-impressionist brushwork with temporal depth. Tracey Moffatt's 'Under the Sign of Scorpio' series at Stux Gallery featured self-portraits as historical and pop culture figures born under Scorpio, including Hillary Clinton and Whoopi Goldberg. Outside Chelsea, Doug Aitken's 'Sleepwalkers' at MoMA projected seven monumental night-time films onto the museum's facades, following five characters through daydreams, though the work was deemed superficial. The standout was David Hammons' untitled installation at L&M Arts in the Upper East Side: seven fur coats on mannequins, altered with paint and one burned, paying homage to 20th-century painters while questioning provenance.