Ellsworth Kelly and others at Matthew Marks Gallery

The Matthew Marks Gallery has an excellently organized website as far as displaying exhibits and artists' works. When I looked at it on October 21, 2006, one of the current shows was by Ken Price. Clicking on the show name takes you to the press release. Links to the right go to thumbnail images from the current show, or to the artist's page. Click on one of these to go to larger images with previous, up, and next links. Sounds simple, and it is, but many gallery websites make navigation way too complicated, or just too frustrating to get around.

On this site, the design is simple, elegant, and effective, except for an occasional warning about incorrect links, which nevertheless doesn't seem to stop you from getting to the correct page.

The best way to get to see online exhibitions is to go to the main Gallery Exhibitions page and wander around, virtually, from there. One of the artists with an extensive gallery presence is Ellsworth Kelly. His Wikipedia entry has some good links but Matthew Marks has been exhibiting his works since 1991, and accompanying most of the shows with web pages, which are listed under Gallery Exhibitions for this artist. The online gallery entries are a bit spotty as far as showing works for the earlier shows but they get better for latter years.

In order to find a video that I could display in this post, I checked YouTube for Ellsworth Kelly. I found several videos, one of which I've embedded below. This video shows Kelly's work at three of the Matthew Marks galleries. Another video I found is of an interview done with Kelly for vernissage tv which does online videocasts of artists and shows. It may show up in the thumbnails that appear at the end of this video. The quality of the videos is somewhat better if watched directly on YouTube.

Mark Grotjahn and others at the Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery does an excellent job of exhibiting artist's works, especially for these paintings by Mark Grotjahn, from an exhibit in 2006. Because of the nature of most of the works - receding and expanding painted and drawn lines - viewing them on full screen, while scrolling up and down, actually enhances the viewing experience. The lines move, the artworks morph toward and away from the viewer as in this work Untitled (White Butterfly Blue MG).

Saatchi Online has such a wealth of features that you could take days to explore it all. At least I think so - I just spent an hour or so finding some that I liked. The current exhibit Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East has a well arranged webpage, so that you can select an artist, go to full screen, and then click through the works.

Finding previous exhibitions is sort of hard work, since one link sends you to a short list of exhibits and a list of artists exhibited without any links to their exhibition. Another link to contemporary artists takes you to an A-Z list of all artists, which has very good resources.

There are extensive display areas for new artists and long lists of artists who have uploaded their stuff in a variety of formats in the online magazine - also blogs, TV, etc, etc.

Out of Time: Contemporary Art from the Collection of MoMA New York

So I may be getting a little obsessive about finding art exhibits on the web, because now I'm determined to track down an online exhibit that was easier to get around back in 2006 when I first started this post. MoMA New York had a good online exhibit for the "Out of Time" show back then but when they revised their site it got a bit fragmented.

The real exhibit got a negative review in the New York Times, for the most part, in Roberta Smith's Power, Injustice, Death, Loss: At Sea in the Here and Now.

It is still easy to switch back and forth between the review, and a view of the critiqued pieces in the exhibit. I found it easiest to do this by going to the "Selected works" page and finding the artwork from there. Then I could see the work that was being described and see if I agreed with the review. Most of the works shown here have text about the work in the show and then links to other works by the artist.

Some of the images had an audio file attached in 2006, but now those six files are found in another exhibition page which has a picture of the art work being discussed. Oddly, the piece by Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Paperbacks), has a picture of Jeff Koons' work but the correct picture can be found in "Selected works" along with a transcript of her talk.

So, the exhibit is still on the web; it just takes some doing to put it all together.