ArtSeen
Bruno Dunley: Clouds
By Amanda Millet-SorsaBruno Dunley has eleven large-scale oil paintings and eleven notebook-scale drawings on display at Nara Roesler in Chelsea, known for its roster of Brazilian artists. Much of Dunley’s new work is the result of a deep investigation into color and finding raw materials within Brazil’s rich and vast natural resources to make handmade oil paint.
Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection
By Hovey BrockWith gob-smacking visual impact, Kimono Style showcases the sophistication of Japanese production techniques, traditional and industrial, in the service of intricate textile designs that range from the elegant to the bold.
Victor Burgin: Photopath
By Hearne PardeeThe appeal of Photopath’s conceptual layering lies in this “reality effect” in what Burgin later called “the condition of pure virtuality.
Shahzia Sikander: Havah…to breathe, air, life
By Lilly WeiIf you enter Madison Square Park at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street from now until early June, a resplendent, golden female figure confidently holding court from within a fenced lawn will greet you. Witness (2023) by Shahzia Sikander is impossible to miss.
Neil Welliver
By Alex GrimleyThe selection of works in the Neil Welliver show currently on view at Alexandre Gallery’s Lower East Side location offers a cross-section of the artist’s output in painting and printmaking between 1974 and his death in 2005. Four large landscape paintings (each about eight feet square) anchor the show, with four smaller paintings and seven prints rounding it out.
Jonathan Santoro: In Praise of Folly
By Mark Thomas GibsonAcid yellow light creates an amber hue that glows from a large exterior window at PEEP. Inside, tire tracks mark the floor. The smell of rubber, buzzing noise—seemingly coming from the overhead fluorescent lights—and scattered tires transform the gallery into an all-night garage. The all-night garage typically looms in the distance, the only beacon of light in an otherwise dark Northern Philadelphia landscape. In Jonathan Santoro’s “garage” there is a sense that something is being dismantled, rather than being repaired.
Gilbert Lewis: Portraits 1979 – 2002
By Curtis EckleyIn these works, spanning the late 1970s to the early 2000s and presented at Kapp Kapp for his first solo New York exhibition in two decades, Gilbert Lewis distills intimate representations of queer life from the periphery—a network of friends and acquaintances who made up the art scene on South Street.
Victor Boullet: WERKK.WERKK.LIVERPOOL.PAINTING.
By Alfred Mac AdamReilly Davidson has packed thirty-six Victor Boullet (b. 1969, Norway) paintings into the Lubov gallery: their psychological impact on the unprepared visitor almost warrants a warning label because their static, mundane violence leaves us bewildered.
Renee Gladman: Narratives of Magnitude
By Cassie PackardSince 2006, experimental poet-novelist Renee Gladman has been making drawings, often characterized by diagrammatic or architectural elements, that tap into language’s rich capaciousness. Gladman garnered acclaim for her Ravicka novels (2010–17), fictions in which bodies move through a shifting city-state with its own language.
Paul Pagk
By Emireth Herrera ValdésPaul Pagk’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu features a selection of twelve large paintings and thirteen works on paper, mostly made over the last three years, allowing us to appreciate the artist's mature style that fluctuates between control, gesturality, and improvisation.
less: minimalism in the 1960s
By Alfred Mac AdamThe show currently on view at Acquavella Galleries, which was guided into existence by Michael Findlay, enables us to see another side of Minimalism. The exhibition assembles some nineteen pieces by nineteen different artists, all working on a scale which, if not exactly domestic, enables us to appreciate individual works in all their playfulness and humor.
Ravi Jackson: Hardcore
By Osman Can YerebakanThe Los Angeles-based artist Ravi Jackson’s current exhibition at David Lewis, Hardcore, surrounds visitors with versions of chaos. Each work is crafted like lines of poetry unburdened by logic or concern for being understood.
In Search of the Miraculous
By Barbara A. MacAdamThis fascinating exhibition, curated by Gerard Mossé and Sebastian Sarmiento, leads us through physical, spatial, and spiritual realms to speculate on the nature of mostly abstract art in its many manifestations. It takes us through the variegated present, from the poetic expressions of artists like the Lebanese-born Etel Adnan to the young, Indigenous painter Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe.
Body Memory
By Emireth Herrera ValdésGHOSTMACHINE’s inaugural group exhibition, Body Memory, features Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Nicki Cherry, Kyoko Hamaguchi, Calli Roche, and Yvonne Shortt. Their works range in medium, and address the concept of the body from different perspectives. They include examinations of trauma, gestures, values, and physical experiences.
Andrea Fraser
By Clara Maria ApostolatosIt is not easy to unravel the different strands of Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique, which remains as clever, wry and provocative as ever. The artist has opened her first US commercial gallery show in over a decade at Marian Goodman, a six-piece survey showcasing the artist’s decades-long study of systems of power embedded within the art system. Bringing together photography, film, and installation art, the show traces her longstanding commitment to addressing local and global issues of structural inequality and marks a shift in Fraser’s angle and attitude in her critical approach—an incited reckoning with questions of social justice.
Shirin Neshat: The Fury
By Amelia SaulShirin Neshat’s impassioned and lyrical show The Fury at Gladstone Gallery is in black and white and rainbows of gray. Warm gray in the photographs that hang, halo-lit, in the first room; icier gray in the dual-channel video The Fury (2022) which, despairingly facing itself on two walls, is installed in the back room.
Aneta Bartos: Monotropa Terrain
By Alex A. JonesIn an erotic view of nature, the body is a psychedelic concept. That is to say, it’s a matter of altered perception. “The body” can swell to replace the scientific and colonial terms that typically delineate nature: an ecosystem is a body; the land is a body. It is the mutability of the body—and the eros of its constant becoming and unbecoming—that Aneta Bartos touches with her video-based exhibition Monotropa Terrain.
Alvaro Barrington
By Alfred Mac AdamAlvaro Barrington is all over the place. Literally. He’s out east, at Karma on East 2nd Street and up north at Anton Kern on 55th Street. And if these geographic extremes of the Manhattan art world aren’t enough, there’s the artist himself…
Marlon Mullen
By Jacob BrooksIt’s hard not to be charmed by the paintings of Marlon Mullen, which emanate his belief in their material and subject. In an art world that loves to self-pathologize, his self-titled show at JTT stands as a bright light of belief and earnestness that’s hard to come by, especially lately, in a desert of cynicism.
Halima Afi Cassells and Shanna Merola: Swan Song
By Steve PantonSwan Song, the exhibition, takes place in the Mike Kelley “Mobile Homestead,” a full-size replica of the eponymous artist's childhood home located on MOCAD's grounds. The venue is awkward, but the exhibition design, done by the artists, skillfully reimagines the space, transforming it into a seamless environment.
Hans Hartung: Revenge
By Robert C. MorganThe current exhibition of paintings by Hartung, titled Revenge, is a partial repetition of an earlier major exhibition of the artist’s work shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975. Several paintings from this exhibition have now been brought together nearly fifty years later for a second “recontextualization” of Hartung’s contribution to abstract art—one that was made, at least partially, during an intensely difficult period in European history.
David Deutsch: Hurly-Burly
By Saul OstrowGiven a selection of earlier works in the lower gallery at Eva Presenhuber it is apparent that Deutsch has always been aware that what differentiates a mimetic image from an abstract one is that an image’s mimetic function of simulation is at its highest when the medium least asserts itself; inversely when the medium asserts itself most viewers see its materiality and not what may be encoded in it.
Joan Brown
By Hearne PardeeBrown doesn’t pursue social satire. Rather she envisions her social mission as education through public art.
Ritual and Memory: The Ancient Balkans and Beyond
By Ann McCoyThis treasure-trove of artifacts from regions stretching from the Balkan Mountains north to the Carpathian Basin on view now at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is a revelation and engenders an overdue revision of ancient history.
Roma/New York, 1953–1964
By David RhodesFrom the moment of entering David Zwirner’s expansive first floor galleries, Roma/New York, 1953–1964 compels. There are so many great works—drawn from museums, private collections, foundations, and estates—juxtaposed in revealing combinations, that for direct visual pleasure and intellectual provocation it could not be more engaging.
Phyllis Stephens: The Movement of Material
By Charles MooreStephens, a fifth-generation quiltmaker, prayed and subsequently investigated the art of dance to bring her ten-work exhibition to life. In each tapestry, Black men and women dance, either alone or in pairs, indoors or outdoors, always fully engaged with their surroundings and emotions.
Julia Jo: Riptide
By Annabel KeenanIn her first US solo show, Riptide at Charles Moffett, Julia Jo embarks on a journey of self-discovery, examining interpersonal relationships in figural paintings that are obscured with swirls of body parts, hints of objects, and glimpses of interiors. Jo’s works are all intimate, rooted in the artist’s own experiences of moving from Seoul, her birthplace, to the US, where she has continuously relocated, a journey that left her with truncated relationships, miscommunications, and in a constant state of reintroduction and reinvention.
Wet Conceptualism
By William CorwinHand-written, rough, colorful, sentimental, or DIY, yet indicative of a complex concept-driven interior thought process not fully compliant with an aesthetic or formalist framework, one that is indicative of traditional “art”: these are the calling cards of “wet conceptualism.”
Jan Baracz: Mutiny’s Darling
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightJan Baracz’s exhibition Mutiny’s Darling at Peninsula Art Space provides a map of the overlooked. The artist utilizes materials marked by subtlety, favoring an inconspicuous tonality that exists somewhere between the woodshed and the boathouse, to address the impinged and imperceptible experience of traversing the ordinary.
Juan Francisco Elso: Por América
By Jonathan GoodmanJuan Francisco Elso: Por América at El Museo del Barrio not only includes the limited work Elso produced before passing away, but also the art of more than thirty artists from Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color
By Brandt JunceauIn New York this new year, the exhibition with the most argument, conjecture, and consequence is the Metropolitan Museum’s Chroma. This somewhat sly intervention means to reintroduce the presence of color in classical art.
Ted Gahl: Le Goon
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightTed Gahl’s Le Goon at Harkawik picks the plangent chords and stirs the submerged chromas of terra melancholia. Melancholia, as opposed to anhedonia, conjures a sensual pleasure within the somber. While his paintings don’t seem to exist in the present, they also don’t seem to be nostalgic for another time, instead dealing with some time outside of time.
Walter Sickert: Painting and Transgressing
By Joe FyfeOut of step with these vitalists is a survey of the career of Walter Sickert (1860–1942) at the Petit Palais. Drawing comparatively negligible attendance, Sickert is one of the most famous yet equally perverse British painters of the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth century. Thank God he’s here.
Benoît Platéus: Other Percolators
By Ann C. CollinsWhile the pictures retain distinct traces of the images from which Platéus works, his titles nudge viewers to riff on the visual and textual clues he presents, freely allowing their own associations to bubble up. It is his hope that new possibilities of interpretation will arise with each encounter as viewers interact with the works, revealing the ways in which seeing is a deeply personal—and perhaps a bit magical—act.
Luca Pancrazzi: FLASH LIGHT
By Jason RosenfeldA committed experimentalist, the Valdarno-born Pancrazzi, who lives and works in nearby Florence, reveals the man behind the curtain in one key picture, Flash, of a camera on a tripod. Its flash is aglow at left—it seems to explode from the picture surface—causing delicate blue rippling rings to pulse out from its center. Source becomes subject, and it is the combination of lenses, flares and glancing reflections, suffusing incandescence, and manipulated perspective that coalesce in this stimulating body of work.
Adebunmi Gbadebo: Remains
By Elizabeth BuheAdebunmi Gbadebo is an extraordinary artist, capable of manipulating, with rare intelligence, carefully-selected materials that align closely with her works’ affective power.
Susan Philipsz: Separated Strings
By David RhodesPhilipsz uses sound to physically engage with space, somehow like an audio sculptor; it’s a sensitivity that enables her to explore emotion, history, and myth, embodying through sound and place those themes in such a way as to make them accessible and intimate to experience in the here and now…
Thierry Mugler: Couturissime
By Maia SiegelThe Brooklyn Museum is leaning into fashion: along with the Mugler exhibit, they’re also showing an exhibition in remembrance of Virgil Abloh, the cult streetwear-turned-Louis Vuitton designer. Although one might hope this is a sign of textile arts getting their turn, it seems more like a grab for brand loyalists. I had never seen so many people in the Brooklyn Museum wearing heavily-branded designer duds.
Judy Ledgerwood: Sunny
By Mána TaylorIn her exhibition Sunny, Judy Ledgerwood has bold intentions. She began working on the paintings last January when she was searching for color during many gray days. At Denny Gallery, the paintings, as well as one large ceramic in the back of the gallery, feel necessary.
Modigliani Up Close
By Phyllis TuchmanModigliani Up Close, the impressive retrospective on display at the Barnes Foundation—its only venue—this autumn and winter rekindled my deep-rooted feelings for the artist. The scholarly, well-written exhibition catalogue, accessible to laymen, added further to my appreciation.
Eve Fowler: New Work
By Ksenia SobolevaThe exhibition of Fowler’s work currently on view at Gordon Robichaux shows us that her feminist pursuits are far from abandoned. Fittingly titled Eve Fowler: New Work, the solo show consists of a film, a series of collages, and a nine-channel video installation.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
By Maddie HamptonIn formal fluidity, Felix Gonzalez-Torres captured resilience. Forever rearticulated, the physicality of his art is itself ancillary, representing a finely tuned and unique symbolic language that Gonzalez-Torres developed to harbor the political, the personal, and the sometimes-violent intersection of the two.
Cy Twombly
By Alfred Mac AdamNever forgotten, Cy Twombly is currently in vogue, with a show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and this spectacular panoply of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper at Gagosian on Madison Avenue. The differences between the two shows are worth noting: in Boston you can see Twombly’s works in conjunction with ancient artifacts, both those belonging to the museum and others belonging to Twombly, himself an inveterate collector of antiquities.
Don Doe: I’ll Have What They’re Having
By Elizabeth JohnsonI’ll Have What They’re Having highlights Don Doe’s constructive/destructive visual devices that challenge viewers to juggle and decode multiple pictures and surfaces.
David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures
By Charles MooreKnown for his vibrant palette and depictions of Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, Hockney has evolved in the new millennium. 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, on view at Pace Gallery from January 13 through February 25, 2023, only reinforces this.
Esteban Jefferson: May 25, 2020
By Rebecca SchiffmanAt Esteban Jefferson’s first exhibition with 303 Gallery, he has created a space that can serve as a site of education and contemplation for how monuments function, through the extent of the 2020 protests.
