ArtSeen
Susan Bee: Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries: New Paintings
By Irene Lyla LeeApocalypses, Fables, and Reveries: New Paintings, is Susan Bee’s tenth solo exhibit at A.I.R. Gallery, where she has long been a member of the legendary co-op. The show features pieces created between 2020–2023, when the apocalypse became all too vivid in a collective imagination that was enduring the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anna Uddenberg: Continental Breakfast
By Hannah Sage KayDescending the stairs and dirty brown hallway to the two-room Upper East Side basement dwelling that is Meredith Rosen Gallery engenders an air of willing abjection before even entering Anna Uddenberg’s solo exhibition, Continental Breakfast, that features three pseudo-functional contraptions in a white-walled, blue-carpeted, drop ceiling-adorned space with florescent lights that feels like the prelude to a high-class murder.
Marie Watt: Singing Everything
By Vittoria BenzineHundreds of chorusing voices, hands, and stories crest across Singing Everything, the second solo show at Marc Straus by Portland-based interdisciplinary and multicultural artist Marie Watt. For twenty-five years, Watt has collaged and sculpted blankets into layered wall hangings and towers that deconstruct the household object’s symbolism within her own diverse German-Scot and Seneca heritage—and the grander scale of the human life cycle. We’re born on blankets, bond with them as teething children and slumbering adults, and die wrapped in them, if we’re lucky.
Michael Queenland: Rudy’s Ramp of Remainders Redux
By Toby KampsHermetic and mysterious, Michael Queenland’s Rudy’s Ramp of Remainders Redux at Maureen Paley tries to conjure hidden meanings from the stuff of everyday life.
John Tursi: New Works
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIn John Tursi's New Works at Ricco/Maresca, the artist cultivates a sense of movement and psychedelic animation through dense repetition. Simple shapes are plaited into larger patterns that Tursi combines into machinic bodies. Each figure evokes pulsating Broadyway Boogie-Woogies of movement, that systematize the body into reeling conveyor belts of synapse.
Red, White, Yellow, and Black: 1972–73
By Cassie PackardThough the panel discussion framed feminism as a buzzword, Red, White, Yellow, and Black was feminism in practice. So is the effort put forward by the show: to sift through ephemera, restage artworks, reconvene group members, and obtain oral histories, all for the sake of fleshing out what never should have been missing from art history in the first place.
Josephine Halvorson: Unforgotten
By Ksenia SobolevaWhile the French term nature morte literally means “dead nature,” the artist makes an argument for the contrary. “Still life” becomes “still alive,” referring not only to the subject of the painting, but also its maker.
Robert Swain: The Perception of Color
By Alfred Mac AdamRobert Swain’s current exhibition The Perception of Color lets ten paintings (please excuse the mixed metaphor) do the talking, and their rhetoric makes a more convincing argument than any essay.
Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds
By Ann McCoyIn an age when few dread eternal damnation and the torments of hell no longer function as a deterrent to bad behavior, a stunning exhibition at the Asia Society Museum expands our knowledge of this infernal nether region.
Uta Barth
By Jessica HolmesThroughout her long career, photographer Uta Barth has probed the limits of human perception through deceptively simple imagery. Sheer curtains, glass pitchers, or bare tree branches are only ostensible subjects, conduits for an ongoing examination of what is her primary implement: light.
Gabriela Vainsencher: Epic, Heroic, Ordinary
By Christopher T. RichardsThe latest in a series of recent solo exhibitions featuring contemporary artists who explore not only figural art, but specifically historical—and thoroughly canonized—representation forms showcases Gabriela Vainsencher’s playful ceramic riffs on ancient Greek and Minoan aesthetics. Now on view at Asya Geisberg Gallery, these artworks offer her an unexpected avenue for feminist reflections on motherhood and the maternal body.
Mona Hatoum: all of a quiver
By Jake RommIn Mona Hatoum’s visual world, the grid is often also a cage, and in this sense all of a quiver references not just collapsing structures, but also the cages used to hold the refugees such collapses create.
Ted Thirlby: Regeneration
By Joyce BeckensteinEast End Arts in Riverhead, among the organizations supporting the creative community on the North Fork, envisioned more of an arts district rather than a single arts center, one with a broader and more diverse reach, inclusive of emerging and well-practiced artists. Regeneration, Ted Thirlby’s solo exhibition at EEA aptly represents how that effort has enlivened and redefined the future legacy of Long Island’s “other Fork.”
JR: Les Enfants d'Ouranos
By Jonathan GoodmanLes Enfants d'Ouranos, translated into English as “The Children of Ouranos,” references Ouranos, the heavenly deity who fathered the Titans. As a personification of the sky Ouranos might be understood both as progenitor and protector of the anonymous, beleaguered children seen in JR’s works of art.
Pat Adams: Large Paintings
By Alfred Mac AdamTo refer to Pat Adams as a grand and venerable presence in American painting is merely to state the obvious. Born in 1928, she has had, since 1954, show after show right up until today. She is a national treasure and ought to be regarded as such. But it is not her age, the number of her shows, or the many institutions that proudly display her art that matter. Our concern should be the quality of her work, her dedication, and her artistic genius. This show is a superb opportunity to focus on what makes her great.
Lesia Khomenko: Full Scale
By Annabel KeenanFor her first-ever U.S. solo show, Full Scale at Fridman Gallery, Ukrainian artist Lesia Khomenko considers the unique experience of witnessing and documenting a war from afar. Like the rest of Ukraine, Khomenko’s life was upended when Russia invaded in February of 2022. As she fled the country, she left behind her physical world, as well as the less tangible aspects of daily life. Particularly crucial for Khomenko was the lack of information on the situation inside Ukraine and the loss of easy contact with her loved ones, including her husband, Max, who is fighting in the war.
Angela Heisch: Low Speed Highs
By Tennae MakiContained biospheres of land, sea, and outer space make up the paintings in Low Speed Highs, Angela Heisch’s current show at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London. The works represent a break away from the tradition of landscape painting, wherein Jung’s dueling archetypes of anima and animus seem to be contained, as well. These pieces picture an optical balance of interlocking gradient shapes rendered in an architectural vernacular that recalls Zaha Hadid’s physical structures.
C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction
By Leo YuanWith the exhibition C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction at Hunter College, art historians Wen-shing Chou and Daniel M. Greenberg set out to present the artistic side of the collector.
Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/
Shapes
By Alex Grimley
Stripes/Plaids/Shapes demonstrates the tremendous variety of sensory and somatic effects Kenneth Noland could wrest from these economical means. With its spacious hanging, each of the twelve paintings is presented in its specificity, to be taken on its own terms.
Mary Jones:
Les Problémes du Confort
By Tom McGlynn
Mary Jones’s newest paintings perpetuate the pas de deux she has previously choreographed between collaged and readymade photographic sources and bravura painterly passages. Her process typically integrates the two via a wide array of technical interventions, activating these elements into a series of staccato movements that refer to the aleatory nature of the “cut-up” but also to genealogies of expressionist painting.
Will Bruno: Midnight River
By Nicholas HeskesFor the European Impressionists, the method of plein air painting was meant to be an interpretation rather than an attempt at faithful reproduction—a dramatic shift from earlier approaches to landscape painting which relied on preliminary sketches, in-studio techniques, and the work of other painters to create a convincing imitation of nature. Will Bruno finds himself situated somewhere between these two approaches to the landscape in Midnight River, his current exhibition at Europa Gallery.
Thérèse Mulgrew: Room 126
By Madison FordThérèse Mulgrew developed her new solo exhibition at Freight + Volume by engaging with the tenets of cinema, conceiving of the whole as a short film caught in oil on canvas. What results is an exhibition experience unafraid to employ exactness in service of emotional resonance. To step into the gallery is to concede to a directorial pursuit and submit to the voyeur’s perch.
Richard Tuttle: 18x24
By Susan HarrisRichard Tuttle: 18x24, the exhibition of new, exuberantly colorful wall reliefs on view at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, is an absolute affirmation of the supremacy of joy that can be had in the making and viewing of art despite—or, maybe because of—the divisiveness, anger, fear, and untruths that abound.
Chih-Chien Wang: A Bright Circle
By Marc MayerThere’s a quietness to Chih-Chien Wang’s photographs, in aggregate as well as individually. Like Vilhelm Hammershøi and Giorgio Morandi, he’s a stay-at-home artist for the most part. In fact, he stays mostly in the kitchen. His humble poetry of daily life has an opportunistic iconography, pleasant things noticed while going about his day. But the signature subject is groceries. The fruit and leafy things he eats, or their detritus, are shot in morning light against backgrounds tinted pale. The neutral studio lighting promotes the isolated subject, but sometimes a darker setting is used for more insistence. Generally, these portraits of comestibles aren’t tantalising. Cut or otherwise abstracted by meal preparation, they may be partially or even largely consumed, or just shy of expiration.
Loriel Beltrán: Calor y Color
By Clara Maria ApostolatosLoriel Beltrán’s first solo presentation with Lehmann Maupin, Calor y Color (Heat and Color), explores the subject of light and how it is created, perceived, and materialized through vibrant color. Close inspection of his works reveals that congealed paint creates surfaces that ripple like water rather than drippings or brushwork. Beltrán pours diverse hues of paint into specially crafted molds and allows them to dry for extended periods. This laborious process is repeated numerous times over the course of months. Once the paint has fully settled, Beltrán slices open the canvas, revealing a tapestry of stratified bands of paint in mesmerizing layers of vivid color that seem to undulate and converge, forming an entirely new visual field.
Vermeer
By Joyce BeckensteinThese are but a few of the ways Vermeer immersed his subjects within timeless, serene settings where, distanced from a world awhirl in conflict, they experience inner peace. And the viewer, in the quietude of Vermeer’s space, can share that sense of peace.
Bispo do Rosário: All Existing Materials on Earth
By Clara Maria ApostolatosIt is tempting to think of Bispo’s work, like that of other artists conventionally grouped under the parameters of the “Outsider” or other approximate synonyms, as launching back and forth from the margins of society to the forefront of artistic innovation. But such a simplistic view misses the complexity and depth of his artistry.
![Arthur Bispo do Rosário, <em>Untitled [Manto da apresentação (Annunciation garment)]</em>, n.d. Fabric, thread, ink, found materials, fiber, 46 × 55 × 2 inches. Courtesy Americas Society. Photo: Rafael Adorjan.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/36054/apostolatos-bispo-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Body and Territory
By David CarrierBut while for at least two generations, recent German art has been much displayed in our galleries and museums, many of the 31 artists or working groups of artists in Body and Territory are not familiar. This show aspires to change that situation.
Sean Scully: The Passenger
By David CarrierHere, then, we get a good presentation of Scully’s entire development. I cannot imagine a better introduction to his art.
Photography Then
By Clyde NicholsThe exhibition’s title is a satirical jab at similar museum-based surveys that attempt to capture contemporary photographic vectors but are constrained by unwieldy bureaucracy. The curators’ hope is that a more intimate approach will yield a more nuanced set of relationships. By most measures, they’ve succeeded.
Larry Poons: The Outerlands
By David EbonyIn a varied professional career that has had significant highs and lows, Poons’s passion and commitment to art was and is unwavering, as evidenced by the works in this show.
No existe un mundo poshuracán
By Davida Fernández-BarkanCoinciding with the fifth anniversary of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, the exhibition marshals roughly thirty-six works of art in support of its thesis—that Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States is to blame for the devastating effects of that event.
Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love
By Leah Triplett HarringtonLyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love presents thirty-five years of the artist’s work, which often veers into collage, installation, and performance in an exhibition that is as much a cumulative self-portrait as it is something of a mid-career retrospective.
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons
By Toby KampsAs the exhibition’s title—an objet trouvé taken from a sticker the artist found on a motorcycle helmet—portends, the histories it conjures are of decline and desperation. Yet the mystery and madness pervading all of Nelson’s creations give them antic and subversive power.
Ann Craven: Twelve Moons
By Greg LindquistAnn Craven’s exhibition Twelve Moons, a cycle of lunar paintings created over its phases in 2022, is packed with a chromatic punch. Quickly and decisively painted, each picture is an expedient vignette of the night sky.
Signals: How Video Transformed the World
By Barbara LondonToday we live at a moment of accelerated technological transformation, as smart phones and social media have become the means of both rapid audiovisual production and global communication. This is a good moment to look back at the video with fresh eyes.
Martin Kippenberger: Paintings 1984–1996
By Alfred Mac AdamMissing are the drunken streetlamps, the impromptu metro entrances, and other sculptural objects, but what we do have makes us realize that each piece has infinite possibilities. In other words, these eight paintings are a valid sample of Kippenberger at his outrageous, parodic best.
Jane Freilicher: Abstractions
By Alfred Mac AdamA curatorial tour-de-force combining resources from the artist’s estate (represented by the Kasmin Gallery), private collections, and at least one public institution, the Delaware Art Museum, these twelve oils show a painter in her mid-thirties: confident, bold—the sixty by seventy-inch canvases attest to that boldness—unafraid to create work that pushes the limit of domestic-scale art.
Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop Style
By AJ MorrisThe exhibition, which was co-curated by Elena Romero and Elizabeth Way and is accompanied by a book of the same name, is part of an ongoing, year-long celebration of hip hop’s 50th birthday, and, with over 100 featured pieces, is the largest-ever exhibition of its kind.
Paul Mogensen: Paintings: 1965-2022
By David RhodesThe paintings are all about geometry and color; their mapping of consequent compositions, together with application of paint, is always workmanlike. There is no pretense.
Dario Escobar: Encrypted Messages
By Rebecca SchiffmanEscobar is known for his extended reflections on what it means to be an artist from Guatemala. By repurposing popular and commercial objects, he gives us an opportunity to rethink Guatemalan history and culture in a global context.
peter campus: meditations
By Rebecca SchiffmanUnlike films, these works do not have any narrative, peak, or climax. Instead, they force viewers to take notice of the small, minute shifts of the quotidian life in these untouched natural zones and ecosystems.
Tony Cragg: Sculptures and Works on Paper
By Phyllis TuchmanPossessing a well-honed, singular formal intelligence, Cragg breathes life into vibrant entities. He masterfully sets in motion rhythmic passages. Repetitive waves wash across his sculptures and enliven his compelling surfaces. His art is fluid, not unchangeable.
Sophia Narrett: Carried by Wonder
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhen everything is adornment it becomes a critical gesture, a self-negation, a reflexive desire that suspends us forever in the moment of the close Victorian look. When the dream becomes too romantic or too dreamy, it shakes us awake. Narrett is able to generate a transcendent interiority on the scale of Emily Dickinson, where self confinement becomes transgressed, drawn and redrawn, to inscribe it within fantasy before breaking its illusion.
Minerva Cuevas: In Gods We Trust
By Hovey BrockMinerva Cuevas’s research-based, socially engaged art makes manifest the latent connections between ethno-nationalism, income inequality, the climate crisis, and neo-colonialism.
Chris Burden: Cross Communication
By Cal McKeeverHow do you preserve a work whose medium is rooted in ephemerality? How does a work retain its performance-ness (as opposed to the video-ness, photograph-ness, object-ness, etc. of standard documentation) fifty years down the road? These questions are on full display in Chris Burden: Cross Communication, an exhibition featuring documentation of twenty-two performances from 1971–80, without presuming to contain the answers.
KP Brehmer: World in Mind
By Saul OstrowIn his effort to subvert capitalism’s visual representation of politics, economics, science, consumer culture, and everyday life, KP Brehmer adopted a graphic designer’s aesthetic to produce diagrams, postcards, inserts, multiples, posters, banners, and displays.
peter campus: meditations
By Hearne PardeeAt Cristin Tierney, two of peter campus’s darkly introspective Polaroid portraits from the 1970s, installed in the office, remind us of the brooding romanticism of his early black-and-white landscape photographs. In an interview, campus calls landscape “a face inside out,” emphasizing his emotional projection into the scenes he records.
