The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

IAN CHENG with Osman Can Yerebakan

Since earning his MFA from Columbia University in 2009, Cheng has been investigating ways to infuse humanity into the machine, not shying away from the possibilities embedded in chaos, in defiance of pristine and consequential order technology and science manifest. After debuting at Serpentine Galleries early last year, BOB continues Cheng’s utilization of simulation to challenge narrative constructs of art, a path he embarked on with his Emissaries saga, composed of intertwined and infinite narrative possibilities within live simulation, which will be a part of the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 14 in March.

In Conversation

AMY SHERALD with Osman Can Yerebakan

Where does a masterful painter, a portraitist, go after painting the portrait of a First Lady? The answer is in Amy Sherald’s grasping, intimate, and serene paintings of subjects she pulls from the crux of life, grasping the heart of the matter in each model.

In Conversation

LORNA SIMPSON with Osman Can Yerebakan

"People really desire a narrative; they want to see a fully formed, closed, succinct message. I’ve always in some way avoided a very closed, concise narrative."

In Conversation

HITO STEYERL with Osman Can Yerebakan

Presenting a commissioned video installation and existing work by multimedia artist Hito Steyerl, Drill at the Park Avenue Armory is the Berlin-based artist’s most expansive presentation in the United States to date.

In Conversation

YTO BARRADA
with Osman Can Yerebakan

Yto Barrada is one of the most prolific artists working today, blurring the boundaries between different techniques, disciplines, and hierarchies in art and culture. The New York-based French-Moroccan artist’s primary material is history, with its gnarly paths and unforeseeable findings. In her expansive work, anecdotes from oral or documented pasts transform into visually haunting works stemming from meticulous research and an interdisciplinary vision.

Ravi Jackson: Hardcore

The 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.

Precious Okoyomon: the sun eats her children

Smaller than Precious Okoyomon’s 59th Venice Biennale installation at the Arsenale, the presentation in the Eternal City operates like an echo chamber, not only for the ear but also for the eye and the skin. Beauty—with its allure and dangerous aloofness—is a core in the artist’s work in poetry, visual art, and food. Under seedlings of botanical beauty, questions of power grow.

Doron Langberg: Likeness

The possibility of a queer visuality unfettered by ideas of representation is at the forefront of Doron Langberg’s debut exhibition, Likeness, at Yossi Milo Gallery.

Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?

The core of the YBCA’s census awareness program was and still is a group exhibition titled Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?, in which more than 20 artists, mostly from the Bay Area, could exhibit their work on citizenship and civic presence, supported by workshops and performances in line with the organization’s multidisciplinary program.

Marina Perez Simão: Tudo é e não é

Mostly large scale, each of the 23 oils on canvas translates Simão’s observations through her São Paulo studio’s window into liquid landscapes. Beyond what the eye sees, they defy geographies, optics, and harmonies of the material world.

ALVIN BALTROP: Selected by Douglas Crimp

In one of Alvin Baltrop’s photographs at Galerie Buchholz, the late queer icon and activist, Marsha P. Johnson joyfully smiles at the camera. Her face is nested in voluptuously flowing hair as she leans toward Baltrop’s lens. None of the seventy-two photographs on display are dated with precision.

CARRIE MOYER:
Pagan’s Rapture and Seismic Shuffle

Times are queer in Carrie Moyer’s twin exhibitions at DC Moore and Mary Boone Galleries, where the New York-based painter introduces exceptional, unabashedly jubilant new paintings of acrylic and glitter on canvas.

Thinking Collections: Telling Tales: A Survey Exhibition of Kyzyl Tractor Art Collective

Thinking Collections: Telling Tales is the first U.S. survey dedicated to the Kazakh art collective Kyzyl Tractor. Kyzyl Tractor is an avant-garde art collective established in the mid ’90s in the wake of the liberating reformations of Perestroika.

Kader Attia Reason’s Oxymorons

Kader Attia’s recurring themes, such as repair, trauma, and loss, occupy Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location in his ambitious exhibition Reason’s Oxymorons.

Oscar Murillo: A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise

In a show with children’s drawings, such an angel resonates with growing up, the unstoppable passage from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

Leeroy New: Aliens of Manila

The sprawling installation is the culmination of the artist’s sojourn amidst grassroots Latin communities and the skyrocketing gentrification of the Lower East Side. Dense with an unabashed color palette of low-cost plastic, items such as baskets or fly swatters are molded into various renderings of abstraction.

Crack Up - Crack Down

Befittingly, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts assumes satire as its central theme under the curation of Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars, who have long subverted despotic decrees of power with open-ended wit and an array of transcultural references

Alex Da Corte A Man Full of Trouble

Arguably, Alex Da Corte has been one of the most prolific artists of his generation in the last two or so years. Between Die Hexe, his magnificent early 2015 occupation of the Upper East Side townhouse housing the blue-chip gallery Luxembourg & Dayan and his current return to New York with a solo exhibition at Maccarone this month, Da Corte has been productive.

Louise Lawler: She’s Here

Louise Lawler's extensive survey, She's Here, at Vienna's SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, manifests her interest in what I will call "transient visibility," which has over the years come to define Lawler's grand oeuvre.

Exhibition 1

Only a few months following the revoked prohibition of citizens of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries to enter the United States, and amidst gradually worsening political relationships with the Middle East, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art opened its doors at a ground floor space in SoHo, in close vicinity to peer institutions such as Swiss Institute and Goethe-Institut’s Ludlow 38.

PACIFICO SILANO: After Silence

Absent are bodies in Pacifico Silano’s After Silence, yet this absence leaves a haunting presence in what remains.

Okayama Art Summit 2019: If the Snake

Blending with its surroundings, the engaging art spills outside, runs through the streets, and bleeds into uncharted, overlooked interiors, bringing fresh breath to sites frequently occupied yet rarely used outside of their original intents.

Carlos Motta: Conatus

Motta’s work in film, sculpture, print, and photography has long dissected the ways religious fundamentalism, primarily Catholicism, has condemned diverse representations of sexuality in indigenous cultures.

Summer of David

“Memory figures large in David’s life: As a young adult, because of the images he has to overcome in order to heal from his past,” writes Amy Scholder in her introduction to In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. Scholder

The Young and Evil

The group exhibition The Young and Evil at David Zwirner looks at an artistic moment, foremost in Downtown New York, during the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality and figurative painting were equally frowned upon.

ANETA BARTOS: Family Portrait

Fatherhood, compared to motherhood, remains less-charted terrain. Family Portrait, Aneta Bartos’s first exhibition with Postmasters Gallery, delves into the artist’s relationship with her father, a former bodybuilder living in central Poland, with photographs full of vigor and vulnerability.

The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement

The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, a 75-artist exhibition about the history, state, and future of migration thrives through its intricate groupings of artists, juxtaposed to integrate mediums, genres, undertones, and geographies, reasserting the capability of thematic group shows to narrate the evolving yet repetitious fate of human experience.

NOT OVER

New York-based curatorial initiative Duplex and digital designer Hollie Pollak helped the organization to gather presentations of new or existing artworks from Visual AIDS alumni, such as Carlos Motta, Conrad Ventur, and Pamela Sneed, in addition to fresh faces, including two video artists, Jake Brush and Jaimie Warren.

RICHARD HAWKINS:
Hotel Suicide

Spearheading Richard Hawkins’s fifth exhibition at Greene Naftali is a painting titled, And then come the dawn (2017), which took Hawkins over a decade to complete. In an email conversation, the L.A.-based artist expressed his restored interest in this painting after a decade with the current socio-political climate. Hawkins re-imagined the story of a worn-out, gay, white liberal at a hotel room in Thailand where the protagonist “takes his indulgence a step too irrevocably far.

BARKLEY HENDRICKS:
Them Changes

Dedicated to Barkley Hendricks’s lesser known works on paper, Them Changes starts with an X-ray image of a person’s derriere superimposed over a graphite drawing of an anonymous buttocks, the X-ray overshadowing the liveliness of human flesh.

Ibrahim Ahmed: It Will Always Come Back to You

Fragments constitute Ibrahim Ahmed’s art: pieces of colorful textiles, words from disparate languages, and memories of remote places.

EDUARDO NAVARRO:
Into Ourselves

‘Delicious’ rarely defines a work of art. Out of the five senses, tasting is a relatively new tool for experiencing art; an inclusive spectacle employed by contemporary artists for social engagement.

Gillian Wearing: Life

The word “life” is a fine title for any exhibition because, in the end, isn’t everything surrounding us simply life? But in the case of Gillian Wearing’s Life, which is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work by a U.S. institution, it proves to be a perfectly fitting title right from the beginning.

Andrew Sendor: InstaCOVID Drawings

Andrew Sendor’s InstaCOVID Drawings, which remained accessible through Sperone Westwater’s online viewing room through August 3, testified to the intrusion of the digital into physical reality as powerfully as Zoom happy hours, Clubquarantine parties, or camera hook-ups.

Sal Salandra: Iron Halo

The tightly sewn paintings of dungeons decorated with confessionals, crosses, and domestic furniture come from an artist who clearly creates like his life depends on it. The salvational aura in each painting radiates not only through his mastery of color and form through thread but also from his vivid rendition of sex in a ritualistic devotion.

TSIBI GEVA: Jolt

The paintings on view in Israeli artist Tsibi Geva’s first solo exhibition at Albertz Benda embody the tumultuousness of his homeland. They evoke displacement, belonging, and demise through narratives that range from intimate to commonplace.

PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU:
Colorful Line

Tens of branches sprout out of a large white wall, each with a colored plastic bag hung to it at the entrance to Colorful Line, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s first exhibition in New York in over a decade.

JACOLBY SATTERWHITE:
Blessed Avenue

The artist’s meditation on his bygone mother’s legacy infuses benevolence and longing into a universe poised between a sassy ’90s house music video and a purgatory scene à la Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Tschabalala Self: Cotton Mouth

At age 30, Self is an artist with an unmistakable visual cohesion, from her orchestration of figures staring over their shoulders, to vibrantly monochromatic backgrounds that spit the characters back at us. Most crucially, however, her chosen technique renders a Self painting unmistakable.

Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair

A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched,” explained Robert Smithson in his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.”

Sascha Braunig: Lay Figure

In the combat between weightlessness and force, the winner is left ambiguous: are the hands guardians of affably soft columns or do they clutch the helpless anchors to destroy? Searching for an answer is futile, and settling for humor is suggested.

MINOUK LIM:
Mamour

Minouk Lim’s first solo exhibition in New York introduces the South Korean artist’s equally haunting and inquisitive practice with three bodies of work intertwined into a eulogy on loss and the consequential search for the missing.

Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — Marvellous Entanglement

Julien’s love song to the Brazilian architect’s life and philosophy is his most recent film installation, Lina Bo Bardi — Marvellous Entanglement (2019), which is currently on view at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.