Tag: james cohan gallery

Kaloki Nyamai at James Cohan Gallery

Nairobi-based artist Kaloki Nyamai’s New York solo debut at James Cohan Gallery introduces an artist who uses acrylic paint, stitching and photo transfer to create complex surfaces that suggest complicated histories.  This painting’s title, ‘The one who stole my heart,’ features a figure leaning back into a man whose outward-looking eyes connect with our gaze.  In contrast to the couple’s intimate, relaxed moment, partially visible figures in the background raise their arms in what could be celebration or protest.  Elsewhere, photo transfers contrast happy moments of communal activity with news articles about political unrest as Nyamai juxtaposes the lives of individuals with larger social happenings.  (On view through May 4th).

Kaloki Nyamai, Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.
Kaloki Nyamai, (detail) Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.

Eamon Ore-Giron at James Cohan Gallery

Can a deity’s identity change over time?  Struck by Octavio Paz’s observation that interpretations of a sculpture of Coatlicue in Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia have gone from “goddess to demon, demon to monster and from monster to masterpiece” in the centuries since Spanish conquest, Eamon Ore-Giron imagines contemporary identities for familiar divinities in new paintings, ceramics and textiles at James Cohan Gallery.  Here, in ‘Talking Shit with Mama Killa,’ Ore-Giron pictures the Incan moon goddess with her geometric fan-shaped crown creating angular and organic shapes that cover her upper head while the lower half of her face is transformed by triangular patterns and tear-like blue drops.  Characterized by angular features that appear to be morphing, this divinity’s identity is capable of shifting and updating by the moment.  (On view in Tribeca through Oct 21st).

Eamon Ore-Giron, Talking Shit with Mama Killa, mineral paint and flasche on canvas, 72 x 72 inches, 2023.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor at James Cohan Gallery

Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s intricately crafted, marquetry hybrid images of friends and family at James Cohan Gallery picture an array of pleasures that include a tropical hotel bar, a young woman playing guitar on the front steps of a house and friends enjoying time together.  The first piece in the show – an image of a cactus created by collaging together thin pieces of wood veneer and other materials and titled ‘Decision Fatigue’ – introduces her technique and points to the unending possibilities for choosing and creating images out of the variety of materials at her disposal, which include not only wood but photographed and textured material as well as paint.  In what feels like Taylor’s most integrated assemblages of materials to date, the artist’s skill is foremost on display (in the tones of Javier and Will’s faces and hair in this image, for example), and the biggest pleasure is not the subject matter but the artist’s skill in rendering it.  (On view in Tribeca through June 24th).

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Javier and Will in CDMX, marquetry hybrid, 56 x 47 ¾ inches, 2022.

Helene Appel at James Cohan Gallery

Soap suds, sand and spaghetti are the mundane subjects of Helene Appel’s extraordinary new paintings at James Cohan Gallery.  A muted palette and minute detail make it necessary to draw close to finely detailed renderings of beach sand and glistening soap bubbles.  From a few feet away, this painting (seen in detail) delights as a trompe l’oeil rendering of a delicately colored fishing net while doubling as an energetically free, grid-busting abstraction. (On view on the Lower East Side through July 27th).

Helene Appel, detail of Blue Net Painting, acrylic and watercolor on linen, 92 ½ x 155 ½ inches, 2018.

Michele Grabner at James Cohan Gallery

Handmade blankets rendered in bronze and boldly colored paintings based on the blankets’ patterns orient Michele Grabner’s latest body of work toward the domestic, the personal and the tactile. Each blanket’s form looks ghostly, harkening back to the bodies that used it to stay warm. As 2-D images on the wall, the cozy factor is replaced by a reference to the grid, the ubiquitous underlying principle to much mid-20th century art. Grabner suggests that context is key. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Chelsea location, through Jan 28th).

Michele Grabner, Untitled, bronze, 43 ½ x 20 x 12 ½ inches, unique, 2016. Background painting: Untitled, oil on burlap and canvas, 86 ½ x 120 inches, 2016.
Michele Grabner, Untitled, bronze, 43 ½ x 20 x 12 ½ inches, unique, 2016. Background painting: Untitled, oil on burlap and canvas, 86 ½ x 120 inches, 2016.