Barbara Hepworth’s pierced organic abstractions, Henry Moore’s curvilinear reclining figures and the undulating forms of Chinese scholar stones come to mind when viewing Sarah Crowner’s attractive new bronze sculptures at Luhring Augustine Gallery’s Tribeca space. Reflecting Crowner’s vibrant paintings, which have fittingly vivid titles like ‘Red Oranges Over Orange with Curve,’ or ‘Violets Over Reds,’ the sculptures are enhanced by and enhance their environment. (On view through May 4th).
Iconic Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist is acutely attuned to the comfort of her audiences. Visitors to her atrium-filling video installation at MoMA in 2008 might have lounged on a low couch while another level of relaxation – beds – awaited at the artist’s New Museum retrospective in 2016. Rist’s current show at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Chelsea offers both a bed and assorted furniture, enticing the public into the artwork itself to be bathed in constantly morphing patterns and images. Rist (seen in this photo conversing with visitors) conceived of Hauser & Wirth’s back gallery space as a living room; her simultaneous show at Luhring Augustine Gallery is a projection-filled back yard. (On view at Hauser & Wirth through Jan 13th and at Luhring Augustine through Feb 3rd).
From Marilyn Monroe to Marlene Dietrich, Yasumasa Morimura mimics the iconic looks of famous figures in the series ‘100 M’s Self-Portraits,’ now on view at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery space. Having made a name for himself in the ‘80s through to the present day via vividly colored photos that depict his reenactments of famous artworks with himself dressed as the main character (he started as Van Gogh with a bandaged ear), the now 72-year-old photographer opted for smaller format black and white images to create his 100 piece portrait series from the 1993-2000. Here, he takes his version of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s into the subway, having his audience watch a passerby react as we also consider the implications of his race and gender transgressing role play. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 21st).
From Boston to San Diego, Lee Friedlander’s black and white photos of urban landscapes turn mundane street scenes into extraordinary coincidences of arranged forms. In Friedlander’s hands, any vertical object in the environment can bisect a scene into separate vignettes – people standing on the sidewalk as seen through car windows seem to occupy their own separate worlds while on this highway overpass in Dallas, a guardrail divides one location into two radically different places. 45 photos from Friedlander’s 60+ year career selected by filmmaker Joel Coen, now on view at Luhring Augustine Gallery, demonstrate Friedlander’s impressive ability to reframe our view of the world. (On view through July 28th).
Known for adopting materials that resemble urban infrastructure (streetlamps, signage) and manipulating them with apparently Herculean effort into whimsical sculpture, Mark Handforth scales down the size but delivers on delight in a show of new work at Luhring Augustine Gallery in Tribeca. Tall burnt matchstick sculptures and deliciously candy-colored aluminum columns accompany ‘Harlequin Star,’ a sculpture that appears to be a guardrail casually folded into a star shape with a neon accent. Handforth has commented on the recurring stars in his work, identifying the shape as something “so recognizable that [it] cease[s] to exist.” Though its ubiquity may make it mundane, Handforth harnesses unexpected materials and light to make this star a standout. (On view through July 28th).
