At over eight feet high, British artist Sarah Ball’s portrait of Elliot has stunning presence in Stephen Friedman Gallery’s Tribeca space. Drawn to young individuals whose self-fashioning demonstrates their creativity and defies gender norms, Ball meticulously renders details of face, hair and dress in an appreciation of each subject’s unique identity. (On view in Tribeca through March 23rd).
Known for working in media including performance, film and theater, LA artist Glenn Kaino turns to portrait painting, small-scale sculpture of adapted samurai helmets and Japanese punch embroidery for his first major solo show at Pace Gallery. Fresh on the heels of a soon-to-close exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum in LA for which he recreated his grandfather’s small East LA market, Kaino continues to probe his heritage as a Japanese American. The show’s portraits aim to keep a record of community in the form of paintings of Kaino’s friends, musicians and people he meets. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 24th).
Near the entrance to the Drawing Center’s retrospective of work by late Belgian artist Stephane Mandelbaum hangs a diverse selection of portraits, arresting in their distortions and expressive immediacy, that signal his complex and conflicted experience of the aftermath of WWII. A drawing of Francis Bacon, known for painting distorted figures reflecting collective horror at the atrocities of the war, hangs next to a portrait of Bacon’s criminally connected lover, George Dyer, which in turn is close to a portrait of embattled Nazi paramilitary leader Ernst Rohm. Giving voice to a disturbing constellation of ideas via texts in Yiddish, French, Italian and German and pornographic imagery, the drawings explore the artist’s obsessions with sex and power which extend into his family life. Under the portrait of Bacon pictured here is an almost totally obscured drawing of Mandelbaum’s father, artist and professor Arie Mandelbaum, visible just as a predella, a platform on which an altar would be placed. (On view in SoHo through Feb 18th).
Raised in rural Pennsylvania with little access to museums but within easy reach of her mom’s crafting supplies, New York artist Melissa Joseph developed a textile-based practice resulting in painterly portraits of family now on view at Margot Samel in Tribeca. Three small pieces in needle felted wool on industrial felt, mounted on found silver plates, are the size of embroidery but use material more akin to impasto painting. Here, Joseph’s extended family piles on to a living room seat, creating a tangle of bodies as familiar and comfortable as the material depicting them. (On view in Tribeca through Nov 22nd).
Marlene Dietrich simmers with irritation in a photo by Irvin Penn, the face of Georg Baselitz’s mother is both frightful and beautiful with purple, red and yellow color, and Piet Mondrian breaks his own profile down into a robot-like assemblage of flat planes in 125 Newbury’s absorbing group exhibition ‘Face Values’ in Tribeca. From mechanical to emotive, around twenty visages from the 20th – 21st century employ a variety of techniques – from Zhang Huan’s ash on linen to Julian Schnabel’s broken crockery – to explore the expressive quality of the human face. Here, Elizabeth Peyton’s portrait of John Lydon portrays the 70’s Sex Pistol’s singer in a thoughtful pose at odds with the punk’s public persona. (On view in Tribeca through July 28th).
