Jung Eun Hye at Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Jung Eun Hye’s black and white conte crayon drawings of her dog Jiro, now on view at Ricco Maresca Gallery, are a testament to the artist’s appreciation of and love for an animal she rescued nine years ago.  Jiro comes across as spunky, wise, laughing in various iterations.  Jung enhances the dog’s vivacity with lively patterning and flowers and plant life that add interest to each composition. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 17th.)

Jung Eun Hye, Brave Jiro, conte crayon on handmade Hanji paper, 28 x 23 ½ inches, 2023.

‘Friends and Lovers’ at the FLAG Art Foundation

Visitors to Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation encounter a wall of beautiful and colorful portraits by Billy Sullivan made over forty-five years at the entrance to FLAG’s hugely enjoyable group show ‘Friends and Lovers.’  Featuring work by over fifty artists and partly inspired by Alice Neel’s expressive portraits (the show includes her 1952 painting of her son, Hartley), the show is a hotbed of better and lesser-known talent and includes work by artists who have lately shown standout work in New York.  Among many highlights are Jerrell Gibbs’ portrait of a dapper young man in a lively interior sitting before an image of Picasso’s iconic dove and Ruby Sky Stiler’s inclusive grouping of male, female and child models that exist in both 2-D and 3-D.  (On view through Jan 20th).

Ruby Sky Stiler, Rose Bathers, Baltic plywood, paint and hardware, 78 x 95 x 3 inches, 2021.
Jerrell Gibbs, Fly Black Boy, FLY, oil, oil stick on canvas, 72 x 60 ¼ inches, 2020.
Billy Sullivan, Various works, pastel, oil and watercolor on pastel and canvas, various dimensions, 1974 – 2019.

Elizabeth Peyton in ‘Face Values’ at 125Newbury

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).

Elizabeth Peyton, John Lydon, oil on canvas, 1994.

YZ Kami at Gagosian Gallery

Son of a portrait painter, Iranian artist YZ Kami grew up speaking the language of portraiture, but as his art practice matured, the identity of his sitters became less important.  Now on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, enigmatic paintings of subjects known only to us by a name or descriptive identifier in the title represent specific individuals at close range who nevertheless feel as if they’re at a remove.  Indistinctly painted contours, a deliberate softening of outlines, give each character a sense of existing at another point in time, perhaps as a memory.  Downcast eyes suggest that the inner life is the subject of these intriguing but elusive paintings.  (On view in Chelsea through Feb 25th).

Isaac in Purple Shirt, oil on linen, 58 ½ x 36 inches, 2022.

Paul Gagner at Freight and Volume

Brooklyn painter Paul Gagner takes personal care to a new and hilarious extreme with this image of an intricate landscape created via shaved hair.  Gagner’s self-conscious art practice sends up the quest for originality and artistic greatness in paintings of self-help books for struggling artists and pictures like one featuring a giant meteorite that has crashed through a studio window and crushed an easel.  ‘Hairscaping’ continues the self-questioning with its tongue-in-cheek pondering of what a truly dedicated artist will do for an art-led life.  (On view at Freight and Volume on the Lower East Side through Jan 13th).

Paul Gagner, Hairscaping, oil on canvas, 26 h x 30 w, 2015.