Minerva Cuevas at Kurimanzutto

‘In Gods we Trust,’ is the provocative title of Minerva Cuevas’ new exhibition at Chelsea’s Kurimanzutto Gallery, a show featuring sculptures of pre-Hispanic deities and vintage magazine ads promoting powerful multi-national oil companies.  Here, a priest of Tlazolteotl, an Aztec deity associated with lust and excess, sits on the pages of financial newspapers, an oil-like substance applied to his mouth and dripped on his arms.  The interrelation of power and oil (a substance also used by pre-Hispanic cultures) also appears in the artist’s huge and damning wall mural featuring nature-inspired corporate logos of companies that have helped bring about climate crisis.  (On view in Chelsea through April 15th).

Minerva Cuevas, Tlazolteotl Priest, foamular, acrylic paint and financial newspapers, ’22 – ‘23

Jonathan Monaghan at Bitforms Gallery

Luxury, power, and technology provocatively merge in Jonathan Monaghan’s mesmerizing digital images and new animation ‘Den of Wolves’ at Bitforms Gallery.  Traditional symbols of monarchal authority – an ermine robe, a scepter – show up in the aisles of an otherwise empty big box outlet or a pristine, unpopulated Apple store, conflating old and new symbols of cultural clout.  Still images titled ‘Sentry’ or ‘Soft Power’ picture the places and beings – composed of luxurious upholstery and architectural details – populating Monaghan’s eerie, too-perfect dystopia. (On view on the Lower East Side through June 12th.  Masks and social distancing are required).

Jonathan Monaghan, Soft Power II, dye-sublimation on aluminum, painted maple frame, 27 x 22.5 inches, 2020.

Melanie Baker at Cristin Tierney

The man in the foreground of this huge charcoal, graphite and pastel drawing by Melanie Baker leans forward conspiratorially, his own identity concealed as he shields the figure before him from view.  Ironically framed on each side by lit sconces, the two shadowy figures seem to have paused in the halls of power to engage in an intense and private discussion that Baker invites us to question.  (On view on the Lower East Side at Cristin Tierney through Feb 22nd).

Melanie Baker, Pomp and Sycophants, charcoal, graphite, and pastel on paper mounted on Dibond, 72 x 120 inches, 2019.

Julie Heffernan at PPOW Gallery

Over the past four decades, Brooklyn painter and art professor Julie Heffernan has questioned traditional roles for women in fantastical works that channel art history and champion female agency.  Her latest body of work lauds women who have stood up to power in portraits that hang alongside framed paintings that reverse typical art historical power relations.  In the background here, Heffernan’s reworks Rubens’ ‘Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus,’ by replacing a man with a woman on horseback, making her rescuer rather than perpetrator. (On view at PPOW Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 6th).

Julie Heffernan, Self-Portrait with the Daughters, oil on canvas, 79 x 56 inches, 2018.

Judy Chicago at Salon94

An all-powerful, muscular man subjugates woman and destroys nature in a series of potent paintings by Judy Chicago from 1984, now on view at Salon94. His invincible nature comes into question, however, in this painting from a triptych titled ‘Rainbow Man,’ in which he strains to bend a rainbow that snaps out of his hands and boomerangs back into shape. More than thirty years after being painted, the artist’s warning has only become more relevant to contemporary attitudes to the earth and the environment. (On view on the Lower East Side through March 3rd).

Judy Chicago, (one panel of the triptych) Rainbow Man, sprayed acrylic and oil on Belgian linen, 108 x 252 inches, 1984.