Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s ‘Four Seasons’ series from 1563 continues to inspire artists and capture the imagination as it displays the abundance of the seasons. In this polychrome ceramic sculpture at Sperone Westwater on the Lower East Side, Italian sculptors Bertozzi & Casoni recreate Spring in vibrant color, manifesting a creature that represents the abundance and promise of new life. (On view through Oct 30th. Masks required.)
Made over months if not years, Peter Sacks’ multilayered works at Sperone Westwater are composed of layers of typewritten text, cardboard, paint, textiles from around the world and more. Describing the mind as sedimentary in a 2019 New Yorker profile, Sacks layers meaning below the surface of each artwork, burying layers of imagery to convey the concept that more lies below, unseen. Here, a piece from his ‘Above Our Cities’ series turns the skies into a colorful riot over the relatively small skyline below. Is this a celebration? An apocalypse? Both? (On view on the Lower East Side through March 20th).
Though Otto Piene’s involvement with Group Zero, a post-war avant-garde group dedicated to exploring light and motion in art, ended when the group dissolved in the ‘60s, his experimentation with light continued into late career. This stunning ceramic sculpture resembling a rainbow at Sperone Westwater is characteristic of his ‘heavy images,’ made by pushing metallic glazes through a screen onto clay before firing. (On view on the Lower East Side through Jan 16th. Masks and social distancing are required.)
Aimed at an artist, the phrase ‘Love Your Work’ can be sincere or suspect. This unforgettable 1999 fresco by Rochelle Feinstein brilliantly isolates the phrase below an envy-green field of paint. Color takes center stage in Feinstein’s latest body of work, now on view online in Sperone Westwater’s viewing room. Inspired by a photo she took in Rome of a double rainbow, the recent work foregrounds the color spectrum and the mutability of art. (Online through June 25th).
Human-created pollution vies with a vividly colored frog to attract the eye in Alexis Rockman’s 2012 watercolor titled ‘Effluent,’ now on view at Sperone Westwater Gallery. Rockman’s artful activism appears alongside new field drawings from New Mexico of plants and animals from the region that are extinct, living or threatened. (On view on the Lower East Side through August 3rd).
