Inspired by art history and contemporary fashion, LA-based oil painter Jesse Mockrin offers glimpses of androgynous creatures with long necks, doll-like features and strangely bone-less fingers. (At Nathalie Karg Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 6th).
Polish painter Paulina Olowska’s series of female figures suggest strong personalities; this shadowy character is based on gardener Valerie Finnis, who confessed to having once put plants before people. (At Metro Pictures in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Monks levitate in an intense ball game imagined by German artist Werner Buttner. Elsewhere, sausages fall from the sky and a dinosaur skeleton in a red hat bounds through a barren landscape in a series of paintings that combine the banal and the unusual to striking effect. (At Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery through Dec 3rd).
Geometric steel beams and panels dangle a pair of organic shapes in Mark di Suvero’s 2015 sculpture ‘The Cave’ at Paula Cooper Gallery, suggesting a manmade structure designed to offer up a natural form for our consideration. (In Chelsea through Dec 10th).
An LED lighting strip turns Miguel Abreu Gallery an eerie green color, illuminating a puddle of synthetic liquid based on a pigment found in rainforest worms. Accompanied by a soundtrack of Amazon jungle noise played backwards, this installation by young Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz creates a surprisingly atmospheric faux-natural environment on the Lower East Side. (Through Dec 22nd).
Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto opens a new chapter in his colorful immersive installations with this homage to the birth of humanity. Hand-crocheted hanging sculptures in the shape of a womb invite visitors to enter and walk back to a communal space with drum and guitar. Allusions to Adam and Eve in both western and indigenous Amazonian culture find common ground in the pursuit of knowledge. (At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 17th).
Young painter Loie Hollowell depicts the nude body as landscape in a way that evokes Judy Chicago’s core imagery and Georgia O’Keeffe’s eroticized flower paintings and western landscapes. Here, Deep Canyon offers a road into the unknown. (At Feuer Mesler Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 18th).
Before being torn down to make way for a new development, 284 Grand Street has been transformed by Korean artists Jong Oh and Jinsu Han into a series of powerfully ephemeral site-specific installations. The least monumental of these is Jinsu Han’s tiny ‘Socket Branch,’ which foretells both the coming winter and the end of a season for this property. (At Marc Straus Gallery’s 284 Pop Up location through Dec 4th).
In the past, front-page news has been source material for Dashiell Manley’s canvases; his recent series explores his emotional and psychological reactions to the news of the day. (At Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 17th.)
It’s easy to recognize this scene by legendary photographer William Eggleston, without even knowing where it was shot. Typically Eggleston, its bright, saturated colors and subject matter featuring an everyday American landscape and vernacular architecture are deeply familiar. (At David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 17th).
Though Michele Abeles’ photos look like appropriated commercial images, they are the artist’s own, transferred to a tablet prepared with various liquids and rephotographed. The resulting multi-layered effect blends oddness, familiarity and accident. (At 47 Canal through Dec 18th).
Pittsburgh-based artist Vanessa German assembles a stunningly arrayed army of folk characters for her current show at Chelsea’s Pavel Zoubok Gallery. The figure in the foreground holds a lantern aloft as if to metaphorically light the way forward; a mother with an astounding headdress of ceramic devotional sculpture holds her limp child to the right; a figure at back speaks for social justice by holding up a stop sign. (Through Nov 30th).
Thirty foot long sheets of paper, covered in Zipora Fried’s handmade marks in colored pencil and graphite hang like banners from the ceiling of On Stellar Rays, announcing the amount of time and effort Fried put into her project. Installed in folds, viewers don’t see the full extent of Fried’s mark-making but can still absorb the deeply calming cobalt and delft blue colors. (On the Lower East Side through Dec 4th).
Berlin-based artist Matthias Bitzer’s paintings, mixed media works and sculptures at Marianne Boesky Gallery are uniquely difficult to categorize. Constructed from concrete, wood, glass and more (and those are just the 2-D, wall mounted works), elegantly minimalist artworks take the eye on an adventure of materials. (In Chelsea through Dec 17th).
Brooklyn artist Andrew Lenaghan rewilds the High Line in this tiny painting of massive buildings, as seen from the elevated park. Dereliction and new development are Lenaghan’s themes; how they seem to merge is his intriguing angle. (At George Adams Gallery through November 30th).
Color gels and the wisteria vine from Bryan Graf’s studio/greenhouse combine to make a ghostly image with alluring depth at Yancey Richardson Gallery. (In Chelsea through Dec 3rd).
Brooklyn-based Lithuanian sculptor Aidas Bareikis continues to mine the world’s junk for his intense sculptural accumulations. Here, ‘Too Much Seaweed’ suggests a global warming meltdown or a calving of the planet. (At Canada New York on the Lower East Side through Dec 4th).
British painter David Hepher explains that like landscape painters before him (Constable, Turner, Cezanne), he paints spaces with which he’s familiar, returning again and again to explore nuances of the well-known. For Hepher, that means South London tower blocks, hulking brutalist buildings whose concrete walls have seen better days. Merging distant views and closeups of spray painted walls and graffiti, this painting both closely examines tower life and keeps it at a distance. (At Flowers Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 10th).
Tiny ghoulish characters – a blue faced man with huge teeth, a sinister frog in a t-shirt – populate young Swiss artist Vittorio Brodmann’s paintings of brick walls. Two sided and hung in the window to show bricks both inside and out, the paintings suggest neighborhood decline but also offer the wall as (literal) canvas. (At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise through Nov 13th).
Every word in Brooklyn artist John O’Connor’s text stories packs a punch. Drawing in colored pencil using myriad fonts, he employs brand logos, emojis and pictograms to tell the tale of a young consumer whose life has taken a turn for the bizarre. (At Pierogi through Nov 13th).
Whether they hover over desolate wastelands piled with junk or barren city streets, Masakatsu Sashie’s floating spheres add another ominous note to already bleak, futuristic landscapes. Composed of old machines or cobbled together from an assortment of panels and featuring text that appears to be ads, the orbs grimly foretell a post-human world. (At Jonathan LeVine Gallery through Nov 12th).
Wood makes a surprise appearance in sculptor and ceramic artist Arlene Shechet’s latest sculptures at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., challenging ceramic for primacy in pieces like ‘I Saw the 18th Century.’ Shechet is also currently showing new work at the Frick Collection inspired by 18th century porcelain, but the pieces in Chelsea bear little resemblance to the delicate results of her uptown project, instead suggesting the sturdiness of a corseted matron from a past century. (In Chelsea through Nov 12th).
Using voter machines from the 40s, 50s and 60s, Luke DuBois presents gallery-goers with some more esoteric choices than the U.S. public faces in today’s election (us vs them, water vs fire, nature vs machine). Once visitors have locked in their votes, a unique video response interprets the data. (At Bitforms Gallery through Dec 23rd).
An epic battle between divine beings – scrawny-armed ‘Undom Engle’ on the left and the pink, wolf-like creature ‘Repaint’ to the right – vividly kicks off Trenton Doyle Hancock’s intense new show at James Cohan Gallery. Though it helps to know the language of Hancock’s invented mythology and his recurring characters, each new work is its own richly imagined tale. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side location through Nov 27th).
An unseen opponent batters James Kirkland with blows that literally make the flesh on his face shake in Paul Pfeiffer’s powerful video at Paula Cooper Gallery. By collaging together short clips that feature direct hits to the head and body and digitally removing Kirkland’s adversary, Pfeiffer focuses attention on the violence of boxing and turns fighter into victim. (In Chelsea through Nov 12th).
Cage-based artworks from the ‘60s to the early ‘80s by late, Paris-based Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo at Andrea Rosen Gallery demonstrate human estrangement from nature. Despite the bright colors, a heart shape, plastic flowers and the label reading ‘Bonheur,’ happiness seems far from this abject couple’s experience. (In Chelsea through Nov 16th).
Created in mirror-polished stainless steel, this sculpture of a lifeguard by Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen and Dragset shimmers like an apparition on the Flag Art Foundation’s 9th floor terrace. Peering intently toward the Hudson River (or the buildings on the block in between), the guard is perpetually alert to a situation we can’t see. (In Chelsea through Dec 17th).
Hong Kong artist Chow Chun Fai paints stills from Hong Kong films, including this distillation of loneliness from Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 classic Chung King Express. Filmed just three years before Hong Kong’s return to China, the movie is about failed relationships and new beginnings, a position that interests Chow Chun Fai as Hong Kong heads towards socialist governance by 2047. (At Klein Sun Gallery in Chelsea through Nov 12th).
Spencer Finch literally changes the atmosphere inside James Cohan Gallery by creating an installation of hanging glass panels that create fog-like conditions inside the space. The shifting panels obscure the view across the gallery only from certain spots, meaning that visitors have to keep peering intently ahead to make out what’s there – an experience akin to moving through fog. (At Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery through Nov 26th).
Inspired by sublime landscapes she’s encountered on road trips, Claire Sherman pictures the majestic outdoors as studies in light and form. (At DC Moore Gallery through Nov 5th).
