As lines to visit Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms at David Zwirner Gallery stretch around the block, the octogenarian art star’s paintings and flower sculptures are ready to wow the eye without the wait. Both engulf the senses with exuberantly patterned, wildly colorful design. (On view through Dec 16th at David Zwirner Gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location.)
Did you capture the perfect eclipse picture as the moon passed in front of the sun in parts of the U.S. last August? For the many whose cameras let them down, Ellen Harvey’s sculpture – a hand-engraved on rear-lit Plexiglas mirror rendition of an iPhone – not only yields a picture of the pivotal moment but also recalls the frustrated efforts of unprepared cell phone photographers last summer. (On view at Danese Corey Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 23rd).
Clouds of pigment abut clusters of hooked forms – the meeting point of lines which cover each canvas like a net – in Shirazeh Houshiary’s elegant new paintings at Lisson Gallery, suggesting areas of active organization amid nebulous clouds. (On view at Lisson Gallery’s 24th Street space through Dec 22nd).
Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ work elicits appreciation of the uncharming extraordinary in life. ‘Cushion,’ from the artist’s latest solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, is no exception. Two misshapen figures intertwine on a couch cushion, enjoying a moment of tenderness and connection. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
The perfectly coiffed blond hair of the model in this surreal painting by Jim Shaw is not only coming from her head but powering her whole being as she emerges from a mass of curls like a genie materializes from smoke. Now on view at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures Gallery, the painting is part of Shaw’s bizarre but powerfully intriguing merger of advertising imagery and storytelling. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Zanele Muholi’s towering self-portrait dramatically dominates her ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ photo series at Yancey Richardson Gallery, challenging viewers to reconcile the South African artist-activist’s ‘exotic’ characters with political realities in Africa and the US. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 9th).
The screen and the stretcher come crashing together in Jacqueline Humphrey’s new oil paintings featuring characters and numbers. Applied through laser-cut stencils, the thickly textured symbols spread across the canvas like a dense fog, at times arranged to resemble brush strokes. (On view at Greene Naftali Gallery through Dec 16th).
If you climb up to the fourth floor of Marc Straus Gallery expecting to find strange things in the attic spaces, Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculptural rendition of scored poppy plants dripping latex won’t disappoint. Surrounded by rubber sculptures of packing crates, perhaps hiding even stranger cargo, the piece comes as an otherworldly surprise. (On the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
For years, Florian Maier-Aichen stayed dedicated to analogue approaches to photography; his latest digital images – created with Photoshop’s Lasso tool – have the joyful energy of a new convert. (On view at 303 Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Antoine Catala’s charmingly strange solo show at 47 Canal remakes emojis as extra-terrestrial faces adorning ‘breathing’ socks and shopping bags. Commenting on what he sees as emojis’ sudden ubiquitous and alien presence in our lives, Catala asks what damage is occurring (band-aids are a theme) and how much ‘cute’ we’re willing to consume at what cost. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 17th).
A heavy, fascinating stillness pervades Matt Bollinger’s paintings and animation at Zurcher Gallery on the Lower East Side, extending even to this sculpture of a hand ashing a cigarette. The hand (crafted in resin and foam with painted highlights) looks like it’s been extracted from a painting, miraculously appearing in 3-D form before us. (On view through Dec 21st).
Young LA artist Becky Kolsrud has fun with the old assertion that women are ‘closer to nature’ by literally cloaking her female figures – giantesses who dominate the landscape – with bodies of water that act like robes or shields. (At JTT Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 17th).
In Jonathan Monaghan’s latest fantastical animation, Disco Beast, a unicorn is captured and drained of energy by a predatory cell phone charging station only to be reborn in a luxury building’s hidden disco. Here, the unicorn is penned in by a ring of TSA scanners, an allusion to the Renaissance Unicorn Tapestries (which act as metaphor for marriage, among other things) and an update on the experience of being ‘captured.’ (On view at Bitforms on the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
When Hayv Kahraman fled Baghdad during the first Gulf War, one of the few non-essential items her family took was a mahaffa, a traditional fan woven from palm tree fronds. In recent works at Jack Shainman Gallery, the artist has woven her paintings together in strips that recall the fan, artfully combining different realities. (On view in Chelsea on 24th Street through Dec 20th).
Inspired by shipwrecks in iconic 19th century paintings by Gericault and Delacroix, Cecily Brown’s latest oil paintings allow strange, fraught characters to emerge from the depths. In this detail from ‘Sirens and Shipwrecks and Bathers and the Band,’ a figure appears from swirling blue depths like a figurehead on a ship, a seemingly stray blue line forming a knowing smile. (At Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 2nd).
A crumpled red duvet at the entrance to Jane Lombard Gallery is at once cozy and alien – a symbol of the comforts of home, but a symbol that belongs to someone else. Constructed in fired clay by Ashley Lyon, sculptures including the bed covering, a piece of memory foam, pillows and this quilt offer a conceptual appreciation of the soft furnishings that make a house a home. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 21st).
Taking the history of painting, particularly 20th century modernism as one major influence, painter Matt Connors shapes color and form into optical experience in new paintings at Canada NY on the Lower East Side. (On view through Dec 10th).
Known for combining art, architecture and design, Jorge Pardo takes a turn towards two-dimensional work at Petzel Gallery with laser cut light boxes bearing his self-portraits. This surprising turn away from 3-D objects and spaces, along with Pardo’s recent self-portraits crafted on furniture, begs the question of whether all of the artist’s design isn’t a form of portraiture. (On view at Petzel Gallery through Jan 13th).
Over a period of weeks or months, photographer Tanya Marcuse builds up sections of earth with transplanted mushrooms, berries, and various plants, adding in preserved animals (who have died elsewhere) along with fresh materials. The result is a tour de force of nature, which she likens to the roiling bodies of Jan van Eyck’s Last Judgment or a Jackson Pollock dense, all-over composition. (At Julie Saul Gallery through Nov 25th).
In his latest solo show at Susan Inglett Galley, William Villalongo’s characters are an amorphous mass of organic material rather than distinct identities. Here, Villalongo alludes to Henry Brown’s escape from slavery in a box mailed from Virginia to Philadelphia, begging the question of how historical distance can allow identities to shift. (On view through Dec 9th).
With staffs and beards of snakes, Gilbert and George merge the roles of Moses, Medusa and themselves as performance artists who make art with their bodies. In their latest two-gallery show, the duo don an array of stylized beards that reference Santa, religious observance and hipsters in their East London neighborhood. (At Lehmann Maupin Gallery on 22nd Street in Chelsea and on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side).
Danish photographer Thomas Bangsted’s WWII scenes at first read as strangely hi-res documentary images until revealed as masterpieces of reconstruction. Photographing objects and vehicles from war museums and collectors, building his own props (like the life raft in the foreground) and tracking down remaining ships, Bangsted pictures the maneuvers that won the war, including this episode in the Allied effort to sink one of the largest warships ever made. (On view at Marc Straus Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
Inspired by Homer’s The Iliad, Adam Parker Smith brings the ancient epic up to date by rendering key characters in Mylar balloons, which he casts in resin, then lines with fiberglass. This serious kitty – decked out as Hercules wearing a lion skin – is the centerpiece of one of New York’s most fun gallery exhibitions. (On view on the Lower East Side at The Hole NY through Nov 19th).
Against Alex Israel’s huge painting of a sky lit by a gorgeous sunset, Chris Burden’s three ‘ghost ships’ dominate Gagosian Gallery’s showcase of work by its LA artists. Equipped with solar panels and GPS, the boats were designed in 1991 to sail alone from Charleston to Plymouth, England. (On view through Dec 16th).
Three isolated bathers search for shells in a nature scene that melds sky and water, melancholy and peace by Paolo Ventura at Edwynn Houk Gallery. Ventura’s new hand painted, collaged photos evoke stage sets that question time and place. (On view in the 57th Street area through Nov 11th).
Even the base of Alice Aycock’s dynamic aluminum sculpture appears to lift off the ground in the artist’s dramatic debut at Marlborough Gallery which now represents the artist. The sculpture alludes to the forces of nature, fairground rides and more in works that combine chaotic and ordered forms in one eye-popping piece. (On view on 57th Street through Nov 18th).
The title of Josephine Halvorson’s exhibition of new painting, ‘As I Went Walking,’ refers to a verse in Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’ about trespassing; Halvorson’s weathered signs and tattered boundary markers suggest that ownership of the land is not so easily claimed. (At Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea through Nov 22nd).
Sarah Bereza’s paintings question what a frame is and what it should hold. Alive with natural forms, the borders of her images are sculpture holding melting forms or, like here, conventional images that surprisingly appear to resist completion, morphing before our eyes. (On view at Bravin Lee Programs in Chelsea through Nov 29th).
Before documentation and text became Conceptual Art founder Douglas Huebler’s primary media, his formica sculptures considered how place was experienced as art. Here, the yellow-hued interior of an S shaped sculpture glows mysteriously as it evokes superpower, the alphabet and Truro, MA the place for which it was named. (At Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea through Nov 18th).
Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel spent a career focusing on energy and sustainable practice; lately, he’s expanded on his professional experience with ‘Waste Not,’ a photo series shot at European waste recycling facilities. Bulteel’s eye for color and composition make materials intriguingly strange (this pile of mixed metals suggests hair) while demonstrating what efforts go on to recycle and reuse. (At Anastasia Photo on the Lower East Side through Nov 22nd).
