Andrea Grutzner turns framed excerpts from the built environment into surprising and colorful abstractions; here, in six images from her Tanztee series, amid wildly patterned clothes, Grutzner builds a structure from the arms and hands of dancers at a tea dance in rural Germany. (On view at Julie Saul Gallery through Feb 3rd).
Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar in 1961, Richard Avedon photographed over thirty weddings at New York City’s Town Hall, recording hopeful beginnings. These images became the opening photos in his 1964 collaboration with James Baldwin, ‘Nothing Personal,’ a photographic portrait of the USA in which joy gives way to darker social realities. Now on view at Pace Gallery, the series is stunningly relevant to contemporary life. (On view at Pace Gallery’s 24th Street location through Jan 13th).
Rainy days aren’t what they seem in Brazilian artist Cleverson Oliveira’s world. Look closely at this detail of a vine-filled, wetland landscape and the raindrops on the surface of the image transform into black and white oblong shapes resembling tiny heads with towering hairdos. (On view at Miyako Yoshinaga in Chelsea through Jan 6th).
Bosco Sodi’s hand-formed ceramic cubes at Paul Kasmin Gallery are new but appear weathered, evoking mankind’s ancient and ongoing relationship with clay. Behind, a mixed media painting continues Sodi’s signature practice of mixing pigment, sawdust, glue and other materials into an explosive, vividly colored abstraction. (On view at Paul Kasmin Gallery through Jan 6th).
Like models strutting down a catwalk, a row of abstracted ceramic figures by nonagenarian LA artist John Mason exude confidence and style. Recalling Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Brancusi’s sculpture and Lygia Clark’s bichos they combine Cubist form, Futurist dynamism with a suggestion of moveability often alien to ceramics. (On view at Albertz Benda Gallery in Chelsea through Jan 13th).
This 1989-90 pair of shoes by Elizabeth Murray features chimney-like shapes and keyholes, bringing to mind two houses (representing a couple?) bound by a tangled set of orange laces. On loan from MoMA, ‘Dis Pair’ is a highlight of Pace Gallery’s exhibition of Murray’s raucous, street-inspired painting from the 80s. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 13th).
Tiny roads bisect the anonymous subject of Derrick Adams painted collage, suggesting that this character is on an unswerving journey. Plaid fabric maps a city grid and African textiles nod to the heritage of the woman in this vibrant portrait of an individual in the driver’s seat of her own life. (On view at Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side through Jan 6th).
When Columbian artist Ruby Rumie chanced to meet Cartagena street vendor Dominga Torres Tehran, she commenced a series of strikingly beautiful portraits now on view at Nohra Haime Gallery in Chelsea. Titled ‘Weaving Streets,’ the show celebrates the communities of women who sell fish, fruit and other foods on the streets. Wearing understated white dresses, the women’s unique identities and natural beauty are the focus of this remarkable body of work. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 6th).
Adam McEwen’s escalator stairs, disassembled and scattered on Gagosian Gallery’s floor are readymades related to movement, though unlike Duchamp’s spinnable bike wheel mounted on a stool, they’re solidly in place. Dedicated to mass transit, their egalitarian nature contrasts an upside down image of a stretch limo, printed on cellulose sponge and hung on the wall behind. (On view at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison Ave 5th floor gallery).
Giuseppe Penone’s 1985 branch, carved from the block of fir wood to which it still belongs, posits artist as creator and forces a comparison between human effort and natural growth. (At Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street through Dec 22nd).
In the corner of a cavernous space that opens to the outdoors, a man rests in his immaculate office next to a retaining wall holding back hundreds of dark cows with yellow tags in their ears. Such surreal juxtapositions are rife in Anna Conway’s meticulous imagined painted scenarios, prompting consideration of how space effects the psyche. (On view at Fergus McCaffrey through Dec 23rd).
Katharina Fritsch’s latest large-scale sculptures of familiar objects blown up to huge proportions and presented in strikingly vibrant colors are as enigmatic and enticing as ever at Matthew Marks Gallery. We immediately confront our mortality in the first gallery, with a skull and egg acting as a reminder of death and a symbol of life about to start. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Three leaves drift down towards the earth in glossy, saturated tones that evoke candy more than autumn colors. Part of an exhibition that considers Gary Hume’s aging mother’s fading memory, the artist’s signature fields of saturated color here suggest absence but not darkness. (At Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Young LA-based sculptor Brian Rochefort takes inspiration from nature, modeling his ceramic vessels after a giant underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize and a series of water-flooded caves in tropical climes among other natural wonders. Building up organic shapes from mud and clay, Rochefort covers their surfaces with ceramic, glass and glaze to create a wonder-inspiring experience of his own. (On view at Van Doren Waxter on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
Astronauts simulate working in the weightlessness of space in Houston’s Johnson Space Center, where they perform tasks on models in a giant pool; captured by German photographer Thomas Struth, the lab appears to be suspended in space and time, submerged as if in jelly or under glass. (At Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street through Dec 22nd).
Susan Wides’ innovative use of a tilt shift lens allows her to choose which plane in a landscape she’ll bring into sharp focus and what she’ll allow to blur. The resulting compositions are a charming reintroduction to the natural world, appearing abstract until our eyes can pick out the details, here, of flowers in the foreground and falling water beyond. (On view in Chelsea at Kim Foster Gallery through Dec 22nd).
Photographer Debi Cornwall’s goal in visiting the U.S. naval station at Guantanamo Bay three times in ’14-’15 was to draw the public into looking at the camp again. Ironically, in some of the most effecting photos in her resulting series, her subjects look away. Men who were detained for years, in many cases with out ever having charges filed, refuse another interrogation – this time by viewers. (At Chelsea’s Steven Kasher Gallery through Dec 23rd. )
Described by Anton Kern Gallery as a ‘traveling hybrid procession-protest piece,’ LA artist Lara Schnitger’s installation at Kern’s 55th Street address features inspirational banners and a huge, mysterious ‘Venus of Fernando’ on a palanquin. Schnitger calls the installation ‘Suffragette City,’ a place in which female power is explored in radically idiosyncratic ways. (On view in mid-town through Dec 23rd).
From her home in a small French town, British octogenarian artist Ursula Morley Price continues to invent unique ceramic forms that evoke the beauty and order of the natural world. This white twist form, on view at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, suggests delicate petals, a flexible spinal column, coral, machinery and more. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Who says a photograph has to lie flat against the wall? Commercial photographer Jim Krantz – famed for his photos of the American west, particularly of cowboys for a Marlboro ad campaign – has collaborated with Modernica on a series of fiberglass chairs featuring wrangling and riding. If you can’t sit on a horse, this must be the next best thing. (On view at Danziger Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
Nina Chanel Abney’s electrifying new paintings take gun violence, racial conflict, and protests turned violent as subject matter. Their dynamic jumble of forms echoes the constant stream of alarming news supplied 24/7 by the media. (Nina Chanel Abney is showing new work at Jack Shainman Gallery’s 20th Street location through Dec 20th and Mary Boone Gallery’s 24th Street location through Dec 22nd).
Young Brooklyn-based British painter Tunji Adeniyi-Jones brings Yoruba deities, Matisse’s dancers and Chris Ofili’s Trinidadian characters to mind in bold, rhythmic paintings at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side. (On view through Dec 23rd).
Five mirror-topped antique wooden tables support a host of antique glassware, installed by Valeska Soares at Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea. Filled with spirits, and looking like the tidily assembled remnants of an epic celebration, the piece emanates a sickly smell that strongly suggests the party is over. (On view through Dec 16th).
In 1959, iconic representational painter Alex Katz made a somewhat drastic decision to cut away the background of a painting that wasn’t working and mount it on plywood. The result was the first of his cutouts, a wall-mounted or freestanding group of sculptures that Katz has created for decades. Now on view at Gavin Brown’s Grand Street location, cutouts include this diminutive cluster of friends. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
“Unfettered, confident, individual…” – these adjectives don’t describe art or an artist, they’re part of Dior’s marketing for its ‘Precious Rocks’ eye shadow compact, remade into a series of large-sized acrylic paintings by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury. Long a provocateur who questions fashion, consumption and ‘high’ art, Fleury’s latest series may be modeled on makeup, but it makes an unmissable nod to mid-20th century hard-edge abstraction. (On view on the Lower East Side at Salon94 Bowery through Dec 22nd).
A tiny, sideways glance from a woman playing the slots in Vegas red flags an internal conflict in Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s absorbing mixed media image at James Cohan Gallery. Constructed using marquetry and collaged photos, the materials themselves speak to a nature/culture divide made more acute by the way the outside world is visible through the casino walls and the subject wears animal patterned (and likely synthetic) clothes. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side space through Dec 22nd).
