Like Fernando Botero’s swelling human figures, Jordan Kasey’s monumental painted bodies transport viewers out of the everyday. Kasey’s figures, however, have the ponderous heaviness of stone enlivened by a sometimes-electric color palette, a dynamic that gives her massive paintings unique energy. (On view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side through March 17th).
Iconic 20th century German painter Georg Baselitz pays homage to artists who’ve inspired him in a new series of portrait paintings at Gagosian Gallery. Presented in Baselitz’s characteristic upside-down format, figures from Tracey Emin to Willem de Kooning (pictured here) hover against black backgrounds in an ethereal glow that suggests a ghostly background presence in the mind of the artist. (On view through March 16th).
Kathy Ruttenberg’s signature human/animal hybrids debuted on New York City streets this winter as large-scale sculptures in the Broadway malls project, a public art project located between 64th and 157th Streets on Broadway. This macquette for a sculpture on 157th Street, currently on view at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, brings her storytelling back to an intimate scale as a human-bodied stag pursues a quixotic romance with a confined mermaid. (On view on 57th Street at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art through March 8th).
British ceramic artist Richard Slee’s ongoing installation of ceramic hammers and tools with wooden handles is a thought-provoking jumble of tongue-in-cheek contradictions, starting with the impossibility of using any of these tools for actual labor. Like Pete Seeger’s famous intention to ‘hammer out love,’ the concept is more convincing than the reality, as suggested by this abandoned pile. (On view at Hales Gallery in Chelsea through Feb 23rd).
Ellen Berkenblit’s snarling big cat dominates Eva Presenhuber Gallery’s basement, where the group show ‘Samaritans’ assembles painting, sculpture and photography that spin strange tales. Above the animal, pipes spew blue clouds while below (or in the distance?) a truck dumps a load of materials. Trapped in the middle of human endeavors, this powerful creature bares its teeth. (On view in the East Village through March 2nd).
LA painter Theodora Allen’s first New York solo show features medieval shields as frames for plants with medicinal or harmful uses. Here, the hallucinogenic Jimsonweed materializes on the support like a ghostly presence, pointing to the non-tangible world of experience. (On view at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s 515 West 27th Street location through March 9th.)
Josh Sperling describes his shaped canvases as “simple, beautiful, and fun” in a recent Perrotin Gallery video that touts the pleasures of looking. He can add ‘huge’ to describe fifteen-foot tall Hocus Pocus, a centerpiece of his current show at the gallery. Evoking flowers or ripples from raindrops in water, the assemblage of eighty-four separate paintings is pure enjoyment. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 16th).
A tattoo of Popeye battling a squid inspired the cartoon-themed body art on this pensive pensioner, an invented character by Rodney Graham. Standing on the balcony of his ‘Vancouver Special’ sporting a rebellious rockabilly style, the character – played by Graham – stands out amid the trappings of middle-class culture. (On view at Chelsea’s 303 Gallery through Feb 23rd).
Art magazine covers inspired Marlon Mullen’s latest body of work, a series of paintings on view at JTT Gallery that revamp the eye-catching images on the country’s best-known art publications. From his studio at the NIAD Center for Art & Disabilities, Mullen here refines a unique vision that injects vivid color, graphic boldness, and some whimsy into a reworking of a 2014 ArtNews cover featuring Yemeni photographer Boushra Almutawakel’s image of a woman wearing a U.S. flag as headscarf. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 17th).
Eleanor Ray’s sunny Texas, Wyoming and Utah landscapes at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery are an enticing alternative to dreary mid-winter New York City. Despite their size (c. 6.5 inches high), the tiny oil paintings communicate wide open spaces suffused with light; here in ‘Wyoming Window,’ the silhouette of a window next to a view from another window turns the sun into an almost tangible presence in the room. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 10th).
Flowing water, curling strands of cable and licorice come to mind when encountering Richard Deacon’s dynamic steamed wood sculpture ‘Under the Weather #2.’ Appearing to both hang down from above like a Sheila Hicks fiber installation and rise up from the floor like a rearing snake, the piece is energized by its contradictory suggestions of slackness and tense energy. (On view on 57th Street at Marian Goodman Gallery through Feb 16th).
While sketching a tree stump in an area of trees lost to climate change near his home, California sculptor Charles Long was inspired by the devastation caused by patriarchal culture to merge a cross section of the dead plant with that of a human penis. Strangely humanoid, the transection is rendered in a huge scale at the back of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a plaintive and comedic monument to loss. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 9th).
James Baldwin’s intellectual legacy and his powerful impact on contemporary culture is the subject of David Zwirner Gallery’s current group exhibition, or ‘collective portrait,’ of the late writer and thinker. By displaying the work of other artists alongside documents and ephemera related to Baldwin, curator Hilton Als considers how the writer may have continued to make art had his career developed differently after the seminal ‘The Fire Next Time.’ In one of the show’s highlights, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s collaged photo draws on images from Nigerian and U.S. West Coast cultures, creating a provocative hybridity. (On view in Chelsea on 19th Street through Feb 16th).
Jeanette Mundt’s vivid red poppies look anything but innocent in this painting, testifying to the power of the plant as a drug. Painted from an on-line source, inspired by Van Gogh’s poppies and including a hidden image of a reclining woman, this rich and seductive image speaks to the possibility of multiple sources to reconfigure as a meaningful image. (On view in ‘The Rest’ at Lisson Gallery through Feb 16th).
