Arranged on a long, low mound of gravel, Masaomi Yasunaga’s stone-infused ceramics at Lisson Gallery look as if they’ve been excavated from an ancient site. Allowing glaze, granite, slip and unrefined porcelain to fuse together in unexpected ways in his kiln, the Japanese sculptor invents a surface for his unconventional pieces that suggests natural forms built up over time. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 15th).
Amusingly excessive, Lindsay Lou Howard’s new ceramics at Launch F18 speak to overconsumption with a sense of humor and a lot of imagination. Here, ‘Plant Based’ offers nutrition to the worms still wriggling in the dirt (?) or fake meat (?) of this giant, 2-foot-tall sandwich. Other pieces in the show, including a lamp made of thick spaghetti in red sauce (interspersed with chocolate, veggies and a can of Sprite) and a sandwich holding a giant ‘Faberge’ egg between pieces of white bread, ask if we really ‘want it all.’ (On view in Tribeca through Oct 15th).
In the middle of Chelsea’s bustling Pace Gallery, it comes as a surprise to hear your own heartbeat filling the cavernous room housing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation ‘Pulse Topology.’ Placing your hand under one of three small monitor suspended from the ceiling not only broadcasts the sound of your heartbeat but translates it into flashing lights in one of thousands of lightbulbs suspended in an undulating pattern from the ceiling. Though essential to life, we often take our beating hearts for granted; making them the focus of an artwork not only flips interior functions to the exterior, it speaks to something visitors have in common. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).
Lima and Amsterdam-based artist Claudia Martinez Garay constructs a complex image of Peruvian culture and history by combining images sourced through different means. In a piece now on view in her solo show at Grimm Gallery in Tribeca, a winged hybrid creature and stepped geometries inside a flat-topped pyramidal form bring to mind Peruvian mythologies and architectures. In the foreground, academic drawings of native flora are mounted on aluminum, expanding representations of Peru into the gallery and into the realm of new understandings. (On view through Oct 15th).
Not many gallery exhibitions are outright funny, but Will Ryman’s latest sculpture at Chart Gallery is bound to have visitors chuckling. Chock-full of eccentric New York characters crafted roughly in what looks like clay (actually resin), the show includes a platform-shoe wearing senior citizen perched on an NYPD barrier and a couple of noodle-slurping Goths on a subway seat. Here, in a piece initially conceived of at the time of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008, an exterminator scatters a crowd of mini businessmen. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 22nd).
Inspired by Islamic art and architecture, Anila Quayyum Agha’s pattern-based practice celebrates the intricacies and pleasures of floral and geometric design. Her installation Beautiful Despair, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, literally immerses the viewer in patterns that are projected from a central cube onto the floor, walls and ceiling of a room at Sundaram Tagore Gallery. With the piece, Quayyum Agha commemorates those lost to Covid (including her sister) while expressing hope for the future. (On view in Chelsea though Oct 8th).
Van Gogh’s flower paintings were intended to be life affirming, representing joy, appreciation of nature and mankind’s love of the divine. In this installation view of Urs Fischer’s piece ‘Denominator’ at Gagosian Gallery, a replica sunflower painting is overlaid with a projection of talking heads sourced from the internet, a juxtaposition geared to suggest that our devotion has shifted to the virtual realm. The painting is part of a recreation of a room in London’s National Gallery, the added heads commenting on how traditional ways of spreading culture have shifted to individuals using on-line platforms. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 15th).
Recent high-profile court cases have argued for basic human rights to be applied to animals while at the same time, many people exist with a remarkable remove from nature. Kate Clark’s skillfully rendered hybrid human/animal characters question the nature of the relationship between humans and animals by existing as both and neither. Confronting audiences with preternatural calm, Clark’s figures suggest an otherworldly intelligence and recall wise fictional characters from the worlds of entertainment and mythology. (On view at 542 West 24th Street through Sept 28th).
Race is “at the nexus of so many social currents and tensions,” wrote a Daily Beast reporter while engaging a 2015 exhibition by Hank Willis Thomas. Yet Thomas’ polished stainless steel sculpture Nexus (in the foreground of this photo), now on view in his solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery, models colorblind mutual aid in the form of two individuals grasping hands. Elsewhere, a bronze sculpture of two clasped hands in different colored patinas titled ‘Loving,’ celebrates a mixed-race marriage while the show’s largest piece, ‘Embrace’ depicts Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s arms enfolding each other. A neon piece spelling out Thomas’ oft repeated phrase (honoring his murdered cousin’s last words) ‘Love Over Rules’ reinforces the artist’s message. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 29th).
In a 1971 letter, American artist Sturtevant declared her art practice not as anti-art but anti-great artist. Her trademark practice of making artwork resembling pieces by renowned artists including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and here, Robert Gober, upends expectations and interpretation when artwork easily recognizable to an art-savvy audience turns out to be something else. In that moment of realization, she explained, “you’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head.” A selection of six pieces from the ‘60s to 2014 at Matthew Marks Gallery includes a reconsideration of Robert Gober’s own meditation on doubling. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).
Experiencing one of late Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesus Raphael Soto’s signature sculptures of hanging plastic cord in 1969, critic Guy Brett remarked that the participant’s ‘physicality was diffused,’ suggesting that moving through the piece breaks down the barrier between bodies and environment. With or without visitors mingling among the threads in this piece in Marlborough Gallery’s summer group show of abstract and kinetic art, Soto’s installation challenges perception as it morphs from solid to ephemeral, suggesting a work always in flux. (On view in Chelsea through Sept 10th.)
Featuring multicolor embroidery and emblems from urban life, ‘Ghana boy’ tunics like this one currently on view at the Drawing Center were worn by Malian workers who’d migrated to Ghana’s coastal cities. The garments might depict tools of a trade (e.g. a barber’s scissors), fashionable clothing or vehicles (motorbikes to airplanes) and speak to the experience of the wearer. On view in the Drawing Center’s wide-ranging design exhibition ‘The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power and Joy from the 15th century to the present,’ this tunic demonstrates self-fashioning between cultures. (On view in SoHo through Sept 18th).
Nicole Eisenman’s monumental painting ‘The Abolitionists in the Park’ at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in late spring/early summer was a highlight of Chelsea gallery tours; you can see it again in the Met Museum’s permanent collection, a recent acquisition thanks to the Green Family Art Foundation Gift. At over 10 feet tall, it towers over visitors, inviting us into a scene of protesters gathered outside City Hall in downtown Manhattan during the summer of 2020. Featuring an array of characters, from figures in shades of blue eating pizza to an entirely red-toned figure lounging in front, Eisenman meets and disrupts expectations of large-scale history painting while taking the genre up to the present moment. (On view in the Mezzanine gallery).
