Ugo Rondinone, Bright Light Shining at Gladstone Gallery

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Lightning strikes three times in the same spot at Gladstone Gallery’s high-ceilinged 21st Street space in the form of bronze sculpture by Swiss New Yorker Ugo Rondinone.  Trees scanned, 3-D printed and cast in bronze have been inverted to resemble day glow yellow bolts of light; at the same time, they belong to the terrestrial realm by still clearly resembling trees.  As nature upends our expectations again and again through storms, floods and extreme temperatures, Rondinone questions the natural order.  (On view in Chelsea through Nov 9th.

Ugo Rondinone, installation view of ‘bright light shining’ at Gladstone Gallery, Oct ’23.

Melissa Joseph at Margot Samel

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Raised in rural Pennsylvania with little access to museums but within easy reach of her mom’s crafting supplies, New York artist Melissa Joseph developed a textile-based practice resulting in painterly portraits of family now on view at Margot Samel in Tribeca.  Three small pieces in needle felted wool on industrial felt, mounted on found silver plates, are the size of embroidery but use material more akin to impasto painting.  Here, Joseph’s extended family piles on to a living room seat, creating a tangle of bodies as familiar and comfortable as the material depicting them.  (On view in Tribeca through Nov 22nd).

Melissa Joseph, Auntie Loretta, needle felted wool in industrial felt in found silver platter, 10” diameter, 2023.

Enoc Perez at Harper’s Books

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Based on vintage Bacardi rum ads and travel brochures, Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez’s paintings of his home country at Harper’s Gallery feature pristine beaches, bright blue pools and abundant tropical vegetation.  Created in a painting style akin to printmaking, for which the artist rubs paint onto canvas using an oil coated sheet of paper and a pencil, the details of each supposed paradise are rendered slightly indistinct.  Titled ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ the paintings revel in an abundance of natural beauty yet withhold a richer appreciation of it, forcing the question of how much of each image is just marketing.  (On view in Chelsea through Nov 11th).

Enoc Perez, View of San Juan, P.R., oil on linen, 2023.

Jay DeFeo at Paula Cooper Gallery

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After completing her iconic 2,000+ lb painting ‘The Rose,’ in 1966, Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo delved into photography, creating the 70 photographs, collages and photocopies now on view at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.  Like ‘The Rose,’ DeFeo’s photographs feature complex textures, moody tonal contrasts and nature-related imagery in straight shots of mushrooms on a fallen tree or chemigrams – abstract images created in the darkroom.  Among the representational works, a single resting hand seen from the side or a section of an illuminated lampshade pictured from below against a black background convey stillness while this powerful shot of rushing water embodies nature’s dynamism and power.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).

Jay DeFeo, Untitled, gelatin silver print, 6 x 8 7/8 inches, 1973.

Eamon Ore-Giron at James Cohan Gallery

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Can a deity’s identity change over time?  Struck by Octavio Paz’s observation that interpretations of a sculpture of Coatlicue in Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia have gone from “goddess to demon, demon to monster and from monster to masterpiece” in the centuries since Spanish conquest, Eamon Ore-Giron imagines contemporary identities for familiar divinities in new paintings, ceramics and textiles at James Cohan Gallery.  Here, in ‘Talking Shit with Mama Killa,’ Ore-Giron pictures the Incan moon goddess with her geometric fan-shaped crown creating angular and organic shapes that cover her upper head while the lower half of her face is transformed by triangular patterns and tear-like blue drops.  Characterized by angular features that appear to be morphing, this divinity’s identity is capable of shifting and updating by the moment.  (On view in Tribeca through Oct 21st).

Eamon Ore-Giron, Talking Shit with Mama Killa, mineral paint and flasche on canvas, 72 x 72 inches, 2023.

Toba Khedoori Paintings at David Zwirner Gallery

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At one end of David Zwirner Gallery’s vast white cube space hangs a detailed painting of tangled, leafless branches by Toba Khedoori; across the room is the artist’s painting of a grid of variously hued blue rectangles.  In the juxtaposition of natural forms vs those that echo the built environment, Khedoori presents dichotomies of art practice: expressive freedom or impersonal rigidity.  While most imagery in Khedoor’s show is centered at the middle of large sheets of wax-coated paper, one painting of tall grasses offers linear forms arranged to depict wildness, bridging the dynamic and measured in one small canvas.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).

Toba Khedoori, Untitled, oil and graphite on canvas, 27 ½ x 24 ½ inches, 2023.

Nicolas Party at Hauser and Wirth Gallery

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At the entrance to New York artist Nicolas Party’s exhibition of new work at Hauser and Wirth Gallery is a vividly colored, full-wall pastel painting of a forest fire.  A nearby drawing depicts a vulnerable-looking baby while further into the show, a tiny oil on copper painting of a dinosaur adds to a meditation on changes to the earth’s climate that forewarns an extinction event.  In this tiny triptych, Party repeats the forest fire imagery as backdrop to a portrait resembling a northern Renaissance devotional image, typically verdant and detailed-filled vistas replaced by destruction.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).

Nicolas Party, Triptych with Red Forest, oil on copper and oil on wood, open: 12 3/16 x 19 5/16 x 2 9/16 inches, 2023.

Yasumasa Morimura at Luring Augustine Gallery

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From Marilyn Monroe to Marlene Dietrich, Yasumasa Morimura mimics the iconic looks of famous figures in the series ‘100 M’s Self-Portraits,’ now on view at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery space.  Having made a name for himself in the ‘80s through to the present day via vividly colored photos that depict his reenactments of famous artworks with himself dressed as the main character (he started as Van Gogh with a bandaged ear), the now 72-year-old photographer opted for smaller format black and white images to create his 100 piece portrait series from the 1993-2000.  Here, he takes his version of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s into the subway, having his audience watch a passerby react as we also consider the implications of his race and gender transgressing role play. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 21st).

Yasumasa Morimura, one image from ‘Once Hundred M’s self-portraits, 100 gelatin silver photographs, each 13 ¾ x 11 inches, 1993-2000.

Tetsuya Ishida at Gagosian Gallery

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Workers are expendable in the alienated world depicted by Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida in the late artist’s paintings at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea.  Coming into adulthood in the Japan’s economic depression in the ‘90s, known as the country’s ‘Lost Decade,’ Ishida catalogued the dehumanizing effect of corporate culture in images that depict workers taking in food from nozzles as if in a gas station or emerging from train doors in the form of boxes with heads, ready for delivery and consumption.  Here, in ‘Exercise Equipment,’ a worried looking individual with Ishida’s features runs not for the health benefits, but to keep ahead of the workers poised to yank him from the treadmill.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).

Tetsuya Ishida, Exercise Equipment, acrylic on board, 1997.

Kathrin Linkersdorff at Yossi Milo Gallery

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German artist Kathrin Linkersdorff’s ‘Fairies,’ a series of vividly colored yet ethereal photographs of flowers now on view at Chelsea’s Yossi Milo Gallery, takes up the age-old concept of memento mori – a reminder of life’s brevity – with contemporary imagery of flowers.  While spending time working in Japan as an architect, Linkersdorff embraced her host country’s reverence for nature as well as the concept of wabi-sabi, or acceptance of imperfection and impermanence.  With both philosophies in mind, Linkersdorff dries flowers over long periods of time, extracting their pigment and reintroducing it into a liquid medium in which the flowers are suspended.  Resulting images like this one emphasize the delicacy and structure of the plants.  Pictured as if the pigments had suddenly dropped away from the petals, the artist suggests a magical deviation from expectation.  (On view through Oct 21st).

Kathrin Linkersdorff, Fairies, VI/3, archival pigment print on Hahnemuehle photo rag ultra smooth, 2021.

Sanford Biggers The Repatriate at Marianne Boesky

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‘Meet me on the Equinox,’ the title of Sanford Biggers’ show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea deliberately evokes a point of convergence between different places or ideas, appropriate for new work that combines objects from a mix of cultures.  Pieces like this marble, wood and textile sculpture titled The Repatriate, continue Biggers’ interest in combining artifacts with different backgrounds, in this case a mask that is itself a collage of various African masks, a wooden platform inspired by bases of roadside shrines in Asia and beyond, and quilts that recall stories of textiles used to send messages on the Underground Railroad.  As its title suggests, Biggers explains that he was thinking of objects with identities that have been altered by context; as ownership changes, identity continues to evolve.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 14th).

Sanford Biggers, The Repatriate, green marble and antique quilts on custom cedar plinth, 73 x 24 x 24 inches overall, unique within a series, 2023.

Liliana Porter at Bienvenu Steinberg and J

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Tiny figures perform enormous undertakings in delightfully absurd new sculpture and 2-D works by Liliana Porter at Bienvenu, Steinberg and J in Tribeca.  Miniscule men with leaf blowers raise up a storm of swirling forms while a little woman with an even smaller a basket of glitter spreads the shiny material into an expanding field of brightness.  Ruptures in scale and contrasts between the real and represented are the stock in trade of Porter’s six decades of artmaking.  Here, magical scenarios convert mundane acts by individuals into aesthetic gestures for the public. (On view through Oct 14th).

Liliana Porter, Untitled with her, gold glitter and metal figurine, dimensions variable, 2023.