Contemporary art inspires. Take your on-line engagement with art to a deeper level on a remote gallery tour. Join Merrily on an hour-long virtual walk through of some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking shows of the moment, seeing and discussing images and video. Tours take place via Zoom. 50% of profits in April go to New York City’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund.
It’s hard to look away from New York artist Christina Nicodema’s vividly colored paintings, packed with brightly plumed birds, a dramatic mandrill baring its teeth and piles of edibles designed to entice. Like a contemporary interpretation of traditional Dutch genre painting, the images bring together plants and creatures from different environments in a celebration of excess, but Nicodema’s addition of porcelain, a painted egg and a cake dangerously ablaze with candles hints at the costs of luxury and human desires. (On view at Hollis Taggart Contemporary through Feb 22nd).
An ominous cloud of fleshy tones and dark lines conjures hidden images (birds? an angular face?) as it hovers over an old-fashioned telephone in Charline von Heyl’s ‘Dial M for Painting.’ Like Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder,’ intrigue and tension dominate; a hastily drawn telephone leads us in to the drama while the floating mass above gives pause for thought, all against a screaming yellow background. (On view at Petzel Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 20th).
Wealth is a provocative topic for Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who depicts two well-heeled fictional Nigerian families in her latest charcoal, pastel and pencil drawings at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Vibrant and moody, the portraits ask – as Ojih Odutola puts it – ‘what would wealth look like’ had colonialism not happened? (On view at both Jack Shainman Gallery locations through Oct 27th).
Nature is vast, mankind is tiny in Cuban painter Tomas Sanchez’s landscapes. Here, a solitary cloud patrols a wooded terrain conspicuously absent of humans. (On view at Marlborough Contemporary through Feb 10th).
