The huge portal dominating Daniel Heidkamp’s hotel room painting leads us into more than we might expect. From what looks to be one of the Maritime Hotel’s distinctive windows, Heidkamp shuffles the New York skyline and offers glimpses of a ballet rehearsal in a building that only exists in this painting. It feels surprisingly daring to rearrange New York’s built environment and particularly appropriate as construction booms in the city. (At Derek Eller Gallery through Feb 5th).
Wave patterns appear to literally rise up from the surface of Ara Peterson’s acrylic-on-wood surfaces. Here, a shifting spectrum of hot and cool colors ripples like the surface of water. (At Derek Eller Gallery through Dec 23rd).
LA sculptor Peter Shire’s ‘Scorpion’ strikes a fencing pose, but something about the red ball on top of this exaggerated tea-pot shape tones down the menace. Behind it, other sculptures reveal Shire’s involvement with the Memphis design group in the 80s and his own sense of humor in a deeply enjoyable survey of the artist’s work from the 70s to the present. (At Derek Eller Gallery on the Lower East Side through Oct 9th).
Admiringly called ‘expertly constructed, aggressively psychedelic and curiously weird’ recently by the New York Times, Steve DiBenedetto’s latest abstract canvases flirt with representation but elude it, hinting at a half-understood world beyond. (At Derek Eller Gallery through April 25th).
Steve DiBenedetto, Catholic Deli, oil on linen, 60 x 72 x 1.375 inches, 2012 – 15.
Art and science meet in Alyson Shotz’s otherworldly steel wire and glass bead sculpture at Derek Eller Gallery. Titled ‘Invariant Interval’ after the spaces between coordinates in a grid that measures spacetime, the piece achieves Shotz’s goal of “…investigating the basic forces that shape our entire physical and metal experience of life” while managing to look gorgeous at the same time. (In Chelsea through Nov 8th).
Alyson Shotz, installation view of Invariant Interval, stainless steel wire, glass beads and aluminum collars, 98 x 104 x 230 inches, Derek Eller Gallery, Oct 2014.
