The woman at the center of Nicole Eisenman’s portraits ‘Weeks on the Train,’ (the writer Laurie Weeks) is casually posed, but commands an unusually large amount of room. The space creates an aura around her and gives her a sense of approachability that eludes the two oddballs seated in front of her. (At Anton Kern Gallery in Chelsea through June 25th).
Whether she is Venus, Sister Ray (a Velvet Underground character), or Penthesilea, the Amazonian Queen, Danish artist Peter Linde Busk’s recurring female character has a jittery, incomplete quality owing to her construction from cast-off and fragmentary materials. Here, Smalti, natural stones, ceramics and more compose a faceless, imperfect creature. (At Derek Eller Gallery on the Lower East Side through June 19th).
Painter and sculptor Volker Hueller is known for mining art history, remixing styles and associations from yesteryear into a contemporary visual vocabulary. In this recent painting, on view at Lower East Side gallery 11R, he turns one of his signature, geometric characters into art object, suggestively equating face and vase. (Through April 24th).
“I don’t care about beauty at all,” New York painter Amy Sillman has declared about the imperfect figures and heavily worked canvas of her paintings. Recent works at Sikkema Jenkins & Co are titled after the German word for metabolism, a nod to the process of changing paint into images that land provocatively between abstraction and figuration, suggesting both bodies and furniture in a color palette that simultaneously soothes and excites. (In Chelsea through March 12th).
Mernet Larsen, Nativity, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 74 x 31.5 inches, 2005.