Tag: gallery

Kaloki Nyamai at James Cohan Gallery

Nairobi-based artist Kaloki Nyamai’s New York solo debut at James Cohan Gallery introduces an artist who uses acrylic paint, stitching and photo transfer to create complex surfaces that suggest complicated histories.  This painting’s title, ‘The one who stole my heart,’ features a figure leaning back into a man whose outward-looking eyes connect with our gaze.  In contrast to the couple’s intimate, relaxed moment, partially visible figures in the background raise their arms in what could be celebration or protest.  Elsewhere, photo transfers contrast happy moments of communal activity with news articles about political unrest as Nyamai juxtaposes the lives of individuals with larger social happenings.  (On view through May 4th).

Kaloki Nyamai, Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.
Kaloki Nyamai, (detail) Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.

Mernet Larsen at James Cohan Gallery

Fascinated for decades by Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne, painter Mernet Larsen applies her own delightfully eccentric perspectival distortions to her French forebear’s iconic imagery in new work at James Cohan Gallery.  Larsen diversifies the cast of characters in ‘The Bathers (after Cezanne)’ adding bikinis to figures more robotic than robust and emphasizing artificiality in the human figures that replace Cezanne’s stabilizing triangle of trees in the original. A diving figure heading into flat waves akin to the slats in Japanese Bunraku puppet theater (which allow figures to move through water) and a woman to the left literally holding up the top of the painting add dynamism and complexity.  By alluding to Cezanne but shifting away from his focus and results, Larsen emphasizes the choices behind a painting’s design and nods to the many iconic painters who have moved beyond inspiration to find their own unique results.  (On view in Tribeca through March 16th).

Mernet Larsen, The Bathers (after Cezanne), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 59 ¼ x 39 ½ inches, 2023.

Thomas Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery

Known for gallery-filling installations made of cardboard and packing tape, Paris-based artist Thomas Hirschhorn marshals these materials to transform Gladstone Gallery’s 21st Street location into a room resembling a destroyed command center or gaming parlor.  Titled ‘Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it’ the gallery’s huge space houses rows of desks littered with cigarettes and coffee cups cut roughly from polystyrene and cardboard computers (some with smashed screens) featuring war-destroyed buildings from both real places and video games.  Hanging from lengths of packing tape, images of soldiers taken from video games populate the room’s aisles, their faces covered by emojis, which also hang like mobiles from the gallery ceiling.  Hirschhorn’s deliberately low-tech materials contrast the realistic imagery from the video game (seen in this photo on one screen) and disturbingly blur the line between real and fake. (On view in Chelsea through March 2nd).

Thomas Hirschhorn, installation view of ‘Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it,’ cardboard, prints, tape, polystyrene, aluminum foil, dimensions variable, 2023.

Jennifer Guidi at Gagosian Gallery

Jennifer Guidi wants to share ‘calm and joy’ in her vibrant landscapes and abstractions, she says of paintings now on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea.  Based on views of the hills in LA and in southern France where the artist recently exhibited at the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery, Guidi uses her signature materials of sand on canvas to depict pleasingly smooth geological forms as a counter to explosive activity in the skies.  Starburst patterns appear in both representational and abstract canvases, spreading color and energy over the landscapes like a shower of beneficence.  (On view through March 2nd).

Jennifer Guidi, Let the Light Fall Gently, sand, acrylic, oil and rocks on linen, 60 x 48 x 1.5 inches, 2023.

Richard Mosse at Jack Shainman Gallery

Even in the dark, Jack Shainman Gallery’s new Tribeca space looks stunning, its vast hall accommodating Richard Mosse’s film ‘Broken Spectre, an extraordinary warning-cry against ongoing environmental devastation in the Amazon.  Shown on a 60’ wide screen and toggling between ariel views of the landscape, on-the-ground footage of people involved in rainforest clearing, mining and agri-business, and microscopic views of minute ecosystems on the forest floor, Mosse catalogues the destruction using technology – multi-spectral video, infrared film and UV microscopy – that provides unique views of the environment.  Alarming and beautiful, Mosse’s film is the culmination of two years of work in the Amazon and, along with Ben Frost’s powerful soundtrack, is a persuasive argument for action.  (On view in Tribeca through March 16th).

Richard Mosse, installation of Broken Spectre at Jack Shainman Gallery, 2024.