Tag: gallery

Apollinaria Broche at Marianne Boesky Gallery

To a soundtrack featuring readings from Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Flowers of Evil,’ Apollinaria Broche’s ceramic and bronze flowers strike gangly poses in her solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, exuding both wonky charm and maleficence.  Like an insect to nectar, viewers are drawn into the center of colorful ceramic flowers that feature tiny bronze sculptures – a winged horse, a contented-looking cat – of cavorting magical creatures.  More ominous figures – snakes, flies – appear as well, suggesting that the flowers inhabit a garden less welcoming than it first appears.  In this detail image of ‘I hid my tracks Spit out all my hair,’ skulls and daggers mingle with the seeds of this lush blossoming plant, summoning a specter of death and violence where it might least be expected.  (On view in Chelsea through Feb 24th.)

Apollinaria Broche, (detail) I hid my tracks Spit out all my air, glazed ceramic, bronze, 63 x 21 x 18 inches, 2023.

Madeline Hollander at Bortolami Gallery

Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Madeline Hollander incorporates movement into her artistic practice in surprising and delightful ways.  Her current solo show at Bortolami Gallery in Tribeca titled ‘Entanglement Choreography’ presents a grid of six mirrored pods on round pedestals which at first glance belie the magic of peering inside.  Each sculpture houses a tiny rotating dancing figure, abstracted like a Matisse nude, which at a certain angle appears to both float above the pod and be contained within it.  Nodding in the title to the notion in physics of quantum entanglement, when two separate particles demonstrate a connection with each other as if moving as if in a dance, Hollander’s partners manifest what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’ (On view in Tribeca through March 2nd).

Madeline Hollander, Entanglement Choreography VI (figs. 6, 12, 18, 24), 24 x 24 x 32 ½ inches, 2023.

Luciana Pinchiero at Praxis Gallery

The striking figures of three life-sized Greek goddesses, accompanied by the silhouettes of three women adopting positions from a how-to book about drawing the nude figure pose dramatically at the center of Luciana Pinchiero’s first NY solo at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea.  Crafted from flat pieces of material, these classic and current representations of women literally lack dimensionality.  Inspired by ancient stories of idealized women from Pygmalion’s sculpture-turned-live-woman to the Venus de Capua who poses as if holding up a mirror, Pinchiero’s sculpture and her paper collages juxtapose imagery from different eras to question how much representation of women has actually changed over time.  (On view in Chelsea through March 9th).

Luciana Pinchiero, installation view of Bad Posture at Praxis International Art, Jan ’24.

Lindsay Adams in ‘Arcadia and Elsewhere’ at James Cohan Gallery

Spread over James Cohan Gallery’s three spaces, the immensely enjoyable group exhibition ‘Arcadia and Elsewhere’ features paintings of nature from the realist to the abstract, the mundane to the sublime.  Many pieces portray idyllic natural landscapes, other scenes get more complicated, especially when humans or their traces appear. Here, Lindsay Adams’ Lonely Fire excites feeling through the fiery tones of the background and the lush colors of individual flowers that stand apart from each other while contributing to a whole that speaks to the beauty of variety. (On view through Feb 10th).

Lindsay Adams, Lonely Fire, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 2023.

John O’Connor at Pierogi Gallery

John O’Connor’s enticingly colorful drawings at Pierogi Gallery’s Chelsea popup take viewers down the rabbit hole into surreal scenarios told with endlessly inventive typography and icons.  Here, the eye-grabbing ‘Car Crash’ pictures a fictional multi-car pileup in which cars of lesser value crash into increasingly more expensive vehicles, starting with a Honda Civic and reaching a Lotus and continuing with fictional cars (Dukes of Hazzard, Flintstones).  O’Connor explains that the spiraling drawing represents the transfer of kinetic energy from car to car, a stand-in for a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.  At the center of this dynamic, pulsing vortex is a worm hole, ready to transport cars, viewers and all into another place and time. (On view at 524 West 19th Street through Feb 10th).

John O’Connor, Car Crash, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 85 x 69.75 inches, 2023.