Exhibition walkthroughs and artist interviews have abounded since the pandemic cut off access to physical gallery spaces, but few videos have been as engaging and personal as Rebecca Morris’ recent Q & As with painter friends at bortolamigallery.com. The untitled work here from New York Art Tours’ archive (May ’16) prefigures the silver and gold paint and the play between organic and inorganic shapes prominent in her show installed through June at Bortolami Gallery in Tribeca.
Young LA painter Noah Davis died from cancer in 2015, but the hundreds of artworks he left behind are currently impacting the New York art scene thanks to a double-gallery exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery. Davis’ style can shift from washy to realistic in the same canvas, creating surprising effects as representation dissolves into uncertainty. Here, two napping figures on a couch evoke a languorous afternoon, made intriguing by the almost melting space above the lap of a third figure. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 22nd).
“Driving through Los Angeles, you see all kinds of things out your window, and they go by so quickly,” Alex Prager told the New Yorker as she explained the bizarre scenarios and eccentric characters in her latest photos and video at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. This towering, nine-foot-tall sculpture dominates the gallery and appears in an even larger version in Prager’s short film ‘Play the Wind,’ an homage to the unexpected and strange on the streets of Prager’s hometown. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 26th).
LA based artist Luis Flores deliberately employs the feminized craft of crochet to create self-portraits which undermine the concepts of masculinity he learned as a boy from his male relatives. Here, he fights with himself in an installation featuring a series of wrestling moves enacted by his body doubles and observed by his passive and skeptical wife. (On view at Salon94 Bowery on the Lower East Side through April 20th).
LA artist Annie Lapin conjures images from accidents, pouring a charcoal water solution over a prepared surface and embellishing the results with analogue and digitally created effects that she transcribes to canvas. In ‘Defenestration,’ a few deft additions to the central shape turns a stain into an escaping figure hightailing it out of a raw linen canvas. A metaphor for emerging artistic creativity? (On view at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea through Nov 10th).
