Three children forge ahead into the unknown on a boat made of braiding hair packaging in this oil-based relief collage on canvas by Yale MFA candidate Kathia St Hilaire. A standout in Derek Eller Gallery’s current group show, St Hilaire’s image features kids venturing forth under a blazing sun to navigate their own identities and paths in life. (On view on the Lower East Side through July 3rd).
Washington-based glass artist Dylan Martinez fools the eye with solid glass sculptures that appear to be plastic bags filled with water. “Our desires often override our true perception of reality,” the artist explains, anticipating the strong urge to believe that there’s water inside each ‘bag’ when, in fact, it’s the reflections on the exterior that create an illusion of movement. A standout in Lyons Wier Gallery’s ‘Fire & Water’ group exhibition, Martinez also amazes with glass sculptures resembling cross sections of a vase, undulating in space. (On view in Chelsea through July 6th).
It’s risky to take too long a look at Sikkema Jenkins & Co’s gallery wall – British abstract artist Terry Haggerty’s mural can literally upend your balance as his painted lines appear to twist and bend in space. The optical surprises continue in painted wooden panels that invite us to try to make out the multiple viewpoints depicted in each piece. Whether you walk away with a headache or invigorated by the effort of wrestling with your perceptions, the show is worth engaging. (On view in Chelsea through June 30th).
As Pop art burst onto the US art scene in the early 60s, Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik moved to New York and forged her own related path, imagining humans as robots, bombs as sculpture and later, models as aliens. In this painting from 1979, Kogelnik morphed the fashion-forward woman of the day into a creature with glowing eyes and stylish garments, hair and skin in reptilian green tones. Set against floating triangles, the women are as abstract as their backgrounds and ready to defy convention. (On view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea through June 29th).
Newly represented by Galerie Lelong, Leonardo Drew’s inaugural show at the gallery arrives with a bang with an installation that resembles a hovering mass of exploded material. Like the artist’s recently opened outdoor work at Madison Square Park, the piece offers an unexpected blast of color unfamiliar to fans of Drew’s black, white and wood-colored wall sculptures while continuing to ponder themes of destruction and regeneration. (On view in Chelsea through August 2nd).
‘Seething’ is the perfect word to describe the undulating mass of red and purple folds that writhe and twist in South African artist Frances Goodman’s ‘Seething Mass,’ a standout in Richard Taittinger Gallery’s current group show. Composed of acrylic nails in colors that range from blood red to vivid magentas and purples, this abstract wall sculpture hangs near shields that resemble sharpened, painted fingernails. In both cases, Goodman gives adornment dangerous potential. (On view on the Lower East Side through June 30th).
Human connection is the subject of ‘In the Bedroom,’ South African artist Claudette Schreuders’ latest show of wood sculpture at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Here, in ‘Guilty Bystander,’ Schreuders offers an intimate look at a pensive, uncomfortable character who is somehow implicated in an event that we don’t see, begging the question of whether one must be physically close to an activity to be involved. (On view through June 22nd).
Shara Hughes’ new paintings of lush, psychedelic flowers dominate landscapes so teeming with life it’s almost alarming. Here, several colorful plants sprout blossoms supported by curvaceous stems resembling cursive script, as if new language was needed to describe this beautifully alien world. (On view at Rachel Uffner Gallery on the Lower East Side through June 23rd).
It comes as no surprise when pondering ‘Tau,’ currently installed at Pace Gallery’s 25th Street location, that sculptor Tony Smith began his career as an architect, building spaces designed to be experienced by bodies in motion. Towering over visitors to the gallery’s 25th Street space, the sculpture’s sleek sophistication invites admiration from all angles. (On view in Chelsea through June 22nd).
Finely sifted red soil imported from Oklahoma becomes a patterned carpet in Rena Detrixhe’s first New York solo show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery. Using a trowel to smooth down the dirt, then imprinting it with modified shoe soles, the Kansas-based artist considers the symbolic value attached to land in the mid-west while alluding to mankind’s impact on it. (On view on the Lower East Side through June 16th).
Inspired by his home country’s rich tradition of textile working, Malian artist Abdoulaye Konate employs colorful patterns, cut-out shapes and embroidery to depict a sea abundant with life. As with many of his representational works, Konate alludes to social issues including the desertification of the country and the lack of access to clean water while he celebrates the beauty of its traditional fabrics and indigo dyes. (On view at Blain Southern in Chelsea through June 15th).
Sanya Kantarovsky’s hauntingly dark new paintings at Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea channel Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Henry Matisse to fascinating but disturbing effect. The green skinned woman at the center of ‘Needles’ may be in hooked up to an IV but the demon-like figure propping her up suggests suffering more than recovery. (On view through June 15th).
Addis Ababa-based artist Elias Sime continues to turn discarded electronics into compositions that can suggest aerial maps or abstracted landscapes in his latest show at Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery. Computers made in China, sold in the US and discarded in Ethiopia make their way into artworks that implicitly question resource distribution and rampant consumption. (On view through June 29th.)
What happens to humanity if global warming leads to drastic sea level rise? Josh Kline envisions the end of life as we know it in a provocative sculpture series featuring submerged cities and preserved specimens of everyday 21st century life at 47 Canal on the Lower East Side. Inside lab hoods, preserved doll-house sized domestic and office environments suggest that what’s normal now may soon be a thing of the past. (On view through June 9th).
Coretta Scott King speaks in a photo held by a silent man who himself is superimposed over an elaborate ornamental structure in this photo collage by Todd Gray. Liberation and the legacy of oppression, particularly of European colonization in Africa and the architectural expressions of wealth it allowed in Europe, come head-to-head in new photo collage by Todd Gray at David Lewis Gallery on the Lower East Side. (On view through June 16th).
Whether she’s boldly charging into the Pacific Ocean or gingerly stepping into a placid pond to expose a cyanotype, Meghan Riepenhoff continues to generate fascinating and beautiful cameraless images of water. For this multi-panel work, the artist dipped her prepared photo paper into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, sprinkled on salt from the ground and allowed the work to dry, propped in the sun. (On view in Chelsea at Yossi Milo Gallery through June 22nd).
California Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian’s striking acrylic columns are both warm and austere, drawing visitors to Chelsea’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery in closer to see the mysterious, barely visible shapes within. Calling them ‘presences,’ Pashgian acknowledges that each distinct body has a character that can be perceived by alert viewers. (On view through May 24th).
Curvy harlequins and female clowns populate French artist Elsa Sahal’s latest solo show of ceramic sculpture at Natalie Karg Gallery on the Lower East Side. Inspired by Picasso’s actors in diamond-patterned clothing, these two truncated figures enact a choreography that could be read as erotic or menacing. (On view through June 15th).
In the Arctic, ‘so much believed to be white is actually – strikingly – blue,’ writes award-winning American poet Robin Coste Lewis in a text applied to the wall at the entrance to Lorna Simpson’s solo show at Hauser & Wirth. Titled ‘Darkening’ and featuring monumentally scaled paintings combining text and images from Ebony magazine, the AP and National Archives, the new work pictures bodies and icy landscapes commenting on, as Simpson has explained, ‘inhospitable conditions and how to survive those conditions.’ (On view in Chelsea through July 27th).
Frank Stella’s latest abstract sculptures are as colorfully exuberant as ever, presenting viewers at Marianne Boesky Gallery with plenty to peruse. Derived from digital processes, the twists and turns of shiny aluminum components take sculpture beyond the handmade. (On view in Chelsea through June 22nd).
Resembling a disco ball and wrecking ball, Robert Longo’s dramatic 1.5 ton sculpture ‘Death Star’ draws viewers into Metro Pictures in Chelsea to discover a sphere covered with 40,000 inert assault rifle bullets. Referring to the number of deaths by gun violence in the US in 2017, the number has more than doubled from those included in a similar piece by Longo from 1993. (On view through May 25th).
The word for Italian born, Alaska-based artist Paola Pivi’s installation of multi-colored, feathered baby bears at Perrotin Gallery on the Lower East Side is ‘cute.’ Explaining that the installation was inspired by her adopted son’s “energy, life and positivity,” Pivi developed a series of bears playfully fighting, doing acrobatics and generally looking to inspire ‘awwwws.’ (On view through June 8th).
Having painted every block on Broadway and drawn every object she owns, New York artist Elise Engler is no stranger to the long-term project. Her most recent obsession – creating a daily visual record of radio news headlines since November 2015 – has resulted in a dense installation of images on the walls of Frosch and Portman Gallery on the Lower East Side. A somber recording of natural disasters, political intrigue and more, the assembled works testify to troubled times. (On view through May 19th).
17th century Dutch still life painters delighted in the effect of light hitting rich fabric or shiny glass; contemporary Brooklyn artist Matthew Hansel is into optical delights of a different sort as he mimics digital distortion in oil and flashe paint. Included in The Hole’s continuing investigation of how digital techniques have impacted non-digitally created art, this shaped painting throws a little fun-house mirror effect into a traditional momento mori. (On view on the Lower East Side through May 19th).
Did Warhol just like Campbell’s soup? Was Roy Lichtenstein simply enamored of blonds? American pop art thrives on its ambiguous criticality towards consumption and mass media marketing, but iconic British pop art icon Peter Blake’s enjoyment of contemporary culture feels less ambiguous. In a noteworthy show at Garth Greenan Gallery, for which a portion of Blake’s London studio has been packed up and reinstalled in Chelsea, the artist’s portraits of wrestlers, clowns, musicians and Marilyn-like woman are a tribute to the more and less famous. (On view through May 18th).
Under a recreation of the night sky as it appeared at the start of the Haitian Revolution, Firelei Baez presents a dramatic installation at James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side space featuring empowered female figures who assert their presence in the gallery and in history. Wearing a tignon that refers to the 18th century legal requirement for African-diasporic women to cover their hair, this casually posed yet regal figure lacks a mouth yet speaks with her eyes. (On view through June 16th).
Amid a mass of vibrant color, a solitary eye peeks out from beneath a pattern that recalls decorative fencing in this photo by Paul Anthony Smith at Jack Shainman Gallery. The barrier, created by meticulously making tiny tears in the surface of a photo, deflects our gaze, shielding the subject protectively. (On view in Chelsea through May 11th).
Raqib Shaw’s richly imagined scenes at Pace Gallery are dominated by the verdant Kashmiri landscape and a tribe of cavorting and lounging peacock-headed characters, who echo the poses of picnicking Parisians lounging in a park in Manet’s 1862 painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Intricately painted in vibrant enamel colors, Shaw’s new paintings are a feast for the eyes. (On view in Chelsea through May 18th).
Titled after the Japanese dolls that return to an upright state if knocked over, Spanish artist Jorge Palacios’ sculpture ‘Okiagari-Koboshi’ is so strikingly shaped, it’s viewers eyes that will keep returning. Resembling a muscle-bound arm extending a slender fist or an oversized 3-D piece of punctuation, the tension between slim and full organic forms offers many interpretations. (On view at Danese Corey Gallery in Chelsea through May 4th).
Starting with a 3D scan of a boulder, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade gradually transforms the large rock into a sphere and a square, morphing through different materials along the way and separating each phase by a mirror. At rear, a steel framework supports three more stones, identical in mass and weight but shaped and positioned to look otherwise. Kwade’s intention – to challenge viewers to question what they perceive – results in a puzzling and provocative exhibition. (On view at 303 Gallery in Chelsea through May 18th).
From her studio on a former coffee plantation in rural Guatemala, Argentine-Brazilian artist Vivian Suter created the large-scale paintings currently hanging from the ceiling, covering walls and extending to the floor at Gladstone Gallery’s 21st Street location. Inspired by nature and literally created outdoors, sometimes in conjunction with the elements, Suter aims to subordinate art to the power of nature. (On view in Chelsea through June 8th).
Tankers arrayed like a minimalist piece of land art in this photograph by Victoria Sambunaris turn an otherwise drab landscape near Salt Lake City into study in form and function. Ringed by a barely visible mountains and spread out under voluminous clouds, the trains in their tight formation dominate the natural world in this image. (On view at Yancey Richardson Gallery through May 11th).
Part installation, part performance, Cameroonian-French artist Barthelemy Toguo’s ‘Urban Requiem’ begins with a room of charcoal drawings of African Americans killed by police and culminates in a gallery of heavy, wooden, torso-shaped stamps marked with messages. Against the back wall of the show, prints made using the stamps advocate for peace and respect for human life. The stamp in the foreground incites hope for ‘All the world’s futures.’ (On view at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea through May 11th).
A male authority figure crumbles as he leads three young women toward a shattered monolith in Arghavan Khosravi’s lushly painted ‘Mesmerized, Listen to the Big Brother’ at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea. Though eerily uniform and restrained by shackles connected to earbuds around their necks, the women are real and may free themselves as the illusion ahead of them breaks apart. (On view through April 27th).
North Carolina potter Jim McDowell channels the ceramic styles of enslaved craftsmen from the mid-19th century in face jugs with a message. ‘War Ends Nothing’ says the text written into the side of ‘War ‘n’ Peace’ on the left, while ‘Trayvon’ at center carries words that expresses anger at and healing after the death of Trayvon Martin. (On view at Cavin Morris Gallery in Chelsea through April 20th).
Nikki Maloof puts her audience right in the cage with these canaries while free pigeons cavort outside. Newspaper headlines on the pages papering the cage alternate between self-help and anxious messages while a dynamic twisting branch and electric colors of the yellow birds against a pink wall suggest pleasure and danger. (On view at Jack Hanley Gallery on the Lower East Side through April 21st).
The back glow behind the woman in Amanda Baldwin’s ‘Blushing Orchid’ and the neon-like outline of flowers against the wall suggest that the artist has a paintbrush in hand and her mind in the digital realm. The surreal, collage-like effect of pairing a realistic eye with Photoshop features or delicate blooms with blanched fern fronds deliberately juxtaposes the pleasure of looking in the digital and analogue realms. (On view at Thierry Goldberg Gallery through April 28th.)
This nearly ten-foot high bamboo and rattan sculpture by Sopheap Pich is a standout in the second iteration of the Cambodian artist’s two-part solo show at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in Chelsea. Inspired by a Louis MacNeice poem about reconciling opposites, Pich suggests seed pods and lungs with a piece that is 2-D, 3-D and larger than life. (On view through April 19th).
Worlds collide in Beijing-based artist Jia Aili’s huge, apocalyptic paintings at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. An ominous, oval-shaped portal appears to generate flashes of lightning and cause a disruption in space and time while to the left, a puffy, cloud-like figure shoots up toward a mysterious black orb. Whether this is an alien-invasion or some kind of terrestrial catastrophe, the drama is deeply absorbing. (On view at Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street location in Chelsea through April 13th).
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).
Vermont-based painter Susan Jane Walp cites early Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca and 20th century great Giorgio Morandi as influences on her painting style. Accordingly, Walp’s carefully tilted pummelo and spoon exude alertness, suggesting the objects depicted are literally poised for a diner. A cropped wine cork, pewter jug and glass egg cup extend off the canvas to allude to a wider spread of items in this measured yet rich array. (On view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on the Lower East Side through April 14th).
Berlin-based artist Michael Sailstorfer’s tear-themed show at Galerie Perrotin aims to convert sadness to fun. Here, a rickety farm building is destroyed by wrecking balls in the shape of teardrops (cables were removed post-production). Elsewhere, the artist prepares tear-shaped lumps of coal for burning and morphed Bavarian beer bottles into tear-shapes with the help of a glass-blower. (On view on the Lower East Side through April 13th).
Based on the life of Frederick Douglass, the most photographed American man of the 19th century, British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s new ten-screen installation ‘Lessons of the Hour’ brings Douglass’ remarkable life and oratory talents into focus at Metro Pictures Gallery. Here, actors play the role of Douglass and his wife traveling by rail, echoing and contrasting his escape via train as a young man to freedom in New York. (On view in Chelsea through April 13th).
A field of fruit appears perfect until it begins to move and collide, revealing soft surfaces that bespeak rot below a flawless exterior. Titled Impeach I, this animation by Jennifer Steinkamp began life as an LA billboard and now exists as a selection of constantly moving, morphing and reforming fruit. (On view at Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s 22nd Street Chelsea location through April 13th).
From persecuted religious figures to the first recorded female sculptor in Spain, Spanish artist Carlos Vega’s portrait paintings bring to light histories of remarkable women who refused traditional gender roles. Here, Vega switches from mortals to marvel at the divine with an image of Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, prosperity. (On view at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea through March 30th).
Before late Swiss artist David Weiss joined forces with Peter Fischli to become the charmingly eccentric duo Fischli and Weiss, he traveled widely, drawing as he went. Also inspired by underground comics, Weiss produced drawings like this tongue-in-cheek take on Giacometti’s famously reduced figure, currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery’s 24th Street location. (On view through April 6th).
External architecture comes indoors at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, where Iranian-American artist Andisheh Avini has installed two domed forms. Born and raised in the US but inspired by his Iranian heritage, Avini provocatively arranges these two quasi-readymades (the domes are crafted and painted by hand) to suggest danger via their pointed spires, around which visitors are invited to step. (On view in Chelsea through April 6th).
A cross section of a tree turns into a bosom in Kiki Smith’s bronze sculpture, ‘Sun,’ a highlight of new work at Pace Gallery that pulls human bodies into close contact with nature. This sculpture’s golden patina recalls gilded, divine bodies while revealing its origins in a majestically-sized tree that nurtures. (On view on 24th Street in Chelsea through March 30th).
Ceramic fragments resembling cracked mud ripple like water in response to visitors’ movements at Bitforms on the Lower East Side, creating a surprising and delightful effect, despite the worrying allusion to a parched environment. Part of Rozin’s new series of mechanical mirrors – interactive artworks that respond via motion sensor to a visitor’s movements which Rozin has created since the late 90s – the new mirrors inhabit a darkened gallery, creating a theatrical feeling that heightens the senses. (On view through March 17th).
Central Park is bursting with color and life in this acrylic painting by New York artist Nicholas Buffon, currently on view on the Lower East Side at Callicoon Fine Arts. Featuring the Bethesda Fountain’s ‘Angel of the Waters’ by queer sculptor Emma Stebbins, the painting calls attention to and celebrates sites important to LGBTQ communities around the city. (On view through March 24th).
Inspired by views of distant galaxies via NASA’s Hubble Telescope, Canadian painter Erik Olson launched a series of paintings that bring his characteristic bright color and expressive forms to outer space. Including paintings made with DS black, a light absorbing coating material, Olson’s show at Bravin Lee expresses wonder at and appreciation of our world and beyond. (On view in Chelsea through March 16th).
Female legs become soft beakers in Jen Liu’s painting of a luxuriously gold-toned world populated by detached body parts, currently on view at Simone Subal Gallery on the Lower East Side. A floating head connects by thin gold wire to the legs, while giant fingers reach in from the side to manipulate events. A nearby video featuring a hot dog factory manned by cadres of female workers aims at “resolving the inequities of wealth and resource distribution through the factory-produced hot dog.” (On view through March 24th).
Thousands of staples obscure and decorate the surface of a photo mounted on wood by Philadelphia-based artist Wilmer Wilson IV at Susan Inglett Gallery. Hiding the besuited figures barely visible below, the staples create an antsy rhythm, reflect light and deflecting viewers’ gaze. (On view in Chelsea through March 16th).
From melted plastics to acrylic paint on paper from old Indian ledgers, Judy Pfaff’s use of traditional and non-traditional art materials continues to set her exuberantly colored new assemblages apart. Now on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, her new riotous new creations are dominated by circular and organic forms. Part of a series of pieces title ‘Quartet,’ they find harmony in difference. (On view through March 9th in Chelsea).
Like Fernando Botero’s swelling human figures, Jordan Kasey’s monumental painted bodies transport viewers out of the everyday. Kasey’s figures, however, have the ponderous heaviness of stone enlivened by a sometimes-electric color palette, a dynamic that gives her massive paintings unique energy. (On view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side through March 17th).
Iconic 20th century German painter Georg Baselitz pays homage to artists who’ve inspired him in a new series of portrait paintings at Gagosian Gallery. Presented in Baselitz’s characteristic upside-down format, figures from Tracey Emin to Willem de Kooning (pictured here) hover against black backgrounds in an ethereal glow that suggests a ghostly background presence in the mind of the artist. (On view through March 16th).
Kathy Ruttenberg’s signature human/animal hybrids debuted on New York City streets this winter as large-scale sculptures in the Broadway malls project, a public art project located between 64th and 157th Streets on Broadway. This macquette for a sculpture on 157th Street, currently on view at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, brings her storytelling back to an intimate scale as a human-bodied stag pursues a quixotic romance with a confined mermaid. (On view on 57th Street at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art through March 8th).
British ceramic artist Richard Slee’s ongoing installation of ceramic hammers and tools with wooden handles is a thought-provoking jumble of tongue-in-cheek contradictions, starting with the impossibility of using any of these tools for actual labor. Like Pete Seeger’s famous intention to ‘hammer out love,’ the concept is more convincing than the reality, as suggested by this abandoned pile. (On view at Hales Gallery in Chelsea through Feb 23rd).
Ellen Berkenblit’s snarling big cat dominates Eva Presenhuber Gallery’s basement, where the group show ‘Samaritans’ assembles painting, sculpture and photography that spin strange tales. Above the animal, pipes spew blue clouds while below (or in the distance?) a truck dumps a load of materials. Trapped in the middle of human endeavors, this powerful creature bares its teeth. (On view in the East Village through March 2nd).
LA painter Theodora Allen’s first New York solo show features medieval shields as frames for plants with medicinal or harmful uses. Here, the hallucinogenic Jimsonweed materializes on the support like a ghostly presence, pointing to the non-tangible world of experience. (On view at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s 515 West 27th Street location through March 9th.)
Josh Sperling describes his shaped canvases as “simple, beautiful, and fun” in a recent Perrotin Gallery video that touts the pleasures of looking. He can add ‘huge’ to describe fifteen-foot tall Hocus Pocus, a centerpiece of his current show at the gallery. Evoking flowers or ripples from raindrops in water, the assemblage of eighty-four separate paintings is pure enjoyment. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 16th).
A tattoo of Popeye battling a squid inspired the cartoon-themed body art on this pensive pensioner, an invented character by Rodney Graham. Standing on the balcony of his ‘Vancouver Special’ sporting a rebellious rockabilly style, the character – played by Graham – stands out amid the trappings of middle-class culture. (On view at Chelsea’s 303 Gallery through Feb 23rd).
Art magazine covers inspired Marlon Mullen’s latest body of work, a series of paintings on view at JTT Gallery that revamp the eye-catching images on the country’s best-known art publications. From his studio at the NIAD Center for Art & Disabilities, Mullen here refines a unique vision that injects vivid color, graphic boldness, and some whimsy into a reworking of a 2014 ArtNews cover featuring Yemeni photographer Boushra Almutawakel’s image of a woman wearing a U.S. flag as headscarf. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 17th).
Eleanor Ray’s sunny Texas, Wyoming and Utah landscapes at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery are an enticing alternative to dreary mid-winter New York City. Despite their size (c. 6.5 inches high), the tiny oil paintings communicate wide open spaces suffused with light; here in ‘Wyoming Window,’ the silhouette of a window next to a view from another window turns the sun into an almost tangible presence in the room. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 10th).
Flowing water, curling strands of cable and licorice come to mind when encountering Richard Deacon’s dynamic steamed wood sculpture ‘Under the Weather #2.’ Appearing to both hang down from above like a Sheila Hicks fiber installation and rise up from the floor like a rearing snake, the piece is energized by its contradictory suggestions of slackness and tense energy. (On view on 57th Street at Marian Goodman Gallery through Feb 16th).
While sketching a tree stump in an area of trees lost to climate change near his home, California sculptor Charles Long was inspired by the devastation caused by patriarchal culture to merge a cross section of the dead plant with that of a human penis. Strangely humanoid, the transection is rendered in a huge scale at the back of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a plaintive and comedic monument to loss. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 9th).
James Baldwin’s intellectual legacy and his powerful impact on contemporary culture is the subject of David Zwirner Gallery’s current group exhibition, or ‘collective portrait,’ of the late writer and thinker. By displaying the work of other artists alongside documents and ephemera related to Baldwin, curator Hilton Als considers how the writer may have continued to make art had his career developed differently after the seminal ‘The Fire Next Time.’ In one of the show’s highlights, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s collaged photo draws on images from Nigerian and U.S. West Coast cultures, creating a provocative hybridity. (On view in Chelsea on 19th Street through Feb 16th).
Jeanette Mundt’s vivid red poppies look anything but innocent in this painting, testifying to the power of the plant as a drug. Painted from an on-line source, inspired by Van Gogh’s poppies and including a hidden image of a reclining woman, this rich and seductive image speaks to the possibility of multiple sources to reconfigure as a meaningful image. (On view in ‘The Rest’ at Lisson Gallery through Feb 16th).
Swiss artist Claudia Comte makes walls the focus of her latest solo show at Chelsea’s Barbara Gladstone Gallery, nodding to US politics, cave paintings and installations like Sol LeWitt’s rule-based wall drawings. Destined to be popular on Instagram as selfie-backdrops, the show reinforces Comte’s wish to make art not just for the art world elite but for everyone. (On view on 24th Street through Feb 16th).
Fans of James Siena’s rule-driven abstract paintings have new lines of enquiry to follow as the artist experiments with a canvas support (vs enamel on aluminum) and expands his normally intimate scale to sizable new works at Pace Gallery. (On view through Feb 9th in Chelsea).
Borders are front and center in U.S. politics and at James Cohan Gallery where Jorge Mendez Blake’s ‘Amerika’ bisects the main exhibition space, arresting both visitors’ thoughts and physical progress through the show. Mid-way along the base of the wall, Mendez Blake has placed a copy of Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ the troubled tale of a European immigrant to New York, intimating that migration is a fraught undertaking from start to finish. (On view at James Cohan Gallery’s Chelsea and Lower East Side spaces through Feb 23rd).
Iranian-born artist Fatemeh Baigmoradi’s burnt photographs recall her father’s attempt to avoid arrest by burning his photos of events that tied him to an oppressed political minority after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The artist connects the resulting images – characterized by beautiful halos of color – to a Persian painting tradition that painted a glow around the heads of featureless holy figures. Her installation, seen here in detail, is a standout in Laurence Miller Gallery’s ‘GRACE’ exhibition, a multi-faceted and fascinating exploration of gender, race and identity. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 22nd).
Charles White called painting his weapon in fighting racism and poverty in the United States. His painting of a sharecropper from 1947-48 demonstrates the difficulty of that life and the resilience of the farmers. Part of an exhibition highlighting White’s last mural – a celebration of the achievements of educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune – the work exhibits White’s commitment to representational art (when abstraction was becoming the new norm) in service of social change. (On view at David Zwirner Gallery through Feb 16th).
Just months before color theorist, abstract art pioneer and teacher Josef Albers passed away, a book titled ‘Sonic Design’ paid homage to his mid-century abstractions that could be discussed in musical terms. In particular, his series of shapes outlined against a dark background appeared simple but, like music, shift over time in how they might be read, with planes receding at one moment and coming forward the next. The book delighted Albers and inspired David Zwirner Gallery’s current show, which brings together select pieces of glass work from Albers’ time at the Bauhaus in Germany, paintings from his iconic ‘Homage to the Square’ series and more, to consider how color, shape and sound might relate. (On view through Feb 16th).
British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye converses with John Singer Sargent’s 19th century portrait of a doctor in a red dressing gown standing before red drapes in this vivid painting of an imagined young man in a red jacket lounging on a red sofa. Is he mimicking the crucifixion or expressing total relaxation in the comfort of this womb-red environment? Titled ‘The Ventricular,’ matters of the heart and health come to mind. (On view at Jack Shainman Gallery’s Chelsea locations through Feb 16th).
A fish-headed creature with legs runs desperately on a treadmill in this painting by Dana Schutz, epitomizing the pervasive anxiety and grotesque shape-shifting that energize her huge new paintings at Petzel Gallery. In one of the show’s largest paintings, Schutz depicts a mountaintop crowded with oddball characters with competing interests (from a landscape artist to a yogi), none of whom look enlightened. Elsewhere, a worried man in a business suit carefully washes a monster he can’t escape. Malaise abounds in Schutz’s portrayal of a dangerous and uncertain world. (On view at Petzel Gallery through Feb 23rd).
Despite the pressures of a busy life, whether she was at home, at work or at her mother’s house, Shirley Lam always put a meal on the table for her family. Thomas Holton’s documentary photos of the Lam family’s life in their 350 sq ft apartment on Ludlow Street is one of three remarkable photo series now on view at the Museum of the City of New York that elaborate on capability and sacrifice in New York’s Chinese communities. (on view through March 24th).
Though inspired by the local history and landscape of the countryside near her studio in Kent, England, Sophie von Hellerman’s latest paintings are anything but tranquil. Scenes of ecstatic dancing and energetically soaring birds join paintings like this one – depicting a WWII soldier’s plane crash in the woods – to offer unexpected rural drama. (On view at Greene Naftali Gallery in Chelsea through Feb 2nd).
In response to recent shootings of African Americans, Betye Saar has revived her iconic Aunt Jemima imagery to create new work that continues to undermine racist stereotypes from U.S. culture. Mounted on a washboard signifying a history of labor performed by African American women, this Aunt Jemima character totes a broom and a gun under the slogan ‘Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines.’ (On view in ‘Betye Saar: Keepin’ it Clean’ at the New York Historical Society through May 27th).
Inspired by a 2018 lie-in by high school students in Washington D.C. to protest gun violence, and ghostly profile portraits by Benjamin Tappan in the New York Historical Society’s collection, London-based artist Bettina von Zwehl created portraits of 17 New York high school students intended to recall death masks. The result is a sobering and beautiful memorial to those killed by guns and a powerful plea to stop the violence. (On view at the New York Historical Society on the Upper West Side through April 28th).
Brooklyn painter Paul Gagner takes personal care to a new and hilarious extreme with this image of an intricate landscape created via shaved hair. Gagner’s self-conscious art practice sends up the quest for originality and artistic greatness in paintings of self-help books for struggling artists and pictures like one featuring a giant meteorite that has crashed through a studio window and crushed an easel. ‘Hairscaping’ continues the self-questioning with its tongue-in-cheek pondering of what a truly dedicated artist will do for an art-led life. (On view at Freight and Volume on the Lower East Side through Jan 13th).
Hung in the spot long occupied by an iconic Jackson Pollock drip painting, and inspired by Clyfford Still’s monumental abstractions, Mark Bradford’s mixed media on canvas artwork declares that non-representational art is still cutting-edge in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ‘Epic Abstraction’ rehang. The bleach and water degraded layered paper surfaces of ‘Duck Walk’ reference Chuck Berry’s famous dance move, also adopted by ballroom voguers, maintaining Pollock’s scale and dynamic movement while prompting alternative considerations of race, gender and history. (Ongoing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
From the decaying elegance of Cuban houses to austere new apartments in Abu Dhabi, Andrew Moore’s photographs signal the passing of time and cycles of decay and renewal. His latest body of work – on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery in Chelsea – took him to Alabama and Mississippi, where he photographed vestiges of the past like this carefully arranged and artfully neglected collection of bottles in Demopolis, AL. (On view through Feb 9th).
Jennifer Packer’s portraits of friends and family don’t fully materialize before us; a fading foot or face that hasn’t quite come into focus keep each sitter’s identity unfixed. Here, in a captivating portrait titled ‘The Body Has Memory,’ Packer suggests that past experiences manifest physically in the body. (On view in Chelsea at Sikkema Jenkins & Co through Jan 19th).
Torn and damaged-looking, Bianca Beck’s past paintings have drawn comparison to anguished post-WWII art movements. Eleven seven-foot-high sculptures dominating Rachel Uffner Gallery‘s back space couldn’t be more different, however. Towering over visitors with raucous poses and vibrant color, they were inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which imagined humans so spirited they had to be disciplined by Zeus. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 23rd).
Construction sites, abandoned objects on the street and even a rubbish-filled alley have inspired Phyllida Barlow’s gritty sculpture, now on view at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Chelsea. Barlow once described her work as ‘hideous,’ and in her current show, ‘tilt,’ her sculpture stands in apparent defiance of gravity, incorporating jarring angles and textured surfaces that offer more for the eye to puzzle over than to delight in. This towering accumulation of jagged forms entices with its pink color but is ultimately menacing, suggesting immanent catastrophe. (On view through Dec 22nd).
In small doses, bark from the Ordeal tree (Erythrophleum guineense) is medicinal; in larger amounts, it’s fatal. This exercise in balance is at the heart of Sopheap Pich’s 17 foot long sculpture, ‘Ordeal,’ now on view at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in Chelsea. At exaggerated scale, the seed pod magnifies the ordeal of drinking water poisoned by the bark as a test of innocence, as defendants were once forced to do, and presents an object that can be used for good or ill. (On view through Dec 21st).
Mark Grotjahn’s latest show at Gagosian Gallery, ‘New Capri, Capri, Free Capri’ links in name to a private exhibition the artist organized at the Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri. In practice, the show is important for the artist in marking a departure from his signature face paintings, in which elongated eyes emerge from a center point surrounded by strong lines like a parting in fur. Still dominated by linear patterns, the new work is entirely abstract, foregrounding shape and color. (On view through Dec 22nd at Gagosian’s 24th Street location).
Helix, wave and vortex forms have inspired Tauba Auerbach to create an array of painting, glass sculpture, woven work, video and more informed by natural forms and logical systems. The ‘Ligature Drawings’ in her latest solo show at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery consider joined and curving forms, exploring language as a system of structured meaning. (On view through Dec 15th).
What do you do as a tune-loving artist with no talent for making music? German artist Gregor Hildebrandt’s answer has been to make art with music-related objects, creating walls with records pressed into clam-shell shapes and ‘paintings’ with cassette tape replacing brush strokes or lines. In the background of this installation view, VHS tape stretched against the wall creates a fluttering surface, as ephemeral as a musical note. (On view on the Lower East Side at Galerie Perrotin through Dec 22nd).
Rona Pondick’s seductively shiny stainless-steel sculptures, featuring her own head on human/animal hybrid creatures, have been shown worldwide; now, she’s debuting the next step in her career with glowing resin and acrylic sculptures at Marc Straus Gallery on the Lower East Side. After health problems forced Pondick to give up foundry work, she began encasing her visage in blocks of resin, creating the suggestion that some magic has temporarily paused the complicated processes within each head. (On view through Dec 16th).
This summer, Spencer Finch reread Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems, inspiring new work that continues his fascination with the way that the poet deftly put into words her keen observations of the world around her. Amid photos of Dickinson’s view from her desk and a collage of 19th century wallpaper patterns (including the one on her walls), Finch painted a leaf from life and repeated the rendering, folding his paper to replicate its trajectory as if falling to the ground. (On view at James Cohan Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 21st).
Lyle Ashton Harris’ new photographic self-portraits continue to posit ambiguous identities while forcing the question of what might be ‘natural’ as he dons masks collected by his uncle in East Africa while posing nude in various outdoor locations in New York and New England. Here, a tenuously held, chipped colored sheet obscures Harris’ face and upper torso, masking his identity as he stands in front of an anonymous shingled façade. Africa, art, ritual, the male nude, New England architecture and other references conjoin and collide in one provocative image. (On view at Salon94 through Dec 21st).
From behind a floating mass of car logos, a stoic figure represents the services of Mhofu Motor Spares in Zimbabwean artist Gareth Nyandoro’s work at Van Doren Waxter Gallery. Known for his cut paper technique – for which he scores, paints and peels layers from the material – Harare-based Nyandoro captures both the energy and the quieter moments of the city’s marketplaces and exchanges. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 21st).
‘Knight to Rook,’ the title of Jane Rosen’s latest solo show at Sears-Peyton Gallery, highlights the strategic placement of her totemic sculptures; here, a glass raptor perches before a stone fox, both suggesting the birds of prey and jackal of Egyptian mythology. Though the artist cites Giorgio Morandi’s vessel-based still lives as inspiration (particularly in a sculptural installation), Brancusi’s stylized, curving sculptures atop rough-hewn plinths come to mind, linking the finished product back to its origins in nature. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 15th).
Caravaggio’s 1602 oil painting ‘The Taking of Christ’ includes betrayal, surrender and alarm in one action-packed scene;’ New York artist Elise Ansel distills the drama in her oil painting, ‘Kiss,’ an abstraction that sketches the main characters as hovering areas of light. By exploring gesture, light and pattern, Ansel focuses attention on the feeling of the scene rather than the specifics, offering new ways to connect to the Old Masters. (On view at Danese Corey in Chelsea through Jan 5th).
In the shadow of Chelsea’s ultra-luxurious new residential buildings, Valerie Hegarty’s new sculptures and wall installations at Burning in Water are a poignant, contemporary vanitas, reminding us that what is fresh will soon be old. Here, the Brooklyn-based artist’s own subway stop is the inspiration for a paint and paper installation that nestles right into a pristine wall. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 5th).
Late sculptor Ken Price evoked bodies and nature in a humorous, accessible and endlessly colorful way for decades until his death in 2012. In a show of work from the ‘90s to 2010 at Matthew Marks Gallery, Price’s evocative forms continue to elicit puzzlement and delight in equal measure. (On view on 24th Street in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Known for large-scale majestic scenes of nature rendered in pastel on paper, Zaria Forman’s stunning new work takes her drawings to a new level. Invited by NASA to join their regular data-collecting flights over Greenland and the Antarctic, Forman had access to the landscapes that she recreates in huge pastel drawings that demonstrate the beauty and fragility of our planet’s northern climates. Here, a supraglacial lake is enchantingly beautiful but also a warmer spot that will contribute to this glacier’s faster melt. (On view in Chelsea at Winston Wachter Fine Art through Dec 21st).
“I was trying to imitate or channel what my kids were doing, because, you know, I can draw,” explains iconic appropriation artist Richard Prince of his new body of work ‘High Times.’ Titled after the counterculture magazine, which requested work from Prince for a 2016 cover, the new work is inspired by drawings from the late 90s that aim for immediacy and feeling that studied drawing couldn’t achieve for Prince. Here, in a piece over 18 x 20 feet, Prince inkjet prints, paints and collages his way into a body of work that overwhelms with manic energy. (On view at Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street location through Dec 15th).
