In her late 80s, late American sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett created this arresting print, now a highlight of her mini-retrospective at Burning in Water gallery in Chelsea. Here, Catlett synthesizes influences from African art, European modernism and more in a portrait that feels both cutting edge and connected with early 20th century avant-garde art. (On view through Feb 3rd).
Known for making alterations to documentary photography in work that questions both history and how we consume photography, Cai Dongdong reframes a shot of guerrillas on Lake Honghu at Klein Sun Gallery. Armed fighters contrast the lake’s tranquil beauty in a spot that saw conflict during China’s civil war. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 6th).
Photographer Sage Sohier looks ambushed by her former-model mother and her sister, who make Sohier up with gusto in this family portrait. Our sympathy is tempered by mom’s and sis’s smiles, but as Sohier stages beauty treatments and time at home in her mother’s company, viewers are prompted to consider the role of beauty and appearances in Sohier’s life and our own. (On view at Foley Gallery on the Lower East Side through Jan 7th).
Working without training on a handloom, Brent Wadden crafts wonky abstractions in pleasingly complementary colors and dizzying black and white lines. (On view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash’s Madison Ave location through Jan 5th).
If a hard-edged abstract painting liberated itself from the stretcher and tottered off, it might look something like Billy Copley’s acrylic on paper sculpture, which appears to be blowing streamers for the new year. (On view at Edward Thorp Gallery in Chelsea through Jan 27th).
Andrea Grutzner turns framed excerpts from the built environment into surprising and colorful abstractions; here, in six images from her Tanztee series, amid wildly patterned clothes, Grutzner builds a structure from the arms and hands of dancers at a tea dance in rural Germany. (On view at Julie Saul Gallery through Feb 3rd).
Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar in 1961, Richard Avedon photographed over thirty weddings at New York City’s Town Hall, recording hopeful beginnings. These images became the opening photos in his 1964 collaboration with James Baldwin, ‘Nothing Personal,’ a photographic portrait of the USA in which joy gives way to darker social realities. Now on view at Pace Gallery, the series is stunningly relevant to contemporary life. (On view at Pace Gallery’s 24th Street location through Jan 13th).
Rainy days aren’t what they seem in Brazilian artist Cleverson Oliveira’s world. Look closely at this detail of a vine-filled, wetland landscape and the raindrops on the surface of the image transform into black and white oblong shapes resembling tiny heads with towering hairdos. (On view at Miyako Yoshinaga in Chelsea through Jan 6th).
Bosco Sodi’s hand-formed ceramic cubes at Paul Kasmin Gallery are new but appear weathered, evoking mankind’s ancient and ongoing relationship with clay. Behind, a mixed media painting continues Sodi’s signature practice of mixing pigment, sawdust, glue and other materials into an explosive, vividly colored abstraction. (On view at Paul Kasmin Gallery through Jan 6th).
Like models strutting down a catwalk, a row of abstracted ceramic figures by nonagenarian LA artist John Mason exude confidence and style. Recalling Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Brancusi’s sculpture and Lygia Clark’s bichos they combine Cubist form, Futurist dynamism with a suggestion of moveability often alien to ceramics. (On view at Albertz Benda Gallery in Chelsea through Jan 13th).
This 1989-90 pair of shoes by Elizabeth Murray features chimney-like shapes and keyholes, bringing to mind two houses (representing a couple?) bound by a tangled set of orange laces. On loan from MoMA, ‘Dis Pair’ is a highlight of Pace Gallery’s exhibition of Murray’s raucous, street-inspired painting from the 80s. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 13th).
Tiny roads bisect the anonymous subject of Derrick Adams painted collage, suggesting that this character is on an unswerving journey. Plaid fabric maps a city grid and African textiles nod to the heritage of the woman in this vibrant portrait of an individual in the driver’s seat of her own life. (On view at Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side through Jan 6th).
When Columbian artist Ruby Rumie chanced to meet Cartagena street vendor Dominga Torres Tehran, she commenced a series of strikingly beautiful portraits now on view at Nohra Haime Gallery in Chelsea. Titled ‘Weaving Streets,’ the show celebrates the communities of women who sell fish, fruit and other foods on the streets. Wearing understated white dresses, the women’s unique identities and natural beauty are the focus of this remarkable body of work. (On view in Chelsea through Jan 6th).
Adam McEwen’s escalator stairs, disassembled and scattered on Gagosian Gallery’s floor are readymades related to movement, though unlike Duchamp’s spinnable bike wheel mounted on a stool, they’re solidly in place. Dedicated to mass transit, their egalitarian nature contrasts an upside down image of a stretch limo, printed on cellulose sponge and hung on the wall behind. (On view at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison Ave 5th floor gallery).
Giuseppe Penone’s 1985 branch, carved from the block of fir wood to which it still belongs, posits artist as creator and forces a comparison between human effort and natural growth. (At Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street through Dec 22nd).
In the corner of a cavernous space that opens to the outdoors, a man rests in his immaculate office next to a retaining wall holding back hundreds of dark cows with yellow tags in their ears. Such surreal juxtapositions are rife in Anna Conway’s meticulous imagined painted scenarios, prompting consideration of how space effects the psyche. (On view at Fergus McCaffrey through Dec 23rd).
Katharina Fritsch’s latest large-scale sculptures of familiar objects blown up to huge proportions and presented in strikingly vibrant colors are as enigmatic and enticing as ever at Matthew Marks Gallery. We immediately confront our mortality in the first gallery, with a skull and egg acting as a reminder of death and a symbol of life about to start. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Three leaves drift down towards the earth in glossy, saturated tones that evoke candy more than autumn colors. Part of an exhibition that considers Gary Hume’s aging mother’s fading memory, the artist’s signature fields of saturated color here suggest absence but not darkness. (At Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Young LA-based sculptor Brian Rochefort takes inspiration from nature, modeling his ceramic vessels after a giant underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize and a series of water-flooded caves in tropical climes among other natural wonders. Building up organic shapes from mud and clay, Rochefort covers their surfaces with ceramic, glass and glaze to create a wonder-inspiring experience of his own. (On view at Van Doren Waxter on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
Astronauts simulate working in the weightlessness of space in Houston’s Johnson Space Center, where they perform tasks on models in a giant pool; captured by German photographer Thomas Struth, the lab appears to be suspended in space and time, submerged as if in jelly or under glass. (At Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street through Dec 22nd).
Susan Wides’ innovative use of a tilt shift lens allows her to choose which plane in a landscape she’ll bring into sharp focus and what she’ll allow to blur. The resulting compositions are a charming reintroduction to the natural world, appearing abstract until our eyes can pick out the details, here, of flowers in the foreground and falling water beyond. (On view in Chelsea at Kim Foster Gallery through Dec 22nd).
Photographer Debi Cornwall’s goal in visiting the U.S. naval station at Guantanamo Bay three times in ’14-’15 was to draw the public into looking at the camp again. Ironically, in some of the most effecting photos in her resulting series, her subjects look away. Men who were detained for years, in many cases with out ever having charges filed, refuse another interrogation – this time by viewers. (At Chelsea’s Steven Kasher Gallery through Dec 23rd. )
Described by Anton Kern Gallery as a ‘traveling hybrid procession-protest piece,’ LA artist Lara Schnitger’s installation at Kern’s 55th Street address features inspirational banners and a huge, mysterious ‘Venus of Fernando’ on a palanquin. Schnitger calls the installation ‘Suffragette City,’ a place in which female power is explored in radically idiosyncratic ways. (On view in mid-town through Dec 23rd).
From her home in a small French town, British octogenarian artist Ursula Morley Price continues to invent unique ceramic forms that evoke the beauty and order of the natural world. This white twist form, on view at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, suggests delicate petals, a flexible spinal column, coral, machinery and more. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Who says a photograph has to lie flat against the wall? Commercial photographer Jim Krantz – famed for his photos of the American west, particularly of cowboys for a Marlboro ad campaign – has collaborated with Modernica on a series of fiberglass chairs featuring wrangling and riding. If you can’t sit on a horse, this must be the next best thing. (On view at Danziger Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
Nina Chanel Abney’s electrifying new paintings take gun violence, racial conflict, and protests turned violent as subject matter. Their dynamic jumble of forms echoes the constant stream of alarming news supplied 24/7 by the media. (Nina Chanel Abney is showing new work at Jack Shainman Gallery’s 20th Street location through Dec 20th and Mary Boone Gallery’s 24th Street location through Dec 22nd).
Young Brooklyn-based British painter Tunji Adeniyi-Jones brings Yoruba deities, Matisse’s dancers and Chris Ofili’s Trinidadian characters to mind in bold, rhythmic paintings at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side. (On view through Dec 23rd).
Five mirror-topped antique wooden tables support a host of antique glassware, installed by Valeska Soares at Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea. Filled with spirits, and looking like the tidily assembled remnants of an epic celebration, the piece emanates a sickly smell that strongly suggests the party is over. (On view through Dec 16th).
In 1959, iconic representational painter Alex Katz made a somewhat drastic decision to cut away the background of a painting that wasn’t working and mount it on plywood. The result was the first of his cutouts, a wall-mounted or freestanding group of sculptures that Katz has created for decades. Now on view at Gavin Brown’s Grand Street location, cutouts include this diminutive cluster of friends. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
“Unfettered, confident, individual…” – these adjectives don’t describe art or an artist, they’re part of Dior’s marketing for its ‘Precious Rocks’ eye shadow compact, remade into a series of large-sized acrylic paintings by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury. Long a provocateur who questions fashion, consumption and ‘high’ art, Fleury’s latest series may be modeled on makeup, but it makes an unmissable nod to mid-20th century hard-edge abstraction. (On view on the Lower East Side at Salon94 Bowery through Dec 22nd).
A tiny, sideways glance from a woman playing the slots in Vegas red flags an internal conflict in Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s absorbing mixed media image at James Cohan Gallery. Constructed using marquetry and collaged photos, the materials themselves speak to a nature/culture divide made more acute by the way the outside world is visible through the casino walls and the subject wears animal patterned (and likely synthetic) clothes. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side space through Dec 22nd).
As lines to visit Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms at David Zwirner Gallery stretch around the block, the octogenarian art star’s paintings and flower sculptures are ready to wow the eye without the wait. Both engulf the senses with exuberantly patterned, wildly colorful design. (On view through Dec 16th at David Zwirner Gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location.)
Did you capture the perfect eclipse picture as the moon passed in front of the sun in parts of the U.S. last August? For the many whose cameras let them down, Ellen Harvey’s sculpture – a hand-engraved on rear-lit Plexiglas mirror rendition of an iPhone – not only yields a picture of the pivotal moment but also recalls the frustrated efforts of unprepared cell phone photographers last summer. (On view at Danese Corey Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 23rd).
Clouds of pigment abut clusters of hooked forms – the meeting point of lines which cover each canvas like a net – in Shirazeh Houshiary’s elegant new paintings at Lisson Gallery, suggesting areas of active organization amid nebulous clouds. (On view at Lisson Gallery’s 24th Street space through Dec 22nd).
Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ work elicits appreciation of the uncharming extraordinary in life. ‘Cushion,’ from the artist’s latest solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, is no exception. Two misshapen figures intertwine on a couch cushion, enjoying a moment of tenderness and connection. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
The perfectly coiffed blond hair of the model in this surreal painting by Jim Shaw is not only coming from her head but powering her whole being as she emerges from a mass of curls like a genie materializes from smoke. Now on view at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures Gallery, the painting is part of Shaw’s bizarre but powerfully intriguing merger of advertising imagery and storytelling. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Zanele Muholi’s towering self-portrait dramatically dominates her ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ photo series at Yancey Richardson Gallery, challenging viewers to reconcile the South African artist-activist’s ‘exotic’ characters with political realities in Africa and the US. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 9th).
The screen and the stretcher come crashing together in Jacqueline Humphrey’s new oil paintings featuring characters and numbers. Applied through laser-cut stencils, the thickly textured symbols spread across the canvas like a dense fog, at times arranged to resemble brush strokes. (On view at Greene Naftali Gallery through Dec 16th).
If you climb up to the fourth floor of Marc Straus Gallery expecting to find strange things in the attic spaces, Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculptural rendition of scored poppy plants dripping latex won’t disappoint. Surrounded by rubber sculptures of packing crates, perhaps hiding even stranger cargo, the piece comes as an otherworldly surprise. (On the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
For years, Florian Maier-Aichen stayed dedicated to analogue approaches to photography; his latest digital images – created with Photoshop’s Lasso tool – have the joyful energy of a new convert. (On view at 303 Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Antoine Catala’s charmingly strange solo show at 47 Canal remakes emojis as extra-terrestrial faces adorning ‘breathing’ socks and shopping bags. Commenting on what he sees as emojis’ sudden ubiquitous and alien presence in our lives, Catala asks what damage is occurring (band-aids are a theme) and how much ‘cute’ we’re willing to consume at what cost. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 17th).
A heavy, fascinating stillness pervades Matt Bollinger’s paintings and animation at Zurcher Gallery on the Lower East Side, extending even to this sculpture of a hand ashing a cigarette. The hand (crafted in resin and foam with painted highlights) looks like it’s been extracted from a painting, miraculously appearing in 3-D form before us. (On view through Dec 21st).
Young LA artist Becky Kolsrud has fun with the old assertion that women are ‘closer to nature’ by literally cloaking her female figures – giantesses who dominate the landscape – with bodies of water that act like robes or shields. (At JTT Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 17th).
In Jonathan Monaghan’s latest fantastical animation, Disco Beast, a unicorn is captured and drained of energy by a predatory cell phone charging station only to be reborn in a luxury building’s hidden disco. Here, the unicorn is penned in by a ring of TSA scanners, an allusion to the Renaissance Unicorn Tapestries (which act as metaphor for marriage, among other things) and an update on the experience of being ‘captured.’ (On view at Bitforms on the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
When Hayv Kahraman fled Baghdad during the first Gulf War, one of the few non-essential items her family took was a mahaffa, a traditional fan woven from palm tree fronds. In recent works at Jack Shainman Gallery, the artist has woven her paintings together in strips that recall the fan, artfully combining different realities. (On view in Chelsea on 24th Street through Dec 20th).
Inspired by shipwrecks in iconic 19th century paintings by Gericault and Delacroix, Cecily Brown’s latest oil paintings allow strange, fraught characters to emerge from the depths. In this detail from ‘Sirens and Shipwrecks and Bathers and the Band,’ a figure appears from swirling blue depths like a figurehead on a ship, a seemingly stray blue line forming a knowing smile. (At Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 2nd).
A crumpled red duvet at the entrance to Jane Lombard Gallery is at once cozy and alien – a symbol of the comforts of home, but a symbol that belongs to someone else. Constructed in fired clay by Ashley Lyon, sculptures including the bed covering, a piece of memory foam, pillows and this quilt offer a conceptual appreciation of the soft furnishings that make a house a home. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 21st).
Taking the history of painting, particularly 20th century modernism as one major influence, painter Matt Connors shapes color and form into optical experience in new paintings at Canada NY on the Lower East Side. (On view through Dec 10th).
Known for combining art, architecture and design, Jorge Pardo takes a turn towards two-dimensional work at Petzel Gallery with laser cut light boxes bearing his self-portraits. This surprising turn away from 3-D objects and spaces, along with Pardo’s recent self-portraits crafted on furniture, begs the question of whether all of the artist’s design isn’t a form of portraiture. (On view at Petzel Gallery through Jan 13th).
Over a period of weeks or months, photographer Tanya Marcuse builds up sections of earth with transplanted mushrooms, berries, and various plants, adding in preserved animals (who have died elsewhere) along with fresh materials. The result is a tour de force of nature, which she likens to the roiling bodies of Jan van Eyck’s Last Judgment or a Jackson Pollock dense, all-over composition. (At Julie Saul Gallery through Nov 25th).
In his latest solo show at Susan Inglett Galley, William Villalongo’s characters are an amorphous mass of organic material rather than distinct identities. Here, Villalongo alludes to Henry Brown’s escape from slavery in a box mailed from Virginia to Philadelphia, begging the question of how historical distance can allow identities to shift. (On view through Dec 9th).
With staffs and beards of snakes, Gilbert and George merge the roles of Moses, Medusa and themselves as performance artists who make art with their bodies. In their latest two-gallery show, the duo don an array of stylized beards that reference Santa, religious observance and hipsters in their East London neighborhood. (At Lehmann Maupin Gallery on 22nd Street in Chelsea and on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side).
Danish photographer Thomas Bangsted’s WWII scenes at first read as strangely hi-res documentary images until revealed as masterpieces of reconstruction. Photographing objects and vehicles from war museums and collectors, building his own props (like the life raft in the foreground) and tracking down remaining ships, Bangsted pictures the maneuvers that won the war, including this episode in the Allied effort to sink one of the largest warships ever made. (On view at Marc Straus Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
Inspired by Homer’s The Iliad, Adam Parker Smith brings the ancient epic up to date by rendering key characters in Mylar balloons, which he casts in resin, then lines with fiberglass. This serious kitty – decked out as Hercules wearing a lion skin – is the centerpiece of one of New York’s most fun gallery exhibitions. (On view on the Lower East Side at The Hole NY through Nov 19th).
Against Alex Israel’s huge painting of a sky lit by a gorgeous sunset, Chris Burden’s three ‘ghost ships’ dominate Gagosian Gallery’s showcase of work by its LA artists. Equipped with solar panels and GPS, the boats were designed in 1991 to sail alone from Charleston to Plymouth, England. (On view through Dec 16th).
Three isolated bathers search for shells in a nature scene that melds sky and water, melancholy and peace by Paolo Ventura at Edwynn Houk Gallery. Ventura’s new hand painted, collaged photos evoke stage sets that question time and place. (On view in the 57th Street area through Nov 11th).
Even the base of Alice Aycock’s dynamic aluminum sculpture appears to lift off the ground in the artist’s dramatic debut at Marlborough Gallery which now represents the artist. The sculpture alludes to the forces of nature, fairground rides and more in works that combine chaotic and ordered forms in one eye-popping piece. (On view on 57th Street through Nov 18th).
The title of Josephine Halvorson’s exhibition of new painting, ‘As I Went Walking,’ refers to a verse in Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’ about trespassing; Halvorson’s weathered signs and tattered boundary markers suggest that ownership of the land is not so easily claimed. (At Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea through Nov 22nd).
Sarah Bereza’s paintings question what a frame is and what it should hold. Alive with natural forms, the borders of her images are sculpture holding melting forms or, like here, conventional images that surprisingly appear to resist completion, morphing before our eyes. (On view at Bravin Lee Programs in Chelsea through Nov 29th).
Before documentation and text became Conceptual Art founder Douglas Huebler’s primary media, his formica sculptures considered how place was experienced as art. Here, the yellow-hued interior of an S shaped sculpture glows mysteriously as it evokes superpower, the alphabet and Truro, MA the place for which it was named. (At Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea through Nov 18th).
Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel spent a career focusing on energy and sustainable practice; lately, he’s expanded on his professional experience with ‘Waste Not,’ a photo series shot at European waste recycling facilities. Bulteel’s eye for color and composition make materials intriguingly strange (this pile of mixed metals suggests hair) while demonstrating what efforts go on to recycle and reuse. (At Anastasia Photo on the Lower East Side through Nov 22nd).
Using his signature long exposure technique, Matthew Pillsbury turns his lens for his latest show, ‘Sanctuary’ at Benrubi Gallery, on basic rights – assembly and expression – that are often taken for granted. Here, a participant pauses in front of Matthew Chavez’s ‘Subway Therapy’ project, which provided pens and post-its for New Yorkers to express their thoughts after the 2016 presidential election. (On view in Chelsea through Nov 22nd).
Kathleen Ryan creates colossal pearls from bowling balls in her New York solo debut at Arsenal Contemporary on the Lower East Side. This piece and others shift our expectations of scale and turn quotidian balls into oversized, luxury jewelry. (On view through Nov 5th).
Claes Oldenburg’s new sculptures remix objects familiar from his and parter Coosje van Bruggen’s career (a pencil once proposed as a New York monument, a banana skin flapping in the wind, yellow and brown potato chips). Collectively titled ‘Shelf Life,’ Oldenberg’s relatively small-scale assemblages beg the question of an idea’s staying power and continued relevance. (At Pace Gallery’s 24th Street location through Nov 11th).
From Graceland to the former steel town of Bethlehem, PA, an assortment of iconic ‘American’ locations inspired Keith Mayerson’s ambiguous portrait of the country at Marlborough Contemporary. Here, Three Mile Island represents conversations around the definition of ‘clean’ power as the famed sight of a 1979 accident has been slated to close in 2019. (On view in Chelsea through Nov 11th).
Inspired to reconsider Malcolm X’s ideology while participating in an Algerian arts festival in 1969, Barbara Chase-Rimboud began a series of bronze sculptures, titled after the activist, fourteen of which are now on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Created with a knotted silk base and bronze forms made by casting worked sheets of wax, the mix of materials signals strength and finery. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
In 1977, Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone grew potatoes inside casts of his ear, mouth and nose. The resulting face-shaped potatoes were cast in bronze and are set among real potatoes in Hauser and Wirth Gallery’s huge showcase of the Italian art movement that embraced ‘poor’ materials and rethought what art could be. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
Tom Sachs creates an updated cabinet of curiosities in his latest show at Sperone Westwater with his display of fake moon rocks. (On view on the Lower East Side through Oct 28th).
No other gallery security staff are as subtle as Tom Friedman’s ‘Guardian,’ a light projection above Luhring Augustine’s exit. Friedman’s entire show does away with his usual labor-intensive sculpture techniques, substituting instead alluring objects and figures that might disappear at the press of a power button. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
Young Columbian artist Maria Berrio envisions harmony between humans and nature in richly patterned Japanese paper collages that delight the senses. In this detail, a lush landscape is setting to a thoughtful folkloric character perfectly at home as human and monkey habitat merge. (On view at Praxis International Art in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
Transparency, an interest in organic forms and a desire to push her materials drove late artist Ruth Asawa’s to create the undulating, hanging wire sculptures, currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location. (On view through Oct 21st).
August Sander’s iconic ‘People of the 20th Century,’ a photographic project documenting the German people in the early 20th century is the starting point for Omer Fast’s ‘August,’ a captivating video imagining Sander’s haunted later years. Here, Fast restages Sander’s oft-reproduced image of young farmers as an opportunity to consider the photographer’s stagecraft. (On view at James Cohan Gallery through Oct 29th).
Fluorescent acrylic beams contrast Bortolami Gallery’s solid black cast iron columns in an eye-popping show of colorful new work by Barbara Kasten. Like a giant glowing Jenga block pile, the sculpture suggests precariousness and possibility while bridging the viewer’s way to Kasten’s new body of work – studio photos mounted with projecting acrylic forms that blur the boundaries between depicted and actual space. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 21st).
Robert Lazzarini’s waving fences and distorted phone booths have satisfied his audiences’ craving for trompe l’oeil effect created with impressive craftsmanship. After a four year hiatus, Lazzarini is back with a gallery full of paintings and this sculpture, a Hollywood Regency style decorative dogwood branch supersized and distorted to suggest luxurious decor gone wild. (On view at De Buck Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 26th).
A reflective countertop doubles the size and lightens the tone of Holly Coulis’ reductive still life, currently on view in her solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Multiple outlines around a tissue box, a carafe and two buds holding a pear give these everyday objects an electrifying glow. (On view on the Lower East Side through Oct 22nd).
Popeye, Chinese landscape painting and pre-Columbian art are among the many influences on Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s small-scale but boldly conceived ceramics. Vessels like this untitled head reimagine use-value while introducing enticingly idiosyncratic characters. (On view at Kaufman Repetto in Chelsea through Oct 21st).
Last year, from the decks of a decommissioned Navy ship, artist Duke Riley orchestrated dramatic light shows with over one thousand pigeons carrying LED lights on their legs. If the birds seemed anonymous as they put on a light show in the dark, their identities come into focus now at a two-gallery exhibition of related artwork, including a room of hand-painted and embroidered portraits of 1,000 birds. (On view at Magnan Metz Gallery’s pop up location at 524 West 26th Street and 521 West 26th Street through Oct 21st).
These shoes may not be the most ambition artworks in Sally Saul’s debut show at Rachel Uffner Gallery, but their unassuming quality – a quotidian appreciation for the quiet pleasures in life, such as the perfect shoes for the occasion – is the perfect introduction to a show of what critic John Yau calls ‘funny, sweet and tender’ artworks. (On view on the Lower East Side through Oct 29th).
Moroccan-born artist Mounir Fatmi’s installation ‘Inside the Fire Circle’ offers the idea of literally jump starting conversation via his arrangement of jumper cables, typewriters and paper on which the public is invited to contribute thoughts. The centerpiece of a show that considers the limits of freedom, the installation suggests that self-expression can be risky. (On view at Jane Lombard Gallery through Oct 21st).
“In Delaware, it is illegal to consume perfume.” This law and other seemingly dated statutes meant to address particular situations are the subject of Olivia Locher’s entertaining solo show ‘I Fought the Law’ at Chelsea’s Steven Kasher Gallery. Locher’s staged ‘crimes’ highlight odd ordinances in the 50 states, making for memorable images that question what else is on the books. (On view through Oct 21st).
Terri Friedman’s multi-part fiber artworks have huge presence; bold colors – from lush green to fiery orange – suggest abstracted strata of the earth and the making process is never far from the surface of a viewer’s consciousness. (On view at James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 14th).
Branch-like, bead-covered forms wrap around a hollow, multicolored cast of a forearm in Eva Rothchild’s latest show at 303 Gallery. Dark, glittery and talismanic, her latest sculptures offer an almost tactic experience for the eyes, turning surface and form into territory to be minutely explored. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
A monster’s human mask falls away in Mark Thomas Gibson’s ‘Washed Up,’ or is a disguise being applied? Either way, to judge by the quivering, fearful eyes, it seems like the game’s up and this creatures underlying monstrous identity will soon be revealed. (On view at Fredericks Freiser Gallery through Oct 14th).
British painter Patrick Hughes continues to explore what he terms ‘reverspective,’ or the upending of our expectation that paintings will appear to be in one fixed place. Walk past one of Hughes’ projecting paintings on board, and the rooms he paints appear to shift; the device is acutely appropriate to his depiction of the Barnes Foundation, the art museum which itself shifted locations by moving to downtown Philadelphia in 2012. (On view at Flowers Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 14th).
In a show dedicated to the legacy of Alexander Calder, Li Jingxiong’s snake skin footballs are a standout. Hung like buoys or a flattened Calder mobile, the balls marry beauty, with their craftsmanship, and danger, with their material. (At Klein Sun Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 7th).
Four paintings hang against chain link fencing at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, inaccessible to the public except by a narrow corridor between the fence and the wall, which has been painted with towering figures of sinuous dancers, themselves depicted behind a painted fence. The show is titled ‘Paradise Lost’ and follows Ofili’s ‘The Caged Bird’s Song’ at London’s National Gallery, for which the artist alluded to the practice in his adopted home, Trinidad, of raising caged songbirds. Here, aggressive fencing suggests that it is not the song of the caged bird that is sweeter. (On view through Oct 21st).
Amid a gorgeous Hudson Valley landscape, friends mingle on the porch of ramshackle Rokeby mansion in Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s colorful celebration of togetherness at Marlborough Contemporary. Anchored by homeowner Ricky Aldrich in a blue jumpsuit, this multiage gathering of babies, dogs, kids and neighbors pays homage to community. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 7th).
Since 2001, Sze Tsung Nicolas Leong has photographed horizon lines around the world from a tantalizing distance, hanging his images so that the Kenyan countryside abuts a view of Toledo, Spain, for example. In this detail, the wind whips tourists on a landscape so barren they look like actors on a stage-set. (On view at Danziger Gallery, in collaboration with Yossi Milo Gallery, on the Lower East Side through Oct 28th.)
Charles Ritchie’s tiny, meticulous watercolor and graphite drawings include reflections in the windows of his suburban home, offering a scene of the outdoors that’s at the same time, a view of his workplace. The merged locations feel dream-like and explore connectedness between interior and exterior realms. (At BravinLee Programs in Chelsea through Oct 14th).
Perfect craftsmanship allows Wim Delvoye’s fabricated, ready-made sculptures to fool the eye, tricking us into thinking he’s performing magic with pieces like this twisting tire. Constructed completely in polished and patinated stainless steel, this remade motorbike tire is fit for a stunt bike. (On view on the Lower East Side at Perrotin through Oct 28th).
Off-the-wall artwork isn’t unusual on the Lower East Side, but artist Daniel Canogar’s flexible LED screen-sculptures give new meaning to the phrase. In a solo show at Bitforms Gallery, Canogar employs grids of LEDS on flexible backing to display undulating patterns, derived from real-time environmental data, from temperature to seismic activity. (On the Lower East Side through Oct 14th).
Son a Thai diplomat, globe-trotting artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has traveled the world for much of his life. On tables covered in rich, purple felt, copper reproductions of the artist’s passports from throughout the years glint in the abundant sunlight of Gavin Brown’s Grand Street gallery like bars of precious metal. (On view through Oct 28th).
Lewis Hine’s early 20th century photos of young women employed in Boston’s textile mills – which aimed to show the deleterious effects of their labor on their bodies – accompany images like this magnification of a textile fragment in Lisa Oppenheim’s latest show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. By zeroing in on this fragment of fabric, Oppenheim aims to reduce the distance created in industrial production between bodies and the products of their labor. (In Chelsea through Oct 21st).
Intercut with circus and festival ads and excerpts from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’ Allen Ruppersberg’s pointed yet ambiguous texts – one asks, ‘Is one thing better than another?’ – question the status quo in eye-catching day-glo color. (At Greene Naftali Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 21st).
Emily Mae Smith’s huge sea creature is a monumental iceberg waiting to surprise mariners drawn in by the tiny sirens – fantasia brooms morphed into mermaids – atop her head. Both the visible femmes fatale and the lurking, pouty-lipped presence suggest visible and hidden forces to be reckoned with. (On view at Simone Subal Gallery on the Lower East Side through Oct 29th).
Glittery sequins meet antique quilts in Sanford Biggers’ first solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, where the artist synthesizes folk tradition and minimalism in this wall hanging titled ‘Ooo Oui.’ (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).
Kazuko Miyamoto’s ‘Female I’ reclines along the floor of Zuricher Gallery like a taught, transparent odalisque, a shifting combination of representational form and pure abstraction that rethinks minimalism’s relationship to the organic world. (On the Lower East Side through Oct 22nd).
Oversized wineglasses, cups, a fork and other objects litter worktables in Amanda Ross-Ho’s latest solo show at Chelsea’s Mitchell Innes & Nash, where the LA based artist spent August making paintings of clock faces (see the normal-sized glass holding goldfish crackers at middle right). Based on vintage paper clock surfaces that she purchased from eBay and used for note-taking, the clocks unmoor time (Ross-Ho recently lost her long-term studio) and the surreally enlarged elements from everyday life become inexplicably important. (On view through Oct 14th).
Sandblasted posters anchored by wood dowels by Ishmael Randall Weeks speak to the eroding effects of time, yet the entropy he evokes speaks more of uncovering the forgotten past than obliterating it. (At Van Doren Waxter through Oct 28th).
The U.S.’s dark and violent past continues to inspire Kara Walker’s new paintings and drawings; here, Walker presents a portrait of Grandison Harris, a 19th century man enslaved and assigned to rob graves to supply the classrooms of anatomy students at a Georgia medical college. After the Civil War, financial constraints forced his decision to return to the college and continue to supply bodies until his eventual death and burial in the same cemetery that he revisited in his working life. (On view in Chelsea at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. through Sept 16th).
