Category: Features & Commissions

Matthew Stone at The Hole NYC

British artist Matthew Stone’s stunning merger of virtual and real (as played out on canvas) was a standout in The Hole NYC’s past ‘Post Analogue Painting’ shows, in which artists demonstrated how digital tools have altered the way they conceive of painting’s possibilities.  In his latest work, Stone introduces a maelstrom of bodies, half-formed by a vocabulary of brushstrokes that he first paints on glass, photographs, then digitally models into not-quite-classic nudes.  (On view on the Lower East Side through June 24th).

Matthew Stone, detail of Neophyte (St John’s Wort), digital print on linen, 63 x 98.4 inches, 2018.

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman Gallery

Nick Cave’s mixed media sculptures at Jack Shainman Gallery look like soft, dyed fur, but the reality is more somber.  Patterns painted on short, sharp wires portray what the gallery reveals is a “…layered mapping of cataclysmic weather patterns superimposed onto brain scans of black youth suffering from PTSD as a result of gun violence.”  (On view on 20th Street in Chelsea through June 23rd).

Nick Cave, Tondo, mixed media including wire, bugle beads, sequined fabric and wood, 96 inches diameter, 2018.

Jenny Saville at Gagosian Gallery

The most provocative – and political – of British painter Jenny Saville’s recent canvases remake traditional Christian pieta imagery in a way that both modernizes it and suggests timelessness.  In this striking piece titled ‘Byzantium,’ Mary is replaced by a figure recalling an ancient Greek striding youth – a kouros – while her dead son’s reclining body is transparent, as if real flesh gave way to a Gray’s anatomy diagram.  Elsewhere in the show, a male parent cradles a lifeless child with a modern war-ravaged city in the background.  As the heads in both images overlap heads and feet reappear many times, Saville seems to suggest that history repeats itself with dire consequences.  (On view at Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street Chelsea location through July 20th).

Jenny Saville, Byzantium, oil on canvas, 76 ½ x 94 1/8 inches, 2018.

Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Gallery

In a gallery titled ‘the repair annex,’ two new sculptures by Charles Ray depict mechanics absorbed in their work.  A man squats in a pose reminiscent of Ray’s own kneeling self-portrait from a few years back but also suggesting supplication or rapt attention to a task.  Ray’s meticulous renderings, here in painted steel, can take years to realize and the attention to detail and smooth finish give the piece an elegance and preciousness that connect this subject less to an autobody shop and more to an art history of heroic bodies.  (On view at Matthew Marks Gallery‘s 526 West 22nd Street location in Chelsea through June 16th).

Charles Ray, Mechanic 1 and Mechanic 2 (detail), painted steel, mechanic 2: 21 x 14 ½ x 18 ¾ inches, 2018.

Delia Brown at Tibor de Nagy

Nodding to the title of Picasso’s carefully posed 1907 bevy of red-light district workers, ‘Demoiselle D’Avignon,’ Delia Brown’s exhibition ‘Demoiselle d’Instagram’ is a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek take on today’s social media self-styling.  Departing radically from her signature realist style, Brown surrounds her subjects in shimmering halos of energy, perhaps emitted from the phones that absorb the attention of each woman.  Meanwhile, baby seals float through the air – their plight ignored by self-absorbed humans. (On view at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side through June 17th).

Delia Brown, mountain, red arrow and tree emojis, oil on canvas, 74 x 60 inches, 2018.