Amid the holiday throngs in the Met Museum’s Great Hall, renowned Taipei-based artist Tong Yang-Tze’s monumental calligraphic installation stands out for its stark clarity and gracefully energetic form. Two canvases present phrases that encourage self-reflection and engagement with the new. Here, the saying ‘Stones from other mountains can refine our jade’ derives from a 3,000-year-old classical Chinese text originally intended to encourage an embrace of talent from another country. (On view through April 8th, 2025).
Tong Yang-Tze, installation view of ‘Stones from other mountains can refine our jade,’ ’24 in ‘Dialogue’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov 2024.
It’s always a pleasure to encounter British abstract painter Ian Davenport’s colorful cascades of paint, artworks that result from pouring vividly colored acrylic paint down an aluminum surface. In new work at Chelsea’s Kasmin Gallery, vertical lines give way to a looser order toward the bottom of each painting, or here, on a panel placed on the floor below. Intending to evoke natural forces including air currents and tides while pointing to the colors of Renaissance paintings by artists including Fra Angelico and Caravaggio, the paintings offer both formal and optical enjoyment. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 20th).
Ian Davenport, Beato, acrylic on aluminum mounted onto aluminum panel, 118 1/8 x 78 ¾ x 93 ¼ inches, 2024.Ian Davenport, Beato (detail), acrylic on aluminum mounted onto aluminum panel, 118 1/8 x 78 ¾ x 93 ¼ inches, 2024.
Malaysian artist Anne Samat’s monumental family portrait at Marc Straus Gallery is a memorial to her late mother, brother and sister. At center, an abstracted figure bearing a ‘no smoking’ sign alludes to Samat’s brother’s fatal illness, yet his form towers protectively over a small standing figure before a small pond. Constructed in everyday materials ranging from rakes to plastic swords and woven with a mix of yarn and rattan sticks, Samat updates Malaysian and SE Asian artistic practices in a powerful installation acknowledging the importance of family and, as the title ‘Never Walk in Anyone’s Shadow’ suggests, self-reliance. (On view in Tribeca through Dec 21st).
Anne Samat, Never Walk in Anyone’s Shadow 2, rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, beads, ceramic, metal and plastic ornaments, handwoven tapestry, 151 ½ x 285 x 77 inches, 2024.Anne Samat, (detail) Never Walk in Anyone’s Shadow 2, rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, beads, ceramic, metal and plastic ornaments, handwoven tapestry, 151 ½ x 285 x 77 inches, 2024.
Pace Gallery’s current exhibition of Irving Penn’s photographs from the ‘40s to 2000, curated by supremely image-savvy artist Hank Willis Thomas, is compact but impactful, featuring juxtapositions of photos with often radically different subject matter that nevertheless have some affinity. A 1947 studio portrait of New Yorker cartoonists poised on a scaffold hangs near a photo of a careful arrangement of blocks, immediately conveying careful arrangement and balance rather than humor or play. Around the corner, two models in Issey Miyake echo the form of a neighboring image of two weathered cigarette butts, a parallel that crashes together the fashionable and the discarded. Hung on gallery walls constructed to recall the temporary structures Penn used as sets, photos are positioned near each other but on different walls, similar yet different. Here, tangled members of a wrestling family appear opposite an arrangement of seafood, both shot in 1948, demonstrating the ‘visual muscle memory’ that Willis Thomas argues ties together Penn’s 70-year career. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 21st).
(left) Irving Penn, Dusek Brothers (1 of 3), vintage gelatin silver print, 7 11/16 x 9 5/8, image, ed of 41, New York, 1948. (right) Irving Penn, Bouillabaisse, chromogenic print, 24 x 20 inches, images, ed of 7, Barcelona, 1948.Installation view. Irving Penn, ‘Kinship’ at Pace Gallery, Dec ’24.
Complex and colorful, Jiha Moon’s ceramic vessels at Derek Eller Gallery entice with their cheeky updates to historic forms and their contemporary subject matter. Dumplings and succulent fruits allude to pleasure while forming the two eyes on this pot dominated by a fake grin. Moon explains that this work is autobiographical, the dark clouds representing the impact on her life of the weather (specifically hurricanes) in Tallahassee, where she lives. The pagoda, boat and two birds refer to Blue Willow Pattern, an English take on blue and white Chinese porcelain with an accompanying love story that alternates between tragedy and happy ending. (On view in Tribeca through Dec 21st).
Jiha Moon, Banana Thunderhead, porcelain, underglaze, glaze, 16.5 x 11 x 9 inches, 2024.
