Inka Essenhigh at Miles McEnery Gallery

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Chic-looking hybrid people/flowers greet visitors to Inka Essenhigh’s show at Miles McEnery Gallery, part of a painting featuring an outdoor rave attended by fabulous flora.  In other works, leaves cluster together to become figures and tree trunks turn into bell-bottom wearing legs, a charming anthropomorphizing of the natural world.  Associated with Disney as much as Dali, Essenhigh’s fantastical vision taps into a desire to connect with nature while also exploring possible surreal outcomes of that wish.  (On view through June 3rd).

Inka Essenhigh, Flower King, enamel on canvas, 76 x 62 inches, 2022.

Liu Xiaodong at Lisson Gallery

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As a student, Beijing-based painter Liu Xiaodong traveled in the historically important region of Shaanbei, China; three decades later, his new body of work at Lisson Gallery considers changes not only in the area but in Chinese culture.  Several large canvases feature youth in their free time, playing in the river, drinking beer or making as if to fight while their friends look on in amusement.  Wearing counterfeit designs and clutching their phones, the youth are more connected to the bustling city behind them than nature or the monuments dotting the surrounding hills.   Prominently pictured behind the youth, the ancient Yan’an Pagoda (associated with the Communist Party for its time headquartered in the area) has been supplanted in prominence by the city’s new towers. (On view in Chelsea through June 10th).

Liu Xiaodong, Brawl, oil on canvas, 98 3/8 x 118 1/8 x 2 inches, 2018.

Josefina Concha at Praxis Gallery

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Chilean artist Josefina Concha’s textile-based sculptures, now on view at Chelsea’s Praxis Gallery, are immediately intriguing for their color, form and technique as well as their playful engagement with art history.  Situated front and center in the gallery is a table covered with undulating fabric, an update on Judy Chicago’s famous Dinner Party installation with a new guest list that includes Concha’s expressive, sewn paintings of Alice Neel, Velasquez and Francis Bacon installed over the table.  Elsewhere, a vibrantly colored, minimal panel pays homage to Agnes Martin while these two clustered organic forms recall the open blooms of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. (On view through June 2nd).

Josefina Concha, Skin Foundations, sewing on canvas, 70 7/8 x 65 3/8 inches, 2023.

Mark Bradford at Hauser & Wirth

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The monumental mixed media artwork ‘Manifest Destiny’ dominates the first room of Mark Bradford’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, its tattered surfaces giving it the feeling of a barely surviving relic, its huge scale making it unavoidable.  Emblazoned with a phrase, ‘Johnny Buys Houses,’ that brings to mind road-side signage for fly-by-night real estate operatives and titled after a term that describes relentless European expansion across the North American continent, the piece signals dubious practices with regard to land, property and ownership. (On view in Chelsea through July 28th).

Mark Bradford, Manifest Destiny, mixed media, dimensions variable, ’23.

Kelly Akashi at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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Kelly Akashi’s poetic assemblages of sculpture in glass, stone, bronze and rammed earth at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery heighten awareness of her materials and processes while juxtaposing human concepts of time with comparatively vast measures of time on earth and in the universe. Here, the glass sphere titled ‘Cosmic Axis,’ brings to mind the axis around which the earth rotates while also alluding to the connection between heavenly and terrestrial realms.  Surrounded by photos of distant nebula taken by telescopes, the sculpture feels especially present in the space of the gallery, its delicacy contrasted by a large concrete pedestal and enhanced by cherry blossoms on top that extend into the space of the sphere. (On view in Chelsea through June 10th).

Kelly Akashi, Cosmic Axis, Flame-worked borosilicate on rotating cast concrete pedestal, 77 x 22 x 22 inches, 2022-23.