Karen Bennicke at HB381

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Karen Bennicke’s richly colored ceramic sculptures are a puzzle, their cubist forms appearing at first to represent street art, alien bodies, signage, or toys.  Once visitors to her exhibition at HB381 spot the maps of Manhattan on the gallery’s back wall, however, each tangle of lines and shapes materializes into a segment of the island’s street map.  We can’t see but we can imagine that work, leisure, recreation and every aspect of city life takes place in the locations pictured, a representation of possibility more than experience.  At the same time, Bennicke’s sculptures speak to histories of settlement and the myriad decisions that went into what our urban environment looks like today.  (On view in Tribeca through Oct 19th).

Karen Bennicke, MP IVA, terracotta, slab built, 40.5” H x 13.5” W x 9.25” D, 2024.

Sky Glabush at Stephen Friedman Gallery

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Sky Glabush, a Canadian artist who lives and works in the countryside outside of London, Ontario, takes inspiration from nature and early modernist art.  His arresting landscape paintings at Stephen Friedman Gallery in Tribeca alternate electric orange and yellow toned scenes with tranquil blues and purples, conveying a breadth of responses to an abundantly varied natural world.  Marked by their geometricized orderliness, Glabush’s huge paintings of forest scenes emphasize a linear quality that’s echoed in the vertical forms of gallery visitors standing before them.  Vibrant and driven by pattern and form, Glabush’s landscapes enticingly argue for the transformative and wondrous aspects of the natural world.  (On view through Oct 17th).

Sky Glabush, River Through Trees, oil and sand on canvas, 96 x 72 inches, 2024.

Hilary Pecis at David Kordansky Gallery

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Hilary Pecis’s still-life paintings at David Kordansy Gallery are anything but still.  Vibrant colors vie for attention with bold patterns in scenes that are empty of people but feel bursting with activity.   Here, a yellow tablecloth tilts at an impossible angle to show viewers a mid-meal scene from multiple perspectives at once.  Though the food looks good, it’s our appetite for color and design that is whetted by this dynamic painting.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 12th).

Hilary Pecis, Lunch in Frogtown, acrylic on linen, 74 ½ x 64 x 1 5/8 inches, 2024.

Joel Shapiro at Pace Gallery

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Perhaps best known for abstracted sculptures that resemble human figures in motion, Joel Shapiro has, in the past decade, memorably suspended forms in the air in explosive installations.  Once again situated on the gallery floor, Shapiro’s new work at Pace Gallery is no less dynamic.  ‘Splay,’ (foreground) resembles an energetically sprawling figure, another piece abstracts an ocean wave, and the show’s central sculpture ‘ARK,’ projects colorful forms outward from a mass that appears to stand on the gallery floor on tiptoes.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 26th).

Joel Shapiro, installation view of ‘Out of the Blue,’ Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, Sept 2024.

Karen Knorr at Sundaram Tagore Gallery

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Inspired by sources from European folk tales to fables from India’s Panchatantra, Karen Knorr’s extravagantly beautiful mini-retrospective of photographs at Sundaram Tagore Gallery taps into the complex relations between humans and animals.  In her most recent body of work, Scavi, the artist pictures excavated sites in southern Italy that were covered by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  To these she adds images shot elsewhere of animals, creating surprising connections.  Titled ‘Bacchus in Attendance, House of Neptune and Amphitrite,’ this image from a garden courtyard in Herculaneum features a leopard seated before a glass paste mosaic of Neptune and his wife, Amphitrite.   Associated with the god of wine, Bacchus, the leopard becomes a stand-in for the deity in a regal portrait of three divinities.  (On view through Oct 19th).

Karen Knorr, Bacchus in Attendance, House of Neptune and Amphitrite, Herculaneum, 58 x 72.5 inches, 2024.