Whale-lovers beware at Barnaby Furnas’ latest solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea – riffing on Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ and Jonah’s cetacean misadventure, Furnas’s new paintings picture whalers in total, gory triumph. Inspired by the fact that whale oil provided light for lamps, Furnas bathes a tattered Jonah in celestial light as he reaches shore, prepared to follow a new path. (Through Dec 21st).
Xavier Gravas is adrift in the contemporary, communication-saturated world. Consternation bows the perfect swoosh of his arching eyebrows. His full lips are set grimly together. He is an invented character that his creator, Aukland-based artist Peter Stichbury, calls a ‘Superfluous Man.’ Haunted by a sense of insignificance, Xavier peruses personal perfection to exquisite and troubling effect. (At Chelsea’s Tracy Williams, Ltd., through Dec 22nd).
Charles Ray’s sculptural self-portrait is stunningly perfect – his body has the unflawed, fluid shine of poured mercury – and relentlessly banal – he sports an everyman physique and needs to tie a shoelace. This first impression holds true to the man vs machine process he used to create the sculpture: a digital drawing is recreated as a clay sculpture which becomes the model for a computer controlled machine that sculpts the sculpture from a solid piece of steel. (At Matthew Marks Gallery on 22nd Street through Jan 12.)
Yinka Shonibare’s crafty revolutionary looks set for success with money, guns and communications, as embodied by his ’12 ‘Revolution Kid (fox girl),’ spotted today in the back viewing room of Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery. Toting a blackberry and a 24 carat gold gilded gun and dressed in Shonibare’s signature Dutch-imported, ‘African’ textiles, she begs the question of who she is and who’s backing her.
From its invention, artists manipulated photographs to show what the camera couldn’t capture – from moving clouds to group portraits – and to produce a more interesting composition. This unknown British artist’s photo from the 1910s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’ exhibition shows true love, if not a true image. (Through Jan 27th).