The perfectly coiffed blond hair of the model in this surreal painting by Jim Shaw is not only coming from her head but powering her whole being as she emerges from a mass of curls like a genie materializes from smoke. Now on view at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures Gallery, the painting is part of Shaw’s bizarre but powerfully intriguing merger of advertising imagery and storytelling. (On view through Dec 22nd).
Zanele Muholi’s towering self-portrait dramatically dominates her ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ photo series at Yancey Richardson Gallery, challenging viewers to reconcile the South African artist-activist’s ‘exotic’ characters with political realities in Africa and the US. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 9th).
The screen and the stretcher come crashing together in Jacqueline Humphrey’s new oil paintings featuring characters and numbers. Applied through laser-cut stencils, the thickly textured symbols spread across the canvas like a dense fog, at times arranged to resemble brush strokes. (On view at Greene Naftali Gallery through Dec 16th).
If you climb up to the fourth floor of Marc Straus Gallery expecting to find strange things in the attic spaces, Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculptural rendition of scored poppy plants dripping latex won’t disappoint. Surrounded by rubber sculptures of packing crates, perhaps hiding even stranger cargo, the piece comes as an otherworldly surprise. (On the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
For years, Florian Maier-Aichen stayed dedicated to analogue approaches to photography; his latest digital images – created with Photoshop’s Lasso tool – have the joyful energy of a new convert. (On view at 303 Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
