Paul Resika’s current solo show, ‘Empty’ at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects defies its title by engaging color field abstraction and also representational painting. A rich blue night sky and curiously intimate sailboats invite enjoyment of saturated color and the beginning of a narrative. (On the Lower East Side through March 19th).
To create the Rorschach-like image on this tapestry, German painter Gerhard Richter quartered and flipped a section from a 1990 abstract painting. At around nine feet tall and twelve feet wide, the complexity of its large surface boggles and its presence is both powerful and yet more ephemeral than the artist’s paintings. (At FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea through May 13th).
Christine Brache’s flesh-colored domino table swaps cards for playing pieces and features Brache’s face as queen and king. This mash-up speaks to the artist’s comparison of her own post-colonial genetic makeup to a VHS tape recording of a family event that has been repeatedly taped over. (At Fierman through March 19th).
Known for her masterful use of repeated materials, New York artist Tara Donovan has been busy lately with styrene cards, intuitively stacking the plastic slips in patterns that hint at the natural world, digital patterns and more. (At Pace Gallery’s 24th Street location through March 18th).
Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu’s hybrid bodies enter a new chapter in her latest solo show at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, where this bronze mermaid merges animal and human. The reference taps into E. African folktales of dugongs – a manatee-like creature – manifesting as female sirens who’d lure men into the sea. (In Chelsea on 21st Street through March 25th).
