British artist Nigel Cooke has long blurred the line between abstraction and figuration, but recent monochromatic paintings on raw canvas at Pace Gallery convey new urgency and dynamism. By contrasting surface areas of relative calm with intersecting webs of paint receding into the distance, Cooke suggests that focus can be achieved and released, instantly altering our perspective on the environments surrounding us. (On view through Feb 29th).
Ja’Tovia Gary pictures the variety in Black womanhood in her new three-channel video installation at Paula Cooper Gallery with footage shot of the artist in Monet’s garden at Giverny intercut with video of Nina Simone’s 1976 performance at the Montreux Festival and street corner interviews with women of African descent in Harlem. Through direct animation on archival film, internet footage and her own images as well as montage, Gary employs a variety of techniques to present a complex view of Black interiority. (On view in Chelsea through March 21st).
At over twenty feet tall, late Catalan fiber artist Josep Grau-Garriga’s monumental tapestry ‘February Light’ dominates visitors to Salon94 Bowery. Made in the 70s after Grau-Garriga had pioneered a move away from realist tapestries crafted with expensive materials into expressionist compositions fashioned from fibers including string, hemp and even old sacks, February Light’s wooden rods and ropes give the piece a remarkable boldness. Created in the years just after the death of dictator Francisco Franco, the many openings in the blood-red areas of the artwork seem to continue Grau-Garriga’s frequent political allusions. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 29th).
On her way to developing an abstract, dripped-paint style that influenced Jackson Pollock in the 1940s, New York artist Janet Sobel painted scenes inspired by the shtetls of her native Ukraine. Now on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery, a selection of Sobel’s work shows her flattening of space and merger of a flowery landscape, patterned skirt and floral headdress in a way that flirts with all-over abstraction. (On view on the Lower East Side through Feb 22nd).
Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz brings the destruction and theft of ancient artworks to public attention at Jane Lombard Gallery with a beautiful but barren reconstruction of the banqueting hall of 9th century BC Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II at the Palace of Nimrud. Though destroyed by the Islamic State in 2015, panels from the Palace of Nimrud are housed in many museums, a point Rakowitz highlights by crafting ‘empty’ walls as meticulously as the patterned ones. (On view in Chelsea through Feb 22nd).
