Helix, wave and vortex forms have inspired Tauba Auerbach to create an array of painting, glass sculpture, woven work, video and more informed by natural forms and logical systems. The ‘Ligature Drawings’ in her latest solo show at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery consider joined and curving forms, exploring language as a system of structured meaning. (On view through Dec 15th).
What do you do as a tune-loving artist with no talent for making music? German artist Gregor Hildebrandt’s answer has been to make art with music-related objects, creating walls with records pressed into clam-shell shapes and ‘paintings’ with cassette tape replacing brush strokes or lines. In the background of this installation view, VHS tape stretched against the wall creates a fluttering surface, as ephemeral as a musical note. (On view on the Lower East Side at Galerie Perrotin through Dec 22nd).
Rona Pondick’s seductively shiny stainless-steel sculptures, featuring her own head on human/animal hybrid creatures, have been shown worldwide; now, she’s debuting the next step in her career with glowing resin and acrylic sculptures at Marc Straus Gallery on the Lower East Side. After health problems forced Pondick to give up foundry work, she began encasing her visage in blocks of resin, creating the suggestion that some magic has temporarily paused the complicated processes within each head. (On view through Dec 16th).
This summer, Spencer Finch reread Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems, inspiring new work that continues his fascination with the way that the poet deftly put into words her keen observations of the world around her. Amid photos of Dickinson’s view from her desk and a collage of 19th century wallpaper patterns (including the one on her walls), Finch painted a leaf from life and repeated the rendering, folding his paper to replicate its trajectory as if falling to the ground. (On view at James Cohan Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 21st).
Lyle Ashton Harris’ new photographic self-portraits continue to posit ambiguous identities while forcing the question of what might be ‘natural’ as he dons masks collected by his uncle in East Africa while posing nude in various outdoor locations in New York and New England. Here, a tenuously held, chipped colored sheet obscures Harris’ face and upper torso, masking his identity as he stands in front of an anonymous shingled façade. Africa, art, ritual, the male nude, New England architecture and other references conjoin and collide in one provocative image. (On view at Salon94 through Dec 21st).
