Young Brooklyn-based British painter Tunji Adeniyi-Jones brings Yoruba deities, Matisse’s dancers and Chris Ofili’s Trinidadian characters to mind in bold, rhythmic paintings at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side. (On view through Dec 23rd).
Five mirror-topped antique wooden tables support a host of antique glassware, installed by Valeska Soares at Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea. Filled with spirits, and looking like the tidily assembled remnants of an epic celebration, the piece emanates a sickly smell that strongly suggests the party is over. (On view through Dec 16th).
In 1959, iconic representational painter Alex Katz made a somewhat drastic decision to cut away the background of a painting that wasn’t working and mount it on plywood. The result was the first of his cutouts, a wall-mounted or freestanding group of sculptures that Katz has created for decades. Now on view at Gavin Brown’s Grand Street location, cutouts include this diminutive cluster of friends. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 22nd).
“Unfettered, confident, individual…” – these adjectives don’t describe art or an artist, they’re part of Dior’s marketing for its ‘Precious Rocks’ eye shadow compact, remade into a series of large-sized acrylic paintings by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury. Long a provocateur who questions fashion, consumption and ‘high’ art, Fleury’s latest series may be modeled on makeup, but it makes an unmissable nod to mid-20th century hard-edge abstraction. (On view on the Lower East Side at Salon94 Bowery through Dec 22nd).
A tiny, sideways glance from a woman playing the slots in Vegas red flags an internal conflict in Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s absorbing mixed media image at James Cohan Gallery. Constructed using marquetry and collaged photos, the materials themselves speak to a nature/culture divide made more acute by the way the outside world is visible through the casino walls and the subject wears animal patterned (and likely synthetic) clothes. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side space through Dec 22nd).
