Despite her assertive pose, Dutch painter Hannah van Bart’s enigmatic young lady appears to literally blend into the background as a shape-shifting wall the color of her dress manifests over her chest. (At Marianne Boesky Gallery through Feb 4th.)
Sandwiched on the wall between two roughly lettered signs reading, ‘The End is Here’ and the enigmatic ‘You Are Pretty Good,’ Jim Torok’s photo-realist renderings of friends and acquaintances like ‘Jennifer’ bring the artist’s thoughts and his community together in the quiet of the gallery. (At Pierogi through Feb 12th).
Handmade blankets rendered in bronze and boldly colored paintings based on the blankets’ patterns orient Michele Grabner’s latest body of work toward the domestic, the personal and the tactile. Each blanket’s form looks ghostly, harkening back to the bodies that used it to stay warm. As 2-D images on the wall, the cozy factor is replaced by a reference to the grid, the ubiquitous underlying principle to much mid-20th century art. Grabner suggests that context is key. (At James Cohan Gallery’s Chelsea location, through Jan 28th).
The vibrant colors and domestic setting rich with decorative details in this gorgeous still life by late New York painter Nell Blaine betray her captivation by 19th/20th century European painters like Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. (On view in midtown at Tibor de Nagy Gallery through Jan 28th).
Using the covers of old encyclopedias, law books and African American reference books, Samuel Levi Jones makes collages on canvas that question what changes as time passes. Jones employs books as symbols of obsolescence to further represent how the ideas expressed therein can also run their course. (At Chelsea’s Galerie Lelong through Jan 28th).
