As summer travel season rolls around, ‘Shrines to Speed’ at Chelsea’s Leila Heller Gallery acts as something of a cautionary tale. Sylvie Fleury’s smashed and sliced car – covered in nail polish – rests near an ominous pair of van doors by Richard Prince and a crushed Fiat 500 by Ron Arad. All are enticing objects but each undermines the glamor of car culture. (In Chelsea through July 9th).
Spanish artist Cristina de Miguel offers an update on Picasso’s 1905-6 Boy Leading a Horse with a version that crops the boy (as if shot on film) and adds expressionist patches of color reminiscent of the post-war CoBrA group. The horse’s expression – he’s in on the joke? – adds humor. (At Freight and Volume on the Lower East Side through July 10th).
At the top of a stepped pile of dirt, a domed chamber houses bees (contained in the top of the structure by a screen) and offers visitors a place to sit for quiet contemplation. Artist Terence Koh explains that the ‘bee chapel’ came to him in a dream as a way of offering sanctuary to the beleaguered insects. (At Andrew Edlin Gallery on the Lower East Side through July 1st.)
Under the direction of photographer Sandro Miller, actor John Malkovich plays a series of unexpected roles in a recent body of work at Chelsea’s Yancey Richardson Gallery. As Warhol’s Marilyn, Arthur Sasse’s Albert Einstein and here, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Malkovich’s face makes some of art history’s most iconic images eerily unfamiliar. (Through July 8th).
Self-taught super realist painter Lordan Bunch paints children from class photos and photo-booth shots, pulling their identities from oblivion to act as memento mori. (At Foley Gallery on the Lower East Side through June 30th).
