Flesh-color, cabbage-like leaves nestle in a container that recalls an incubator in Hannah Levy’s alluringly odd sculpture at 247365 Gallery. Waxy fingers that hold the tub and leaves made of something resembling skin recall Keith Edmier’s resin renderings of his mother or Matthew Barney’s plastics and petroleum jelly, making for fascinating but unnerving sculpture.
Sally Saul’s arresting ceramic self-portrait portrays her as if in mid-sentence, her eyes looking into the distance as if trying to phrase something just so. Surrounded by tiny attentive birds, what she says has caused nature to stop and listen. (At LaunchF18 on the Lower East Side through March 6th).
This small painting by New York artist Clare Grill is a standout in a group show at Lower East Side gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects for its lively color and suggestion of a sympathetic face framed by lighter color, curving bands. (Through March 13th).
Like Freud, Mickalene Thomas’ couch has made her famous. Normally appearing as a colorful, patchworked backdrop in Thomas’ photos and paintings of lounging African-American beauties (seen on the back wall), it’s a character of its own in this retro living room, transplanted to Chelsea’s Aperture Foundation. (Through March 17th).
At over ten feet tall, this polyethylene sculpture by Jeff Koons magnifies kitsch to its limits. Whether it’s a contemporary crucifixion, as Koons has said, a phallic symbol, as others have pointed out, or something else entirely, there’s more than meets the eye. (At Chelsea’s Flag Foundation through May 14th).
