Christina Forrer at Luhring Augustine Gallery

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LA-based Swiss artist Christina Forrer’s new tapestries at Luhring Augustine continue to explore complex and troubled relationships, specifically between mankind and nature in the show’s most dramatic work, ‘Sepulcher.’  Titled after the space in which a dead person would be laid, the piece features a blazing sun, burning fields, bolts of lightning and icy breath from a blue figure in the sky, all signs of nature wreaking havoc.  Yet lady bugs, a waterfall and a fertile orchard suggest continued benefit and abundance.  All crafted in bright and pleasing colors, Forrer’s apocalypse is tempered by love of and hope for the natural world.  (On view in Tribeca through Oct 29th).

Christina Forrer, Sepulcher, cotton, wool and linen, 97 x 162 inches, 2021.

Marco Maggi at Bienvenu Steinberg & J

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You need good eyesight to appreciate Marco Maggi’s minutely crafted cut paper collages and etched glass, but ironically in the artwork ‘Global Myopia’ at Bienvenu Steinberg & J, the artist proposes that our collective vision has deteriorated as technology has come to dominate our lives.  Quoting the artist, the gallery explains, “We live inside a phone: a screen that brings us closer to what is faraway and takes us away from what is close to us.” Maggi covers this huge lens with minute geometries as delicately engraved as frost.  Viewers are invited to slow down and view the work carefully, appreciating the details and the process of discovering them.  (On view in Tribeca through Nov 12th).

Marco Maggi, Global Myopia, engraving on biconvex lens, 20 in h x 20 in w x 3 in d, 2022.

Emily Mae Smith at Petzel Gallery

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Inspired by the manically busy brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, Emily Mae Smith’s recurring broom character is set apart – an individual posing with tense self-assurance in several of the artist’s new works now on view at Petzel Gallery.  Initially, Smith saw the brooms as representative of unrecognized female labor; separated from the pack, they become lone underdogs constructed from the discards of wheat production but forming identities of their own. This figure is host to two mice on her legs and birds and a squirrel on her head, offering sanctuary and even enduring abuse as part of her relationship to nature.  (On view through Nov 12th).

Emily Mae Smith, Habitat, oil on linen, 2022.

Kohei Nawa at Pace Gallery

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Pixels and biological cells are the focus of Japanese artist Kohei Nawa’s ‘PixCell’ artworks at Pace Gallery, sculptures that invite viewers to consider the relationship between the natural and artificial.  In this sculpture of a baby deer, the surface is rendered in spheres of various sizes, as if distorted by being viewed through a lens.  Transparent and appearing to rise up from the surface of the animal, the cells speak to the title of the show, ‘Aether,’ by giving the deer an ephemeral quality that belies its physical weight and form.  (On view through Oct 22nd).

Kohei Nawa, PixCell-Bambi #24 (Aurora), mixed media (glass beads, resin, Taxidermy, aluminum plate), 26 1/8 x 25 9/16 x 25 9/16 inches, 2021.

Jenny Holzer at Hauser & Wirth

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‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’ is one of Jenny Holzer’s most famous ‘Truisms’ (a series of short quotes from academic texts she started collecting in the late 70s) and one that comes readily to mind in her current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Gallery.  Lining the walls and scattered on the floor are versions of ‘curse tablets’ popular in ancient Greece and Rome, small metal plates inscribed with ill wishes toward a rival.  Holzer’s contemporary versions, printed on lead and copper, then distressed, bear tweets from Donald Trump and Q, founder of QAnon that appear to extend the tablet tradition into the present day.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).

Jenny Holzer, installation view of ‘Demented Words’ at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Sept 2022.