‘Friends and Lovers’ at the FLAG Art Foundation

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Visitors to Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation encounter a wall of beautiful and colorful portraits by Billy Sullivan made over forty-five years at the entrance to FLAG’s hugely enjoyable group show ‘Friends and Lovers.’  Featuring work by over fifty artists and partly inspired by Alice Neel’s expressive portraits (the show includes her 1952 painting of her son, Hartley), the show is a hotbed of better and lesser-known talent and includes work by artists who have lately shown standout work in New York.  Among many highlights are Jerrell Gibbs’ portrait of a dapper young man in a lively interior sitting before an image of Picasso’s iconic dove and Ruby Sky Stiler’s inclusive grouping of male, female and child models that exist in both 2-D and 3-D.  (On view through Jan 20th).

Ruby Sky Stiler, Rose Bathers, Baltic plywood, paint and hardware, 78 x 95 x 3 inches, 2021.
Jerrell Gibbs, Fly Black Boy, FLY, oil, oil stick on canvas, 72 x 60 ¼ inches, 2020.
Billy Sullivan, Various works, pastel, oil and watercolor on pastel and canvas, various dimensions, 1974 – 2019.

Kay WalkingStick at the New York Historical Society

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Known for its outstanding collection of paintings from the Hudson River School, an early-to-mid 19th century movement that pictured the sublime in the landscape north of New York City, the New York Historical Society’s current exhibition ‘Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School’ invites new perspectives on what is considered the first ‘American’ school of art.  Kay WalkingStick, an artist of Cherokee descent, has for decades researched Native American histories in locations around the country, picturing specific landscapes overlaid with designs from local indigenous communities.  Here, a Haudenosaunee pattern from the New York region indicates Native American presence in the landscape despite an absence of pictured people.  The museum pairs WalkingStick’s depiction of Niagara with one foregrounding the power of the Falls by Louisa David Minot, one of the few female Hudson River artists, who referred to the scene as representative of conflict between Britain, the US and Native Americans around the War of 1812.  (On view on the Upper West Side though April 14th).

Kay WalkingStick, Niagara, oil on panel in two parts, 2022.
Louisa David Minot, Niagara Falls, oil on canvas, 1818.

Stephane Mandelbaum at The Drawing Center

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Near the entrance to the Drawing Center’s retrospective of work by late Belgian artist Stephane Mandelbaum hangs a diverse selection of portraits, arresting in their distortions and expressive immediacy, that signal his complex and conflicted experience of the aftermath of WWII.  A drawing of Francis Bacon, known for painting distorted figures reflecting collective horror at the atrocities of the war, hangs next to a portrait of Bacon’s criminally connected lover, George Dyer, which in turn is close to a portrait of embattled Nazi paramilitary leader Ernst Rohm.  Giving voice to a disturbing constellation of ideas via texts in Yiddish, French, Italian and German and pornographic imagery, the drawings explore the artist’s obsessions with sex and power which extend into his family life.  Under the portrait of Bacon pictured here is an almost totally obscured drawing of Mandelbaum’s father, artist and professor Arie Mandelbaum, visible just as a predella, a platform on which an altar would be placed.  (On view in SoHo through Feb 18th).

Stephane Mandelbaum, Bacon et predella avec portrait d’Arie (Bacon and predella with portrait of Arie), graphite on paper, 1982.

Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth Gallery and Luhring Augustine Gallery

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Iconic Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist is acutely attuned to the comfort of her audiences.  Visitors to her atrium-filling video installation at MoMA in 2008 might have lounged on a low couch while another level of relaxation – beds – awaited at the artist’s New Museum retrospective in 2016.  Rist’s current show at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Chelsea offers both a bed and assorted furniture, enticing the public into the artwork itself to be bathed in constantly morphing patterns and images.  Rist (seen in this photo conversing with visitors) conceived of Hauser & Wirth’s back gallery space as a living room; her simultaneous show at Luhring Augustine Gallery is a projection-filled back yard.  (On view at Hauser & Wirth through Jan 13th and at Luhring Augustine through Feb 3rd).

Pipilotti Rist, (installation view) Welling Color Island West, video installation with projector skirt, projection on carpet, plants and furniture, silent, unique, dimensions variable, 2023.

Rammellzee in ‘Wild Style’ at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery

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Forty years after the release of the independent film ‘Wild Style,’ a chronicle of the early days of New York hip hop culture, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery celebrates with a star-studded exhibition of writing, painting and sculpture that captures the creativity and energy of emerging urban youth cultures in the late 70s and early 80s.  Rammellzee’s sculpture Gasholear, surrounded by a cloud of spacecraft capable of producing lettering, is an astounding sight at the center of the main gallery.  Grasping a combination guitar/double halberd, this futuristic character is a machine/robot/human force to reckon with. (On view in SoHo through Jan 13th).

Rammellzee, The Gasholear (THE RAMM:ELLl:ZEE), c. 1987-1998, 180 pound exoskeleton of the RAMM:ELLl:ZEE, found objects, wireless sound system, paint and resin), dimensions variable.