Performance is key to New York artist Aki Sasamoto’s practice, but for her latest show at Bortolami Gallery, she outsources the action to her sculpture and to gallery visitors. Titled ‘Sounding Lines,’ after the devices used to test water depth from a vessel, the show consists of handmade sculptures resembling giant fishing lures and lengths of long springs stretched across the gallery between them. Occasionally, a motorized arm causes one of the springs to dance around and unaware visitors to react with surprise. Delightful yet disconcerting, the installation foregrounds our own response to (literally) alluring art. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 19th.)
Steve Wolfe at Luhring Augustine Gallery
Late San Francisco artist Steve Wolfe’s trompe l’oeil versions of books, boxes of books, book covers, sketchbooks and records at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca space continue to testify to the personal significance of iconic works of art, literature, music and more. Here, Wolfe’s recreation of a Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karina’ – made with oil paint, enamel, ink transfer, modeling paste, canvas and wood – looks used but intact. Other ‘books’ have ripped or dingy covers, indications of having been well-used, while dated cover art offers its own history of design. Wolfe’s New York Times obituary from 2016 included the newspaper’s critic Holland Cotter’s note that “…the histories trapped in the work are what warm up the optical tours de force.” Eight years after Wolfe’s passing, his work continues to fascinate not just for the pleasure of his sculptural skill but for the personal connections and memories the volumes evoke. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 19th).
Gina Beavers at Marianne Boesky Gallery
Titled ‘Comfortcore,’ and inspired by a Scandinavian concept of snug interior décor, Gina Beavers’ show of sculptural paintings at Marianne Boesky Gallery pictures chunky blankets, cheerful cushions and thick towel sets which together poke fun at the rampant marketing and consumption of coziness. Having recently moved into a home of her own, Beavers explains that online searches for furnishings led to ceaseless ads for similar products. Here, in a thick, 3-D painting she cut from foam and built up with putty and paper pulp before painting, Beavers collages together so many items with similar prints that it’s hard to tell where the products start and stop. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 5th).
Leonardo Drew at Galerie Lelong
At the entrance to Leonardo Drew’s current solo show at Galerie Lelong is a huge, ten-foot-high grid of panels, each hosting a rich abundance of fragments, yet this towering, orderly artwork is overwhelmed by the dynamic chaos of a floor-to ceiling installation in the main gallery beyond. The materials – wood, plaster and paint – appear to be weathered fragments from a natural disaster but are in fact deliberately distressed and arranged in clusters around the gallery’s two main columns. In his urge to reinvent, Drew has reused elements from previous installations – projects for Art Basel in ’22 and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in ’23 – to respond to the specifics of Galerie Lelong’s industrial-architecture-turned-white-cube by banishing its austerity and taking over the space. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 19th).
Wangari Mathenge at Nicola Vassell Gallery
Wangari Mathenga doesn’t dream the way most people do. Able to dream while awake and be awake yet dreaming, Mathenga eventually realized that her sleep patterns were atypical and, in her recent body of painting at Nicola Vassell Gallery, pictures herself between states of consciousness. Though we see her pajama’d figure lying down, the artist’s interest is in the brain in an active sleep state and her pictures emerge from data taken from the cameras she set up in her home and the dream journals she keeps. Originally intending to paint the dreams she recorded, Mathenge instead focused on her own moving figure in canvases that offer intimate insights yet picture a state of consciousness accessible only to her. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 19th).