ArtSeen
Frank Bowling: London/New York
By David RhodesFor Frank Bowling’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, paintings from a six-decade career that saw Bowling work between London and New York are presented at both the London and New York locations simultaneously. Works on view span over 50 years of the artist’s career, from 1967 to the present day.
Assuming Distance
By Valerie MindlinCurators Ekaterina Lazareva, Ekaterina Savchenko, and Iaroslav Volovod put out an open call to artists living and working in Russia to engage in abstract reasoning and consider the speculative in any way one could conceive of it.
David Smith: Follow My Path
By Jonathan GoodmanSmith knew sculpture for what it was: an object in its own right, and, traditionally, a memorial to those who preceded those currently living, now gone. At the same time, his abstraction moved his art into a field of pure form, tending at times to reference nothing but itself.
Cristina BanBan: Del Llanto
By Alfred Mac AdamCristina BanBan’s Del Llanto is the perfect answer to the tedious, inevitable question, “And what have you been doing during the pandemic?” She’s been mighty busy, so much so that she’s filled two venues, 1969 Gallery in Tribeca and albertz benda in Chelsea, with her efforts: over 30 works in oil, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal.
Polyplatonics
(For Keltie Ferris)
By Phong Bui
Trans-confetti, trans-dazzlement, end of day./ He’s amazed by constellations of dots as conduits./ Bilateral symmetry, troweling, spraying, framing/ As a total necessity.
Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street
By Lisa Yin ZhangStanding on the sidewalk, peering into this Chinatown storefront around the corner from the Lam’s apartment, the exhibition invites the viewer to imagine that other families much like this one exist in similar apartments all around, if one could only see through the walls.
Eamon Ore-Girón: The Symmetry of Tears
By Barbara CalderónIn golden and grandiose paintings like cosmological topographies, Eamon Ore-Girón uses a geometric and mathematical language to reconsider the value and meaning of ancient aesthetic systems. Building upon medieval, colonial, and ancient Andean influences, Ore-Girón’s work allows multiple truths to exist in harmony and perhaps suggest new ways of thinking about how the past persists in the present.
Gabriel Rico: Of Beauty and Consolation
By Madeleine SeidelFor Of Beauty and Consolation, Rico—who is currently based in Guadalajara—explores mortality and meaning in the modern era through large sculptural pieces that incorporate scientific motifs and found objects such as neon lights, antlers, and horseshoes.
Koho Yamamoto: Under a Dark Moon
By Amanda Millet-SorsaAt the age of 99, master calligrapher and sumi-e artist Koho Yamamoto is having her first museum show at the Noguchi Museum. Curated by Dakin Hart, 10 paintings are exhibited in an intimate gallery and reflect a humble selection from her life-long practice.
Carol Rhodes
By William DavieComprising domestic-scale, oil-on-board paintings and pencil drawings, this tight, brief overview acts as an appetizer before her first posthumous survey scheduled to take place at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Marilyn Lerner: Walking Backward Running Forward—Again
By David RhodesTypically, all of Lerner’s paintings are mapped out on paper first, beginning with pencil drawing and then gouache color; these works on paper are rough approximations of the paintings that follow—they are never in any case “studies” to replicate in the traditional sense, though they are necessary for the anticipation of the custom-made wooden panel supports.
Remy Jungerman: Brilliant Corners
By William CorwinThe kaolin painted over the surfaces of Jungerman’s assemblages also adds a layer of metaphysical meaning: it unites, perhaps uncomfortably, the complicated narratives of Surinamese Maroon culture and the Dutch De Stijl.
Daiga Grantina: Temples
By Alex BennettDaiga Grantina’s engagement with sculpture is opulently panoramic and exacting. Her purview handles material acutely and intuitively, accreting relational assemblages or singularly charged compositions—in each case they are profoundly about their material.
John Giorno
By Barbara A. MacAdamInfluenced by Warhol, Rauschenberg, the graphic art of Pop as Edward Ruscha construed it, and the shock and schlock of advertising slogans and other signage, Giorno mixed media to promulgate feelings, beliefs, and social justice.
Hermann Nitsch: Bayreuth Stories
By Alfred Mac AdamWhether real or acrylic, blood is Nitsch’s preferred way to express the sublime, which the artist construes very much in Edmund Burke’s sense, as a spectacle that astonishes us, freezes us mentally and physically, and infuses in us a touch of horror.
J Stoner Blackwell & Masamitsu Shigeta
By Darla MiganThe current exhibition at SITUATIONS, an untitled two-person painting show, pulls at the threads of both genre painting and abstract coloration with works by J Stoner Blackwell and Masamitsu Shigeta, respectively.
Katie DeGroot: Boscage
By Robert R. ShaneIt’s not always a bad thing if you can’t see the forest for the trees.
The National 2021: New Australian Art
By Paul GladstonThe National 2021 is the latest in a biannual series of survey exhibitions initiated in 2017 showcasing new Australian art in major venues across Sydney. This year, The National is staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Carriageworks, Sydney, with a separate curatorial team at each location.
Hypnose
By Joseph NechvatalThe exhibition Hypnose (Hypnosis), curated by Pascal Rousseau for the Musée d’arts in Nantes, is a chronicle both compelling and comical. Although submerged in a stream of spiritual consciousness tied to artistic principles of universal connection, the exhibition also flirts with certain kitsch clichés, most notably the iconic hypnotic-disc that by spiraling supposedly sucks suggestible cerveaux down a somnambulist whirlpool.
Alice Neel: People Come First
By Ann C. CollinsCurators Randall Griffey and Kelly Baum gather more than 100 of the artist’s paintings, watercolors and drawings in Alice Neel: People Come First, a retrospective of the 60 years Neel spent transposing New York and its citizens into work that bears witness to the struggles of everyday life in the city as much as it dignifies the individual.
Liu Xiaodong: Borders
By Vivian LiKnown for his massive paintings of people around the world living at the edge of contemporary society, the neo-realist painter Liu Xiaodong was commissioned by the Dallas Contemporary to create a series of paintings on the US-Mexico border.
Rebecca Warren: V
By Louis BlockPrimeval and metamorphic, this language is a departure for Warren, and represents a new way of engaging with the body. Where her former sculptures were concerned with the grotesque, and touch was an incessant reminder of the distorting gaze transforming every bulbous outcropping into breast or phallus, these forms are more intimate.
Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21
By Alfred Mac AdamCurators Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and Elia Alba have composed a wild mélange of Latinx art, one that connects the viewer directly to the complexities of Latinx heritage in the context of the United States.
Kennedy Yanko: Postcapitalist Desire
By Folasade OlogunduduIn the historic landmark townhouse housing Tilton Gallery on New York City’s Upper East Side, Kennedy Yanko presents her latest exhibition and first solo show with the gallery, Postcapitalist Desire.
Kate Millett: Terminal Piece
By Ksenia SobolevaA palpable feeling of suspense suffuses the space of Kate Millett’s Terminal Piece (1972). 46 wooden chairs are installed in two long rows behind a parallel series of vertical wooden bars that span the length of the gallery. The lighting is dramatic, with seven light bulbs suspended from the ceiling illuminating the space within the cage-like structure, while the territory of the viewer remains dimmed.
Matthew Schrader: M. Obultra 3
By Peter BrockMatthew Schrader’s solo presentation at White Columns explores the complex symbolism of an iconic piece of American flora. Symmetrical pairs of curved leaves give ailanthus altissima an instantly recognizable silhouette, but Schrader’s work also speaks to the ways that this plant is actually a thriving immigrant entangled in the matrix of race and power that structures this country.
Monique Mouton: Inner Chapters
By Louis BlockThe title of Monique Mouton’s current show at Bridget Donahue, Inner Chapters, evokes something of a trance: the state that a novel creates when the plot accelerates but the end is not yet in sight, when the gamble of picking up the book has paid off.
Wilhelm Sasnal: New Paintings and One Film
By Amanda GluibizziWilhelm Sasnal’s paintings are sometimes described as “photorealistic,” but that’s not strictly the case. As his film Paintings and Bikes (2019) makes clear, the images in paintings occupy their own spaces and are preoccupied with their own concerns, not ours.
Kim Juwon: The night, the past recalls the past
By Jonathan GoodmanThe night, the past recalls the past (Edit 1–2) (2019), is a video by South Korean artist Kim Juwon (b. 1981) about the artist’s personal life from the years 2007 to 2019.
Nour Mobarak: Logistique Elastique
By Benjamin CliffordThe first impression made by Nour Mobarak’s solo debut in New York is celestial: several roughly spherical objects are scattered throughout Miguel Abreu’s Orchard Street gallery, like an eccentric solar system in miniature.
Tariku Shiferaw: It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang
By Charles MooreTariku Shiferaw’s It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang embodies Black joy—but not in the sense that people might think. In his latest exhibition, the artist pays homage to quotidian pleasures: those often referenced in the jazz era, a time when the greats sang about their daily lives.
David Row
By Colin EdgingtonDavid Row’s third exhibition at Locks Gallery is a testament to the evasive, liminal, and arbitrary elements of vision on which the artist focuses our gaze. Shifting from canvas to wood panels, Row has continued his use of irregular-shaped substrates, deeper color combinations and contrasts, and layered geometries, interstices, corners, and two- and three-dimensional space.
Alessandro Pessoli: Carousel
By Charles SchultzThe surfaces of Pessoli’s paintings teem with a diversity of mark making, which is part of what gives them their sketchbook quality. He uses pencils and stencils, oil sticks and spray paint, pastels and oil paint; all of them come together in an elegant play of texture which is especially charged when the viewer moves around the wooden panels and the gallery light rakes across the matte and reflective zones.
Julie Mehretu
By David RhodesThis exhibition, although a midcareer retrospective—Mehretu is far from done yet—gathers an impressive corpus of works. It arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York after iterations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will be the final venue this coming fall.
Jo Messer: Knees to Navel
By Reilly DavidsonMoving between the works on display at 56 Henry, one might be tempted to construct some kind of narrative that unites the paintings. Messer, however, favors an engaged act of decoding that emphasizes time spent with each individual work. Multiple visits provoke new and evocative experiences, and further probing is richly rewarded as images and themes manifest themselves only after sustained scrutiny.
Rose Salane: C21OWO
By Adriana FurlongThe objects Salane has amassed function quietly and intently towards the preservation of an ideal. I leave the show cognizant of their quiet solitude, a negative space formed by the absence of both worker and body. Each object is a mere starting point for a thick web of information and history that includes fingerprints and leaning elbows, boredom and the buzz of commerce.
Still/Live
By Charlotte KentAs expressions of mortal transience, commodity culture, or composition, still lifes make us pause. Across photography, video, mixed reality, and a variety of digital arts, the 15 artists in Still/Live at the Katonah Museum of Art find new methods for modernizing the genre. Curator Emily Handlin brings together a selection of works that exhibit an interest in the history of still life in order to expand its range of meanings and expression for our own time.
