ArtSeen
Ran Hwang: Becoming Again
By Robert C. MorganI would not be surprised if Ran Hwang’s current exhibition is the largest solo museum exhibition now on view in Florida, given the scale of her major multimedia installation works, such as Garden of Water (2010) and Becoming Again (2017).
Kamrooz Aram: Elusive Ornament
By Dina A. RamadanThrough painting, and more recently, sculpture and collage, Kamrooz Aram’s practice explores the classification and hierarchies of art history. Grounded in eurocentrism and informed by colonial conquest, understandings of Islamic art—itself a European discipline—have been formulated through contradistinction.
Zac Hacmon: Mia
By Emireth Herrera ValdésIn Mia, Hacmon debuts a newly developed artistic language towards Constructivism and incorporates the principles of contemporary security culture.
Robert C. Morgan: The Loggia Paintings: Early and Recent Work
By Raphy SarkissianSevere yet expressive, hermetic yet lucid, circumspect yet luxuriant, the geometric abstractions painted by Robert C. Morgan are absorbing explorations of form.
Merrill Wagner
By Joan WaltemathOne doesn’t know, initially, how often Merrill Wagner painted these paintings and how often they painted her. The hallmark of a true artist is someone who meets the material and the idea to be embodied in it halfway, and in so doing allows the material to speak and renders its qualities visible.
Ann McCoy, Paulina Peavy, and Olga Spiegel
By Christine DavisIn this stunning exhibition, we see the work of three women whose visionary practices show us lives lived in service of reflection upon the immaterial. Although their philosophical explorations are different, McCoy, Peavy, and Spiegel all work through personal cosmologies guided by forms of knowledge outside mainstream critical discourse.
Howardena Pindell: A New Language
By Maximiliane LeuschnerCurrently at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge—former home to British art collectors Jim and Helen Ede—Pindell unfolds her new approach—from abstraction to filmic confrontation—over three galleries on two floors in the annexed exhibition galleries.
Beatriz Milhazes: Mistura Sagrada
By David EbonyIn this, her first show at Pace, the Rio de Janeiro-based, Brazilian artist presented ten large-scale, colorful abstract paintings (up to approximately 8 by 10 feet), on the gallery’s second floor, plus an immense chandelier-like hanging sculpture displayed separately in the light-filled space on the seventh floor.
Robert C. Morgan: The Loggia Paintings: Early and Recent Work
By Jonathan GoodmanIntellectual, critic, and art historian Robert C. Morgan also makes paintings, and has been doing so for most of his long career. The current show, on view in the large, high-ceilinged main space of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, consists of a series of drawings called “Living Smoke and Clear Water”: small, mostly black-and-white works, of both an abstract expressionist and calligraphic nature (early on in life, Morgan studied with a Japanese calligrapher).
Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club
By William CorwinIn the comprehensive survey exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, Xaviera Simmons explains with brutal clarity the need for real gestures; land acknowledgments without Land Back will not do, and there can be no equality without reparations. As the title calls out, starting book clubs to read the literature of the oppressed without yielding the social and economic capital demanded in those very texts means nothing.
Hekate’s Grove: Elizabeth Insogna, Karen Heagle, Kay Turner
By Ksenia SobolevaOn view at FiveMyles gallery in Brooklyn is a compelling three-person exhibition titled Hekate’s Grove. Featuring works by sculptor Elizabeth Insogna, painter Karen (Karsen) Heagle, and performance artist and folklorist Kay Turner, this show pays homage to the ancient Greek goddess Hekate, a rather obscure patron deity of witchcraft who is commonly associated with crossroads and entryways, and capable of both good and evil.
Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio
By Alex A. JonesOf all the forms of fine art found in Chelsea today, the art of communicating with spirits remains little-represented. Ricco/Maresca is one of the few galleries known for bolstering self-taught artists. The current show unveils a practice which has been mostly hidden in Grant Wallace’s family archive since his death. However, it would be a mistake to label his work “outsider art.”
Federico Solmi: Joie De Vivre
By Mark BlochSolmi’s solo exhibition Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum traces his journey from Bologna, Italy, as the son of a butcher born in 1973, to his latest turn as a societal voyeur in the United States, transforming this elegant outpost of the Smithsonian, a little known but spacious museum in deepest Northern New Jersey, into a digital space truly worthy of the term “metaverse.”
Francine Tint: Life in Action
By David EbonyMostly large canvases (up to 6 by 10 feet) painted within the past three years, in the midst of the pandemic, the works on view in Francine Tint: Life in Action appear as luminous and effervescent as any she has made. But within the parameters of the visual vocabulary she has established over decades, Tint reveals a highly nuanced range of emotional states—from exuberantly euphoric to introspectively pensive.
Ursula von Rydingsvard: LUBA
By Amanda GluibizziWhen the cedar is fresh and you first cut into it, Ursula von Rydingsvard has said, the wood inside is pink, like “flesh.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why von Rydingsvard has long referred to her sculptures as “she” (though GÒRKA [2021], with its central, vertical lingam may be a “he”)—they’re alive and soft and individual, even as she works within her own aesthetic parameters.
Fiona Rae
By Barbara A. MacAdamAt play in the fields of abstraction, British artist Fiona Rae forces us to consider what indeed is abstraction. Could it be a part removed from a whole, or a piece used to construct a form? Can it stand alone? While this might appear to be a simple and overused trope today, it remains a provocative one, sitting at the core of anything we call art, and Rae’s works are truly art about art.
Angel Otero: Swimming Where Time Was
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThere may be no better example of a product of Chicago’s transgression, specifically the ethos of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), than Angel Otero.
Tirtzah Bassel: Canon in Drag
By Christopher T. RichardsVisitors will likely come to Tirtzah Bassel’s exciting new exhibition Canon in Drag with an expectation of gender inversion and playful camp—and Bassel doesn’t disappoint.
Carol Saft: The Cynnie Paintings
By Amanda Millet-SorsaCarol Saft’s painting asks us to slow down, to self-reflect, and cherish the ones we hold dear. For Saft, that meant turning her gaze to her partner, Cynnie, who takes center stage in these paintings, and thus gives us an intimate view into the domestic life of a mature lesbian couple, a subject that has not often been addressed in this tender and quotidian way in art history.
Alex Katz: Gathering
By Tom McGlynnKatz’s individual portraits, figurative groupings, and landscapes form a highly personal and potentially arcane firmament of scenarios yet their forthright presentation in simplified motifs and bold color paradoxically make his deeply subjective journey available to all.
Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered
By Wendy BlakeMorris Hirshfield Rediscovered, at the American Folk Art Museum, has brought his fantastical images—of women, animals, landscapes, and religious subjects—back into the public eye with forty-two paintings, more than half his output.
The 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet?
By David CarrierIn the preface of Mirror of the World. A New History of Art, Julian Bell says that he sees “art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continually reflected back at us.” His description applies word for word to this International, which does a superlative job of reflecting our present political situation.
Henrike Naumann: Re-Education
By Annabel KeenanIn her debut US solo show, Re-Education at SculptureCenter, Berlin-based artist Henrike Naumann explores the power of design to disseminate specific messages and align with larger ideologies.
Beyond Caravaggio: A New Account of Neapolitan Painting
By David CarrierIn his survey Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture, Anthony Blunt says that he counted more than two hundred churches, and a great deal of painting, sculpture, and decorative art was—and mostly still is—housed in these churches. But Naples’ artistic history has been marginalized.
Preetika Rajgariah: Servicing Self
By KK KozikThe poetic potential of yoga mats, it's safe to say, has rarely been explored in painting. In the hands of Preetika Rajgariah, however, second-hand plasticky pads transcend novelty and become the underpinning for self-portraits that are a sexy brew of eye candy, conceptual smarts, and earthy physicality.
Cy Twombly
By Jonathan T.D. NeilTo understand Twombly is to understand how his immersion in the fragments and fascinations of Greek and Roman culture made his work a living conduit to the “enduring” forms, figures, and stories of the ancient world. If Twombly is “about” something, this is what it is.
IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY
By Amelia SaulThe artists in this show tend towards identities that spill over and beyond traditional boundaries; the humor, sadness, dissolution, joy, plasticity, the lost and found of this more liquid existence is all in evidence. If one were to write, in contrast, ‘in a dream you saw a way to survive and were full of joy…’ you’d get the feeling.
Oscar Murillo: A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise
By Osman Can YerebakanIn a show with children’s drawings, such an angel resonates with growing up, the unstoppable passage from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.
David Novros: Paintings
By David RhodesAltogether, architectural features are recalled and a connection between the painting and the room is activated. This is what is at stake. Moving among the paintings the gallery becomes an active environment, like a chapel with frescoes.
Dean Fleming: Fourth Dimension
By Tom McGlynnOne of the most salutary effects of taking in Fleming’s work (and his intentions for it) from the mid- 1960’s is to make present room for a visionary continuum that promotes a newly expansive sympathy for space- and the time it takes to experience it.
Wild Strawberries
By Jonathan GoodmanThe artists in this show cannot be characterized as sharing communal values, either in form or theme. But that is exactly the point; the works are meant to display the pluralism present in contemporary art. What the artists do share is a determination to question the traditional, both in the sense of artistic legacies and codes of acceptable behavior.
Ron Gorchov: Watercolors 1968–1980
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightThe exhibition provides the unique experience to see where Gorchov expands the saddle into more of a field, plays at the boundaries, attempts to relate it more directly to the edge of the paper through trial and error, before finally settling on his aesthetic.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: New Works for a Post Worker’s World
By Robert R. ShaneWhether Valenzuela’s imagery engages with present-day workers, utopic visions from a modernist past, or a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, capitalist structures of time come under critique throughout BRIC’s exhibition. His work defies the capitalist conceit of linear progress by showing us ongoing labor exploitation that reaches back to the beginning of the industrial era, and it revolts against the structures that systematically control the time of worker’s lives.
Gabriel Orozco: Diario de Plantas
By Hearne PardeeOrozco attends not so much to botanical morphology as to the effects of touch, to how colors drip and seep through the porous papers, heightening our attention to these everyday effects, and to the bright red chop marks that punctuate the stains and tangles.
Niki de Saint Phalle
By Alice GodwinHenie Onstad reveals the marvelous entirety of Saint Phalle’s career, beyond the exuberant surface to the dark and twisted edges of the avant-garde.
Bayne Peterson: Mirage
By Amanda Gluibizzi“These things are BANANAS,” commented another visitor to Bayne Peterson’s Mirage on view at Kristen Lorello. He wasn’t wrong.
Josephine Pryde: The Vibrating Slab and Club Med
By Alexandra DrexeliusPryde appears apathetic towards distinctions between the natural and the manmade. She seizes moments of physical flux where material substrates emerge in the process of deformation and wear, whether it be wind whipping a mountain-face or water distorting a tablet screen. Apprehension of what a thing is emerges in the instant it falls apart.
Emily Mae Smith: Heretic Lace
By William CorwinIn critiquing the aesthetics of the digital, or even the expanded imaginary realm of our contemporary society, Emily Mae Smith brings to bear many of the compositional fixtures and iconography of the history of Western European painting. And it is dark, devastating, and relentless.
Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings & Structures
By Alfred Mac AdamWhat should make you ecstatic is the fact that you are becoming part of the recurring enactment of LeWitt’s concept of art: the translation of a concept born in his mind into, simultaneously, images and words.
EJ Hauser at WINDOW
By Louis BlockWhat does it mean for topography to unfold like this, to be made rather than a simple fact? Peering through a storefront window at this canvas, the most saturated colors describe tracts of land and bodies of water, darker colors suggest shadows in the landscape, and the ghostly imprints of revision—pinks and violets against each other—read as memories, transcriptions of light hitting the landscape.
Randy Wray: Travelogue
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWray’s ability to avoid semblance and reduction prioritizes specific but undisclosed sources, creating distinct shapes that defer recognition. Hovering in the protean spaces that can simultaneously suggest the interiors of bodies, bones, plants, and tools, Wray’s practice stays in the apeiron, presiding over the final moment where forms resist determination and luxuriating in the mutable recognition of shadows.
