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ArtSeen
Freddy Rodríguez: Early Paintings 1970–1990
By Susan BreyerHutchinson Modern & Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition at its East 64th Street gallery space, Freddy Rodríguez: Early Paintings 1970–1990, features a selection of paintings and collages by the Dominican York artist.
Cauleen Smith: Mutualities
By Sasha PanaramCauleen Smith’s Mutualities, a show on Afro-diasporic histories and futurities, offers viewers another opportunity to engage the form of a list and its potential by presenting a selection of artworks that gather the works of Black feminist writers, activists, and spiritual leaders who urge viewers to create new Black worlds.
Meg Lipke
By Tom McGlynnThe sculptural presence of these new works is carefully modulated by the wide vocabulary of glyph-like gestures that Lipke paints in colors that evoke, by turns, both the folkloric and psychedelic.
Alienation ?
By Robert C. MorganBy transforming the single word of the show’s title into a question, the gallery provokes viewers to come to terms with its meaning.
Otto Piene: Rasterbilder / Ceramics
By Tom McGlynnOtto Piene’s life’s work constitutes a grand example of the artist’s capacity for transforming the leaden memories of war and its ruinous aftermath into golden allegories of energy, light, and futuristic aspiration.
MORE TIME LESS
By Sophia MaThis second ensemble show for Cathouse Proper, curated by David Dixon, invites viewers to examine cultural and informational exchanges across time: these allusions, both hidden and on the surface, draw connections between the works and within the works themselves.
ART CLUB2000: Selected Works 1992–1999
By Sam KormanART CLUB2000 was a collective of precocious, 20-something Cooper Union grads, who, under the guidance of de Land, operated like the gallery’s house-band, putting on an annual exhibition at American Fine Arts from the group’s inception in 1992 until they disbanded, poetically, at the end of the millennium.
Luther Hampton
By Earnestine JenkinsLuther Hampton (b. 1942) grew up in the heart of his native South Memphis, a Black neighborhood well-known for its cultural contributions to the history of the city, such as the famous soul music label, Stax Records.
TITAN
By Bruna ShapiraThe new iteration is part of TITAN, an outdoor exhibition from kurimanzutto gallery in phone booths all located within a short stroll along 6th Avenue between West 51st and West 56th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan. The site, one of the main arteries of the city, was selected for its abundance of advertising and proximity to cultural and financial powerhouses—Radio City Music Hall, UBS, CIB, MoMA, and Peggy Guggenheim’s original gallery Art of This Century.
Hulda Guzmán: my flora, my fauna
By Will FenstermakerGuzmán’s solo exhibition at Alexander Berggruen is her first in the United States since then, and it finds her turning, mostly, to views around her studio, where she was confined during COVID quarantine. It’s a breathtaking retreat. From the artist’s window, palm trees spread out over lush tropical hills.
Wassef Boutros-Ghali: A Retrospective
By Kaleem HawaCompiling paintings and drawings from his personal collection, Wassef Boutros-Ghali: A Retrospective at albertz benda is a debut of sorts, the first time many of his works have been shown publicly.
Jack Whitten: I AM THE OBJECT
By Dan CameronSince Whitten’s death in early 2018 at the age of 78, a new and welcome focus of attention has been brought to his achievements.
Frank Auerbach: Selected Works, 1978–2016
By Tom McGlynnThere are a number of portraits presented at Luhring Augustine in this tightly-curated survey of Auerbach’s paintings and drawings, which also includes some of his relatively larger landscapes. It’s a welcome opportunity to review up-close a number of mature works by an artist much more well known (as practically a national treasure, really) in his adoptive homeland in the UK.
Ronnie Landfield: Concurrence
By Tom McGlynnAn important attribute that has contributed to Landfield’s independence as a painter is his assimilation of the long history of improvisatory painting and his dedication to physically exploring the recombinant potential of its basic pictorial presumptions.
Yuji Agematsu: Times Square Times (Kodak All-Stars)
By Peter BrockThe orgy of artificial light and advertising causes most visitors to tilt their heads skyward as they drift through Times Square. Despite, or perhaps because of this maximalist effort above our heads, Yuji Agematsu remains attuned to the peripheral drama unfolding at street level. Over the course of four years during the mid-2000s, the artist took hundreds of 35mm photographs during nightly walks through Midtown Manhattan’s most exalted intersection. The resulting images form the basis of his third solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery.
James Luna: Take a Picture with a Real Indian
By Susan HarrisJames Luna:e a Picture with a Real Indian is a posthumous installation at Garth Greenan Gallery of a performance/installation originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum’s downtown branch in 1991. The piece takes on issues of Native American identity and stereotypes, and explores how they land in largely non-Native spaces of viewing and writing about art.
Philip Mueller: Last Days of Soft Machine
By Nadine KhalilAs Mueller’s world is captured in a drunken disarray, the sense of an aftermath emerges—that still-raging afterparty.
James Hyde: Public Sculpture
By Hovey BrockThis exhibition extends James Hyde’s current practice of combining photographic imagery with paint and other materials on a variety of flat surfaces, including linen, board, and steel. Playing with the conventions of painting, these works have aesthetic appeal, but Hyde is after bigger game.
Genesis Belanger: Through the Eye of a Needle
By Holly BushmanIn Genesis Belanger’s exhibition Through the Eye of a Needle, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, death is an expected, albeit uninvited, guest, at home in the affluent domiciles orchestrated here through tableaux and mise-en-scène.
Michelangelo Pistoletto
By Ann C. CollinsPistoletto’s art lies not so much in the physical objects he creates, but in what happens to us when we encounter them, and in the potential they inspire.
Astrid Kajsa Nylander: minijobs
By Ann C. CollinsIn her exhibition minijobs at Page (NYC), the Stockholm-based artist Astrid Kajsa Nylander builds a collection of paintings that revel in the possibilities of the diminutive sewing notion while challenging the relegation of women’s artmaking to realms of craft and hobby.
John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance
By Jean DykstraPhotographer John Edmonds was a standout in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, where his understated portraits and still lifes quietly deconstructed ideas about race, gender, and masculinity. His reserved and lovely show at the Brooklyn Museum—his first solo museum exhibition—includes a few of the photographs on view at the Whitney and in his well-received book Higher (2018), as well as new portraits and still lifes.
Julie Mehretu: about the space of half an hour
By William CorwinIn this new body of work—actually three different sets of paintings and etchings—Julie Mehretu is inscribing marks from a series of hands: her own, the fingerprints of digital interventions, and even the hand of the Almighty (at least by implication), on a series of roiled and undulating backgrounds.
Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings
By Jonathan GoodmanTom Sachs, in a mid-career show—his first at Acquavella Galleries—is offering “handmade paintings” aligned with classic American, mostly commercial iconography: a reproduction of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, the McDonald's Golden Arches, an American flag. These images are so ubiquitous as to have taken on definitive status, giving them an authority nearly ethical in their quality; all this despite the fact that Sachs’s paintings are mostly of logos of things to be sold.
Ariana Papademetropoulos: Unweave a Rainbow
By Kathleen HeftyAn orange creamsicle-colored carpet lures visitors to Vito Schnabel Gallery into another realm—that of Unweave a Rainbow, LA-based artist Ariana Papademetropoulos’s current exhibition on view at the gallery’s New York space. The plush room is sensual and juvenescent, complete with six paintings and two modular sculptures of rainbow-hued velvet cushions placed on the floor to be utilized and rearranged.
Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch
By Adriana FurlongThe semiotic and material sampling Biggers plays with reveals a fidelity to the movement of the body as expression of autonomy and to the repurposing of messaging as tools for creating new worlds. Both the vernacular of quilts and the ontology of dance embody these fleeting dispatches: carefully delineated calls to action. Codeswitch, faithful to its name, sees Biggers stepping with ease between and among vernacular and notated history, a skill that avoids easy reduction and co-option.
Mary Mattingly: Pipelines and Permafrost
By Charlotte KentMary Mattingly’s recent photographs in Pipelines and Permafrost stitch together a story of geologic deep time for the imagination. The New York-based artist has always woven ecological concerns into her public works and photography practice, committed to helping audiences question how the land and water resources as well as the products and presumptions of our lives came to be.
The Archive to Come
By Charlotte KentIn The Archive to Come, curators Clark Buckner and Carla Gannis invited artists to contribute a work of their choice that responded to “questions of loss, memorialization, crisis, and re-invention … questions about what we value and want to preserve as we work to recover from their ravages and build for the future.”
Joseph Holtzman: Six Recent Paintings
By Gilles Heno-CoeHoltzman finds an excellent collaborator in Sam Parker, whose refreshingly visionary approach shares the painter’s energy and tongue-in-cheek humor, qualities that are often lacking in the woefully conventional and overly-serious New York art scene. Holtzman’s first solo exhibition on the East Coast, much like his installation at the Hammer Museum in 2014, features an all-encompassing environment of color and pattern, visually situated somewhere between Biedermeier, Arts and Crafts, De Stijl, and 1980s Pattern and Decoration. This campy atmosphere of celebratory excess serves as the perfect backdrop for his recent oil on marble paintings.
Vivian Springford
By Barbara A. MacAdamIndeed, Springford’s paintings, with their spiritual meanderings and discomforting vivid colors that appear to congeal and darken toward the center of the canvas, seem to strike a cultural nerve today. We are drawn into circular dark voids—evoking sexual orifices, pockets of the cosmos, the eye of a hurricane, and the caverns of dream and memory in the mind.
RosTA
By Olivia GilmoreAttending the vernissage for RosTA in person both shocked and soothed, the show resembling a highly consumable piece of mass media, read hesitantly after we removed our masks in the early autumn sun. Hard and steely like the Soviet hammer and sickle, RosTA served danger, sex, agitprop; the denouement, gratis galette, and Nero d’Avola.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash
By Amber Jamilla MusserChase uses the laundromat to illustrate how practices of the quotidian—washing, here—can bring together individual needs and vulnerabilities into a form of collective possibility, showing the ways that care (both of the self and others) is fundamental to community.
Luigi Ghirri: The Idea of Building
By David RhodesThe exhibition is curated by the artist Matt Connors, and comprises 29 vintage prints together with archival material, handmade exhibition invitations, books, commercial work, presented in vitrines. The title of the exhibition is taken from a text by Ghirri’s widow, Paola Ghirri, in which she describes his attitude to not only printing—each print is handmade and unique—but also to his construction of images and fascination with hand-built objects. The photographs, usually taken frontally, have often been taken for montages, when in fact the various parts of the composition existed in place out in the world already, and are simply framed by Ghirri using the photograph’s own rectangular limit.
Luisa Rabbia: From Mitosis to Rainbow
By Jason RosenfeldBrooklyn-based artist Luisa Rabbia is showing nine new paintings in her fourth solo show at Peter Blum Gallery. The Turin-born Rabbia has worked in multiple media, but this display concentrates on canvases covered by a combination of materials: colored pencil, pastel, acrylic, and oil.
Tschabalala Self: Cotton Mouth
By Osman Can YerebakanAt age 30, Self is an artist with an unmistakable visual cohesion, from her orchestration of figures staring over their shoulders, to vibrantly monochromatic backgrounds that spit the characters back at us. Most crucially, however, her chosen technique renders a Self painting unmistakable.
Mark Mulroney and Soyeon Shin
By Nina WolpowConsequently, it is fitting that the gallery’s two, otherwise highly distinct, painting shows are unified in their status as departures for their artists. Both evince softenings, emotional simplifications of otherwise complex artistic projects.
Theaster Gates: Black Vessel
By Robert C. MorganIt is extraordinary that this exhibition of work by the celebrated artist Theaster Gates is the first we have seen in New York. Titled Black Vessel, the show pulls apart various strands that have haunted contemporary art in recent years.
Alexis Rockman: Lost Cargo: Watercolors
By Alfred Mac AdamAlexis Rockman’s medium for the 22 marine and submarine works currently on view at Sperone Westwater—watercolor and acrylic on paper—is paradoxical: watercolors are notoriously susceptible to moisture while acrylic paint, though water soluble, is waterproof when dry. So, the paintings are ephemeral and permanent at the same time, like nature itself.
Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer
By Alex BaconCosmic Dancer, curated by Florence Ostende at the Barbican Centre in London (with which his eponymous dance company is partnered as an artistic associate) is the first in-depth exploration of Clark’s work. By foregrounding materials like films, interviews, sets, and costumes, Cosmic Dancer provides an opportunity to survey Clark’s career-to-date through the lens of its documentation.
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