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ArtSeen
Rashid Johnson: Untitled Anxious Red Drawings
By David CarrierThis “incredibly anxious time,” Johnson says, “feels simultaneously unsettling, urgent, and radical.” And so he aims to respond in this art. Red is the color of anxiety.
Off the Wall
By Alfred Mac AdamColor experimentation brings together the seven very different artists in this sparkling virtual group show. Sequestered in the confines of apartments and houses, where we see the same colors day after day, we crave color permutations, which is exactly what this lively mix of multi-generational colorists provides.
Bharti Kher: The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos
By David RhodesChange and reconfiguration are core issues for Kher, and her practice is heterogeneous, reiterating the significance of flux and transformation in her works.
Sarah Charlesworth: Image Language
By Robert C. MorganThe majority of what is presented at the Printed Matter exhibition is drawn from Charlesworth’s seemingly infinite collection of photographic imagery, taken from various sources in various working contexts. This exhibition represents the systemic basis of Charlesworth’s research and highlights the fundamental archival elements that define her life’s work.
Gerhard Richter: Painting After All
By Jessica HolmesIf someone had asked me six weeks ago to write a review of an exhibition I couldn’t physically go to see, I would have said no. Well, that was six weeks ago. On March 4th, the Met Breuer opened Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, a major show of work by one of the most celebrated artists of the late‐20th and 21st centuries.
Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered
By William CorwinThe relationship of painting to the viewer is reversed as the spectator is surveilled by an alien eye. Kohlmeyer paints this cloistered presence into her works with varying degrees of directness.
Hernan Bas: Developing TiME LiFE
By Charlotte KentAmidst the rise of online viewing rooms for shows we might not otherwise see, Lehmann Maupin made the decision to provide us backgrounds to shows we have. In Developing TiME LiFE, the gallery presents studies (available for sale) as well as information from Hernan Bas about the process for his most recent fall 2019 show.
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist
By Ann McCoyThat a contemplative artist like Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) is having an exhibition in a shuttered museum, as her viewers are experiencing enforced reclusion during a pandemic lockdown, has a profound synchronicity.
Mohammed Kazem: Infinite Angles
By Ruba Al-SweelKazim is neither an experimental light artist of the Instagram-era or a disc jockey of the New Wave renaissance. Rather, his layering of light and sound create infinite reverberations, lending the conditions for the party and the after-party, ad infinitum.
Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo
By Susan BreyerOne work in the final gallery contains the image of a small pink cross, above which Centurión embroidered the phrase, “renazco a cada instante,” “I am reborn at every moment” (1995). To feel renewed in deep crisis by faith, creation, and love. To be carried forward by small joys, to allow these joys the fullness and purity of our appreciation. This is art, personified.
Adrian Morris
By Brian T. LeahySince his passing in 2004, Morris’s paintings have found new audiences, largely thanks to James, the painter Carol Rhodes, and a handful of adventurous European curators and dealers. Maxwell Graham, the founder of Essex Street, adds his name to that list with this presentation, providing a tantalizing introduction to the artist for North American viewers.
Rochelle Goldberg: Psychomachia
By Peter BrockPsychomachia further develops a conviction that manifests throughout Goldberg’s work and writing: that consumption, whether physical or visual, is necessarily a mutual process.
Peter Saul
By David CarrierPeter Saul (b. 1934) is a classic Pop artist who, with his current exhibition at the New Museum, is achieving the recognition he has long deserved.
Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head.
By Kathleen LangjahrAs COVID-19 continues to proliferate throughout New York City, forcing all art institutions to remain closed to the public, museums and galleries have been scrambling to convert their programming to an online-only format. A standout example of this adaptation is P.P.O.W.’s current presentation, Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect
By Brandt JunceauWhen the poet-draftsman Lequeu loved a thing, he drew a section of it. An axial slice down the middle, revealing an unseen interior space, was surely his favorite go-to graphic sleight of hand. A section, which is a purely imaginary concept, makes anatomy out of every subject.
Sara Erenthal’s Art of the Street and Screen
By Megan N. LibertyArtist Sara Erenthal’s canvases are discarded objects: flat-screen TVs, couches, refrigerators, and wooden panels and doors. Her characteristic iconography is a hand-painted, black-outlined woman with big hair, almond-shaped eyes, and small red lips accompanied by lines like “I’LL BE AS LOUD AS I NEED TO BE,” “GOOD NEWS IS COMING STAY TUNED,” and “I WON’T MAKE MYSELF VULNERABLE TODAY” (the last notably written on a discarded mattress).
Things on Walls
By Darla MiganIn what now seems like prescient thinking borne out of a creative collaboration, the exhibition Things on Walls at Affective Care—an operating medical office specializing in psycho-interventionist treatment—explores sculpture in a variety of mediums, including ceramics, wood, cast paper, resin, metal, and video. Organized by New Discretions, a curatorial project by Benjamin Tischer of Invisible-Exports, the show includes 17 works that play in the overlaps of “inner” life understood as both designed physical space and psycho-sensory interiority.
Hadi Fallahpisheh and Phoebe d’Heurle: What a Fuck and What the Fuck
By Ketter WeissmanMemory, both collective and individual, is explored in What a Fuck and What the Fuck, a two-person exhibition of Phoebe d’Heurle (b. 1987, Atlanta, GA) and Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) at Soloway. The title was borne in a domestic scene wherein d’Heurle and Fallahpisheh discussed the absence of soap bars in their shared home. The work in the exhibition exposes and explores suppressed personal events within an associative framework.
Kate Shepherd: Surveillance
By Susan HarrisSurveillance marks a vast leap in a new direction. Working on, experimenting with, and percolating this new body of work for years, Shepherd dug deep into her self and her process to figure out how to make paintings that would essentially make themselves instead of her superimposing images on them.
Curtis Talwst Santiago: Can’t I Alter
By Magdalyn AsimakisThis month, the scaffolding in Curtis Santiago’s installation at The Drawing Center hits differently than it did when the show opened in February. Can’t I Alter remains a meticulously arranged selection of interrelated sketches, sculptures, and murals installed into the hunter green scaffolding standard in New York City, where the artist is based.
Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography
By Daniel PatemanBarbican curator Alona Pardo has united more than 50 artists of different gender identities, sexualities, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds, whose divergent approaches—spread across six themed sections—challenge a singular, prescribed definition of masculinity. Rigorously exploring how it has been imagined, socially constructed, and performed from the 1960s to today, this timely show is an ambitious testament to the breadth of male experience.
Petra Cortright: borderline aurora borealis
By Barbara A. MacAdamAlthough she is a digital painter Cortright also embraces tradition, and while her medium is new, she does not shy away from redeploying something old. A painter who doesn’t use paint, she teaches us to look using her tools as we follow her lead through represented landscapes and between hanging sheets of abstract images.
Leap of Color
By Tom McGlynnThe show is dominated by artists associated with what became known as the Washington Color School, including Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, and Gene Davis, whose careers benefitted from Clement Greenberg’s notion of “post-painterly abstraction.”
Louise Fishman: An Hour is a Sea
By Hearne PardeeOriginally intended for Frieze New York, the works went online due to current events, but one can’t escape the sense that the digital format, while denying us the materiality so vital in Fishman’s work, enhances our experience in other ways, enlarging the paintings’ scope as if to compensate for their physical absence.
Nick Raffel: plenum
By Alex JenPlenum leaves one wavering between marvel and doubt. Raffel’s beautiful craft is undeniable: the MDF works are made with just a table saw and glue, and the steel pipes are shaped with custom-made jigs. The show also leaves one with questions about Raffel’s precise fabrication decisions and why he cracked the window and left the lights off.
Matt Mullican: Universal Perspective
By William WhitneyTogether, the two canvases continue Mullican’s career-long investigation into the ways isolated details can impact visual perception of the whole—or a micro version of the ways in which apparent minute factors can impact society as a whole.
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