ArtSeen
Jorge Galindo: Verbena
By Amanda Millet-SorsaLast summer 2021, Jorge Galindo had his first major exhibition in the United States, and this year he returns to New York with Verbena, his first solo exhibition of his newest works, at Vito Schnabel. Since then, his work has gained in momentum and has been shown at Nino Mier in Los Angeles, the Hall Art Foundation Schloss Derneburg Museum (Germany), and the Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (Portugal), where his collaborative work with Pedro Almodóvar was exhibited.
Julie Curtiss: Somnambules
By Jason RosenfeldFor her third show at Anton Kern, and first in the prime lower floors of its East 55th Street headquarters, Julie Curtiss has produced a great deal of work, and plumbed her pseudo-surrealist tendencies while following themes of sleeplessness or the persistence of invented memory, evocations of the internal and the gently malevolent. She has also expanded her sculptural practice and conceived of a fine suite of polychrome drawings. This ambitious and exemplary display forms a compelling dialogue with both the self and the body at large, the latter still suffering the aftershocks and privations of the international pandemic.
Alix Le Méléder: LES GRANDES ROUGES
By Joe FyfeIn Alix Le Méléder’s current exhibition, only her second solo in New York, there are the types of big, commanding, difficult abstractions that are not so common these days. All the better to see them freshly, and this work is of the first order.
Yuri Yuan: Dark Dreams
By Vanilla AnandamThe eleven oil paintings (all 2022) that comprise Dark Dreams at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, the artist’s second solo exhibition in New York, depart from the accepted conventions of Surrealism and forge ahead, past the threshold of dream and sleep.
Peter Sacks: Above Our Lands
By Jonathan GoodmanBorn in 1950, Sacks would have known well the social struggles generated by apartheid. This show portrays his strengths in double fashion—as an abstract artist and as a political memorialist.
Sharon Butler: NEXT MOVES
By Adam SimonThat Sharon Butler’s subtle explorations of painting vernacular began as digital sketches is just one of the disjunctions in her current exhibition, NEXT MOVES, at Jennifer Baahng Gallery.
Here We Are: Young, Black, and Indigenous Women in the Art World
By William CorwinThis exhibition of works by five women of color (Jodi Dareal, Arrianna “Arri” Santiago, Jaclyn Burke, Ifeatuanya “Ify” Chiejina, and Debbie Roxx) spans the range of emotions from anger and pride to expressive concepts such as glorification, humor and wit, to simple, decorative beauty.
Leland Bell: Paint, Precision, and Placement. A Centennial Exhibition
By John GoodrichAny ambitious painter faces a conundrum: what can a painting say today that hasn’t already been said? Some artists, chastened by the historical record, may phrase it a little differently: how to paint something worth hanging on a wall, when the walls of our museums already boast the most extraordinary paintings? Leland Bell (1922-1991), who would have turned one hundred years old this fall, was possessed by the second of these challenges. His centennial show at the New York Studio School, which includes some two dozen paintings and drawings selected by curator Steven Harvey, puts on full, luminous display his passions, insights and struggles.
Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Foreigner’s Song
By Irene Lyla LeeAn expanse of dark is splattered with white. A figure walks beneath, turning back, as if momentarily, to wave. His reflection is held in a puddle at his feet; above him are large flowers and a vague map. The white spots are not stars, yet they guide us toward the concept of a night sky. C.G. Jung inferred that archetypes exist within each one of us. Our starry nights glimmer with ancient cosmic formations that can be understood, and as they are, we begin to discover our place among them. This painting is titled The Traveler’s Dream (2022).
Robert Zehnder: Ageless Machine
By Clare GemimaRobert Zehnder’s new paintings and sculptures all possess a strong visual symbology and psychologic indexicality, evocative of his most recent trip to Europe. Returning with a critical and philosophical attachment to the idea of hidden functions of certain architectures, namely those ecclesiastical in nature, Zehnder’s intrigue into how these ideas can influence one’s own spatiality, both internally and exteriorly, has produced Ageless Machine, the artist’s first solo-exhibition with Mrs.
Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s
By Alfred Mac AdamCora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s is a time capsule, and like all time capsules it is an enigma. Time capsules are supposed to provide people of the future a sample of things typical of the moment when they are buried. Which raises the critical issue of perspective: are we to understand these eight glorious pieces according to what we think they meant thirty-five years ago, or should we understand them according to what they say to us today? Even if we lived through them, the 1980s are as irrecoverable as the 1880s: an abyss separates us from that decade even if human time—memory—may trick us into thinking we actually know that remote moment perfectly.
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience
By Amanda Millet-SorsaFor 25 years the LeRoy Neiman Center has shown its dedication to printmaking by providing students and artists an environment to educate, learn, and work with master printers. To celebrate its long-standing collaborations with close to seventy artists, the Center invited affiliate artists to organize exhibitions highlighting work within its vast print collection. William Cordova is the first artist to organize such an exhibition.
Jamie Earnest: Good Mourning
By David CarrierJamie Earnest’s seven medium-sized paintings each frame a window, an opening outward or a ladder leading upwards, linking her imagined space to an outside world.
Juan Sánchez: Ricanstructions condiciones que existen
By Emireth Herrera ValdésThe phrase “Primero soy Boricua” resonates in Juan Sánchez's solo show Ricanstructions condiciones que existen at Hutchinson Modern. Twenty-four works of collage, painting, printmaking, and mixed media, spanning from the 1980s to his most recent production in 2022, provide insight into the artist's trajectory, including his activism, political views, and lived experience as a Boricua born in Brooklyn.
Stolen Sun
By Thyrza Nichols GoodeveA small table with several smooth oblong river-washed stones placed informally on its surface greets me as I enter. Objects of beauty whose situation for being in this gallery is war, they resemble loaves of hard tack homemade bread. The effect is homey and inviting; harsh and ironic. Some are sliced and fall in welcome stacks as if waiting to be placed on a dinner plate.
New York Food Exhibitions
By Mary Ann CawsAs I write, there is at the Museum of the City of New York, a gigantic and vividly colorful exhibition entitled Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate, which opened on September 16 to great acclaim in the newspaper and radio.
Mala Iqbal: Shape Shifting in the Outer Boroughs and Its Effects on the Traveler’s Perception of the Midnight Sky
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightIqbal concretizes the momentary but vivid perceptions of strangers we capture in crowds—the tangible effects of faces, of fading voices, of the colors and silhouettes of clothing—while recording the translucent uncertainty of sightings that our memory is unable to make more permanent.
Aubrey Levinthal: Neighbors, Strangers, Gazers, Bathers
By Andrew L. SheaWhereas previous bodies of work consisted primarily of autobiographical and domestic scenes, here Levinthal ventures forth to engage with the outside world and the figures she encounters there.
Will Ryman: New York, New York
By Jillian RussoWill Ryman’s exhibition New York, New York at Chart Gallery celebrates the city’s absurdity, vitality, grittiness, and beauty with ten sculptural works conceived as vignettes of street life.
Merrill Wagner
By Robert C. MorganThe remarkable coming together of painting and sculpture in the career of Merrill Wagner carries a steady and clear-cut certainty that reveals itself in an exhibition currently on view at the uptown Zwirner Gallery.
Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young
By Ann McCoyThe exhibition title, Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young, refers to Beardsley’s (1872–1898) birth 150 years ago, and the freshness of his work today. He was a consumptive who died at the tragically early age of twenty-five, and here we see the scope of his early genius.
![Aristophanes, <em>The Lysistrata of Aristophanes: Now First Wholly Translated into English and Illustrated with Eight Full-page Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley</em>. London: [Leonard Smithers], 1896. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/34409/mccoy-beardsley-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Julian Schnabel: Predominately Natural Forms, Mexico, 2022
By Alfred Mac AdamJulian Schnabel’s inventive exuberance shows no signs of flagging. Whether harvesting the awnings from the stands of fruit vendors in Troncones, Mexico, where these paintings were made, and transforming the irregular shapes into spectacularly asymmetrical shaped canvases, or, as here, using velvet as his surface, he finds ways to impose his abstract will on whatever medium he chooses.
Fernanda Gomes
By Barbara A. MacAdamThe entire installation, filling the gallery’s several rooms and corridors, is something like a stage set, with all the props either tossed about or lined up—and the performance not yet rehearsed. Where should the pieces go? What is their purpose? How do they relate to one another? Do they? And, above all, how do they activate our imaginations?
Allie McGhee: Parallax
By D. Dominick LombardiThe art of Allie McGhee evokes such a youthful and uncompromising focus on variations in scale, texture, technique, and color theory that it defies any preconception one might have of an eighty-one-year-old artist.
Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics
By Brittany Rosemary JonesHopefully, in time, this rich and remarkably varied exhibition will be seen as the impetus for a renewed discussion about her career, one that considers her contemplative yet fallible grappling with so many pertinent issues.
Eric Fischl: Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and thus America
By Alfred Mac AdamIn the case of Eric Fischl, “psychological” means a painterly style works through a mental Gestalt process: instead of our eye completing a broken line as it would in a Gestalt experiment, it is our minds that complete Fischl’s works.
Robert Janitz at the Anahuacalli
By Suzanne HudsonThese last works especially bait other kinds of readings, not least in their figuring of semiotic becoming: the shapes suggest a human form seen from behind against a monochrome or gradient ground, with the orb standing in for a head and its base then legible as shoulders.
Mad Women
By William CorwinCurators Damon Brandt and Valentina Branchini are staking a claim in the pedigree of Madison Avenue itself as an incubator of revolutionary art of the sixties, and more importantly presenting women gallerists as dynamos of culture at that time.
John Coplans: La Vie des Formes
By Joe FyfeIn one of the more instructive passages in Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno observes that well-made texts are like spider’s webs, “Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey”: When things begin to click with your subject, everything of use that gets near it gets stuck in it. One afternoon, reading The Waterfall by the English writer Margaret Drabble she described a real place in England called the Gordale Scar, a roofless cave with an interior waterfall, “a lovely organic balance of shapes and curves, a wildness contained within a bodily limit.” I thought of my ongoing research project on John Coplans (1920–2003). His life and work was very much a wildness contained within a bodily limit.
Hank Willis Thomas & For Freedoms: Another Justice: US is Them
By Joyce BeckensteinFor Freedoms aspires to engage the arts as a means of helping people reconsider how we as a people view and mete out justice. It’s a huge sweeping mission, but one that the exhibition, Another Justice: US is Them—Hank Willis Thomas & For Freedoms (US refers to the United States) manages to distill to intimate size and scale.
Stressed World
By Lenore MalenStressed World is a show made of artworks that are largely handcrafted: painted, carved, drawn, cast, or assembled. They’re mostly intimate and human scale with some exceptions.
Masaomi Yasunaga: Looking Afar / 遠くを見る
By Cassie PackardA former student of Sōdeisha member Satoru Hoshino, contemporary Japanese potter Masaomi Yasunaga carries some of the school’s avant-garde predilections forward, deftly melding traditional and experimental techniques to make inscrutable and compelling objects with a constitutional aversion to orthodoxy.
Astrid Terrazas: La Jardinera
By Elizabeth BuheThe eleven paintings and single sculpture in Astrid Terrazas’s first solo show at P·P·O·W encompass far-reaching spatial and temporal terrain through powerful, graphic figuration.
Lorna Simpson: 1985–92
By Maddie HamptonLorna Simpson executes photography with elegant restraint and a delicate but steady refusal to meet expectations. Combining text with imagery, her early photographs set up an elusive narrative only to deny catharsis.
Guston/Morandi/Scully
By Tom McGlynnThe curatorial correlation of these three painters offers an opportunity to make relative judgements about how each came to their individual conclusions on painterly touch.
Mark Laver: Within
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightMark Laver’s Within at Ricco/Maresca approaches the landscape through a radical subjectivity that blurs the boundary separating nature itself from our perception of it.
Paul McCarthy: A&E
By Donatien GrauThe series of performances titled A&E was the first half of a European program that brought McCarthy and Lilith Stangenberg first to the SchauSpielHaus in Hamburg for five nights in a row and then to the Volkstheater in Vienna for four nights.
Painting in New York: 1971-83
By Ksenia SobolevaWhat became clear to me upon seeing the show is the unfortunate degree to which art historians have left painting out of feminist history, when in fact the paintings gathered together here share a lot of the sensibilities conventionally acknowledged as central to the feminist canon.
Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971
By Phyllis TuchmanRegeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971 is jam packed with treasures and revelations. At the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, you’ll find film clips, movie posters, historical photographs, scripts, film scores, cameras, costumes, artworks by boldface names, and even miscellaneous objects, such as tap shoes worn by the remarkable Nicholas Brothers, as well as one of Louis Armstrong’s trumpets. They’ve all been brought together to tell an unfamiliar story. This astonishing, well-paced journey through seven-plus decades of movie history suggests that this fledgling institution, only a year old, has already emerged as a significant place for film aficionados to discover the past, present, and future of moving pictures.
