ArtSeen
BRIC Biennial: Volume III, “The Impossible Possible”
By Nina WolpowI like a lot of what I saw at the third BRIC Biennial, but I collect articles abandoned on Brooklyn curbs. Human teeth, intact ponytails, the remnants of birthday balloons, a torn copy of Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet—these are a few of the objects on view.
Lesley Vance
By Alfred Mac AdamLesley Vance swirls her powerful colors over the canvas until she dominates the entire surface. Horror vacui or will-to power? Probably equal doses of both, but the utter assertiveness of her ribbons of color in these nine oils on canvas mark her as a conquistador.
Ricardo Brey: Doble Existencia / Double Existence
By Jonathan GoodmanDouble Existence presents works on paper and sculpture that offers the "double" perspective of someone coming from a culture very different from the one he lives and works in now; it may also be true that "double existence" refers to the double life—internal and external—we experience during the course of our existence.
Charles LeDray: American Standard
By Jason RosenfeldAmerican Standard is the product of a resolutely original mind and represents an expansive view of the nation in the moment—it is exacting in its technique and sharp in its cultural commentary.
Gabo Camnitzer and Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco: Aesthetic Behavior; Developmental Sequences
By Joseph LubitzDescending a flight of stairs into the sunken gallery, the syrupy sounds of a '60s exotica album echo off a tiled floor. A large hardbound reference book is propped up on a bookstand. It is opened to a page with a black and white photograph of a darkened room containing what looks like the shell of an observatory, brightly illuminated from the inside.
Louise Lawler: She’s Here
By Osman Can YerebakanLouise Lawler's extensive survey, She's Here, at Vienna's SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, manifests her interest in what I will call "transient visibility," which has over the years come to define Lawler's grand oeuvre.
Rona Pondick: Works 2013 – 2018
By Hearne PardeeUsing a combination of casting, 3D printing, and hand modeling, Pondick has refined her methods of fabrication in pigmented resin and cast acrylic, which she combines in constantly changing relationships.
Robert Duran: 1968 – 1970
By David RhodesIncredibly—given the quality of the paintings—this is Robert Duran's first showing in New York City since 1977. The exhibition, comprising seven acrylic on canvas and eleven watercolor on paper paintings from 1968 to 1970, locates Duran's work at a particularly divisive moment for contemporary art in general and painting in particular.
Keltie Ferris: RELIEF
By Daniel Gerwin“My paintings used to be dense and layered, and lately I’m separating out the parts.” This was Keltie Ferris’s remark in a September 2015 interview with Jason Stopa about her exhibition that year with Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Wilmer Wilson IV: Slim… you don’t got the juice
By Harry PhilbrickWilmer Wilson IV is a performance artist who makes sensuous objects, the process of whose creation leaves traces that inform the meaning of the artworks.
Nicholas Galanin: The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls
By Christopher GreenAt Open Source Gallery, 60 white porcelain hatchets, patterned with red and blue florals, tumble end over end in a shallow arc along the length of the gallery. Suspended from the ceiling by threads of clear fishing line, they fly as if thrown.
Adrift: Cao Yi, Li Qing, Yi Xin Tong, and Zhao Zhao
By Tanner TafelskiChambers Fine Art’s exhibition Adrift highlights four young artists grappling with China’s version of being a millennial.
The Young and Evil
By Osman Can YerebakanThe group exhibition The Young and Evil at David Zwirner looks at an artistic moment, foremost in Downtown New York, during the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality and figurative painting were equally frowned upon.
Viva Ruiz: ProAbortion Shakira: A Thank God for Abortion Introspective
By Simon WuViva Ruiz is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, a Queens native, and an artist for whom showing in a gallery is the exception rather than the norm.
Symbolism in Europe: Burne-Jones, Khnopff, Mucha, and Gauguin
By Jason RosenfeldAt the very moment that the European Union appears on the verge of splintering, with Britain’s impending Brexit on March 29, four concurrent monographic and single venue exhibitions have celebrated artists central to fin-de-siècle Symbolism, the last truly unified movement in European art.
In Search of the Cuenca Biennial
By Evan MoffittAs my taxi dropped me off on a cobblestoned street, there was no sign of the Cuenca Biennial.
Margrit Lewczuk: Angels
By Alfred Mac AdamMargrit Lewczuk has, as they say, a thing for angels. She has summoned 18 of them for this show, along with two paintings of birds and four of wings: a veritable heavenly host.
Matvey Levenstein
By Jason RosenfeldStarting with iPhone photos, some dating back to 2009, Levenstein employs a conceptual process of selecting and expanding or shrinking images without the aid of a projector. It is a manual translation of the intimacy of the phone screen, first to drawings and then to oils.
David Weiss: Drawings
By Hovey BrockSeldom does a contemporary art exhibit leave an aftertaste of joy. But this one does.
Nick Brandt: This Empty World
By Daniel PatemanImmediately upon entering Waddington Custot gallery, photographer Nick Brandt's series "This Empty World" dazzles with its imposing scale, colorful detail, and technical ambition.
Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesA view of a landscape opens with Kevin Beasley’s relief, The Reunion (2018), a heavy “slab” of guinea fowl feathers, Virginia soil, and cotton built up and suspended in polyurethane resin.
Jon Key: Violet: Mythologies and Other Truths
By Danilo MachadoIn a lush new series of works at Rubber Factory, Bushwick-based artist Jon Key layers personal realities, myths, and acrylic paint in the spaces between body and landscape.
Luke Stettner: ri ve rr hy me sw it hb lo od
By Avram C. AlpertLuke Stettner’s current exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery, ri ve rr hy me sw it hb lo od, is a heavy show. I do not use the word heavy lightly.
David Byrd
By Nicholas HeskesDavid Byrd died in 2013 at the age of 87 in Oxford, New York. Since then his paintings have gradually received attention, resulting in a number of exhibitions in recent years
Banu Cennetoğlu
By Ann C. CollinsTurkish artist Banu Cennetoğlu, in her first US solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, curated by Sohrab Mohebbi with Kyle Dancewicz, assembled an archive of every video file and photograph she has taken over a twelve-year period into one continuous reel.
Cally Spooner: SWEAT SHAME ETC.
By Kaegan SparksSWEAT SHAME ETC. succeeds, but as an exhibition, the intense dialectic its title proposes is engulfed by the etcetera.
Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture
By Amber Jamilla MusserWhat does history look like? Jacob Lawrence's series of fifteen prints on Toussaint L'Ouverture, displayed at DC Moore gallery, invites us to contemplate the complexities of a historiographic intervention within the context of aesthetics.
Daniel Baird: murmur
By Jared QuintonThe scale, calm, and quietude of Daniel G. Baird's second solo exhibition at PATRON Gallery are befitting of its title: murmur. Indeed, the prevailing features of the installation are its dimness and the burbling hum of tiny fountains.
Yukultji Napangati
By Maureen Catbagan and Amber Jamilla MusserYukultji Napangati paints timelines—yellow and orange dots connected by undulations that curve and spiral, submerging the viewer within the immensity of a vibrating sea. Time through lines, and yet outside of time.
Margrit Lewczuk: Angels
By Joan WaltemathNothing is obvious—there is no face, rather a series of brushstrokes fill in for a face, itself flanked by a flurry of criss crossed marks motioning the wind of a wing otherwise invisible on either side of the central form. There is something deeply mysterious and poignant in the immediacy of Lewczuk's Angels.
Libita Clayton: Quantum Ghost
By Michael EbyThe Bristol-based Clayton's new show at the southeast London gallery Gasworks uses archival material to simulate this emigration from one international mining hub to another. Titled Quantum Ghost, the installation considers inorganic matter is the vital agent driving international flows of capital and the coerced movement of bodies.
The Deceptive Everyday
By Tom McGlynnEveryday events are deceptive in that their very ordinariness can remain transparent to us. It is a somewhat irrational human impulse to maintain a more exalted interval between the art of life and naked subsistence. Who hasn't harbored a secret wish, formed perhaps in the magical thinking of childhood, that we can be artists of our own lives, authors of our own destinies—that we can make "me" a world.
