ArtSeen
Beach
By Jason RosenfeldCurated by Danny Moynihan, Beach presents sprawling displays in Nino Mier’s two New York spaces of 107 works by an astounding 88 different artists, young and old, alive and dead. Like the tide, it spreads everywhere: into windowfronts, viewing rooms, offices, behind staff desks, and up the tall walls of Crosby Street in Soho.
Gary Simmons: Public Enemy
By Hannah Sage KayFor Gary Simmons, who observed the vast disconnect between the political nature of hip hop and the contemporary, predominantly abstract, art of the 1980s, the union of these two modalities engendered an artistic language that could speak simultaneously to multiple publics. Neither didactic nor illustrative, but rather legible and generative, Simmons’s work prompts viewers through subtly affective clues to examine their relationship to those symbols from popular culture that he re-forges into biting social commentary.
Darrel Ellis: Regeneration
By Ksenia SobolevaDarrel Ellis (1958–1992) was engaged in a lifelong love affair with history, from the European nineteenth and twentieth century paintings that he meticulously studied on visits to the MoMA and the Met to the 1950s negatives he inherited from his photographer father. But like any love affair, this one did not come without quarrels. Traveling from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Darrel Ellis: Regeneration at the Bronx Museum is the first major museum exhibition of Ellis’s work. Expanded to triple the size of the previous venue in his birthplace, the Bronx Museum installation presents nearly two hundred works on paper, paintings, photographs, and archival material. It is an impressively comprehensive survey of Ellis’s oeuvre.
Giorgio de Chirico: Horses: The Death of a Rider
By Ron HorningIt’s usually too soon to write off what might seem, at first glance, a great artist’s less compelling work, as these small paintings would make abundantly clear if nothing else did. For more than a hundred years, Giorgio de Chirico has been revered for the so-called metaphysical paintings he made before, during, and right after the first World War. Then, in 1919 according to John Ashbery, de Chirico’s painterly genius “evaporated”…
Gego: Lines in Space
By Irene Lyla LeeIt takes a subtle hand to map the invisible, to be attuned to whispers, and barely realized thoughts. It takes a particular softness to orchestrate a rest in the din with enough force to open us with its lightness. Gego is a master of narrating the unseen.
Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth
By David CarrierAs its title, Trembling Earth signals, the exhibition is focused on his images of nature. That title is taken from the drawing The Human Being and its Three Power Centers (1930), displayed in the exhibition. For Munch, humanity is interconnected with the universe in an energy flow that he called “earth waves,” or “trembling earth.”
Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins: Balancing Act
By Clare GemimaBalancing Act challenges viewers’ levels of participation, visual perception, and manual precision—a considerable number of actions needing to take place in a gallery setting, let alone anywhere outside of an arcade hall. While the artists’ collection of mechanically sharp paintings eviscerates any indication of their painterly hands, their huge interactive game contrastingly engages its participants to become their own blatant sculptor.
Jonas Mekas, Open Archives
By Caitlin AnklamIn Jonas Mekas, Open Archives at Mana Contemporary’s Chicago location, the exhibit employs a straightforward curation: Moving clockwise around the room, the objects follow the order of the newsletter’s release, the gallery lined with small gray floating shelves, one object per shelf.
A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran
By Ann McCoyKahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) is one of the best-selling books of all time: Elvis Presley’s well-worn annotated copy of The Prophet was found posthumously among his effects. Gibran, a popular Lebanese American poet, artist, and mystic remained fixed in the collective spiritual imagination for decades; Gibran, a Maronite Christian, included other religions, Sufi mysticism, Jungian psychology, Buddhism, and Theosophy in his mix.
Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado: Porvenir/Portátil
By Hannah Sage KayAn exhibition of seven sci-fi assemblages made by Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado from repurposed materials which, though undergirded by a general memento-ization of home and family, serve as prototypes for the cultivation and sustainment of life on an inhospitable Earth or extraterrestrial environment.
Christina Quarles: Come In From An Endless Place
By Patricia LewyThe figure paintings on view in Christina Quarles’s exhibition of new work at Hauser & Wirth are like nothing you’ve seen before. In them, arching curves sweep, spin, fall, and rise in what seem like single gestures, so it is startling to realize that those lyrically abstract lines actually limn the contours of distended and knotted arms, legs, torsos, buttocks, breasts, and heads.
Se Yoon Park: Roots and Wings
By Leah Triplett HarringtonBorn in 1979, Park is of the generation of South Koreans who came of age amidst the country’s metamorphosis from an insular, agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. Korean artists from this generation increasingly star in the global art world as international audiences seek to understand the past, present, and future of the divided peninsula. There are references to Korean culture in Park’s Roots and Wings, now on view at Carvalho Park, but more than a homogenization, it mediates heritage through a self-portrait drawn through aspirational dreams and the devotion of parents.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again
By Terry R. MyersAt first, Akunyili Crosby’s pervasive use of photographic transfer—taken from her personal archive as well as the breadth of Nigerian life as pictured in mass-media—appears to provide a literal pathway for the world outside of the work to enter: a goal of collage since at least Synthetic Cubism in which it had a certain shock value. Here, instead, the neatly arranged assortment of small images remain in the background, providing a quiet visual humming or buzzing amidst the more robust components of the work.
Rachel Stern: One Should Not Look at Anything
By Olivia McCallOne Should Not Look at Anything—curated by Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva as part of Baxter St’s Guest Curatorial Program—translates the frustration and havoc of unrequited desire from the pages of Salomé into lush, multivalent portraits and still lives.
A Dweller on Two Planets
By Ann McCoyThis is an exhibition for the viewer who loves watching the silent films of Georges Méliès—for a trip to the moon or a mermaid submerged in a goldfish tank. A trip to Microscope Gallery fills that bill. Here, four exceptional Asian women artists take us on a time-travel into imaginary realms where mythology, science fiction, and complex narratives converge.
Torkwase Dyson: Closer (Bird and Lava)
By Hearne PardeeWith the installation of her sculpture Close, Close, Closer (Bird and Lava) (2023), situated at the crossing of the ‘T’, Torkwase Dyson brings the entire building into focus, elucidating her concept of Black Compositional Thought—a bodily balance of space, scale, and power relations.
Kang Seok Ho: Deep is the rising sun, far is the falling one
By Emily ChunRendered with a layered technique of tapping the paint onto the surface to produce roughly hewn, almost scabrous surfaces, these works lovingly transform creases in clothing into topographic landscapes, as in Untitled (undated): “I always compare the wrinkles in clothes to the ridges of mountains,” the artist said.
Persiana Americana
By David RhodesThe title, with its implicit notion of travel: through culture, material goods, and language, together with the manifold associations both physical and historical, is apt and intentional. The trade routes and communication across and between continents represents not only the recursive and continuing flow of people and material, but also artists and their works—and this continues, as we see at Below Grand.
Sas Colby: Stamp Collecting
By Megan N. LibertyThe conceit of Colby’s small photographs such as these, made from images she took or sourced from magazines, is not immediately obvious. But the more time spent in the small exhibition Sas Colby: Stamp Collecting at Stellarhighway, the more the stamps reveal themselves, connecting Colby’s ongoing interests in photography, mail art, and collage across her fifty-year career.
Carlos Amorales: Words of Mouth and Hands
By Alfred Mac AdamCarlos Amorales has a baroque sensibility. And like his forebears in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his essential trait is ingegno (feebly Englished as wit). The baroque theoretician Emanuele Tesauro, in his 1654 Aristotelian Telescope, defines ingegno as the divine ability to generate metaphors by “binding together the remote and separate notions of the proposed objects.” Amorales’s ingegno brings together sound, sight, and material and combines them to form a composite that is simultaneously personal and universal: like a divinity, he creates something out of nothing.
Jonas Wood: Drawings 2003–2023
By Ekin ErkanCurated salon-style under the direction of the artist himself, twenty years of works on paper—Wood’s definition of drawing is expansive—illuminate the subtly reflective sensitivity that undergirds a seemingly whimsical art practice.
Guim Tió: Roots
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWe see the figures that populate the settings of Guim Tió’s Roots far off. The artist evokes the unlearning that the land can do to our bodies—and the unforming of identity that happens when we find ourselves in foreign lands.
People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue
By Alfred Mac AdamCurated by Kathy Battista, People of the Otherworld introduces Ken Kiff’s work to a New York audience unaware of his existence. This it accomplishes in grand style by amassing twenty works produced between the 1960s and 1990s. It also seeks to show Kiff’s affinities with ten younger artists, including some who are not painters.
Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable
By Suzanne ZelazoMina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable, currently on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, showcases numerous, never-before exhibited works by the poet, artist, actor, designer, inventor, and cultural theorist in a groundbreaking retrospective that finally gives this early-twentieth-century artist her due. Although Loy’s significance in literary history is now well-established, she has remained relatively unknown in the wider art market and her contributions to art history are only now beginning to be recognized.
Elise Ansel: Sea Change
By Alfred Mac AdamAnsel’s work demands to be considered on its own, independent of any pictorial point of departure. Why this is the case reflects a female artist’s relationship to tradition—one to which critics might say she “owes” so much. In fact, Ansel is dependent on no one but herself, and these splendid images owe nothing to anyone, especially to no man. They are exuberant, passionate, and reaffirm the sheer joy of abstract painting.
Alejandro Contreras: In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!
By Caitlin AnklamAlejandro Contreras’s In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?! at the ELM Foundation, his first solo exhibition in New York, is viscerally overwhelming. The sheer amount of material is difficult to process. Installation view: Alejandro Contreras: In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!, The Boiler at ELM Foundation, Brooklyn, 2023. Courtesy the artist and The Boiler.
Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker
By William DavieLavinia Fontana (1552–1614) is widely considered to be a woman of many firsts in western Europe. She was the first woman to achieve professional success as an artist beyond the confines of a court or a convent. She was the first woman to run her own workshop at a time when women were not allowed to conduct business of their own. She was the first woman to paint large-scale public altarpieces and nudes. All this while giving birth to eleven children, only three of whom survived her.
Song Dong: Round
By Barbara LondonSong Dong’s exhibition on view at Pace—his first overseas solo show since the COVID-19 pandemic—focuses on work he made while trapped in his studio during the long lockdown. Cut off from the world, he used the solitary time to his advantage and developed a series of subtle projects that reflect his interest in adapting ancient philosophy to a contemporary context.
Rachel Wolf: My My My Tintals and Fishscales
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhile the archival impulse deals with the canon of majoritarian culture on its own terms and with its own language, provisional sculpture provides a visual alterity of the marginal that has always run parallel to it—a vibrant language of ordering and piecing together what has been broken.
Downbeat
By Jonathan GoodmanThis very good group show at the gallery’s main space on 57th Street, includes a bit of everything: drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, small installations.
Philip Guston Now—A Personal Meditation
By Phong BuiIt is good to remind ourselves that for every demagogue, tyrant, or dictator, their most fierce adversaries are the free thinkers, artists, writers, poets, and other creatives. We should also be reminded that painting, being the oldest form of human expression, long before the invention of language, has held an unusual and sustaining power to reflect directly or indirectly our perpetual struggles among ourselves while providing healing agencies through the artists’ inner impulses, guided by their ideals of truth that are opened to constant self-corrections without fear from others.
Philip Guston Now
By Barry SchwabskyWhat comes through, again and again, is the intensity of Guston’s self-questioning: his recurrent wish to have “dismantled everything and started from scratch,” his incessant sense of internal conflict, his conviction (pun intended) that in his art, the canvas is—not, as his old friend Harold Rosenberg had said, an arena in which the individual artist has the freedom but also the obligation to act, but rather a different kind of space, one in which Guston felt divided against himself, a space of judgment: “a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge.”
Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting
By Catherine CraftThe retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, on view until September 17th, offers ample opportunities to consider, and reassess, Motherwell’s painted oeuvre through almost sixty well-chosen examples. Curated by Susan Davidson, who as a longtime curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York organized a 2013 exhibition on Motherwell’s early collages, it will subsequently travel to the Kunstforum Wien, Austria.
Boris Lurie & Wolf Vostell: Art After the Shoah
By William CorwinBoris Lurie met Wolf Vostell at a Fluxus happening in Long Island in 1964. Lurie was born in 1924, Vostell in 1932, and World War Two was the defining event in their lives. Their deep friendship, and a long-distance lifelong artistic bond—perhaps almost a collaboration—was formed by their autonomous but similar interpretations of the tragedy of the war and the troubling capitalist resonances it had left in post-war Western culture.
Aliza Nisenbaum: Queens Lindo y Querido
By Jennifer FieldAliza Nisenbaum: Queens Lindo y Querido, which concludes the artist’s two-year residency at the Queens Museum, occupies two ground-floor galleries with multiple points of entry, no doors, and vast overhead skylights, all of which contribute to a feeling of openness and accessibility that is consonant with the humanistic philosophy underscoring her practice.
Amy Sillman: Temporary Object
By Amanda GluibizziWe could compare it to storyboards, as indeed, the gallery does, but Sillman allows us more control than we’re given when watching a movie. We’re not simply passive viewers; through our agency the objects are activated. In this way, though monochromatic and hard and made after the moves of painting—and therefore unlike Sillman’s limpid drawings, with their transparent medium and evident switchbacks—Temporary Object bears an important resemblance to the drawings included throughout and testifies to the artist’s process.
Luciano Fabro
By Joseph MasheckThe Paula Cooper Gallery has a terrific exhibition of works by the conceptual sculptor Luciano Fabro (1936–2007), from May 6th to July 28th, at both 534 and 521 West 21st Street. It includes a couple of large pieces as well as a number of remarkable painting-sized reliefs titled “Computers.”
Cao Fei: Duotopia
By Jane McFaddenThe current Cao Fei exhibition in Berlin serves as a small survey for the artist and as an astute window into our contemporary moment.
Schema: World as Diagram
By Cassie PackardCurated by writer Raphael Rubinstein and artist Heather Bause Rubinstein (whose labyrinthine fabric painting City as Shape (2019) is included in the show), Schema takes up the question of how artists have employed a broad cross-section of diagrammatic forms, from the map and the mandala to the isarithm and the ideogram.
Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable
By Amy RahnCurated by renowned curator and scholar Jennifer R. Gross, whose research and propulsive writing build a strong current that seamlessly carries all the components of this complex show, the exhibition gathers a stunning variety of drawings, paintings, paper collages, and archival materials in its forceful argument that Loy was foremost, and in the current expansive meaning of the word, an artist.
Joel Kuennen: Planets are Slow Animals
By Pia SinghJoel Kuennen’s Planets Are Slow Animals at Chicago Manual Style ingeniously incorporates the art of long-looking with engagement of an ever-present future as it evidences itself through geologic time in a numinous net cast in the experimental garage gallery in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood.
Germaine Richier
By Richard KalinaGermaine Richier’s retrospective, recently closed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and opening in July at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier brings back into public view a twentieth-century sculptor whose work feels especially relevant today.
Roni Horn: A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream ...but a dream not dreamt is.
By Charles SchultzThere would be no right angles. There would be almost no artificial light. There would be nothing on the walls to explain the work. For Horn’s biggest exhibition in Asia she wanted her audience to do more looking than reading, to engage with the heart as much as the mind.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Maps
By Joanna SeifterIn a conversation between Smith and Whitney director Adam Weinberg, the pair describe a tenet of Smith’s art as the act of “changing nouns to verbs.” In other words, Smith’s art aims to shift the role of Indigenous people as subjects that are mapped, or are the target of imperialist abstractions like defined frontiers, to that of mapmakers themselves. Smith’s mixed-media War-Torn Dress (2002) most overtly highlights the distinctions between the mapped and the mapmakers.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses
By Phyllis TuchmanAt this point, is there anything new to say about Vincent van Gogh’s art, much less his most famous painting, Starry Night (1889)? After all, a constant stream of noteworthy exhibitions are held every year promising the latest insights and revelations about the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter’s work. In this crowded field, however, Van Gogh’s Cypresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stood apart.
Cathy Josefowitz: Forever Young
By Amanda Millet-SorsaHauser & Wirth on 69th Street is showing the work of artist Cathy Josefowitz (1956-2014), who lived between Western Europe and the Boston and New York regions, holding family roots in Woodstock, NY where she would spend many childhood summers.
Denzil Hurley: To be pained is to have lived through feeling
By David RhodesTo be pained is to have lived through feeling is Barbados-born American artist Denzil Hurley’s (1949–2021) third exhibition at Canada and represents a selection of works from over thirty years.
Djamel Tatah: Solitary Figures
By Robert C. MorganIn Djamel Tatah: Solitary Figures, the artist has finally been given his first exposure in the New York art scene, with the aid of Richard Vine’s curatorial prowess. In addition, the superlative and insightfully conceived catalogue essays on Tatah’s work by Vine and art historian Barbara Stehle possess an exactitude and incisiveness that are difficult to argue against.
Works on Paper: 100 Years
By Alfred Mac AdamMy friends, come one, come all! The Amanita Gallery has brought the greatest show on earth to the Lower East Side! Fifty-nine works on paper by fifty-four artists: a glorious, international century. Whatever your favorite style may be, you’ll find it here in a dazzling panoply.
Daniel Lind-Ramos: El Viejo Griot—Una historia de todos nosotros
By Zoë HopkinsThere is a tacit co-dependency between things in Daniel Lind-Ramos’s assemblages. Objects sustain one another in a careful balance, leaning up against each other to form ecosystems of reciprocal uplift.
Darrel Ellis: Regeneration
By Megan N. LibertyArchive and working process are at the center of the exhibition Darrel Ellis: Regeneration at the Bronx Museum of Art.
Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous
By Amanda GluibizziEvery time I see a Lisa Yuskavage exhibition, I’m excited to discover the passages of pure painting that the artist permits herself. In Rendez-vous, Yuskavage’s first solo show in Paris, there are such moments in the striped-and-scraped socks that the artist-model wears in The Artist’s Studio (2022), in the dollops of pigment lined up on a wheeled work table in Big Flesh Studio (2022), and—most delectably—in the lick of an apple that curls up toward a listless model in the lower right-hand corner of the same painting.
Arthur Cohen: Ripped Terre Verte
By Raphy SarkissianThe enigmatic paintings of Arthur Cohen, mounted elegantly on the walls of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, exude both linearity and painterliness. In this exhibition, titled Ripped Terre Verte, lyrical abstractions blur the boundaries between the finished and unfinished, between unity and disunity of forms, recalling the tenets of the outstanding exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, held at the Met Breuer in 2016.
Anna-Eva Bergman: Voyage vers l’interieur
By Rebecca SchiffmanThe exhibition pamphlet for Anna-Eva Bergman’s first major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris begins with a blunt, but necessary, assertion: “Although celebrated and exhibited around the world in her lifetime, [Bergman’s] work needs to be more widely reconsidered today.” This ethos is carried through the entire exhibition, which spans eight galleries and features over two hundred works by the artist, rightfully securing her place as a major post-war artist.
Robert Hawkins: Dream Mine
By Jessica HolmesIn 1894, John Hyrum Koyle, a Utah Mormon, received a message from the Angel Moroni in his dreams. Moroni, a major prophet of the Mormons and the Latter Day Saint theological movement, instructed Koyle to tunnel a mine through a mountainside located in Salem, Utah, where he would uncover gold and riches that would provide untold financial wealth and security to the church and all its believers, especially through the end times.
