Osman Can Yerebakan

Osman Can Yerebakan is a curator and art writer based in New York.

In Adult Theater, Julien Ceccaldi’s first solo institutional exhibition in the US, the galleries at MoMA PS1 are decorated with snippets from the lives of a friend’s circle on their quest for “The One,” a path dotted with hook-ups, “situationships,” and heartbreaks.

Installation view: Julien Ceccaldi: Adult Theater, MoMA PS1, Queens, 2025. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.

A corporal likeness is amiss in the five sculptures at Oren Pinhassi’s show, Losing Face. However, in the display at Lehmann Maupin’s basement gallery, a yearning for it is commonplace.

Oren Pinhassi, Truth Teller, 2024. Steel, sand, burlap, polymer and rock, 93 x 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy the artist, Edel Assanti, London and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Smaller than Precious Okoyomon’s 59th Venice Biennale installation at the Arsenale, the presentation in the Eternal City operates like an echo chamber, not only for the ear but also for the eye and the skin. Beauty—with its allure and dangerous aloofness—is a core in the artist’s work in poetry, visual art, and food. Under seedlings of botanical beauty, questions of power grow.
Installation view: Precious Okoyomon: the sun eats her children, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, 2023. © Precious Okoyomon. Courtesy of the artist, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, and Gladstone Gallery. Photo: Daniele Majoli.
The Los Angeles-based artist Ravi Jackson’s current exhibition at David Lewis, Hardcore, surrounds visitors with versions of chaos. Each work is crafted like lines of poetry unburdened by logic or concern for being understood.
Ravi Jackson, Untitled, 2022. Plywood, door handle, inkjet prints, acrylic, 23 3/4 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and David Lewis. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle.
In a show with children’s drawings, such an angel resonates with growing up, the unstoppable passage from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.
Oscar Murillo, disrupted frequencies (Colombia, Brazil,Turkey, China), 2013-2019 (detail). Ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt tippen, highlighter pen, permanent marker, paint, crayon, staples, natural pigments, debris, oil, oil stick and other mixed media on canvas, 75 x 87 inches. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum. Photo: Tony Prikryl.
In the combat between weightlessness and force, the winner is left ambiguous: are the hands guardians of affably soft columns or do they clutch the helpless anchors to destroy? Searching for an answer is futile, and settling for humor is suggested.
Sascha Braunig, Study for “Medusa”, 2021. Oil on linen over panel, 14 x 11 1/4 inches. Courtesy Magenta Plains, New York.
Julien’s love song to the Brazilian architect’s life and philosophy is his most recent film installation, Lina Bo Bardi — Marvellous Entanglement (2019), which is currently on view at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Isaac Julien, Belas almas, almas menos belas / Beautiful Souls, Less Beautiful Souls (Lina Bo Bardid - A Marvellous Entanglement), 2019. Endura Ultra photograph facemounted. ©Isaac Julien. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
Fragments constitute Ibrahim Ahmed’s art: pieces of colorful textiles, words from disparate languages, and memories of remote places.
Installation view: Ibrahim Ahmed: It Will Always Come Back to You, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, 2021. Courtesy Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: David Hale.
The tightly sewn paintings of dungeons decorated with confessionals, crosses, and domestic furniture come from an artist who clearly creates like his life depends on it. The salvational aura in each painting radiates not only through his mastery of color and form through thread but also from his vivid rendition of sex in a ritualistic devotion.
Sal Salandra, Kiss it, 2020. Various Threads. Courtesy Club Rhubarb.
Mostly large scale, each of the 23 oils on canvas translates Simão’s observations through her São Paulo studio’s window into liquid landscapes. Beyond what the eye sees, they defy geographies, optics, and harmonies of the material world.
Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2021. Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 19 7/8 inches. © Marina Perez Simão. Courtesy the artist, Mendes Wood DM, and Pace Gallery.
At 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.
Installation view: Tschabalala Self: Cotton Mouth, Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2020. © Tschabalala Self. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York. Photo: Matt Grubb.
Andrew Sendor’s InstaCOVID Drawings, which remained accessible through Sperone Westwater’s online viewing room through August 3, testified to the intrusion of the digital into physical reality as powerfully as Zoom happy hours, Clubquarantine parties, or camera hook-ups.
Andrew Sendor, @albertochehebar:SoCiaL DiStAncE.March18, 2020. Graphite on paper, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
New York-based curatorial initiative Duplex and digital designer Hollie Pollak helped the organization to gather presentations of new or existing artworks from Visual AIDS alumni, such as Carlos Motta, Conrad Ventur, and Pamela Sneed, in addition to fresh faces, including two video artists, Jake Brush and Jaimie Warren.
Jack Smith, No President, 1967–1970. 16mm black and white film. © Jack Smith Archive. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
The core of the YBCA’s census awareness program was and still is a group exhibition titled Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?, in which more than 20 artists, mostly from the Bay Area, could exhibit their work on citizenship and civic presence, supported by workshops and performances in line with the organization’s multidisciplinary program.
Art+Action’s Come to Your Census Campaign on Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Street Pole Banner Featuring Artwork by Art+Action Featured Artist, Innosanto Nagara. San Francisco. March 2020.
Blending with its surroundings, the engaging art spills outside, runs through the streets, and bleeds into uncharted, overlooked interiors, bringing fresh breath to sites frequently occupied yet rarely used outside of their original intents.
Installation view: If the Snake, Okayama Art Summit, 2019, with Pierre Huyghe’s NOT YET TITLED, 2019-ongoing, and Etienne Chambaud’s Calculus, 2019. Huyghe: courtesy the artist, TARO NASU, Marian Goodman Gallery and Hauser and Wirth © Kamitani Lab / Kyoto. Chambaud: Collection of Ishikawa Foundation, Okayama. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ola Rindal.
Where does a masterful painter, a portraitist, go after painting the portrait of a First Lady? The answer is in Amy Sherald’s grasping, intimate, and serene paintings of subjects she pulls from the crux of life, grasping the heart of the matter in each model.
Portrait of Amy Sherald, pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Based on a photograph by Jordan Geiger.
The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, a 75-artist exhibition about the history, state, and future of migration thrives through its intricate groupings of artists, juxtaposed to integrate mediums, genres, undertones, and geographies, reasserting the capability of thematic group shows to narrate the evolving yet repetitious fate of human experience.
Dorothea Lange, I Am an American, 1942. Gelatin silver print, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.
The possibility of a queer visuality unfettered by ideas of representation is at the forefront of Doron Langberg’s debut exhibition, Likeness, at Yossi Milo Gallery.
Doron Langberg, Daniel Reading, 2019. Oil on linen, two elements, 96 x 160 inches overall. © Doron Langberg. Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
Presenting a commissioned video installation and existing work by multimedia artist Hito Steyerl, Drill at the Park Avenue Armory is the Berlin-based artist’s most expansive presentation in the United States to date.
Portrait of Hito Steyerl, pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Based on a photo by Trevor Paglen.
Befittingly, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts assumes satire as its central theme under the curation of Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars, who have long subverted despotic decrees of power with open-ended wit and an array of transcultural references
Zhanna Kadyrova: Market, DobraVaga. Photo: Jaka Babnik. Arhiv: MGLC.
"People really desire a narrative; they want to see a fully formed, closed, succinct message. I’ve always in some way avoided a very closed, concise narrative."
Portrait of Lorna Simpson, pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
Motta’s work in film, sculpture, print, and photography has long dissected the ways religious fundamentalism, primarily Catholicism, has condemned diverse representations of sexuality in indigenous cultures.
Carlos Motta, Corpo Fechado: The Devil's Work, 2018. HD video, 16:9, color, sound. Courtesy the artist.
The sprawling installation is the culmination of the artist’s sojourn amidst grassroots Latin communities and the skyrocketing gentrification of the Lower East Side. Dense with an unabashed color palette of low-cost plastic, items such as baskets or fly swatters are molded into various renderings of abstraction.
Installation view: Leeroy New: Aliens of Manila: New York Colony, Pintô International, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Pintô International. Photo: Ethan Browning.
Louise 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.
Louise Lawler, CS #204, 1990. Silver dye bleach print. © Louise Lawler. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York / The SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna.
The 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.
Paul Cadmus, Shore Leave, 1933. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Malcolm S. Forbes. © 2019 Estate of Paul Cadmus / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Since earning his MFA from Columbia University in 2009, Cheng has been investigating ways to infuse humanity into the machine, not shying away from the possibilities embedded in chaos, in defiance of pristine and consequential order technology and science manifest. After debuting at Serpentine Galleries early last year, BOB continues Cheng’s utilization of simulation to challenge narrative constructs of art, a path he embarked on with his Emissaries saga, composed of intertwined and infinite narrative possibilities within live simulation, which will be a part of the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 14 in March.
Portrait of Ian Cheng, pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
The word “life” is a fine title for any exhibition because, in the end, isn’t everything surrounding us simply life? But in the case of Gillian Wearing’s Life, which is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work by a U.S. institution, it proves to be a perfectly fitting title right from the beginning.
Gillian Wearing, Me as Dürer, 2018. Framed chromogenic print. © Gillian Wearing. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles, Maureen Paley, London, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Thinking Collections: Telling Tales is the first U.S. survey dedicated to the Kazakh art collective Kyzyl Tractor. Kyzyl Tractor is an avant-garde art collective established in the mid ’90s in the wake of the liberating reformations of Perestroika.
Kyzyl Tractor Art Collective, Focus Kazakhstan: Thinking Collections: Telling Tales, Mana Contemporary, 2018. ACAW Signature Exhibition. Courtesy Asia Contemporary Art Week & The National Museum of Kazakhstan. Photo: Michael Wilson.
A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched,” explained Robert Smithson in his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.”
Jean Shin, Spring Collection, Looks 14, 2016. Leather remnants and t-pins. Courtesy the artist.
“Memory figures large in David’s life: As a young adult, because of the images he has to overcome in order to heal from his past,” writes Amy Scholder in her introduction to In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. Scholder
David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79, (printed 1990). Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches. Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York.
Tens of branches sprout out of a large white wall, each with a colored plastic bag hung to it at the entrance to Colorful Line, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s first exhibition in New York in over a decade.
Installation view, Pascale Marthine Tayou: Colorful Line, Richard Taittinger Gallery, 2018. Courtesy of GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins /
Habana and RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY, New York. Photo: Shark Senesac.
Absent are bodies in Pacifico Silano’s After Silence, yet this absence leaves a haunting presence in what remains.
Pacifico Silano, After Silence, Stellar Projects, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Stellar Projects
Yto Barrada is one of the most prolific artists working today, blurring the boundaries between different techniques, disciplines, and hierarchies in art and culture. The New York-based French-Moroccan artist’s primary material is history, with its gnarly paths and unforeseeable findings. In her expansive work, anecdotes from oral or documented pasts transform into visually haunting works stemming from meticulous research and an interdisciplinary vision.
Portrait of Yto Barrada, pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
‘Delicious’ rarely defines a work of art. Out of the five senses, tasting is a relatively new tool for experiencing art; an inclusive spectacle employed by contemporary artists for social engagement.
Installation view of Eduardo Navarro: Into Ourselves. The Drawing Center, New York, 2018. Photo: Martin Parsekian.
The artist’s meditation on his bygone mother’s legacy infuses benevolence and longing into a universe poised between a sassy ’90s house music video and a purgatory scene à la Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Blessed Avenue, 2018. 3D animation and video, 19:20. Edition of 5 with 2 APs. Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/ Rome.
Times are queer in Carrie Moyer’s twin exhibitions at DC Moore and Mary Boone Galleries, where the New York-based painter introduces exceptional, unabashedly jubilant new paintings of acrylic and glitter on canvas.
Carrie Moyer, Triple Trills, 2017. Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 66 x 90 inches. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
Dedicated to Barkley Hendricks’s lesser known works on paper, Them Changes starts with an X-ray image of a person’s derriere superimposed over a graphite drawing of an anonymous buttocks, the X-ray overshadowing the liveliness of human flesh.
Barkley L. Hendricks, Rear Entry, 1974. Watercolor, graphite and ink stamp on paper, 22 x 28 inches. © Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Spearheading Richard Hawkins’s fifth exhibition at Greene Naftali is a painting titled, And then come the dawn (2017), which took Hawkins over a decade to complete. In an email conversation, the L.A.-based artist expressed his restored interest in this painting after a decade with the current socio-political climate. Hawkins re-imagined the story of a worn-out, gay, white liberal at a hotel room in Thailand where the protagonist “takes his indulgence a step too irrevocably far.
Richard Hawkins, Expanding Horizon, 2007 Acrylic on paper,16 3/4 x 17 5/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
Minouk Lim’s first solo exhibition in New York introduces the South Korean artist’s equally haunting and inquisitive practice with three bodies of work intertwined into a eulogy on loss and the consequential search for the missing.
Minouk Lim, Hole in Chest Nation - Mr. Chai, Head, Mr. Ahn, 2014. Wood, metal, synthetic hair. 35.43 x 23.62 x 11.81 inches. Courtesy Tina Kim.
The paintings on view in Israeli artist Tsibi Geva’s first solo exhibition at Albertz Benda embody the tumultuousness of his homeland. They evoke displacement, belonging, and demise through narratives that range from intimate to commonplace.
Tsibi Geva, Jolt. Installation view. Courtesy Albertz Benda.
Fatherhood, compared to motherhood, remains less-charted terrain. Family Portrait, Aneta Bartos’s first exhibition with Postmasters Gallery, delves into the artist’s relationship with her father, a former bodybuilder living in central Poland, with photographs full of vigor and vulnerability.
Aneta Bartos, Scythe, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 30.65 inches. Courtesy the artist and Postmasters, New York.
In one of Alvin Baltrop’s photographs at Galerie Buchholz, the late queer icon and activist, Marsha P. Johnson joyfully smiles at the camera. Her face is nested in voluptuously flowing hair as she leans toward Baltrop’s lens. None of the seventy-two photographs on display are dated with precision.
Alvin Baltrop The Piers (man sitting and smoking), n.d. (1975-1986) silver gelatin print, image size: 16.8 x 11.4 cm, paper size: 16.8 x 11.4 cm
Only a few months following the revoked prohibition of citizens of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries to enter the United States, and amidst gradually worsening political relationships with the Middle East, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art opened its doors at a ground floor space in SoHo, in close vicinity to peer institutions such as Swiss Institute and Goethe-Institut’s Ludlow 38.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Untitled, 2012. Felt marker, colored pencil, and mirror on paper. 27 1/2 x 39 1/3 inches. Private Collection, California. Courtesy the artist and the Third Line. Photo: Charles Benton.
Kader Attia’s recurring themes, such as repair, trauma, and loss, occupy Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location in his ambitious exhibition Reason’s Oxymorons.
Kader Attia, Reason’s Oxymorons, 2015. 18 films and installation of cubicles. Films 13 to 25 minutes. 55 × 262 × 468 inches (installed overall). Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Arguably, Alex Da Corte has been one of the most prolific artists of his generation in the last two or so years. Between Die Hexe, his magnificent early 2015 occupation of the Upper East Side townhouse housing the blue-chip gallery Luxembourg & Dayan and his current return to New York with a solo exhibition at Maccarone this month, Da Corte has been productive.
Installation view: “A Man Full of Trouble.” Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, NY / LA.

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