Saul Ostrow
Saul Ostrow is an independent critic, curator, and Art Editor at Large for BOMB magazine.
This exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, though titled Peter Saul’s Art History, is less a sweeping survey of Saul’s interpretation of art history than a concentrated, slapstick chapter on Western modernism and perhaps his influences. It is composed of a sampling of works which Saul, over the course of his career, has revisited.
James Rosenquist becomes newly legible when he is approached not as a canonical figure of Pop art, but as an artist tracking how social experience is reorganized by a world of proliferating images. The exhibition Waiting for an Idea at Off Paradise compresses the arc of his project into a compact—almost meta—diagram.
Despite its promising title, I Am Gravity offers less than a compelling argument for Bill Bollinger’s work as either historically pivotal or presently relevant. What is at stake here is not merely a curatorial shortfall, but a continued failure to grasp how post-Minimalism constitutes a missing chapter in late modernism’s history.
Upon entering the exhibition To the North Star, featuring works by Joe Overstreet (b. 1933, d. 2019) at Eric Firestone Gallery, one might initially assume that his career was defined by adapting to trends and approaches that dominated abstract painting from the mid-to-late twentieth century.
Renowned for his photorealistic paintings and complex woodcuts, Franz Gertsch’s subtle and layered approach is easy to miss when seen through a small selection like the eight works that make up Presence at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery.
Remaining open to continual adjustment, Tom McGlynn transforms repetition into a generative principle, a painterly counterpart to Donald Judd’s modular rigor where variation arises through disciplined reiteration.
The title of this exhibition, Galacticonexus—a neologism that fuses “galactic” and “nexus”—is itself highly revealing, as it draws upon the language of speculative fiction and conjures images of the architecture of cosmic interconnectivity. The analogy is apt, since the show consists of an expansive array of nineteen hanging wire sculptures dating from 1975 to 2025. Installed throughout Karma’s expansive Chelsea gallery, Saret’s sculptures are suspended at varying heights—some hovering just above the floor, others floating overhead—to evoke the vastness of space.
AS OFTEN AS NOT, a posthumous exhibition of Lawrence Weiner’s work at Gladstone Gallery, showcases his iconic language-based approach to artmaking.
When I first received the press release for Faktura / Tektonika at Sean Kelly, my anticipation was genuine. I was not expecting an art historical treatise, or a museum show but rather a contemporary view—an exhibition that would thoughtfully engage with these pivotal significant concepts in the present moment.
Like many contemporary artists, Kennedy Yanko’s work looks overly familiar. This reflects the broader contemporary cultural tendency of artists recycling past forms and aesthetics.
Conceived and executed in 1969, the exhibition 48" Standards by Mel Bochner at Peter Freeman showcases works that, at the time of their initial presentation, would have been considered materially and conceptually unconventional, perhaps even radical.
Ironically, while Cady Noland’s work itself may not be explicitly critical or proactive, her approach to her career and interactions with the art world demonstrate a deep, critical awareness of her own position as a successful artist.
DRIVE II, currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, can be read as a nuanced and complex commentary on art, consumerism, and personal mythology. Cars are its principal referent. The cars that make up DRIVE II were all owned, used, and modified by Rhoades, but in no dramatic manner.





















![Bridget Riley, Final Study for "Halcyon" [Repaint], 1971. Pencil and gouache on paper, 37 3/8 × 36 inches. Collection of the artist. © Bridget Riley 2023. All rights reserved.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstudio.brooklynrail.org%2Fassets%2F77e2c4ce-d99b-4e20-b43e-14deb4c45b83.jpg&w=3840&q=75)







