ArtSeen
MARGRIT LEWCZUK Me, We
By Tyler AkersPainter Margrit Lewczuk’s career was marred in 1999 by a fire that destroyed the contents of her Chelsea studio. 16 years later, she has assembled a new oeuvre of vibrant paintings, drawings, and cut-outs while living and working in her Brooklyn home with her husband, fellow impassioned artist and professor Bill Jensen.
ALIZA NISENBAUM
By Erin YerbyThe body gives itself to the visible, to presence, making it something too easily objectified, idolatrized—a tension embedded in the portrait. In her recent exhibition at White Columns, Mexican-born, New York-based painter Aliza Nisenbaum utilizes portraiture to draw out this excessive visibility of the body and what this visibility obscures: namely, the body as place of torsion—a twisting convergence of presence and absence, actuality and dream, thought and flesh.
STUART SHILS because i have no interest in these questions...
By Hearne PardeeAfter years as a landscape painter, Stuart Shils has assembled a wide-ranging show at Steven Harvey, integrating painting, photography, and sculpture, often in the same piece.
WANG JIANWEI Time Temple
By Tatiana IstominaWang Jianwei is one of China's most important conceptual artists investigating the themes of knowledge, society, and ideology. Born in 1958, he trained as a painter in the academic style of Russian Realism, and from the early 1990s moved to work in video, theater, and socially engaged projects.
STURTEVANT Double Trouble
By Christopher GreenA cynic might point out how convenient it is for the Museum of Modern Art to have an exhibition that essentially doubles the narrative of modern art enshrined in neighboring galleries and on the floor below.
All Pores Open
By Molly ElizaldeAll Pores Open showcases four seemingly very different artists, Shirley Gorelick (1924 – 2000), Ted Partin (born 1977), and artist duo Dit-Cilinn (born 1983) and David Ohlsson (born 1985), all of whom engage with the problem of portraying identities.
JOE FYFE make me one with everything
By David RhodesIn Joe Fyfe’s work, the inherent characteristics of any given material are presented foremost and combined with a sense of highly nuanced formal invention. Materials and objects are sewn, glued, tied, or left leaning together; there is no idealization or “neutral ground” sought for painting—and painting and its possibilities is the subject of this exhibition—as medium specific.
Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art
By Charles SchultzSpeaking of People is a powerful group exhibition that focuses on the many ways contemporary artists have taken inspiration from the pages of Ebony and Jet magazines.
Djordje Ozbolt More paintings about poets and food
By William J. SimmonsOzbolt’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Ozbolt manipulates art-historical categories and source materials that rework traditional expectations about painting. He alludes to the punk aesthetic that I consider understated subversion—irreverence combined with a sophisticated and technically proficient practice.
SADIE BENNING Fuzzy Math
By Terry R. MyersSadie Benning’s recent works fit together beautifully while resisting fitting in completely with other things to which they could be compared. The complexity of their situation as such is what gives them their eye-catching personality, an attitude provided mainly by the disarming procedures of their production.
RUDY BURCKHARDT Subterranean Monuments: A Centenary Celebration
By Robert BerlindThis elegant installation celebrating the centenary of Rudy Burckhardt’s birth was a good introduction to his work for anyone coming to it for the first time. The photographs for which he is perhaps best known were intermixed with his paintings, an arrangement he did not favor during his lifetime, but which here demonstrates the continuity of his interests.
Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall
By Maya HarakawaThe digital and its potential are at the heart of Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Curated by critic Brian Droitcour, the show is an extension of the gallery’s digital publishing venture, Klaus_eBooks.
Rough Cut
By Kate LiebmanRough Cut attempts to offer a new look at how eight emerging and mid-career artists incorporate collage into the process of making abstract art. The show’s premise arises from one of curator Jennifer Samet’s overriding intellectual pursuits: understanding the artistic process.
TAL R Altstadt Girl
By Margaret GrahamSome of the most striking colors to be found in the natural world exist solely as counterparts to death and decay. Here and there, the lately living or slowly fading are ushered beyond the pale by richly-hued molds and parasites that unfurl in balloons and waves of radiant rot.
SAUL MELMAN Central Governor
By Shana Beth MasonIn the Basement Boiler Room of MoMA PS1, an installation known as Central Governor quietly resides in the form of a glimmering, gilded furnace. The current state of the machine is the result of an extended performance—168 days from preparation to completion—executed in 2010 by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman.
JON SCHUELER 1975 – 1981, The New York Years
By Mary Ann CawsAfter studying with the great and eccentric Clyfford Still at the California School of the Arts, exhibiting with the Abstract Expressionists in New York, and having endured stints of teaching on the East Coast and in the Midwest, Jon Schueler left New York in 1970 for the isolation and particular weather of the Scottish Highlands.
RYAN MCNAMARA Gently Used
No Entrance, No Exit
By Kara L. Rooney
Much has been said of late about the status of so-called “post-Internet” art. Detractors, like Art in America’s Brian Droitcour, see the movement as “the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive in networks.”
LUCY SKAER
By Ann McCoyTwo stunning simultaneous exhibitions by the Scottish artist Lucy Skaer give New Yorkers their most comprehensive view of the artist’s range to date. Skaer represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale, was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2009, and has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
Nostalgia
for Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014)
By Anne Waldman
To you, muse who / rocked the brains of / so many of my heroes / You a hero too / for wise quip bon mot and / panoramic eye
A Tribute to
Jake Berthot
1939 – 2014
Last afternoon with Jake, 12/28/14 by Sam Messer.
Castles Burning
By Michael StrausTaking its title from a line from the Neil Young song “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” this group show at the split-level gallery ROOM EAST is anything but a downer.
