ArtSeen
Intimacy
By Millie Christie-DervauxThe works featured in Intimacy all pose this same question—“What is this thing called ‘me’?”—and further explore what “this thing called ‘me’” means in communion with others, whether during the process of creating a portrait, making breakfast, or making love.
The Incomplete Araki
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesThe opening of Nobuyoshi Araki’s latest exhibition, The Incomplete Araki, in February of 2018, welcomed a diverse mix of admirers, bondage enthusiasts, and blushing academics, decorated here and there by a column of kimono. Unable to see the art in such a swarm, I enjoyed watching visitors’ eyes—especially those of the more staid—dilate between lust and analysis.
Social Photography VI
By Graham W. BellWhere does the virtual world of Instagram enter the physical art space? What does this convergence look like? Social Photography VI at Carriage Trade in Manhattan’s Chinatown looks to answer these questions with its sixth iteration of an annual exhibition.
Summer: Curated by Ugo Rondinone
By David RhodesEntering the gallery and leaving behind the traffic noise of a busy weekday Grand Street, I found summertime to be successfully, if disconcertingly and humorously, evoked. Summer, curated by the artist Ugo Rondinone, brought together seven intergenerational artists whose works relate at varying tangents to this apparently straightforward seasonal idea.
ATSUKI SETTANGELI:
New Dawns of the Samurai Spirit
By Mark Bloch
Settangeli pledged to devote his considerable gifts and career to the ideals of the Samurai, Japanese warriors from the 10th through 19th centuries, and their six virtues: filialness, loyalty, fidelity, justice, charity, and courtesy.
3: Brenda Goodman, Christina Tenaglia, and Marie Vickerilla
By Jonathan GoodmanGoodman, Vickerilla, and Tenaglia all demonstrate a thorough knowledge of modernism and its penchants for abstraction, but they are not constrained by the past. All three are excellent artists dedicated to visual change.
JASON STOPA:
The Gate
By Eliza Barry
What can a gate be? This is not a riddle, however, in his recent body of paintings one could say Jason Stopa approaches it as one.
GEOFFREY CHADSEY:
THAT’S NOT IT
By Ivan Talijancic
ver the past decade, Brooklyn-based visual artist Geoffrey Chadsey has crafted a prolific body of work comprised of fictional portraits of ambiguously gendered subjects, rendered in astonishingly vivid detail, and exacted by obsessively precise colored-pencil and crayon strokes.
Interventions
By Millie Christie-DervauxThe most compelling question that the show offers, though, is on the symbiotic relationship between the subject’s body and the photograph’s body—explored, for the most part, through works in which the artist has altered the picture after it has been printed.
ANN CRAVEN:
Sunset Moon
By David Rhodes
a “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein once said. It is particular, not necessarily singular: Ann Craven’s repeated motifs of flowers, moons, sunsets, or birds typically extend an accessible image into multiplicity without undermining the exceptional character contained in each image produced.
AARON FOWLER: Donkey Days, Donkey Nights, and Bigger Than Me
By Will FenstermakerAs an editor, I distrust superlatives, but here goes one that’s deserved: Aaron Fowler’s Donkey Days is the best solo gallery show I’ve seen in New York this year. Fowler’s assemblages are meticulous, intricate, and complexly layered, steeped with references and allusions—narrative, formal, and material—to art history, popular culture, and the artist’s own familial and personal experiences.
CANDICE BREITZ:
Love Story
By Emily Watlington
Responding to this growing anxiety, Candice Breitz’s Love Story (2016) takes up conventions and tropes for representing atrocity by mining the cinematic medium’s capacity for eliciting empathy, while also highlighting the ways in which the screen reinforces distance.
CEAPHAS STUBBS:
Phantom Limb
By Nico Wheadon
Phantom Limb is a solo exhibition of recent works by Ceaphas Stubbs, a New Jersey-based artist who collapses photography, sculpture, and collage into a singular process that yields hyper-layered 2D prints from 3D dioramic still lifes.
Forsaking Pop: A New Art Generation from Japan
By Mark BlochThe Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 pounded the souls of many young Japanese artists.
This Is Not A Prop
By Nina WolpowThis summer, West (whose estate Zwirner acquired this year) is the inspiration for This Is Not A Prop curated by two 26-year-olds who work at Zwirner: Alec Smyth and Cristina Vere Nicoll. As Smyth puts it, “In a way, [West] embodies the ethos of the gallery, which has always been to show artists that are surprising and exciting and weird and doing something outside of what you would normally think of as art.”
PHOEBE BOSWELL:
Take Me To The Lighthouse
By Nico Wheadon
A profoundly layered and probing exhibition, Take Me To The Lighthouse posits a simple yet sage premise—that life cuts, water heals, and light reveals even in the darkest circumstances.
PACIFICO SILANO: After Silence
By Osman Can YerebakanAbsent are bodies in Pacifico Silano’s After Silence, yet this absence leaves a haunting presence in what remains.
Cliche
By William CorwinAccording to the rationale behind the summer group exhibition Cliche, finding a painting that doesn’t fall into the pattern of one cliché or another is about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.
JACK SMITH: Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis
By Mark BlochHad intolerance not been rampant in 1963, the deserved anti-heroic notoriety Jack Smith received when Flaming Creatures appeared, following screenings for initiated friends in ’62, might have been for fearless dedication to his vision; instead it made him a gay icon.
You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s
By Colin KinniburghAt first glance the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s offers a familiar picture of that turbulent decade.
74 million million million tons
By Andreas PetrossiantsIn one image, a group of protestors carry a body in need of urgent medical attention, or in mourning—a glimpse of the violence perpetrated by the state of Israel on civilian protestors in Gaza on May 14th that killed sixty and injured over two thousand people.
JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE:
Sheets
By Daniel Gerwin
In his new exhibition of 40 works, Chase’s black male Venuses are bathed in warm yellows, tropical indigo and ultramarine, and rich purples. The men are romantic but not romanticized.
DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI’ & R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment
By Christopher GreenOverlooking the busy port of Red Hook’s Atlantic Basin, blood-red text is pasted on the window of the third floor gallery at Pioneer Works. On one pane is the phrase: “A NATION IS A MASSACRE,” followed by: “THE DETAILS ARE GRUESOME & AMERICAN & AS PATRIOTIC AS GUN VIOLENCE & RAPE & MASS MURDER.”
MARY CORSE:
A Survey in Light
By Elizabeth M. Gollnick
At the entrance to Mary Corse: A Survey in Light at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a monitor plays White Light (1968), a film showing a young Mary Corse at work in her studio. In one scene, Corse holds a square of fluorescent tubing, moving it playfully in front of the camera. The square begins to glow, seemingly from within, without any apparent wires or electrical source.
PHILIP HUGHES:
Vues d’en Haut
By Mary Ann Caws
Philip Hughes, a British painter celebrated for his paintings of various walks, is exhibiting, in the Maison de la Truffe et du Vin here, some extraordinary works focusing on some “scenes from above”—in other words, scenes of the earth shot from the sky.
ERNIE GEHR:
Essex Street Quartet (2004)
By Jason Rosenfeld
Ernie Gehr’s series of four related films form part of “The City” section of The Long Run, MoMA’s thematic reinstallation of its fourth floor permanent collection to showcase work by artists from their later years.
OTOBONG NKANGA:
To Dig A Hole That Collapses Again
By Elliot J. Reichert
Curator Omar Kholeif insists that Otobong Nkanga is first and foremost a draughtswoman—her works ideate from sketches even if they end up as paintings or poems, several of the latter which are published in this exhibition’s catalogue. His intuition bears out in the first United States survey of her work, which includes solidly sculptural works alongside paintings on paper, as well as tapestries that work their own glimmering magic in an expansive, all-encompassing gallery.
RAUL GUERRERO
By William CorwinRaul Guerrero is a pragmatic conceptual artist: he aims for the maximum emotional and mythopoetic impact using a pithy economy of means. For instance, The Rotating Yaqui Mask (1973) presents a fearsome devil’s visage with authentic animal horns and teeth, attached to a small motor installed on the far wall of the gallery.
TRACEY MOFFATT: Vigils and Travellers
By Maureen Catbagan and Amber Jamilla MusserMulvey shows us that the power of the gaze operates by producing or reifying distance between the one who watches, who is presumed to have power, and the object of the gaze, who is assumed to lack it.
STEPHEN ANTONAKOS:
Proscenium
By Jason Rosenfeld
This is the case of Proscenium (2000), one of his largest and most successful works, which dances through the cavernous space of the Neuberger, its traced forms conjured as if from Tinkerbell’s wand.
MARIANNE VITALE: On the One
By Kyle ConnorsStanding in the space, in the midst of the oxidized steel Totems and Masks, I couldn’t help the feeling that I was just as much on display for the art as it was for me.
PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU:
Colorful Line
By Osman Can Yerebakan
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.
LUCAS SAMARAS:
Photo-Transformations
By Charles Schultz
Samaras’s “photo-transformations” are the result of chemical manipulations the artist made to Polaroid images as they were developing.
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
By Gillian SneedAxis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.—on view at Hunter College’s 205 Hudson and Leubsdorf galleries—is the first exhibition to excavate the understudied experimental practices and exchanges of a generation of queer Chicanx artists in Southern California from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.
SUE COE:
Graphic Resistance
By Ann McCoy
In 1986, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, as it was then known, held the first solo museum exhibition of Sue Coe’s work in New York. It was titled The Malcolm X Series. Thirty-two years later, as MoMA PS1, the institution now gives Ms. Coe her second solo exhibition in New York, Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance.
SUMMER WHEAT:
Swamp Hunters (2018)
By Alex A. Jones
This painting appeared in a solo show at Andrew Edlin Gallery called Gamekeepers, a title which refers to those who manage land to ensure proper conditions for hunting wildlife. It is a paradoxical stewardship, nurturing life to prepare for the hunt.
MARTHA DIAMOND:
Cityscapes
By Tom McGlynn
Walking off of Great Jones Street and into Eva Presenhuber’s beautifully proportioned New York space hosting Martha Diamond’s most recent show of paintings, one can figuratively reconstruct the quotidian grandeur of an urban promenade in luscious abstract oils.
Indicators: Artists on Climate Change
By Patrick JaojocoSince the institution’s founding, Storm King Art Center’s mission to elaborate on art in the natural landscape has sought to evolve with the times. As sea levels and global temperatures rise, Storm King has followed contemporary artists into the conceptual fray of what constitutes “nature” in this day and age.
Giacometti
By Alfred Mac AdamThe two hundred or so objects assembled in this superb show—sculptures, paintings, and drawings, many of which have never been shown before—enable us finally to set aside the monstrous obfuscation of Giacometti’s oeuvre by philosophers and critics (Jean-Paul Sartre especially) who projected their ideology or self-image onto him and his work, and see him in the company of Egyptian, Greek, and African painting and sculpture, as well as the work of Brâncusi, de Chirico, and Cézanne.
WAYNE THIEBAUD:
Pastel Scatter (1972)
By Hearne Pardee
A distillation of pure color and dramatic light effects, Wayne Thiebaud’s Pastel Scatter (1972) seems to be a spontaneous gesture, yet it’s evident that it is rendered in the methodical technique Thiebaud developed in his 1960s paintings of pies and ice cream cones.
JULIA PHILLIPS:
Fixator (#2) (2017)
By Louis Block
What is most disconcerting about Fixator is what it lacks. The voids between its structural elements seem to weigh more than the solid ceramic and metal structures making up the imaginary body now resident in PS1’s creaky galleries.
MALICK SIDIBÉ:
Love Power Peace
By William Whitney
Love Power Peace (the title comes from a James Brown album) exemplifies Sidibé’s magic, showcasing never seen before photos in an exhibition that confirms his status as a cultural icon.
Multiply, Identify, Her
By Anna DunnWhen you enter Multiply, Identify, Her, you are immediately asked to both acknowledge yourself as a body, and to merge your body with artist Geta Brătescu. Her piece Autoportret în oglindă [Self-Portrait in the Mirror] (2001) is composed of a mirror with a grainy black-and-white cut-out photograph of her nose, mouth, and two sets of her eyes taped onto the plane.
ROB WYNNE:
FLOAT
By Barbara A. MacAdam
In his intriguing, often provocative, interpolated show at the Brooklyn Museum, Rob Wynne builds, reflects, and—more literally—reflects on connections in American art. In doing so he manages to intervene in the course of art history itself. He pulls at the museum's paintings and sculptures and activates them through light and language, transmuting the collection by means of his signature hand-poured, mirrored glass.
The Surface of the East Coast
By Jonathan GoodmanA consortium of five New York galleries have mostly reproduced a French museum show with the same name—The Surface of the East Coast—held in Nice in the summer of 2017. Some twenty-two of the twenty-four artists in its European version are offered on our side of the Atlantic; the purpose of the exhibition, curated by Marie Maertens, was to pair artists from the late 1960s in France, who belonged to the Supports/Surfaces movement active at the time—its participants wanted to meld Marxist and Freudian thought, along with contemporary American criticism—with abstraction.
CLARENCE SCHMIDT: Let's Call it Hope
By Jonathan GoodmanClarence Schmidt, remarkable poet of homespun constructions, was raised in Astoria, Queens, but made his way to the Woodstock area in the late 1930s. Trained as a mason, he acquired land on which he would build a remarkable house, alive with scores of windows.
Collapsed Field
By J CAntonia Kuo’s work in Collapsed Field ruptures the notion that the digital plane is an affectless mirror through which we can access our social spheres as divorced from the material and physical influences of real life.
