ArtSeen
Summer McCorkle: des abends
By Ann C. CollinsMcCorkle’s camera moves are minimal. She allows her images to linger on screen. Things feel informal and sincere, allowing the viewer to settle in and listen.
Isaac Aden: Vespers and Auroras
By David CarrierThese are Color Field works, made quickly after painstaking preparation of the grounds, using spray paints. Describing them as Claudian Color Field paintings, Aden says that they allude to “those rare moments as the sun ignites a new day or gently fades into the evening.
(Nothing but) Flowers
By Alfred Mac AdamThe title of this spectacular show of 59 artists should be: These Are Not Flowers. Only Magritte’s admonition keeps us from confusing nature and art, though of course such confusion is the inevitable result of this floral avalanche. When do flowers cease to be nature and become art?
George Ortman: Against Abstraction
By David RhodesOne very good reason, amongst others, to visit is to take the opportunity to see George Ortman’s (1926–2015) works not solely through the lens of minimalism—one view that has become habitual—but rather, to think about how Judd and Ortman relate historically, and contrast aesthetically.
erotics: towards a poetics of the liminal
By Lucia HinojosaCecilia Vicuña’s practice exists within a sensory threshold, situated between what is and what is not. It lives in the space of the broken, in the ruptures where the possible finds forms of release and reintegration.
Our World is Burning
By Olivia GilmoreOver 30 artists focus their attention on human crises in the Arab world and the global ecological emergency at large, while the exhibition itself sparks outrage for its partnership with the Qatari-state-run MATHAF: the Arab Museum of Modern Art.
Don Voisine: Time Out
By Robert C. Morgan“Time out” would not constitute time away from painting. Rather it meant a serious re-adjustment: the paintings produced during the peak of COVID-19 in New York would come from another environment, namely a living environment.
Torkwase Dyson: Studies for Bird and Lava
By Jason RosenfeldThe rigor of Torkwase Dyson’s intellectual and pictorial practices was fully on display in Studies for Bird and Lava, a set of 11 works in Pace’s new, light-filled East Hampton space, but the compelling aesthetic appeal of her project was also evident.
Jennie C. Jones: Passing Tones and Broken Chords
By Adriana FurlongThe semiotic possibilities inherent in a passing tone, a non-chordal interstice between two dominant chords, hold both the capacity to conjoin and the potential to rebuff its modal order. A visit to Jennie C. Jones’s Passing Tones and Broken Chords at Alexander Gray Associates outpost in Germantown, New York, finds her not merely continuing to mine the juncture of sonic and sculptural forms, but playing within the fertile furrow of negative space between rigid hegemonic structures.
Rute Merk: SS20
By William CorwinThe seven-and-a-half-foot-square canvas BALENCIAGA, SS20, Look 89 (2019) by Rute Merk presents a disquieting vision of humanoid perfection: a confident androgyne blue goddess on a blue background. Like the depiction of the Vitruvian man, Merk’s model is inscribed in a square and stares out at us blankly.
Hélio Oiticica: Dance in My Experience
By Bruna ShapiraNew Yorkers who had an opportunity to see the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium at the Whitney Museum in 2017 may have tried on his “Parangolés”—multilayered garments and capes made of fabric, plastic, or paper often bearing political slogans.
Artist Stories from the Pandemic
By Joyce BeckensteinTo date, the museum’s website features 51 videos testifying to artists’ personal reactions to this calamitous pandemic. But Erni’s archival project does much more: the short, sometimes breathless clips in this video montage create a poignant exhibition with explicit themes distilling both the agony and unrelenting resilience of artists as they adapt to change.
Jeffrey Gibson: Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House
By Susan BreyerNow, with vacant pedestals dotting the country, citizens have the physical and psychological space to reconsider how our diverse and complex histories are memorialized. Which individuals, groups, or historic junctures merit monuments? Which lessons should be relayed to following generations? Are there particular formal devices or motifs new monuments can employ to better captivate and communicate with the public?
Artemisia
By David CarrierAs the catalogue exhibition essay by Francesco Solinas says, she was a famously “strong and combative” woman whose “unbridled ambition for success, wealth and higher social standing” made her famous and successful during her lifetime. But reaching that goal took heroic struggle and for a long time, Baroque painting and art by women was marginalized.
Banksy: A Visual Protest
By David CarrierJust as René Magritte’s Surrealist paintings often rely upon unexpected juxtapositions of banal objects or scenes, a daylight sky and a nighttime street for example, so Banksy shocks by creating irrational correspondences.
An Alternative Canon: Art Dealers Collecting Outsider Art
By Jonathan GoodmanOrganized by art writer and curator Paul Laster, An Alternative Canon: Art Dealers Collecting Outsider Art presents nearly 75 artworks collected by some 30 dealers. The range of the works, shown salon-style in Edlin’s space near the New Museum, is remarkable.
Susan Philipsz: Muffled Drums/The Unquiet Grave
By Nicholas HeskesNow online, this project inevitably represents a reduction of the original installation, but it is nonetheless a clever reframing that responds thoughtfully to its changed circumstances.
Frank Jones: 114591
By Nicholas HeskesDrawings like those made by Jones, though accepted into the canon, remain at odds with what is generally thought of as “art” as a result of their sincerity and independence. It seems to me that this type of work, which arises out of the necessity of existential conditions, has the potential to collapse the often-arbitrary division between art and life.
The Institute of Queer Ecology: Metamorphosis
By Alex A. JonesThe four-episode series resembles an educational nature show, with essays spoken over digital animation and found footage, narrated by nonbinary artists Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski. As its name implies, Metamorphosis takes multiple forms as an artistic project.
The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art
By Charlotte KentMoving past familiar questions about art, machines, autonomy, and authorship that have been around since the invention of photography, the generative artworks on view through Kate Vass’s website offers a chance to think about our respective starting points, the steps we take, and how rules apply in this game of life.
Philip Guston: What Endures
By Barbara A. MacAdamThese works capture one significant period in Guston’s multifaceted career (or careers), hinting at the breadth of his artistic and intellectual reach.
Jorinde Voigt
By Barbara A. MacAdamVoigt conveys her conceptual imaginings in color and line. Her peregrinations lead us through a sea of hand-dyed blue paper that has a Disney-esque underwater appearance in which strange, sometimes almost identifiable forms swim or float.
Scott Benzel: Mindless Pleasures
By Yxta Maya MurrayScott Benzel's new show at LA's Bel Ami gallery, Mindless Pleasures, gives viewers an important opportunity to contemplate the mysteries of deterministic chaos during this period of human history.
Maureen Catbagan
By Amber Jamilla MusserWithout many of its external markers, the phenomenology of time has been profoundly altered: we exist in a constant negotiation between realities and temporalities. In its excavation of memory—both personal and collective—Maureen Catbagan’s recent painting series plumbs the psychological space of this uncertainty.
Barkley L. Hendricks: In the Paint
By Lee Ann NormanThough a small selection of works, In the Paint aptly demonstrates the foundation for Hendricks’s explorations of aesthetic sensibility and racial identity that would predominate his decades-long career.
Ashley Garrett: Aegis
By Robert R. ShaneThese abstract works do not recount a hero’s journey but bear witness to vibrant forces of nature through swirling forms, capricious brushstrokes, and passages of brilliant light. It is as if the forests in which Artemis hunted or the seas which wrecked Odysseus’s ship are given agency in Garrett’s work and begin to tell their own tales of turmoil and splendor.
Ari Marcopoulos: Fast Breaks
By Robert SlifkinAri Marcopoulos has understood photography’s singular capacity to apprehend and comprehend the world. And as an artist who has produced around 250 books and zines as well as a number of short films, Marcopoulos is also sensitive to the archival time contained in the photographic medium, and he grasps the fact that this temporality often resonates both backwards and forwards.
Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb & Sterrett Smith: fastness, slowness and Monstrous Beauty
By Simon WuThe show is a collaboration between artists Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb, and Sterrett Smith. In their artist statement, they suggest that this collection of objects convenes like an “exquisitely discordant" set of sounds, known as a wolf tone to musicians.
Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest
By Simon WuThe musculature of Jiménez’s figures is exaggerated but also flattened, and their genders are ambiguous. Most of them are closely-cropped figure studies, but a portion of them appear to be drawn from memory-scenes or TV broadcasts.
Andrew Sendor: InstaCOVID Drawings
By Osman Can YerebakanAndrew 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.
Susan Philipsz: Sleep Close and Fast
By Patrick J. ReedThe glass and steel material content in Sleep Close and Fast bespeak the disinfecting wipe-downs that businesses, including galleries, perform with regularity. The artworks advertise sanitation, a less comforting quality than it may seem.
