ArtSeen
Kon Trubkovich: The Antepenultimate End
By David CarrierWhat can pictures tell us about the great events of political history? Recent scholarship identified the complex relationship between Jacques-Louis David’s history paintings and the French Revolution. Was he truly a prophet?
Tamara Gonzales: Horrible Beauty
By Amanda Millet-SorsaTamara Gonzales has spent her life living, experiencing, understanding, and connecting with the indigenous cultures of the Americas, spiritual and ritual practices from India and the Caribbean, and with Magick, as well as undergoing healing journeys facilitated through psychedelic plant medicines, without forgetting her early years professionally decorating cakes while being immersed in counterculture and the punk music circles of the 1970s in New York.
Louise Lawler: LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK
By Hannah Sage KayAn homage, a funerary march, a quiet celebration: Louise Lawler’s final exhibition at Metro Pictures, which will permanently shutter its doors in the coming months, resounds with a distinct nostalgia.
Leonardo Drew
By Jillian RussoLeonardo Drew’s exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co. pairs a monumental site-specific installation with nine recent sculptures, creating a magical, immersive environment. The works on view reflect Drew’s various approaches to his materials, including wood, cotton fabric, and aluminum, which he cuts, distresses, and paints, giving them the quality of found objects. Drew is known for repurposing previous sculptures to create new ones, mirroring natural cycles of decay and transformation.
Kon Trubkovich: The Antepenultimate End
By Nicholas HeskesEvery bit of color imperfection and grain on the CRT display is rendered precisely and on a magnified scale. The effect is a clash of worlds (at least on the formal level) in which archaic electronic media is worked onto elements of the Western European canon.
Nicky Nodjoumi: We the Witnesses
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightWhat is exhaustible versus what is inexhaustible comes to mind in Nicky Nodjoumi’s We the Witnesses at Helena Anrather. Newsprint is exhaustible. The images that circulate within newspapers, the ones that swarm around events, elicit quick shocks of something limbic but rarely have permanence past the next day’s issue.
O-I-L Paint
(for Albert Ryder)
By Bill Jensen
Submerged in the murk of modern life/Immersed in the murk of oil/The great mark-maker breathes forth clarity
A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
By Peter AchesonBill Jensen said that Ryder’s paintings are made of stardust, and I take his point. By all accounts, his palette was limited and he experimented with glazes and homemade varnishes. So how does the homespun become “stardust”?
A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
By Amanda Millet-SorsaIt’s heartwarming, and a real rarity, to see so many works by an artist in his hometown—and in a whaling museum, which adds context to both Ryder’s life and the seascapes prevalent in his work.
Jennie C. Jones: New Compositions
By Ann C. CollinsJones is most at home at the intersection of music and art history, building hybrids of the two while questioning her place within the legacy of the latter: How does the work of a Black woman artist fit into a tradition dominated by white men? Turning music into objects and objects into auditory experiences, she troubles the boundaries of any category in which she might be contained and does so with elegance and control.
Hemali Bhuta: and the epic did not happen!
By Barbara A. MacAdamThis warm and elusive show can be befuddling. Its reach is far and subtle, and embraces many modalities while its expression is quiet and minimal. It is what it isn’t.
Stacy Lynn Waddell: Mettle
By Darla MiganStacy Lynn Waddell’s Mettle, the artist’s first solo show in New York at Candice Madey gallery, presents new paintings in gold leaf on canvas and works on handmade paper.
Emilie Stark-Menneg: Strawberry Moon
By Alfred Mac AdamEmilie Stark-Menneg is a psychological artist, but to call her one is to do her a disservice. Eric Fischl, for instance, presents us with fraught moments in the lives of his subjects, fragments of a narrative, but Stark-Menneg sets aside stories in favor of psychic icons of an autobiographical nature.
Nicole Storm
By Bryan MartinNicole Storm’s first solo show in New York is an exuberant installation of heavily worked surfaces that combines abstract color painting and calligraphic line drawing. Occupying half of White Columns gallery, the exhibition presents a multicolored collection of two-dimensional and sculptural mixed media works with recurring visual elements.
Ron Gorchov: Spice of Life
By Tom McGlynnSince Gorchov’s most effective canvases tend to target the solar plexus of the viewer, the scale of each becomes significant. The closer the scale of his paintings to a torso, the more bodily tension they tend to exert.
Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious Body of Work
By Charlotte KentAt stake in the new Pace group exhibition Convergent Evolutions are the questions of who gets to be seen, when, and how. The exhibition of 17 artists who range across 60 years, multiple media, and assorted styles brings together poignant contemporary concerns about representation.
Katelyn Eichwald: Never
By Elizabeth BuheThere is a wicked alchemy to Katelyn Eichwald’s work. Her modestly-sized paintings of ordinary subject matter—piled rope, a gleaming white turret, a shadowy clockface—bewitch us, like scrims, portals, or talismans might.
Alex Callender: All Her Loves and All Her Disappointments
By Marcus CivinThrough historically informed works, Alex Callender resituates and reframes colonial images of Black people, especially Black women, asserting possibility and agency and enabling a kind of rebirth and immortality.
Joanna Borkowska & Sandi Slone: Material/Immaterial
By Robert C. MorganEach painter is highly aware of what they are doing: their artistic narratives are largely technical, emphasizing formal and chromatic elements that reveal an emotional depth in their work. The pleasure in seeing this exhibition is the kind of pleasure that one expects to see—and to feel—when the circumstances around a show are focused entirely on the art of abstract painting.
Matvey Levenstein
By Andrew L. SheaDepicting everyday scenes in and around Levenstein’s home on the North Fork of Long Island, these paintings are said to have originated with casual photographs that the artist took on his phone.
Philip Guston: 1969–1979
By David RhodesIn this extraordinary exhibition, 18 paintings made between 1969 and 1979 are presented in two rooms.
Lois Dodd
By Hearne PardeeInaugurating Alexandre Gallery’s new space on the Lower East Side, this exhibition of twenty-seven paintings spans the imposing length and breadth of Lois Dodd’s career.
John Currin: Memorial
By Alfred Mac AdamWith the seven oil paintings in Memorial, John Currin embraces Mannerism in all its twisting, elongated distortion.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor: Future Promise
By Susan HarrisTaylor’s subject material in Future Promise, at James Cohan Gallery, has taken a turn toward the personal in paintings that reflect the impact of quarantine on her as an artist, mother, and person.
Daniel Johnston: I Live My Broken Dreams
By Barbara PurcellDaniel Johnston: I Live My Broken Dreams opened September 11, two years to the day of his passing. The prolific, enigmatic singer-songwriter and artist, famed for his self-released music cassettes and comic-book drawings, would have turned 60 this year.
Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings
By Tom McGlynnEach of Nozkowski's paintings wind up as amalgams of geometric and biomorphic abstraction of varying scale, color, and pattern that appear to me to be an invented pictographic language analogous to one thing leading to the next.
Liz Ahn: unobservable scavenger
By Pamela SneedIn this painting show that is part installation and sculpture show titled, unobservable scavenger, there are plenty of places to enter, walk around, retrace, read, look up and then down.
Wallace Berman: Off the Grid
By Ann McCoyDescending into the cellar at TOTAH feels like entering a sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies. The leitmotif of this exhibition could be the theme of intimacy, images feeling like handheld windows into the artist’s psyche.
Julian Schnabel: Self-Portraits of Others
By David EbonyMost of the twenty-five plate paintings by Julian Schnabel in this exhibition, produced between 2018-2020, were inspired by photographic sources and, especially, a cinematographic source—photo reproductions of well-known artworks, and particularly images of van Gogh paintings that appeared in the 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate.
Bernar Venet: 1961 & 1963: les origins
By Joseph NechvatalVenet’s current show, 1961 & 1963: les origins at Ceysson & Bénétière Paris, puts him back into that post-Duchampian / Yves Klein context with early minimal works that ponder the power of black and the pull of gravity through an inter-disciplinarian methodology.
Martha Tuttle: Wild irises grow in the mountains
By Louis BlockMartha Tuttle’s paintings can be defined by belonging, in that they are seriously invested in a material process that takes the craft of the medium as part of its subject.
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town
By Douglas DreishpoonMany archival gems are featured in Back in Town, the homecoming exhibition organized by Robert Scalise and Jason Andrew at the University of Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery.
McArthur Binion: Modern:Ancient:Brown
By Amanda Millet-Sorsa
The paintings in the exhibition bring together Binion’s agility with color, a study that he has deepened for 40 years, as well as minimalism and geometric abstraction.
Kamala Sankaram: The Last Stand
By Julie ReissThe Last Stand is an experimental opera in three acts that uses field recordings as libretto and score.
Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good To You
By Cat DawsonWardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good To You holds within one unified structure, two incongruent ways of being in the world.
BRUCE CONNER & JAY DEFEO:
(“we are not what we seem”)
By Jessica Holmes
Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo (“we are not what we seem”) is a testament to the singular relationship, cultivated over decades, between these two stalwarts of the post-war San Francisco cultural scene.
Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings
By Jason RosenfeldMatisse, among other Old Masters, gets the full Yuskavage treatment in her show of 14 new paintings at Zwirner, displayed in two rooms.
Raquel Rabinovich: Portals
By Jonathan GoodmanRaquel Rabinovich, now 92, is an artist working in Rhinebeck, New York; born in Buenos Aires, she moved to the United States in 1967. The artist is known for her monochromatic painting and glass sculptures, as well as her ecologically influenced works, likely the result of her proximity to the Hudson River.
