ArtSeen
Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment
By Jason RosenfeldCross Pollination is the product of a partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, which has lent 16 prized images of hummingbirds by the quirky American salt marsh painter and naturalist Martin Johnson Heade for the occasion, along with other works.
Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor
By Louis BlockWong Ping’s world is full of hyper-contrasting gradients within forms, and the neon sheen of his characters’ various body parts appears less like an effect of light than some sickly glaze on a dessert. In the New Museum’s darkened galleries, frames rush past almost too quickly, and scenes of longing and sex—mostly not actual sex, but frustration, budding fetishes, fantasies—are gemlike and addicting.
Robert Rauschenberg: Channel Surfing
By Kate LiebmanThroughout the exhibition, Rauschenberg plays with the availability of narrative when abutting many images in a single picture plane. The works in Channel Surfing, split across two floors, embody the action of movement, of going, of living in and passing through a world glutted with image.
Matvey Levenstein
By Christian KleinbubIf you knew nothing about Matvey Levenstein’s work, but something about art history, you would find yourself in the pleasurable position of surveying his recent paintings at Kasmin Gallery the way I did, as an introduction to a painter who you really ought to know, and whose works hit you like an encounter with the unknown.
Paul Thek: Interior / Landscape
By Katy Diamond HamerSome of the work on view in the Watermill Center’s two-floor exhibition was previously on display at the Whitney, but many of his most important pieces are being shown for the first time. Paul Thek: Interior / Landscape shines a light on the fact that Thek was an avid draftsman.
Martine Syms: Loot Sweets
By Madeleine SeidelLoot Sweets, on view at Bridget Donahue in New York until September 25, is a heady collage of found objects, paper scraps, and nostalgia that transforms into an uneasy meditation on consumption as a performance—on the things we buy, make, and throw away as an extension of self and culture.
Mike Goodlett: Desire Itself
By Alexandra DrexeliusTime stopped this summer for Mike Goodlett. He passed away on the last day of June at his home and studio in Wilmore, Kentucky, where he spent the past 30 years living and working. This was not merely a marriage of convenience: Goodlett’s work was intimately informed by his cloistered surroundings.
Tacita Dean: The Dante Project • One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting • Pan Amicus • Significant Form • Monet Hates Me
By Alfred Mac AdamTacita Dean’s current show at Marian Goodman is not your ordinary gallery show. In fact, Dean has subtly revolutionized the very concept. The presentation of an artist’s work at a given moment can produce a species of tunnel vision because the individual pieces, often created at the same time, frequently bear such a resemblance to one another that they blend together.
Wandamba yalungka.../Winds change direction...
By Jillian RussoAn exhibition of 13 video works addressing today’s most pressing global concerns, Wandamba yalungka/Winds change direction, takes its title from the traditional language of the Waanyi aboriginal people of Queensland. The language is on the verge of extinction, spoken by only 16 people as of 2016. Expertly curated by Maura Reilly for the Performa website, the exhibition brings together an international and multi-generational group of artists.
Gina Werfel: In Context
By Jonathan GoodmanGina Werfel, originally a New Yorker, has spent the last 21 years teaching art at the University of California, Davis, but she maintains a residence on the edge of Harlem and has been a long-time member of Prince Street Gallery. She makes ebullient, enthusiastic New York School paintings that can best be described as free-form versions of Lyrical Abstraction.
Get Lifted! The Art of the Ecstatic
By Maureen Catbagan and Amber Jamilla MusserIn a world that feels more constricted with climate catastrophes and social restrictions, how does one lift? How does one get beyond the borders of a compressed body, a compressed language of the self? How does one begin to transcend to a space of release, to a space of flow, to a space of euphoric joy?
Donna Moylan: Take Shelter
By Lenore MalenFor Donna Moylan, the wild is the norm. At Tanja Gunert’s Hudson gallery, Moylan’s paintings point to a surrealist revival in recent art though she claims a long history in this genre. As a young artist living in Rome for 23 years she developed a signature style that incorporated abstract shapes and caricatures inhabiting otherworldly landscapes.
Fritz Vogt Drawings: A Sense of Place
By Lyle RexerFritz Vogt, an itinerant renderer who worked in five counties west of Albany, left behind hundreds of drawings in graphite and colored pencil that give a glimpse of a world that no longer exists, when towns were growing and farming was prosperous.
Estefania Velez Rodriguez: Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion
By Robert R. ShaneWe feel disorientation and ecstasy as we enter Estefania Velez Rodriguez’s large-scale landscapes in Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion. Illuminated by fluorescent oil and spray paint, the pattern-rich paintings strip away the surface of the natural world to reveal the inner life of nature and of the artist.
Jennifer Wen Ma: An Inward Sea
By William CorwinJennifer Wen Ma’s work consistently engages the imagery of life teetering on the edge of oblivion, and her current installation An Inward Sea at the New Britain Museum of American Art (part of their “New/Now” programming) addresses this through the lens of COVID.
Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964
By Benjamin CliffordAlthough the people that populate the FCCB’s photographs may at times exist in Romantic solitude, the built environment and mass-produced goods around them proliferate relentlessly—these are unmistakably images of urbanism at mid-century.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming
By Jacob DreyerOne of the most prominent Chinese artists of the past two decades, Cai Guo-Qiang makes work that delves into the folkloric precursors to China’s technocratic state, even as he regularly works with that state on his grandest projects.
The New Woman Behind the Camera
By Lyle RexerThis revolution is the insertion into the archive of a very large group of women photographers, many of whom have been virtually unknown to contemporary viewers.
The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570
By Christian KleinbubIf you think yourself immune to the seductions of visual propaganda, go check out the current Met exhibition, The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570. It will test you.
Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête
By Elizabeth BuheOne of the questions posed by Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête (Head to Head) at the Drawing Center is how the artist’s works link embodiment with experience of the built environment—or how they are, as one wall label notes, “at once bodies and maps.” Both of these terrains have been subjected to the kind of seeing, measuring, and regularizing that is the inheritance of colonial modernity, but Caland reorders this logic through soft, sensorily evocative form, winding continuous lines, and layered mark-making that yields densely hatched thickets vibrating with electric poppies.
A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
By Choghakate KazarianThe exhibition currently on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see a gathering of 25 pictures by Albert Pinkham Ryder and related works by modern and contemporary artists.
Prélude
By Joel KuennenPrélude, as the name suggests, is one of the inaugural exhibitions of collector Maja Hoffmann’s long-standing project in Arles, LUMA. A secondary meaning of the word, to warm up, is appropriate as the work exhibited finds ways of accessing a growing feeling, that something disastrous is coming, things are heating up and this is just the beginning of our collective discombobulation.
Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter
By Natasha KurchanovaLouise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, currently on view at the Jewish Museum, presents a wealth of new material that makes us look at her art from an unexpectedly different angle. This new perspective is made possible by a posthumous discovery of a large cache later known as her “psychoanalytic writings.”
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
By Robert C. MorganSean Scully’s work has a consistency that gives it a heightened level of energy reflected in both its convincing visual impact and the artist’s diligent production.
Cézanne Drawing
By David RhodesCézanne brings his radical and extreme engagement with the practice of painting to his work on paper, endowing what is ostensibly conventional subject matter—landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes—with an unpredictable charge.
Eamon DeFabbia-Kane: ABERRATION
By Bat-Ami RivlinABERRATION is the current solo exhibition of works by Eamon DeFabbia-Kane at the Putty’s Coronation project space, the nomadic gallery’s first exhibition and solo presentation in this particular address.
Ibrahim Ahmed: It Will Always Come Back to You
By Osman Can YerebakanFragments constitute Ibrahim Ahmed’s art: pieces of colorful textiles, words from disparate languages, and memories of remote places.
Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities
By Pepe KarmelThere are no simple answers in Sikander’s work. But there is an urgent invitation to walk through the looking glass into a series of different worlds, foreign yet uncannily familiar, where the partitions of other continents reveal the fault lines of our own.
Paula Rego
By William DaviePaula Rego is one of the finest, most idiosyncratic artists of her generation.
Carrie Moyer & Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times
By Margaret EwingWhile Moyer’s solo practice is rooted in meticulous attention to composition, and Pepe’s in history and politics, the 10 works on view made jointly and mostly while on residencies reflect the centering of experimentation and play that can happen when removed from daily responsibility and routine.
Fehras Publishing Practices: Borrowed Faces: Future Recall
By Maximiliane LeuschnerBorrowed Faces: Future Recall at The Mosaic Rooms in London is Fehras Publishing Practices’ institutional debut in the United Kingdom.
Dawn Clements: Living Large: A Survey
By Tom McGlynnThe immediacy of Dawn Clements’s drawing acts as a seismic register of emotional states transcribing both real and imagined landscapes
Samantha Nye: My Heart’s in a Whirl
By Ksenia SobolevaMarking a pivotal time in her career, Nye’s first solo exhibition My Heart’s in a Whirl is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Cerith Wyn Evans: Aspen Drift
By Louis BlockIn this show titled Aspen Drift, there is a surprising absence of blur. Cerith Wyn Evans’s neon sculptures describe form in such exacting terms as to evoke something diagrammatic, like glowing renderings of discrete movements suspended in the air.
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted
By Hannah Sage KayTwisted is the 80-year-old artist’s first ever solo museum exhibition in New York City—despite a career marked by invisibility (whether purposeful or socially enforced), Hershman Leeson has only gained visibility with time.
