ArtSeen
Bridget Mullen: Quitters
By William CorwinToying with horror, but relying mostly on witty articulations of the abject and the grotesque, Bridget Mullen positions herself at a very strange crossroads. Her contorted portraits and disjointed tableaux lie between the crisp geometricity of Cyril Power, Jacques Villon, or Tamara de Lempicka and the shaggy, blunt, and gooey cartoons of Don Martin, R. Crumb, and, most significantly, Philip Guston.
Duane Michals: Kaleidoscope
By Jonathan GoodmanNow 90 years old, Duane Michals continues to make striking, idiosyncratic images that range in influence from modern and contemporary art to works that celebrate authors of major recognition. His current show indicates he is in full strength, usually creating staged photos and, in this show, sculptures and films whose force comes from a humorous surrealism close to the absurd.
Mia Westerlund Roosen: Aftermath
By Lilly WeiAftermath, Mia Westerlund Roosen’s fifth show with Betty Cuningham, is one of the sculptor’s most overtly political ventures, even if she has consistently advocated for feminist, environmental, and other topical issues over the years.
Eleen Lin and Tammie Rubin: Mythodical
By Madison FordIn Mythodical, the heavens drip into the sea, horns hang from the ceiling in a silent siren, and marshy debris on canvas and entangled sculpture suggest mysteries unseen. This is the world built by painter Eleen Lin and ceramicist Tammie Rubin in their collaborative exhibition at C24.
Yi To: Where the pebble hits the water
By Nina WolpowIn paintings by the fledgling artist Yi To, hazy forms in various stages of development—fetal, infant, mature—confusingly intertwine, and are intermittently inspected by fully articulated physiognomies.
Richard Hawkins: The Forrest Bess Variations
By Christian LiclairFor his Forrest Bess Variations, Hawkins created a series of abstract paintings in vibrant colors that are, as the title indicates, mediations on the late Forrest Bess (1911–77), a gay painter from coastal Texas, who is known for translating his mythical visions onto canvas.
Robert Irwin: New Work
By James WellingIrwin’s show at Pace offers viewers new sensory experiences. Seven intriguing “Unlight” wall reliefs occupy the two street level galleries. Each relief is assembled from up to two dozen tightly spaced six-foot fluorescent light fixtures fastened to the wall.
Rose Nestler: too bad for heaven, too good for hell
By Elizabeth BuheThe ten fabric sculptures on view in too bad for heaven, too good for hell at Mrs. prove that Rose Nestler is an exceptional artist, able to align the formal manipulation of her materials and the conceptual contours of her message so closely that the result is both wholly her own and wholly convincing.
Maggi Hambling: Real time
By Jason RosenfeldMaggi Hambling, age 76, has her first solo show in New York. This dumbfounding development for one of England’s most important artists can be chalked up to the usual reasons: a suspiciousness of, until recently, figurative art and especially portraiture; a bias against female artists; and a bias against British post-war artists not named Bacon, Freud, or Hockney.
Adam McEwen: Execute
By Amanda GluibizziAs I walked through Adam McEwen’s latest show at Gagosian, I was surprised to find my hands clenching. Normally I’m an alert art-viewer, of course, but with this exhibition everything felt taut, from the tightly stretched canvases to the tips of Bic pens painted barely to touch the corners of the pictures’ surfaces, and my body responded in-kind.
Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon: Fragments
By William CorwinSculptors Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon give life to the shared spaces between human beings, and the spaces they leave behind.
Elbert Joseph Perez: Just Living the Dream
By Clare GemimaElbert Joseph Perez’s sobering humor and historical fixation instill an anxiety-inducing literalness, crying out from somewhere between the borrowed opulence of historical, still-life masterpieces, and a gravitational interest in the concept of “existence,” described by the artist as a “baseline misery.”
Seether: Alexandra Hammond, Jackie Slanley, Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM)
By Hovey BrockNamed for Veruca Salt’s 1994 grunge hit, Seether is composed of artworks by Alexandra Hammond, Jackie Slanley, and Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) that invoke resistance and rebirth through themes found in nature and myth.
Frida Orupabo: Closed Up Like a Fist
By Margarita Lila RosaFrida Orupabo’s solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, Closed Up Like a Fist, is a visual encounter with the hauntings of the Black Atlantic archive. Drawing from a rich tradition of literary and visual archives that have aimed to salvage Black femmes from fossilized narratives, Orupabo’s exhibition reads as a cartography of Black femme precarity, delicately pinned up by the resolve to survive.
Leonardo Drew
By Toby KampsThe format of 248A feels forensic, like a buried Viking ship or a crashed airliner being pieced back together. But the stories it conjures are more quotidian, speaking to the everyday experience of things falling apart. “Entropy,” Drew says, “is the baseline of my work.” Any apparent chaos in the work, however, is undergirded by a deep-seated order.
Vik Muniz: Scraps
By Lyle RexerEverything Muniz does is personal, that is, all his work reflects a distinctive attitude toward images and their production, but Scraps may be as close to a psychic confession as we are likely to get.
Dewey Crumpler: Painting Is an Act of Spiritual Aggression
By Jonathan GoodmanDewey Crumpler’s excellent show at Derek Eller Gallery comprises many paintings given to his compelling mixture of imagery: quotations of major modernist art, groups of faceless figures in gray hoodies, and science-fiction designs or templates that skew toward something approaching an otherworldly realm.
Michael Rado: Show Your Work
By Charles SchultzMichael Rado wants you to know how the fabulous works on the walls of his exhibition at Art Cake were made. He wants you to know so that you can trace the progress and appreciate the choices that organize multiple fields of information into singular compositions.
Dwight Cassin: Oronsay
By S. DavidPopulated by past and present imaginaries, Cassin’s sculptures—all made of repurposed wood—are sites whereat idea and visual diction are not covalent; rather, they contest among each other along discrete planes of figuration and activity.
Jordan Belson: Landscapes
By Alfred Mac AdamAfter his death in 2011, Jordan Belson underwent a metamorphosis.
Elaine Reichek: Material Girl
By Norman L KleeblattElaine Reichek scavenges among sources from literature, history, mythology, and art, fabricating images and texts she transforms into textiles. Trained as a painter by avant-garde, intellectually rigorous icons, notably Ad Reinhardt, her career has been defined by her strategic use of the textile medium—a feminist, postmodern strategy.
Jim Osman: Walnut: Second Series
By Tom McGlynnOne encounters Jim Osman’s sculptural assemblages as maquettes of the possible. His work’s potentiality is made manifest via his canny juggling of organic materials, tectonic engineering, and solid color—together with how those disparate materials cohere in highly animated theaters of ensemble character.
Jarrett Key: from the ground, up
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightJarrett Key is interested in the slow, germinating speed of folklore and the gradual repetition needed for world-building.
Jacques-Louis David & Charles Ray
By Jason RosenfeldIt is probably better that the exhibition has little to say along these lines. But that does not mean David’s allegiances should be glossed over in favor of the David of formal invention and narrative fluidity.
From Forces to Forms
By William CorwinThere are works of art which elude categorization, and some of these are the most enigmatic or inscrutable.
Rona Pondick
By Susan HarrisThe disparate parts of Rona Pondick's metal hybrids came together as unified, albeit disconcerting, wholes, but deliberate disjunctions characterize the new pigmented resin and acrylic pieces that accentuate their literal and spiritual ruptures.
The Project of Independence
By Maddie KlettThe history of how the region has been portrayed at MoMA explains why and how The Project of Independence looks the way it does: transnational, organized by both in-house curators and external experts, and featuring a mix of national and individual imaginings of post-independence design. Each of these seems like a decision by MoMA leadership to create a foil to the museum’s orientalist past.
Simone Fattal: Finding a Way
By Maximiliane LeuschnerFinding a Way is foremost a meditation on fragments, a topic that has long preoccupied Fattal.
Tadaaki Kuwayama
By Alfred Mac AdamWe see Tadaaki Kuwayama’s long career writ small, from 1960 until 2022. We’re missing work from the 1970s, but what we have is more than satisfying, again to put it pedantically, pars pro toto, the part that stands in for the whole. So, nothing like a retrospective, but enough of a retrospective for us to construct an artistic biography.
Claude Rutault & Peter Nadin
By Chris MurthaWhereas the realization of Rutault’s Proposal revived the ethos of 84 West Broadway, the oil on panel paintings in Nadin’s The Distance from a Lemon to Murder (all 2020) recall the imagery he began producing in the 1980s after the project dissolved.
Jule Korneffel: Here comes the night
By Andrew L. SheaWith Here comes the night, an exhibition of eight acrylic paintings now at Spencer Brownstone, Jule Korneffel declares an infatuation with twilight atmosphere.
Tabboo!: Cityscapes
By Jonathan GoodmanTabboo!, legendary for his drag performances in the eighties on the Lower East Side, is showing recent cityscapes at Karma’s two sites, located in the East Village where the artist still lives, and at Gordon Robichaux.
Mel Bochner: I STILL DON'T GET IT
By Tom McGlynnOver the course of his career Bochner’s art has evolved from a skeptical, anti-subjective conceptualism that valued an austere tactical reframing of aesthetic conventions, towards his more recent work, which appears a transparently subjective gushing of hyperbolic invective.
Michael Heizer
By Robert C. MorganHeizer integrates structure as a means whereby form is endowed with density. The importance of this should not be underestimated.
George Widener: COUNT DOWN
By David RhodesThere are fifteen framed works displayed at Ricco/Maresca, all mixed media on paper and dating from 2010 to 2021, presented elegantly across white or black walls to striking effect.
Yashua Klos: Our Labour
By Jillian RussoEliminating many of Rivera’s intricate details, Klos leaves empty space in which the figures float. As a result, the composition doesn’t read as entirely resolved. This is possibly suggestive of the bonds still forming between Klos and his family, but it also gives the collage a Dadaist quality.
Leidy Churchman: New You
By Ksenia SobolevaLeidy Churchman is a queer gift to the tradition of American landscape painting.
Thomas Struth
By James WellingAs I studied at the portraits, I imagined the show through a series of musical metaphors. The CERN images are symphonic in scale.
Sascha Braunig: Lay Figure
By Osman Can YerebakanIn the combat between weightlessness and force, the winner is left ambiguous: are the hands guardians of affably soft columns or do they clutch the helpless anchors to destroy? Searching for an answer is futile, and settling for humor is suggested.
Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data
By Marcus CivinFor Dinkins, one of the main problems with AI is the existing data it uses.
Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community
By Jonathan FinebergLucy Fowler Williams, a curator from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has brought an historical overview to both the Water, Wind, Breath catalogue and to the exhibition itself, telling the history of the encounter between technologically advanced European cultures and Native Americans in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
Barnett Newman & Brice Marden
By Jessica HolmesNewman: Notes — Marden: Suicide Notes, now on view at Craig Starr, exhibits two series by twentieth-century icons, Barnett Newman and Brice Marden, that show each artist shifting from painting to a focused exploration of the primordial mark of the line.
Celebrating the City
By Annabel KeenanThroughout this show, this feeling of being part of a larger, timeless community with shared interests and activities continually emerges.
Joe Bradley: Bhoga Marga
By Charles SchultzA Joe Bradley painting is many things, but it is not for the dainty of heart. When you walk amongst his canvases you walk through a kind of dream jungle where the meaty atmosphere is mottled and streaked with sinuous filaments that may or may not cohere into something you think you recognize.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound
By David CarrierBouabré said that he didn’t work from his imagination, but drew what delighted him. His delights included cloud formations; the natural markings on the surfaces of oranges, bananas, kola nuts, and leaves; numbering systems; and, more broadly, what he called “knowledge of the world.”
Itziar Barrio:THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE)
By Jillian McManeminItziar Barrio’s genre-fucking is generative and liberating. Narrative, reenactment, fracturing, remix, and improvisation are approached sans a tyrannical hierarchy of form.
Jonathan Baldock: Grave Goods
By Helena HaimesIn the hands of a less capable artist, it could all very easily become a blurry, art historical hodgepodge. However, thanks to Baldock’s deft sensitivity to vernacular histories of craft, folklore, theater and ritual, his technical prowess, and, crucially, his dark, infectious sense of humor, this heady mix of references becomes engaging rather than overbearing.
