The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

LARRY POONS with David Rhodes

In the lead-up to Larry Poons’s exhibition Momentum at Yares Gallery, David Rhodes paid a visit to the painter at the studio he has occupied on Broadway, just south of Union Square, since 1975.

In Conversation

McArthur Binion with David Rhodes

David Rhodes speaks to McArthur Binion about his life, career, and current exhibition.

Moira Dryer Project

The abstract paintings of Moira Dryer (1957 – 1992) are due for critical reevaluation. Hopefully the two-part exhibition at Eleven Rivington, Moira Dryer Project, was just a beginning.

Letter From BERLIN

Here in Berlin, two timely exhibitions by Imi Knoebel present the artist’s long preoccupation with color and its material support.

LETTER FROM BERLIN: The Esprit of Gestures

Gesture has had a changing reception since Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism positioned it as a carrier of unmediated meaning at the middle of the 20th century. Once perceived as spontaneous, open and direct, gesture later became a sign of empty rhetoric: redundant, obsolete, and naïve.

Letter from BERLIN

Alois Riegl (1858 – 1905), an Austrian art historian, was a major figure in establishing the study of art history as an independent discipline. He was also highly influential in the development of late 19th century formalism. It is well documented that Greenbergian formalism, with its blinkered appreciation of mid-20th century painting and sculpture, has brought this way of looking into serious disrepute.

DEBORAH LIGORIO Escursione Meridionale

The central piece of this exhibition is a structure of five vertical and parallel planes, open at the sides and standing floor to ceiling. The sheets of board and window screen material form a structure that is ad hoc, but elegant and open at the sides like a thick, layered, section of wall

Letter from BERLIN
SERGEJ JENSEN Master of Color

There is something that still surprises when an artist reacts to materials, sounds, or available images in a way that simply feels good or feels right; creating something different where everything is rationally believed to have been done before.

HOKUSAI Retrospective

Hokusai Katsushika (1760 – 1849) said that all he had done before the age of 70 was not worth bothering with. He hoped for longevity in life in order to achieve something in his paintings; evidently he believed in the long haul.

AMY SILLMAN Thumb Cinema

What happens in a painting by Amy Sillman resonates with the struggle and discomfort of being a mortal, corporeal being.

A LETTER TO PHILIP GUSTON from David Rhodes

So many years have passed since your new paintings at the Marlborough Gallery caught your friends and supporters off-guard. Among your embattled partisan crowd, Bill de Kooning was almost alone in supporting your change of direction; after all, like you, he did what he wanted to do, when he needed to do it.

A LETTER TO MOIRA DRYER from David Rhodes

On a visit to New York last November, I visited Carol Szymanski and Barry Schwabsky. On the walls of their apartment are many beautiful works, though the one that had me immediately walking over to take a closer look was a small gouache on paper. It was one of yours.

FRANK STELLA The Retrospective, Works 1958-2012

Over the decades of his career, Frank Stella has embraced an ever more expansive and inclusive exploration of painting as a spatial entity. Inasmuch as actual physical parts form shapes and surfaces to be painted, Stella’s rich illusionistic mix has pushed composition outward from the wall, while retaining the idea of pictorialism in the use of pattern and gesture to create an anomalous fictive space on any given surface.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK Above and Below

Among the films, photo-collages, and drawings in Gordon Matta-Clark’s exhibition is a sculptural stone fragment of praying hands.

GERT & UWE TOBIAS

Collaborative woodcuts made on paper and mounted on canvas, sculptures, collages, and drawings from twins Gert & Uwe Tobias occupy the ground floor of the Whitechapel Gallery.

JANE FREILICHER Painter Among Poets

Jane Freilicher remains an important figure when considering the New York poets that emerged in the mid 20th century.

JO BAER

Jo Baer remains one of the foremost practitioners of Minimalism, having contributed to the movement many paintings and drawings, as well as writings that fueled the theoretical debates of the time.

TEXTURA Y TRAMA Y ABSTRACCIÓN

During the months of March and April in both Barcelona and Madrid, the curatorial project Jugada a Tres Bandas proposes to galleries that they interrupt their usual schedule and invite independent curators to organize exhibitions that include non-gallery artists.

ANDREA BÜTTNER

Andrea Büttner’s current solo exhibition, her third at the gallery, brings together works featured earlier this year at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

EVAN NESBIT Porosity

For his first solo exhibition in New York, Evan Nesbit is showing at both spaces of Eleven Rivington. Comprising painting and sculpture, the exhibition is titled Porosity, which describes an aspect of Nesbit’s painting process, as well as, it could be said, the imaginative speculation undertaken to surmise what may structure the sculptures beneath their painted surface.

YUN HYONG-KEUN

Comprising a survey of twelve paintings, this exhibition presents a thoughtful overview of Yun Hyong-keun’s (1928 – 2007) quietly compelling work.

LYNDA BENGLIS

Three contrasting types of work comprise Lynda Benglis’ current exhibition at Cheim & Read. Standing alone in the gallery’s first room is a towering cast aluminum piece: The Fall Caught (2016), a vaguely anthropomorphic form leaning against a wall, large enough to stand beneath.

Parc Natural

For this exhibition Parc Natural at Galeria Trama, curator Frederic Montornés returns to the writer Georges Perec’s book Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces) (1974) that he freely interpreted for his 2015 MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) exhibition in 2015.

Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth presents works from several series—“Quantum Walls”, “Portals”, lenticular works from the “Third Entity”, one piece from the continuing Black Monolith Project, and a sculpture (all dated 2015 – 17)—continuing a five-decade-long investigation of passions vis-à-vis a testing exploration of painting itself.

Arlene Shechet: Skirts

With an intense emphasis on color, the multi-tiered, often column-like structures achieve a fresh synthesis of painting and sculpture. This is more than it may at first seem: Shechet has long been interested in ideas from the West and the East—both Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching—a practice that allows for the invention she excels at to encompass non-formal factors, or rather to integrate idea, desire, and process.

Ann Craven: Animals Birds Flowers Moons

Something seems to have changed between Ann Craven’s last Karma exhibition in 2018 and Animals Birds Flowers Moons, the current exhibition. Individual works now advance a particularly estranging form of romanticism with even more boldness and adventure than before.

Alain Kirili

This commemorative exhibition comprises three different groups of work and four additional individual pieces. The first group presented is Commandment XVI (1991). The eleven individual pieces are made of forged iron and stand between nineteen and twenty-nine inches, relatively low in height from the floor, placed in a close configuration and viewed primarily from above.

Pat Steir: Paintings, Part II

After arriving at the gallery, located on the Via Francesco Crispi, a short walk downhill from Bernini’s Palazzo Barberini, I needed a few seconds for my eyes to adjust after the August sunlight outside. Then, the full subtlety and clear radiance of these cool, austere paintings had full effect. This second iteration of a two-part summer exhibition by Pat Steir comprised eight paintings—six predominantly red, yellow, and blue on black and two white on black.

JACKIE SACCOCCIO Portraits

In an excellent 2008 review in Gay City News, the late painter Stephen Mueller described Jackie Saccoccio as proceeding to “disrupt the picture plane either by continually contradicting space or by defining it.” In her current work, Saccoccio continues to punch holes in the picture plane, with pleasure.

GRAHAM COLLINS Stadiums

For Graham Collins’s second solo exhibition at the Journal Gallery, several different series of works are combined, including large-scale painted objects that effectively reconfigure the gallery’s main space.

CARMEN HERRERA

To inaugurate its new Chelsea space, Lisson, one of London’s most significant and established galleries, presents works created over the past two years by the painter Carmen Herrera.

Frank Bowling: London/New York

For Frank Bowling’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, paintings from a six-decade career that saw Bowling work between London and New York are presented at both the London and New York locations simultaneously. Works on view span over 50 years of the artist’s career, from 1967 to the present day.

Bharti Kher: The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos

Change and reconfiguration are core issues for Kher, and her practice is heterogeneous, reiterating the significance of flux and transformation in her works.

Pamela Jorden: Reflector

Reflector comprises five, large-scale oil-on-linen paintings. They are variously shaped, and consist of two interrelated parts, like bodies embracing whilst moving through space, easily bringing to mind an improvised dance—figures in motion, relating, communicating, combining.

VARDA CAIVANO / YAEL DAVIDS

Varda Caivano and Yael Davids’s two-person exhibition opened during Berlin’s hectic Gallery Weekend, and despite the profusion of new shows in the city, this proved to be the one not to miss.

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Films and Their Sites

After presentations in Europe (at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts du Mans (1999) in Locarno, and at the Villa Arson de Nice (2004)), the present iteration of this exhibition, organized by Jean Louis-Raymond, coincides with the first U.S. complete retrospective of Straub and Huillet’s filmmaking, at MoMA. Comprising an original film poster, mounted photographs, writings, and video, the exhibition raises an interesting question: Does this amount to documentation?

Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975

This exhibition brings together fourteen oil paintings by David Reed first collectively shown in 1975 in a solo exhibition at Susan Caldwell Gallery.

George Ortman: Against Abstraction

One 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.

Letter from BERLIN: FRANK BADUR, Why Pattern?

Frank Badur has been part of the Berlin scene from the time he studied here, between 1963 and 1969. He became a professor at the University of Art in 1985, and, like many other German artists who maintain successful international careers, he has continued to teach.

MARY HEILMANN: RYB: Mary Heilmann paintings 1975—1978

Before becoming one of the most eminent abstract painters of her generation, Mary Heilmann arrived in New York as a sculptor in 1968. Exploring Pearl Paints, a short distance from her Chinatown loft, (Barnett Newman among many others had bought supplies at the famed, now-shuttered retailer), Heilmann initially decided against using the wide range of pigments on offer, avoiding what she referred to as “pretty” color and working in a restricted palette of earth tones and white. In 1974, however, her art underwent a substantial shift.

Summer: Curated by Ugo Rondinone

Entering 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.

Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color

Agnes Martin desired that her paintings, when exhibited, should be presented together in a small group for quiet contemplation. Her long-standing gallerist Arne Glimcher made sure, from her emergence as an artist of significance in the 1970s to this current exhibition, that where possible it would be the case.

JOSEF ALBERS Paintings, Drawings, Prints

Josef Albers’s (1888 – 1976) artwork, while concise in nature, allows complexity to reveal itself with prolonged looking. What is initially declared through simple means—some lines or a few colors—is free of graphic stasis. Nothing in an Albers stays still.

Moira Dryer: Paintings & Works on Paper

Moira Dryer’s third exhibition with this gallery—two previous exhibitions organized by gallery partner Augusto Arbizo took place in 2014 and 2016—comprises twelve paintings and nine works on paper.

Picasso: Seven Decades of Drawing

Invention and innovation leap from every change in direction, one technique superseding another and with elliptical explorations that return over the years: he never seems completely done with anything—there is still more to do with fresh insight and new discoveries.

ØYSTEIN AASAN

As the source of the Berlin-based Norwegian artist Øystein Aassan’s second solo exhibition at PSM Gallery, a quote from Barnett Newman is cited: “The painting should give man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, because in that sense I was there.” Aasan achieves this sense of place through a very literal emphasis on making and context.

FRANZ ERHARD WALTHER

Facing the large gallery windows that open onto Grand Street, four white organic pillow-like shapes hang on a free-standing floor to ceiling wall; one in each corner. The title of this piece is “Vier Körperformen” (1963). A small, framed drawing to the right of this wall, “Körperformen” (1963), shows the outline of five similar shapes.

JOE FYFE make me one with everything

In Joe Fyfe’s work, the inherent characteristics of any given material are presented foremost and combined with a sense of highly nuanced formal invention. Materials and objects are sewn, glued, tied, or left leaning together; there is no idealization or “neutral ground” sought for painting—and painting and its possibilities is the subject of this exhibition—as medium specific.

Vivian Springford

These thirteen works expand the possibilities for painting or abstraction, even as we understand those terms today.

Terry Winters: Table of Contents

Terry Winters’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks features paintings that derive their compositions from sources that range from the molecular to the cosmic, from the natural world to propositional math equations and the virtual world generated by computers.

Letter from BERLIN

When Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) began “Battle Piece” in 1942, it was to have been the first of a series of works for solo piano titled “Encouragements,” intended as a composer’s contribution to the struggle against Fascism; part of the genre Kampfmusik that had earlier included chamber operas, theatre music, and agitprop songs. The composition not only addressed the social and political struggles of the day, but also a desire to transform disparate musical idioms into a subjective communication of personal experience.

GERMAN STEGMAIER

German Stegmaier makes oil paintings and graphite drawings; he sits well within tradition and displays no desire to work with new or novel materials. He often presents his work in groups, clustered and unaligned.

ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA Selfie

In using her body as both the image and site of her work, Aneta Grzeszykowska continues the dialogue and tradition of such artists as Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and, most obviously in this exhibition, Alina Szapocznikow—another Polish sculptor whose work traffics in bodily fragmentation.

PER KIRKEBY Serial Thinking

As well as printmaking, Danish artist Per Kirkeby’s (b. 1938) oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, architecture, writing (poetry, essays, and travel books), and performance.

SAM FALLS

Two concurrent exhibitions in New York this fall refer to natural and cultural forms in poetic installations with entirely different, conceptually framed takes. Both use painting as intellectual and physical currency, and both excerpt works of literature in their press releases. Chris Ofili cites John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. For Sam Falls, the relevant citation comes from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift: “A jail with no jailer and a garden with no gardener—that is I think the ideal arrangement.” 

Roma/New York, 1953–1964

From the moment of entering David Zwirner’s expansive first floor galleries, Roma/New York, 1953–1964 compels. There are so many great works—drawn from museums, private collections, foundations, and estates—juxtaposed in revealing combinations, that for direct visual pleasure and intellectual provocation it could not be more engaging.

ELLSWORTH KELLY Schwarz & Weiss

Here is a chance to walk through an entire strand of Ellsworth Kelly’s long and productive career—not yet definitive, because (at 88) he is still adding to it.

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI

As the poet John Ashbery once said: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

PIERRE OBANDO Like New

This is Pierre Obando’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title of his exhibition is taken from Roy Lichtenstein’s painting “Like New,” which is an atypical work for Lichtenstein and a telling choice for Obando.

TAMARA ZAHAYKEVICH ZAHAYKEVICH

One enters Tamara Zahaykevich’s exhibition on a small ramp that leads down to a set of differently sized rooms. It is a dynamic space and requires a thoughtfulness that is repaid: encountering these interconnected rooms, one is encouraged to take stock of their relational qualities and the particular proportion of each room to its neighbor.

ALEX KATZ Drawings

Two walls, both hung with drawings, face each other. One, shorter in length, was custom-built for this exhibition. They are painted a pale green, not a found green but one mixed by the artist and then matched to a Pantone color in the paint store and applied to the walls by gallery assistants. At the far end of the gallery, a row of windows open onto buildings across the street and a tree in the full green leaf of early summer.

MARK DI SUVERO

Identification between body and things is of central importance to Mark di Suvero’s sculpture and other works.

MIRA SCHENDEL: Sarrafos and Black and White Works

Mira Schendel was born Myra Dagma Dub in 1919. A Jew by birth, Schendel’s mother had her daughter baptized at the Church of St Peter and Paul, raising her in Milan as a Roman Catholic where she studied art and philosophy.

ANN CRAVEN:
Sunset Moon

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.

David Novros: Paintings

Altogether, architectural features are recalled and a connection between the painting and the room is activated. This is what is at stake. Moving among the paintings the gallery becomes an active environment, like a chapel with frescoes.

Letter from BERLIN

A mobile is characterized by balance and movement; various parts are able to randomly reorganize themselves in response to touch or to currents of surrounding air. This simple device, in effect a kinetic sculpture, is also familiar as a children’s toy and a store window display.

Marilyn Lerner: Walking Backward Running Forward—Again

Typically, all of Lerner’s paintings are mapped out on paper first, beginning with pencil drawing and then gouache color; these works on paper are rough approximations of the paintings that follow—they are never in any case “studies” to replicate in the traditional sense, though they are necessary for the anticipation of the custom-made wooden panel supports.

June Leaf

The work, in other words, is not an intermediary between one subjectivity and another, but is mysterious and productive in itself.

Ernst Caramelle: actual size

We journey through this exhibition with Ernst Caramelle. The works unfold his biography, daily experience, and curiosity about both art and life. From the very beginning of his career, before the beginning in fact, certain necessary core questions—what are art works actually, and what is it to be an artist—had already coalesced. What, too, are the connections between artworks and everything else? Are they part of everything else? Caramelle could not take any of this for granted, as a given.

Letter from BERLIN: MANFRED KUTTNER A – Z

Galerie Johann König is a short walk from Potsdamer Strasse, a new neighborhood for the Berlin gallery scene now long decentred from the original art district of Berlin Mitte. What once formed a haven of cheap, available space after the fall of the Wall in 1989 has now become a chic and increasingly expensive neighborhood for the incoming wealthy of former West Germany.

Robert Bordo Back Flip

The National Exemplar has a distinct program that focuses on artists of different generations, as well as on bodies of work that may have been overlooked relative to an artists’ better-known works.

Martha Diamond: 1980-1989

Martha Diamond’s exhibition at Magenta Plains presents paintings from the 1980s; on view are large canvases in oil at street level and, downstairs, small painted studies on Masonite.

DAN WALSH

Dan Walsh’s exhibition at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street gallery presents a two-decade overview (1994 – 2014) that includes paintings, works on paper, mixed media pieces, and artist books.

ROBERT RYMAN

The subject of Robert Ryman’s work is the relationship between light and matter; in particular, the relationship between a changing light and a specific surface.

Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943-47

Curator Saskia Spender, Gorky’s granddaughter, has installed over fifty landscapes, including paintings and works on paper from 1943 to 1947.

KELTIE FERRIS:
(F(U(T()U)R)E)

This exhibition of paintings and drawings marks a bold and confident change in the working methods of Keltie Ferris. A significant departure has been made from the characteristically fuzzy and pixelated images taken and transformed from screens present in previous paintings.

Julian Schnabel: The Sad Lament of the Brave, Let the Wind Speak and Other Paintings

Despite the undeniably heroic scale and boldness, the paintings have as much to do with self-effacement in the circumstance of unknown experience as an adventure or foil, a falling into form and a finding of balance however precarious, or transitory.

AL HELD Alphabet Paintings

This exhibition, comprising ten paintings and two works on paper culled from several private collections, affords viewers the rare, if not unique, opportunity to apprise Al Held’s Alphabet paintings, made between 1961 and 1967 andthought by many in this city to be his finest work.

GUNTHER FORG Lead Paintings

When Günther Förg’s monochrome paintings first appeared during the mid-1970s, they seemed to be, at least in part, a rejection of the expressionist and figurative tendencies of Das Neue Wilden (The New Wild) German painting emerging during those years.

Roland Flexner and Japanese Bronzes of the Edo Period

This pairing of drawings by Roland Flexner with bronze vessels from the Edo period is both beautiful and thought provoking­—so much pleasure and intellectual acuity, combined in an exhibition of real depth.

GIOTTO L’Italia

The fourteen works present here—mostly on panel, but also including five detached frescoes—are brought together for the first time, at the Palazzo Real. They provide a partial, but representative, record of Giotto Di Bondone’s (1267 – 1337) production over a more than forty-year period—from early to late in his hugely influential career.

MAUREEN GALLACE: CLEAR DAY

This sparingly hung exhibition, including over seventy works, is the largest gathering to-date of Connecticut born artist Maureen Gallace’s (b. 1960) small-scale paintings. While it is easy to see precedents for these paintings—Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Lois Dodd, and Alex Katz—the paintings are distinctly singular; in a genre tradition, but certainly not generic.

Beverly Fishman

Beverly Fishman’s high gloss surfaces have an inscrutable beauty. The shape and color of each work looks both estranging and familiar, and whilst the combinations of sometimes acidic or synthetic color entrance, they do not comfort.

Robert Duran: 1968 – 1970

Incredibly—given the quality of the paintings—this is Robert Duran's first showing in New York City since 1977. The exhibition, comprising seven acrylic on canvas and eleven watercolor on paper paintings from 1968 to 1970, locates Duran's work at a particularly divisive moment for contemporary art in general and painting in particular.

Adolph Gottlieb: Classic Paintings

In a pamphlet accompanying Adolph Gottlieb’s 1954 retrospective, Clement Greenberg wrote, “Picasso, of all people, was struck by Gottlieb’s pictures when he saw them in reproduction, said so, and incorporated them in his big Kitchen painting.”

Bill Jensen: Stillness/Flowing

Paintings from 2017 to 2021 make up this exhibition of Bill Jensen’s remarkable recent work. This period was one of growing instability capped with a pandemic, unforeseen in 2017 and still very much in progress in 2021.

Paul Mogensen: Paintings: 1965-2022

The paintings are all about geometry and color; their mapping of consequent compositions, together with application of paint, is always workmanlike. There is no pretense.

Letter from Berlin

In late 1950s Brazil, amid cultural, social, and economic upheaval, changes were registered by new forms of literature, music, and visual art. In visual art, Neoconcretismo combined geometry with sensuality and expressiveness, absorbing examples of the Bauhaus and European modernism.

Haroon Mirza: For a Dyson Sphere

It is understandable that there is so much interest in Mirza’s work; his freshness, originality, and apparent joy in producing his installations puts him in that position.

Letter From BERLIN

Two Berlin-oriented exhibitions at the Martin-Gropius-Bau seek to reevaluate the influence of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965), on the contemporary built environment and its social consequences. This is the most extensive presentation of the Swiss architect’s wide-ranging work in over twenty years.

Letter from BERLIN

Adrian Schiess and Helmut Dorner have a shared perspective on painting, occupying an extreme position on the medium. They are emphatically painters: their concerns are not descriptive or iconographic.

Letter from BERLIN

This is the Pakistani-born, London-raised, and Berlin-based artist’s third solo exhibition with Esther Schipper, and the first at the gallery’s new location on Schöneberger Ufer. Again, Ceal Floyer’s simple and direct strategy of inversion and displacement make for a subtle encounter of surprise, absurdity, and wit.

CAROL RAMA Spazio anche più che tempo

Carol Rama’s first exhibition was shut down by the police, who removed her paintings from the gallery. Some of the overtly sexual watercolors on display included images of men having sex with dogs and women excreting snakes.

AMY FELDMAN High Sign

For this artist’s second solo exhibition at Blackston, the walls and ceiling of the front gallery have been painted gray, and the difference this makes in how one experiences the five large-scale paintings that explore the tonal shifts of the complex hue is significant.

MILTON RESNICK:
Boards 1981-1984

In 1981, when Milton Resnick was 64, he bought 140, 40” by 30” impregnated, wax, corrugated boards. He had recently completed the large-scale Planets, Elephants and Straws in the Wind series. Each painting took as much as several months to finish and was up to seventeen feet in length.

John Armleder: Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash

John Armleder’s second exhibition at David Kordansky is an enveloping experience, and whilst it is true to say that questions are asked of painting’s art historical legacy, the effects of chance and playfulness guarantee an altogether immediate, and pleasurable, involvement for the viewer.

Dan Walsh

Viewers familiar with Walsh’s work will no doubt recognize the strategy of built images, each part, part of a generative process extending across a painting’s surface or, a sculpture’s three dimensions—nevertheless, the deadpan permutations are not strictly programmatic, and invite the viewer to participate in an intellectual and retinal exploration of how exactly these images come to be.

FRANK STELLA Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings

Just for now, I would rather stay at street level and save a walk up the staircase at 45 East 78th Street for another visit. Not since Dorothy Miller’s 1959 Sixteen Americans exhibition at MoMA has a group of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings been shown together like this—and here they are, installed on the ground floor of L&M’s plush town house.

SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD: Summer and Winter

In the first room of Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s exhibition, the visitor encounters the summer section of the exhibition’s title. Later, on moving through to the second room, the winter section. The cyclical progression of the seasons defines the rhythm of life in a climate that sees weather changing through the months, as well as vegetal and animal response. It’s impossible not to think concurrently of mortality and a celebration or acknowledgement of transformation.

Paul McCarthy: A&E Sessions–Drawing and Painting

A&E Sessions at Hauser and Wirth comprises works made as a result of Paul McCarthy’s multi-disciplinary project A&E, which was produced by the artist during improvisatory performances involving him and the Berlin-born German actor Lilith Stangenberg.

Philip Guston: 1969–1979

In this extraordinary exhibition, 18 paintings made between 1969 and 1979 are presented in two rooms.

Susan Philipsz: Separated Strings

Philipsz uses sound to physically engage with space, somehow like an audio sculptor; it’s a sensitivity that enables her to explore emotion, history, and myth, embodying through sound and place those themes in such a way as to make them accessible and intimate to experience in the here and now…

Cézanne Drawing

Cézanne 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.

Letter From BERLIN

Exhibitions dealing, in their very different ways, with 21st century abstraction opened in the first half of September here in Berlin. Nymphius Projektee presents a small survey of painting, hung salon-style, which looks at some conceptual and geometric tendencies in 1980s abstraction that still underpin much abstract painting today.

ROBERT MANGOLD: Paintings and Works on Paper 2013–2017

Since the mid 1960s, Robert Mangold has consistently examined the possibilities of support shape, surface, color, and drawing, in dynamic and equal relation. This exhibition of recent work is no exception.

HANS HARTUNG: A Constant Storm

Hans Hartung (1904–1989) was born in Leipzig, Germany, into a family where paintings and music were always present. He was the son and grandson of physicians: his father involved in pharmaceutical research. Young Hans had a thing about lightning; he was captivated by the effects of energy as light, shadow, and space—sketchbooks filled with drawings of thunderbolts were known to his family as Hans’s Blitzbücker (Books of Lightning).

David Novros

The kinesthetic relationship viewers encounter with painting has long been a preoccupation for David Novros.

Cordy Ryman: Constellations

Cordy Ryman has long made a practice of installing works to suit the context of a specific gallery space, and his current exhibition at Freight + Volume is no different.

ADRIAN SCHIESS Peinture

Entering an Adrian Schiess exhibition is not a passive experience, and his current show at FRAC in Marseille is no exception. Spread out over two floors, Schiess has installed individual pieces on nearly every surface, be it hanging on or leaning against the wall, or lying flat on the floor.

PETER PLAGENS

This is Plagen’s best show to date, with works that indicate an ongoing achievement after decades of work, which thematically returns to the same question of how a presumed incompatibility of styles can co-exist in the same painting.

Philip Taaffe

In this third solo exhibition at the gallery, Philip Taaffe continues to pursue an elegant and precise aggregate of images and technique.

Pierre Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing

Pierre Bonnard typically evades categorization as a member of one tendency or another in nineteenth or twentieth century painting, for example Impressionism. Bonnard’s paintings are about far more than a genre categorization opticality, though they are visually complex in the extreme.

Monique Mouton: Scene

This particular group of works presenting a constellation of relations as if staged for the duration of this particular presentation.

Bernard Piffaretti: Pick Up

In this, Bernard Piffaretti’s fourth Lisson Gallery exhibition and the second in New York, the recursive nature of his project is present in more ways than one.

Bernard Frize: Come to Me Again

The elliptical, parabolic nature of Frize’s approach to painting means that the strict chronology of production is not linear or predictable. Rather, previous methods or series of paintings return, thus requiring us to check their dates. We see quickly that a series of paintings may not be exhausted and abandoned simply because it is followed immediately by a very different series, and can in fact be the source of reactivated, ongoing exploration.

Spieltrieb: Polly Apfelbaum, Beverly Fishman, Ryan Mrozowski, Kathleen Ryan

German polymath Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) coined the term Spieltrieb in response to Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) text The Critique of Judgment.

Jack Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s

In both the drawings and the paintings, that process of becoming through painting, using temporality as structure—not descriptive images—evinces Tworkov’s remarkable achievement and his path toward Nirvana.

GERWALD ROCKENSCHAUB: Geometric Playground (Flamboyant Edit)

Rockenschaub’s work cannot be easily categorized. Playful and engaged with the world and its technologies as it is, it also has a formal exactitude that deploys abstraction’s constructivist history as much as the potential of architectural intervention.

Luigi Ghirri: The Idea of Building

The exhibition is curated by the artist Matt Connors, and comprises 29 vintage prints together with archival material, handmade exhibition invitations, books, commercial work, presented in vitrines. The title of the exhibition is taken from a text by Ghirri’s widow, Paola Ghirri, in which she describes his attitude to not only printing—each print is handmade and unique—but also to his construction of images and fascination with hand-built objects. The photographs, usually taken frontally, have often been taken for montages, when in fact the various parts of the composition existed in place out in the world already, and are simply framed by Ghirri using the photograph’s own rectangular limit.

Peter Bradley

The nine recent paintings presented in this exhibition differ in significant ways from Peter Bradley’s earlier work, examples of which could be seen here in New York just last month in Karma’s recreation of the groundbreaking De Luxe theatre exhibition of 1971, an exhibition Bradley curated at the invitation of the de Menils in Houston, Texas, and one of the first racially integrated exhibitions of contemporary art in the United States. Included, whether high profile or not, were those who Bradley considered the best artists working with abstraction in the country.

George Widener: COUNT DOWN

There 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.

Deadeye Dick: Richard Bellamy and His Circle

In a 2002 interview with Judith Stein, the curator of Deadeye Dick: Richard Bellamy and His Circle and author of the recent, definitive Richard Bellamy biography, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, Richard Tuttle said, “Dick was unbelievably sensitive, delicate and extremely refined. But he was strong—the strongest part of him was his belief in following his own way with art.”

Julie Mehretu

This exhibition, although a midcareer retrospective—Mehretu is far from done yet—gathers an impressive corpus of works. It arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York after iterations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will be the final venue this coming fall.

Albert Oehlen

The Serpentine exhibition is extraordinary. This show highlights Oehlen’s ongoing engagement with both the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas and the Kiev-born American artist John D. Graham ‘s painting Tramonto Spaventoso (‘Terrifying Sunset’) from 1940–49. In the high-vaulted central gallery space of the Serpentine Gallery—around which smaller adjoining spaces provide views out onto the park—are a group of canvases scaled to match Rothko’s horizontal paintings in the Houston chapel.

Will Ryman: Dinner III

This is Will Ryman’s first New York gallery exhibition in five years, and his first with CHART. Formerly a playwright, Ryman applies a particular kind of philosophical and formal enquiry, rooted in his interest in the Theatre of the Absurd, to sculpture. From this basis Ryman seeks to examine and explore, with humor as well as seriousness, our existential search for meaning in a clearly indifferent, at best contingent, world.

Mike Childs: The Journey: Grids, Color and Curvilinear forms, 2004 to 2020

Toronto-born and South Bronx-based Mike Childs has been working in New York since 1995. In this exhibition, 28 paintings from the last 16 years are presented, revealing a constant and evolving exploration of how humans negotiate their surrounding modularly built, urban environment. Patterns and contiguous space interface, interlace, and proliferate like so many passing surfaces and colors, changing with the passage of time or the panorama of a gaze. Walls, graffiti, signage, and bridges of the Bronx all began to fold into the flux of Childs’s images during his time living in the neighborhood.

Helmut Federle: Basics on Composition

The group of paintings that comprise Helmut Federle’s fifth solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery originate in a work made in New York City in 1979 after moving from Basel, Switzerland. He would stay in New York City, with some interruptions for four years.

Robert Janitz: Uptown Campus / College Robert Janitz

Nonchalance and elegance, speed and subtlety, all come together in Janitz’s work.

Guy Goodwin: Mattress World

This exhibition of paintings and works on paper underscores what a unique, highly accomplished, and still evolving body of work Guy Goodwin has achieved over the past several decades.

HASSEL SMITH:
The Ferus Years

The paintings in color and surface recall the American West, not as landscape painting, but as abstractions of light, heat, and surface.

Letter from BERLIN

An exhibition of work by Matti Braun, the Berlin-born, Cologne-based artist, is always something to which one looks forward. At BQ, Braun has made a show that speaks for itself more than just visually, extending any singular interpretation of the works with the simple device of an exhibition title.

RICHARD ALDRICH:
Enter the Mirror

Painting is but one option among many for Richard Aldrich, his abstract paintings being just the most familiar, as can be seen in this latest exhibition at Bortolami, his fourth at the gallery.

Larry Poons: "First Thought, Best Thought"—The Particle Paintings (1996-2002)

They are somewhat akin to drawings by children: unfussy, direct, energized, inventive. The paintings are strikingly bold. Configurations of disjunctive color and pattern don’t so much settle as insist on taking the viewer for yet another go around. Somehow this is never finished; the viewer is caught in a process, not of resolution but of constant change.

Wyatt Kahn

Wyatt Kahn’s wall-based works evade some old categories and challenge a few new ones.

Mark Grotjahn: New Capri, Capri, Free Capri

Casa Malaparte, a house built for, and partially designed by, Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in the late 1930s, is situated on Punta Massullo, a rocky outcrop on the eastern side of Capri.

An Artist Writing

I think that here are some surprising common aspects of making art, and writing about it, in handling paint and in handling words. For me this is because both are as much about finding as about doing. The act of doing is always generative whether it is obvious or not, to the point where it is often the most interesting aspect of either.