ArtSeen
TREVOR PAGLEN: A Study of Invisible Images
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesThroughout his career, Trevor Paglen has made artwork out of the “invisible.” An expert in clandestine military installations, Paglen has trained his eye on places and programs that, officially, do not exist—from military black sites to NSA headquarters, drone surveillance to the CIA’s abduction outfits.
, 2017, dye sublimation metal print, 48 x 48 inches. Edition 1 of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.
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Minimalism and Beyond
By Benjamin CliffordMinimalism and Beyond takes its title seriously: an emphasis on ‘beyond’ informs Mnuchin Gallery’s liberal selection of works, and lets surprising, productive connections develop. That said, the conventional narrative of Minimalism’s origins in the early 1960s and its evolution into Postminimalism later in the decade is well represented.
MERIEM BENNANI: Siham and Hafida
By Jane CavalierWith a distinctive combination of documentary storytelling, slapstick humor, and cartoonish animations, Meriem Bennani transforms the main gallery of the Kitchen into a theater of the absurd with her spectacular new video installation, Siham and Hafida (2017).
TIFFANY JAEYEON SHIN: Like Water and Oil Never Assimilating
By Jaclyn JaconettaTiffany Jaeyeon Shin's exhibition Like Water and Oil Never Assimilating (2017) is simultaneously an education on racist American history and an ongoing effort to tend to its casualties.
LOIE HOLLOWELL: Point of Entry
By Hearne PardeeIn her impressive debut exhibition at Pace Gallery’s recently opened space in Palo Alto, Loie Hollowell compresses powerful, evocative images into highly crafted objects.
Kara Walker and the New History Painting
By Allison Hewitt WardHer offering this fall, “Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present the most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!...,” (the title is too long to reproduce in full) presents a set of new and urgently drawn canvases and works on paper.
Queering Queer Abstraction
By Joseph HenryOn its surface, Redress (2015) by Lucas Michael refers to nothing specific. The sculpture consists of three neon bands shaped into an open rectangle with the lower line missing; the bands all emit a searing light red hue.
MICHAEL BERRYHILL: A Window, Adore
By Tom McGlynnWalking down the slot canyon of Vandam Street and into the mini-cavern of the Kate Werble Gallery and Michael Berryhill’s show of recent paintings can have the effect of discovering a fecund microclimate of crystalline flora and fauna nestled among the bleached, late summer-bones of lower Manhattan.
SANFORD BIGGERS: Selah
By Steven PestanaIn Selah, Sanford Biggers’s first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, the African American artist continues his ongoing exploration of African power figures and his carefully formalist work with antique quilts.
Resurgent Histories, Insurgent Futures
By T. D. TuckerThe art of insurgency is on full display in Resurgent Histories, Insurgent Futures, an exhibition about cultural guerrilla warfare at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.
![Etcétera, <i>Mierdazo</i> [Big Shit], protest performance in front of the Argentine National Congress building, 2002. Courtesy the Grupo Etcétera archive.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/19288/Tucker-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
LOUISE FISHMAN
By Jan AvgikosThe exhibition of new paintings by Louise Fishman sent me looking back through her previous catalogues. She’s been painting for more than fifty years. Are the paintings getting even better?
WILLIAM WEGMAN: Dressed and Undressed
By Pac PobricIt’s amazing what happens when you dress up a dog. Put a blonde wig on a Weimaraner. Give it a top hat, dress it in elegant furs or a Hawaiian shirt, step back for a moment, and take a look.
MIRA SCHENDEL: Sarrafos and Black and White Works
By David RhodesMira 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.
HOLLY COULIS: Table Studies
By Jason RosenfeldStill life is a time-worn but hardly vigorous genre at the moment, but Athens, Georgia-based painter Holly Coulis has been inventively tweaking its terms, and never more so than in these new playful and precise works.
NAOTAKA HIRO: Gibbous
By William WhitneyPatience is often spoken of casually, but, in fact, it is a hard skill to master. In Gibbous, his fourth show at Brennan & Griffin, Naotaka Hiro has seemingly done just that. In making his latest works, Hiro lets his mind wander, exploring different ideas as they appear, in a patient meditation.
ROSALYN DREXLER: Occupational Hazard
By Colin EdgingtonA woman falls from heights unknown. We see her from below. She wears a blue bikini, marked by red hands on her breasts and red hearts on her pubis. Behind her in the distance, neon rays the color of sunset hours burst forth at dynamic angles into the black nothingness that surrounds them.
ALEX BRADLEY COHEN: Flat Top
By Jane CavalierThe exhibition title is a play on two simultaneous traditions: the modernist charge to flatten illusionistic space and the “flat top” hair cut popularized during the Def Jam era of hip hop.
NSFW: Female Gaze
By Jesse FirestoneNSFW: Female Gaze is a large thematic group exhibition at the Museum of Sex, curated by Vice’s Creators’ editor in chief, Marina Garcia-Vasquez, and Museum of Sex’s associate curator, Lissa Rivera.
KIKI SMITH: From The Creek
By Steven PestanaFrom August 12 – November 19, visitors enter the domestic bliss of Thomas Cole’s Federal style home and are immediately greeted with the sensibility of his 21st century catskill neighbor, the multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith.
PETER SAUL: Fake News
By Hovey BrockHow is satire even possible in the age of Tr*mp, when his words and deeds, in their shamelessness, parody themselves? Peter Saul’s new paintings, with their hyperactive, surrealist blend of Pop Art, art history, and political commentary, gave a pretty good answer in his latest show, Fake News.
AMIR NIKRAVAN: Rational Design
By Ian CofreLos Angeles based artist Amir Nikravan has taken a singular, pill-like form he encountered in Pasadena’s Stuart Building—a site originally known as the Stuart Pharmaceutical Company Office and Plant (1958)—and he’s given it a treatment of rupture and reconfiguration for Rational Design, his first solo show at Karg Gallery.
RAILING OPINION
By Maura BrewerHello, I’m writing in response to the recent review by Ian Cofre of Amir Nikravan’s exhibition Rational Design at Nathalie Karg Gallery.
Animal Farm, curated by Sadie Laska
By Will FenstermakerAs a general principle, artist-curated exhibitions can be untidy and idiosyncratic in ways that museums and the market abhor, and this can make them interesting, disorienting, dissonant—even iconoclastic in the best instances.
ANETA BARTOS: Family Portrait
By Osman Can YerebakanFatherhood, compared to motherhood, remains less-charted terrain. Family Portrait, Aneta Bartos’s first exhibition with Postmasters Gallery, delves into the artist’s relationship with her father, a former bodybuilder living in central Poland, with photographs full of vigor and vulnerability.
MOUNIR FATMI: Survival Signs
By Alan GilbertIn his current exhibition filled with formally precise artworks using a clear set of visual tropes—typewriters, sharp objects, and books—one work by Mounir Fatmi feels incongruous: a small, slightly blurry black-and-white photograph of a man sporting an Adidas satchel standing next to a glowing circle on the ground.
Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo
By Louis BlockGoya’s prints and Eisenstein’s 35mm films serve as an introduction to Longo’s massive charcoal drawings.
Robert Motherwell: Early Paintings | Enormity of the Possible
By Mary Ann CawsNot far apart, about two minutes or a bit more by foot, depending on what friends you see along the way, are the two present exhibitions at Paul Kasmin Gallery, at 293 and 297 Tenth Avenue.
AD MINOLITI: G.S.F.C. (Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg)
By Anthony HawleyIn G.S.F.C. 2.0 (Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg), hard- edged geometries filled with solid colors converge with organic lines to create vaguely figurative forms. While these figures might possess an actual leg, they’re denied the legibility of a human framework by the rest of their “bodies,” which are comprised of airy geometries loosely tethered in a kinetic fashion. In the painting G.S.F.C. #2, the form appears to be almost squatting, or hopping, with knees spread wide. The sharply bent knee in G.S.F.C #5 lends the subject a rather balletic quality, while the geometries of G.S.F.C.
LIZA BUZYTSKY and KAWITA VATANAJYANKUR: Stamina
By Alexandra HammondCurated by Alexandra Fanning, the show includes two video works by Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur and an ongoing sculpture-performance by the Brooklyn-based Russian-American Liza Buzytsky.
AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Eleanor RayAd Reinhardt is known as an artist of extremes. While committed to abstract painting that became infamous for its austerity, he also had an expansive curiosity about art and the world. He was a vocal critic of the art market and his peers, as well as a proselytizer of art and architecture from disparate regions and periods, which he obsessively photographed for slide lectures.
AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Alex BaconThis presentation at David Zwirner Gallery is the largest exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s blue paintings ever assembled, and the first dedicated to them since a seminal 1965 show at the Stable Gallery.
AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings
By Nathlie Provosty1943, the year Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Tehran to discuss their war strategy, Ad Reinhardt made a deep blue and green oil painting that is the earliest work in this Zwirner Gallery exhibition.
FIAT#LUX
By Mary Ann CawsAt the Agora Gallery, there opened "an immersion exhibition" entitled FIAT#LUX where Chantal Westby's paintings merge with Lénaïc Mercier's multi-media installation, in a length of light.
ELLIE GA: Strophe, A Turning
By Kaitlyn A. KramerTheophrastus is thought to be the first person to send a message in a bottle out to sea. In 310 BCE, in an attempt to prove the water in the Mediterranean Sea flowed from the Atlantic Ocean, the Greek philosopher sealed a message in a bottle that asked its recipient to send word from wherever it was found.
AMANDA ROSS-HO: My Pen is Huge
By Hovey BrockLos Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho has built a career focusing on the studio as locus, metaphor, and container for the creative process. Keeping her interests tethered to this line of inquiry has given her the freedom to cover a swath of art practices including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and performance.
DIANA AL-HADID: Falcon's Fortress
By Steven PestanaIn the Islamic Golden Age, Turkish engineer Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari wrote a proto-Borgesian text called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206).
MARK THOMAS GIBSON: Early Retirement
By William CorwinI know it is futile—an impossible dream—for me to join Mark Thomas Gibson’s NRA (Negro Rifle Association), but longing is a major component of the magic associated with comic books.
