ArtSeen
100 Sculptures – NYC
By William CorwinTodd von Ammon and the gallery have together curated a menagerie of form: these objects may illustrate the history of sculpture, they certainly depict its various categories and typologies, and all are very small. They veer from the figurative to the abstract, the absurd and surreal to the conceptual and symbolic.
Erick Johnson: Double Take
By Hovey BrockDouble Take brings together five paintings from 2020–21 and 33 photographs by the New York-based artist Erick Johnson. Taken over the last five years, the 33 untitled photographs come from Johnson’s Instagram feed @erickjohnson9. Mostly taken in New York, each one is a street scene that somehow triggered Johnson’s aesthetic sense.
Wu Tsang: Anthem
By Barbara LondonInnovation appears every once in a while. When it does, an encounter occasionally brings a full on coup de foudre. Wu Tsang’s site-specific “sonic sculptural space” Anthem (2021) did this in spades for me, and is the not to be missed sensorial experience at the Guggenheim Museum on view through September 6.
Sophie Friedman-Pappas: Transfer Station
By Rudy NatanzonIn the process of creating what she calls “self-cannibalized” assemblages, Friedman-Pappas continually disassembles and rearranges found bits of driftwood, plastic figurines, half-chewed dog toys, phragmites, and other materials from the Freshkills area. The results are objects that appear to be neither hand-crafted nor found; they are weathered by wind or decomposed under layers of soil, but are simultaneously new.
Tales of Manhattan
By Jonathan GoodmanTales of Manhattan celebrates the quarter-century history of the gallery as a place for innovative art and an exemplar of the internationalism that has been central to New York’s remarkable longevity as a cultural center.
Joshua Marsh: Seven Cascades
By Hearne PardeeThe 12 modest paintings on view at Mother Gallery take on the ambitious challenge of Asian landscape painting. They are accompanied by five small but richly worked graphite drawings that hark back to Marsh’s 2016 residency at a garden north of Tokyo, where he experienced an autonomous realm of design based in nature.
Joyce Kozloff: Uncivil Wars
By Hovey BrockKozloff brings to bear her considerable Pattern and Decoration chops, reinterpreting with bold compositions and colors the plans created by Union and Confederate soldiers. On every map, she also paints renderings of the COVID-19 coronavirus, juxtaposing past and present in an urgent appeal to confront the forces—political, economic, and cultural—that have made this country as divided as it has ever been since the Civil War.
Robert Smithson: Abstract Cartography
By Ann McCoyThe vast expanse of Smithson’s artistic vision is staggering, and in this exhibition, we are transported on a geological timeline from the Proterozoic to a futuristic possibility of entropic collapse.
Madeline Hollander: Flatwing
By Hannah Sage KayBy choosing the rather doomed crickets as her subject, Hollander’s Flatwing highlights the enormity of an impact that can be brought about by even the smallest of changes, thus emphasizing the precarity of our present environmental situation and the intensely choreographed nature of the world around us.
Joe Light and Chris Martin: Be Natural
By Daniel FullerMartin’s career has been a gentle, deliberate burn. The consummate artist’s artist, his ingenuity and willingness to dive into possibility is that of tremendous envy from many younger artists. Light, famously, took to painting to proclaim his devotion after a stint in prison in 1966. His voice is sharp, urgent.
Andrew Cranston: Waiting for the Bell
By Cal McKeeverWaiting for the Bell, Andrew Cranston’s first solo show in New York at Karma, presents a new direction in scale for his dreamlike and beautiful paintings. The show is split in two distinct sections: one contains many of Cranston’s small paintings on book covers, which he is known for; the other includes eight large-scale paintings on canvas. These are the standout works in the show. Each has a restrictive color palette and depicts simple, oddly familiar and sparsely populated landscapes. A sense of stillness prevails over everything.
Julien Nguyen: Pictures of the Floating World
By Emily ChunThe sinister, tenebrific aura of Nguyen’s earlier works, like the macabre scene in Mary, Anne, Christ, and John (2018), is tempered in this recent show. It’s true that his works still resist easy projection, but therein lies Nguyen’s main aesthetic claim: like good theology, his works make the familiar strange again.
Cici Wu: Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness)
By Marcus CivinIn Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness), her second solo exhibition at 47 Canal, Cici Wu presents nine sculptures, four drawings, and a video, all dated 2021, that invite us to expand our understanding of proto-cinema by letting light, perception, and philosophy lead the way.
Rosy Keyser & Joseph Montgomery: Wrecked Angle
By Amanda Millet-SorsaIn their two-person show at Ceysson & Bénétière, the abstractions of Rosy Keyser and Joseph Montgomery take us through an eclectic journey of Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera, assemblage, and Minimalism into their own personal synthesis of painting and sculpture as frictional yet unified objects.
fetch fiddle fidget: Adriana Farmiga, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Rune Olsen
By Madeleine SeidelThe readymade has long been one of the art world’s most misunderstood tropes.
Saul Chernick: Enlightened Objects
By Cigdem AsatekinSaul Chernick’s Enlightened Objects are both physically and perceptively sensible.
Wangechi Mutu
By Jess ChenAt Gladstone, Wangechi Mutu’s sculptures stand alone, but at the Legion of Honor they mount a meta-critique of their environment.
Rindon Johnson: Law of Large Numbers
By Ann C. CollinsGathering materials that are aged, processed, transmuted, and repurposed, Johnson does not set his focus on fixed objects but in the way things evolve over time.
Made in L.A. 2020: a version
By Olivia GauthierConceived prior to the 2020 election and before “coronavirus” became common terminology, the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2020: a version, offers a trenchant and diverging array of artworks under the auspice of locality—Los Angeles as a lens, however ambiguous.
No W here: Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, Toni Ross
By Amanda GluibizziAs they were planning their joint exhibition at Ricco/Maresca, Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, and Toni Ross agreed to choose an evocative object from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would serve as an organizing principle for each artist’s portion of the show. To their surprise, all of them chose the same piece.
William Eric Brown: ColorStatic
By Jonathan GoodmanWilliam Eric Brown’s ColorStatic is a highly innovative show of TV screen-like tablets, spotted with random shapes that look both like abstract paintings and the static ones that used to be found on televisions.
Chloë Bass: The Parts
By Phillip GriffithChloë Bass’s The Parts, organized by the Brooklyn Public Library’s curator for visual art programming Cora Fisher outside the Central Branch in Grand Army Plaza and the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights, addresses both the isolation brought on by the pandemic and the trauma and exasperation of Black and brown Americans brought on by police killings.
Daniel Gibson: Ocotillo Song
By Nicholas HeskesThe most recent exhibition by Los Angeles painter Daniel Gibson at Almine Rech summons various descriptors to mind: psychedelic, floral, surreal, Boschian. But the one that connects them all is autochthonous.
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show
By Zoë HopkinsYou’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show is an intimate gathering among old friends. Old and new works by each of the artists represented in the original exhibition flock together in a gorgeous reunion of living and passed on spirits.
Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter
By Brandt JunceauLouise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, an exhibition of 47 objects including sculpture on pedestals, in suspension and multiplying in vitrines, plus large freestanding vitrine-pieces, a very large “Cell” installation, paintings, collage, drawings, notes, plaques, and reliefs by Louise Bourgeois, with a selection of especially eloquent quotations from Sigmund Freud, is an event that each of its subjects might have wished for, maybe even demanded.
Elisabeth Kley: Minutes of Sand
By William CorwinKley imagines heaven, or at least an alternate realm, not as an aery cloud-filled firmament, but of geometric perfection and the comforting repetition of vegetal forms, rolling waves, and architectural detail.
Mary Mattingly: Public Water
By Julie ReissIn June 2020, Mary Mattingly and More Art launched A Year of Public Water, a collaboration that uses various platforms to inform its audience about the sources of New York’s water supply.
Ruth Hardinger: Transcending Fields
By Robert C. MorganThe structures that occupy these intensified spaces at Mana incite feelings of hyper-sensitivity, impossible to categorize through any specific artistic means or style.
Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well
By Charlotte KentThere is a light touch here that nonetheless manages to be immersive. The retrospective is selective in its offerings, and though much is necessarily missing, there is no sense of lack, but rather encouragement to seek out more on your own.
Lisa Brice
By Claire PhillipsThrough her work, Brice reclaims the female nude, depicting a cast of women who do not perform for the pleasure of the male gaze, but for their own.
John Dilg: Flight Path
By Louis BlockIn John Dilg’s paintings, dusk and dawn are suffused with green, and the color seems as inevitable as the setting and rising of the sun. His is an old green, like celadon or lichen, that makes the hues of spring shoots seem rather showy.
Maren Hassinger
By Sally Eaves HughesMaren Hassinger’s new work, commissioned for Dia Bridgehampton, frays the boundaries between artistic genres by circling back to a formative material, process, and politics of her five-decade practice: fiber.
Sal Salandra: Iron Halo
By Osman Can YerebakanThe tightly sewn paintings of dungeons decorated with confessionals, crosses, and domestic furniture come from an artist who clearly creates like his life depends on it. The salvational aura in each painting radiates not only through his mastery of color and form through thread but also from his vivid rendition of sex in a ritualistic devotion.
Border Crossings
By David Carrier and Paul GladstonBorder Crossings and its accompanying, richly illustrated catalogue highlight important issues for the reception of art across the ideological boundary between North and South Korea.
Every Wall is a Door
By Steven PestanaRelying on devices familiar to cinema and theater such as darkened rooms, outsized projection, and spectacle, teamLab aims to make visitors’ participation integral to the fruition of their artworks in the service of “democratizing” art.
Onyedika Chuke: The Forever Museum Archive_Circa 6000BCE
By Folasade OlogunduduIn The Forever Museum Archive_Circa 6000BCE Onyedika Chuke presents new iterations from his decade-long ever-expanding body of work, The Forever Museum Archive. The archive includes an assortment of art and non-art objects, hand-made sculptures, texts, and moving images.
Wood Works: Raw, Cut, Carved, Covered
By Alfred Mac AdamWorks by 20 artists are included in this wood-themed show.
Kirill Alexandrov: Asymmetry & Vladimir Martirosov: Docile Bodies
By Valerie MindlinThese two exhibitions showcase the way sculpture functions as a trigger.
