ArtSeen
Simon Hantaï: Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc
By Louis BlockIn the late sixties, Hantaï abandoned the rounded biomorphic contours for an all-over approach, seeking an increased flatness in the finished paintings, a project that occupied him for the rest of his career. It is this period of intense production, from the late-sixties through the seventies, that the current show surveys.
Looking Back / The 12th White Columns Annual
By Ksenia SobolevaThis year, the annual is organized by Mary Manning, an artist whose own practice revolves around mindful observation and the poetics of sequencing. Venturing out to see art during the pandemic became a welcome escape for Manning, while at the same time offering a space to contemplate everyday reality.
Dominic Chambers: Soft Shadows
By Folasade OlogunduduFor his first solo exhibition with Lehmann Maupin, Soft Shadows, Dominic Chambers showcases four autobiographical life-sized paintings.
Tess Bilhartz: Follow Me Down
By Clare GemimaTaking shape through glistening metallic scales and boundless oceanic interiors, Tess Bilhartz’s Follow Me Down grants viewers entry and exploration into a new terrain, yet offers no certainty of an escape.
Shawanda Corbett: To the Fields of Lilac
By Elizabeth BuheIf we understand the world Corbett’s art builds through the pressure of fingers and brush to extend beyond the gallery’s reach, we find a powerful model for problem-solving poised to yield an ever-adapting environment flexible enough to accommodate needs that are, as of yet, unknown.
no one is tall to heaven
no one is large to the land
By Jacob Bromberg
In response to David Novros’s exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris
Chris Martin
By Charles SchultzChris Martin has shown with Anton Kern enough times to know how to manipulate the unique characteristics of the place. Because of its essentially linear structure, the exhibition space sets up a loose expectation for some form of narrative.
Snow Day
By David WhelanSnow days are coveted by those who tire of winter gray, bringing the excitement of flurries and the stillness of bright snow banks to an otherwise bleak landscape. The ten artists exhibited in Snow Day, the Drawing Room’s latest exhibition, tap into this attraction. Snow as a subject goes to the heart of something in all works of art: the attempt to capture something fleeting.
Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself
By Mary Ann CawsA stupendous exhibit. I won’t put an exclamation point there, for that punctuation would be repeated, excessively. Here is a fine example of what a gallery can do in an exhibition if the focus is on a specific kind of thing, in this case on an historic collective and collaborative art-making activity, repeated differently as an off and on ritual event.
Beverly Semmes: POT PEEK
By Susan HarrisBeverly Semmes’s current show at Susan Inglett Gallery represents the multitude of modes and media with which she has been engaged for the last thirty years while introducing notable new elements that invite reflection on the relationship between her signature dress and ceramic sculptures and her “Feminist Responsibility Project” (FRP), an ongoing series in which she paints and draws over ’90s-era porn magazine pages.
Jasper Johns: Painted Bronze
By Paul Hayes TuckerIt has been said that Jasper Johns’s Painted Bronze (1960) was generated by an offhand remark uttered in 1960 by the Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. The Dutchman was apparently grousing about Johns’s suave dealer, Leo Castelli, and his ability to market works by emerging artists. “Give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans,” de Kooning supposedly snarled, “and he could sell them.”
Art of the Cuban Revolution
By Billie AnaniaThree concurrent exhibitions in New York expand on Cuban resilience through the aesthetics of the Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África, y América Latina (OSPAAAL), a revolutionary art movement focused on Third Worldism during the Cold War.
![Alfrédo Rostgaard,<em> [Che]</em>, 1969. Carlos Vega Collection, Interference Archive.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/32527/anania-cuba-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Martín Ramírez: Memory Portals
By Jonathan GoodmanIt is a bit difficult to characterize Ramírez’s structures—not quite buildings, but clearly aligned with them. Although the artist worked at a time that saw the beginnings of our contemporary culture, there is something both ancient and properly modernist about his efforts.
Alec Soth: A Pound of Pictures
By Jean DykstraSoth’s own pictures consider the metaphorical and emotional weight of photographs but also the nature of his engagement with his subjects
Bill Jensen: Stillness/Flowing
By David Rhodes
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.
Haroon Mirza: For a Dyson Sphere
By David RhodesIt 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.
Rackstraw Downes: Drawings
By Alfred Mac AdamThere are two Rackstraw Downes in this remarkable show of 33 drawings and one oil on canvas. The range is huge, from 1975 until 2020, but with the bulk of the drawings made in 2020. Not exactly a retrospective, but enough of one for us to see two discrete phases in his career: his mature style and his late style.
Liz Larner: Don't put it back like it was
By Bryan MartinEntropic, phenomenological, gendered, and ecological ideas are all brought forth to display an exceptional sculptural practice that might otherwise seem disparate. But the strength of interconnected concepts and form presents Larner as an endlessly fascinating, endearing, and unique sculptor who coolly traverses art historical movements.
Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw
By George KanAcross this exhibition’s unprecedented gathering of works, Yoakum’s unique visual language becomes apparent. A vocabulary of parallel lines, doubled lines and tessellated organic shapes dovetail, merge and proliferate below skies of blue and faded peach.
Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden
By Robert C. MorganThe recent exhibition, Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden, follows in the spirit of this change, although it is drawn from the brilliant depositories of the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden. These collections are largely focused on drawings produced during the Northern Renaissance and Baroque period, although they also include more recent works.
Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism
By Natalia GierowskaThe recently opened exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism, is a Pissarro retrospective which, instead of uncertainty, would likely bring a lot of pride to the artist. Curated by the museum’s director, Josef Helfenstein, and Christophe Duvivier, this exhaustive show gathers nearly 200 works by the artist, including 100 paintings.
Jeff Koons: Lost in America
By Phyllis TuchmanIt’s an illuminating show. Instead of confronting lots of sculptures lite, as some would have it, this retrospective illuminates the changing role objects have played in Koons’s career. Digging deeper, you’ll notice, too, that the terms statues and sculpture are not interchangeable. Though paintings and prints are on display here, the large, three-dimensional works primarily draw our attention.
The Hare with Amber Eyes
By Jason RosenfeldThe Jewish Museum’s present show is a spinoff of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, the best-selling book from 2010 by the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, an elegant, erudite, auto-biographical, and equal parts devastating and elevating family memoir. Designed by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and curated by Stephen Brown and Shira Backer in collaboration with the book’s author, the exhibition documents through 450 objects the rise, fall, and perseverance of the Odessan grain-merchants-turned-bankers Ephrussi family over a century and across three continents, and the odysseys of their prized possessions.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction
By Robert C. MorganWhile Sophie Taeuber-Arp is perhaps best known in Europe—given the majority of readings on her work stem from translations in German, French, and Italian—her relatively brief career was a formidable one, to say the least. Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art is a magnificent, if not exemplary, exhibition that includes some 400 works intuitively conceived and produced in diverse media by a remarkable avant-garde practitioner.
Helène Aylon & Colette Lumiere
By Norman L KleeblattI saw Helène Aylon’s (1931–2020) current exhibition, Reflections, at Kerry Schuss Gallery in Tribeca immediately before heading to the opening of Colette Lumiere’s show at Company Gallery’s new Elizabeth Street location. The latter, curated by Kenta Murakami, is vividly titled Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972–1983. I have known both artists for decades. Their works and installations, their methods and practices couldn’t be more different.
Angela Davis: Seize the Time
By Jillian RussoThoughtfully co-curated by Gerry Beegan and Donna Gustafson, a selection of posters, print media, courtroom sketches, artwork, and photographs document the construction of Angela Davis’s public image by mainstream and alternative media. Interspersed with the archival material are works by contemporary artists who continue to build upon Davis’s philosophies of freedom.
Wild Horses
By Claire PhillipsA couple is lying in bed. A woman, with her arms raised and left knee bent, leans languorously on the man behind her, who buries his face in a pillow. Bright light from the open curtains falls over the peaks and valleys of their bodies. We feel awkward as we stumble into their private sphere. But are we voyeurs or invaders? The feeling prevails through Wild Horses, Sim Smith gallery’s exhibition of paintings and photographs in southeast London, which focuses upon the subject of couples in various guises.
Bernard Frize: Come to Me Again
By David RhodesThe 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.
Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw
By Lyle RexerYoakum’s landscapes have been well-known in the world of folk and outsider art for four decades, but their enfranchisement by the larger art world has taken longer, even though the work of this Chicago artist was recognized and collected by a group of trained artists in the same city almost as soon as it appeared in the 1960s.
Holly Coulis: Eyes and Yous
By Alfred Mac AdamHolly Coulis’s brilliant, punning title perfectly captures the intellectual conceit that drives her equally brilliant show. Her work, picking up on the eyes in the title, has always been a matter of focus. How, in her earlier paintings, to perceive a still life: should the size of objects in a painting be determined by reality or should size have nothing to do with representational verisimilitude?
Lands End
By Constance LewallenIn Lands End, artists have taken over all sections of the former restaurant, even those not normally seen by diners, such as the kitchen and trash areas. The exhibition is presented by the FOR-SITE Foundation and curated by its executive director, Cheryl Haines, who invited 27 international artists and collectives to address the perils of climate change.
No Tears: In Conversation with Horace Pippin
By Amanda GluibizziBy sheer coincidence, I visited No Tears: In Conversation with Horace Pippin, which situates Pippin’s John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) in the context of critical texts and Dean Moss’s video johnbrown (2014), on December 2, the 162nd anniversary of John Brown’s hanging. It was my second encounter with the abolitionist that week, having visited Kara Walker’s exhibition—where Brown made an appearance in the artist’s video Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021)—at Sikkema Jenkins just a few days earlier.
Witch Hunt
By Olivia Gauthierresented at The Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Witch Hunt organized by curators Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood showcases the work of 16 female-identified artists across varying mediums and from a global lens. Representing 13 different countries, the 15 projects in the two-pronged exhibition probe and expand what feminist art looks like and what questions it asks, while highlighting the significance of performance and video-based work in feminist art practice.
Jane Freilicher & Thomas Nozkowski: True Fictions
By David CarrierJane Freilicher (1924–2014) and Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019), both important painters, were very different artists. She made figurative paintings of still life objects with countryside and urban scenes in the background, while he was an abstract painter whose subjects had elusive, “real” sources. They hardly knew each other, and they certainly didn’t influence each other. What, then, is to be gained displaying them together, in this exhibition of some 16 works, late paintings by both of them?
Darren Bader: The American Express Holiday Show
By Hunter BraithwaiteLast fall I imprudently ran up my company Amex to buy materials for a body of sculpture I wanted to make. So begins Darren Bader’s latest foray into the funny, sexy, sad lives of objects: a compendium of wall-mounted and floor-balanced assemblages—knickknacks, tchotchkes, doo-dads, detritus, debris, and crap—all of which exclaim a certain thingness, plus a sentimental value somewhere between an Etsy-trained AI and at least 10,000 Midwestern monkeys banging out Hamlet.
John Willenbecher: Works from the 1960s
By Mark BlochJohn Willenbecher’s work is an art of anticipation. His precise forms anticipate the seriousness of Minimalism, while his paradoxically playful objects beg to be handled, a quashed call to participation impossibly choreographed behind glass.
Carl Andre
By Alfred Mac AdamBrilliantly curated, this succinct show of 21 works created between 1972 and 2021 manages to present Carl Andre in three modes. Simultaneously monumental and intimate, these pieces provide a nuanced view of an artist all-too-easily consigned to Minimalism and left there in splendid but intellectually mute isolation.
Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen?
By Folasade OlogunduduStand still and direct your gaze three stories up into the MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium and prepare to be arrested by the motif of black-and-white in Adam Pendleton’s Who is Queen? The work, monumental in scale, with its three soaring scaffold sculptures, taking up the height of the 60-foot atrium, is his most “autobiographical” to date and considers history not as fixed or static, but rather continuous, alive, and ever-evolving in real time.
Raymond Saunders
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightRaymond Saunders’s current solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps presents a series of gripping assemblages, hung on the walls like excavated fragments. The individual configurations might be referred to as slabs, panels, boards, or slates. However, thinking of the works instead as decks of culture or rafts of visuality may lend us a better lens for interpreting the work.
Chris Martin
By William CorwinThe shimmer of bright sunlight on wine-dark water, endless swirled striations of minerals in a Catskill outcrop, blurred light beams through dust: Chris Martin presents one-to-one dialogues—examinations of the minutiae of ineffability. In this newest cycle of paintings, Martin toys with aesthetic details in nature that have their correlatives in his arsenal of surfaces, textures, and non-repeating but predictable patterns.
Marcus Jahmal: Mining
By Jessica HolmesAcross the barren landscapes of self-taught artist Marcus Jahmal’s recent paintings, barren trees dot empty horizons, bathed in the hot glow of ambers, burgundies, and reds. Stripped of any foliage, their limbs reach like outstretched arms towards the sky while hollows in the trunks form elongated mouths that look as if they are singing, moaning, or supplicating to the gods.
Georg Baselitz: Drawings
By Jonathan GoodmanGeorg Baselitz, now in his 80s, continues to produce remarkable expressionist art, usually of figures seen upside-down. Born in Eastern Germany and educated in several art schools there, he moved to West Germany, where he first encountered abstraction. In 1969, he showed, for the first time, a painting with an inverted figure. Since then, this motif has been a signature element of his style.
Shikō Munakata: A Way of Seeing
By David CarrierShikō Munakata (1903–75), a Tokyo-based printmaker, became internationally famous in the 1950s. Starting in 1959, he often visited New York, which he thought of as his second home. Much inspired by Vincent van Gogh, (who himself was of course much influenced by prints from Japan), Munakata modernized the style of classic Japanese prints to present subjects from contemporary life. This exhibition includes nearly 100 of his woodblock prints, most in black-and-white, some in color.
Ragnar Kjartansson
By Valerie MindlinRagnar Kjartansson’s work has always attached particular significance to the unhurriedly contemplative awareness of the moment and the durations embedded therein. In the artist’s eclectic inaugural show for Moscow’s GES-2, he presents a curated group exhibition as a piece of autobiography.
Maria Nordman: At the Start
By Ann McCoyNordman joins Gaea and contemporary feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray in demanding a break from the phallogocentric and imagining a new creation myth. In her “Plato’s Hystera” (hystera is Greek for uterus) from Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray advocates that we consider the cave as a place of origins. This is in opposition to the heliocentric view of the outer world as the source of enlightenment.
