Conceptual Art – Page 5

Delaware Art Shows- “Take A Seat” at The Delaware Contemporary

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington

May 222025

Work by Adam Ledford

Painting by Sierra Montoya Barela

Painting by Sierra Montoya Barela

Installation by Debra Broz

Take A Seat, at The Delaware Contemporary, presents three artists whose work focuses on aspects of domestic life. The sculptures in Adam Ledford‘s installation, and Debra Broz’s porcelain creations both explore items found around the house and encourage viewers to take a longer look beyond the initial familiarity. Sierra Montoya Barela‘s still life paintings, with their bright colors and unique compositions, balance out the exhibition.

From the museum-

The dinner table recalls memories of cuisine, traditions, faces. Many of these memories are not clearly outlined but are rather assembled together through the periphery of our experiences. At the edge are small details such as decor or furniture, all of which complement the feeling and evoke emotion that registers our memories of the moments. The settings themselves often define the sensibility of the dinner table. Working within and beyond these domestic settings, Sierra Montoya Barela, Debra Broz, and Adam Ledford each contribute their distinct techniques to a larger place setting, inviting visitors to reminisce on tables past and present.

Sierra Montoya Barela is a painter of modern-day still life, capturing the spaces we exist in, but specifically the life that exists alongside us. Barela’s use of perspective composes a portal of access, one that feels like a peephole into the domestic items that capture our impression of a space. Each painting offers a scene that imbues surrealistic comfort. Plants that grow as we move around them, food that waits to be consumed, isolated hands or feet that are suggestively attached to a body. Barela’s spatial acuity combined with her use of color and pattern is multidimensional and lively, highlighting the surroundings that outline our lives.

Also questioning elements of space, Adam Ledford melds multiple mediums together to create installations that are dimensionally varied. The mixture of sparse line work directly applied on the wall with hand-crafted, two-dimensional ceramic vessels create a composite scene of domestic familiarity. Evocative of furniture found in our homes, the drawings support the elegant pots that rest on their implied surfaces. The nature of the entirely non-functional dioramas are deceivingly simple; their whimsical nature feeding into our sensibilities of space and depth, while subverting those perceptions into new spaces of disbelief.

Debra Broz also works within the composite. Broz alters found porcelain sculptures, seamlessly combining various pieces together to craft new creatures altogether. These small figurines are reminiscent of lovingly coveted trinkets that decorate our shelves and tables. Broz leans into our memories, appropriating the figurines’ normal representation and twisting them into something fantastical. As an actual conservator of porcelain goods, Broz’s technical skill leaves little room for error; enabling her audiences to jump into the sublime and become collectors of her newly constructed tchotchke.

This show is on view until 5/25/25.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Matthew Stone at The Hole

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

May 162025

“Radiating Kindness (Oil)”, 2023, Oil on linen

“Bold Glamour”, 2023, Digital print on linen

For AI Paintings, Matthew Stone‘s 2023 exhibition at The Hole’s Lower East Side location, he explored new ways of using the latest technology while expanding on techniques used in his previous digital creations.

Details from The Hole about this exhibition-

Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.

Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.

AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.

A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.

The show also includes examples of Stone’s “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone’s circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.

Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists’ use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.

Below, in an interview for The Standard, he discusses using AI for this work further-

When working with AI, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed or do you always feel in control?

I have never felt fully in control while making art and I’ve always been back and forth between wanting to be and understanding the transformative and creative power of just letting go. The most exciting moments in my creative process have often been unexpected mistakes. Those happy mistakes have revealed something that can then be consciously amplified. Using AI creates lots of unexpected outcomes very fast. So as someone who likes accidents in this context of image making, it’s a good way to become accident-prone.

Do you consider AI as just another digital tool? Or does it feel more like a collaboration? In other words, do you sometimes feel AI might develop its own taste, point of view, conscience?

It’s a digital tool and I try to resist the urge to anthropomorphize it. But it’s difficult because it feels like such a paradigm shift and also sometimes like dreaming. I think that culturally speaking, we are moving in a direction that assigns these qualities of perceived sentience to AI even when more mundane actions are at play. It’s not clear to me how we will tell if AI has achieved general intelligence, but I think most people will assume it to be the case long before it actually happens, assuming that it does.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Saya Woolfalk at Susan Inglett Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

May 092025

The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.

From the gallery about this show-

The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.

The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021. While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:

“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”

Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022), in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.

The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.

The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and Design– Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.

Apr 252025

Mural by Donald Walker

ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden

Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields. Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.

So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.

This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.

Below are a few selections from 2021-

Mural by Lance Turner

“From This Moment Forward” by Herman A. Keith Jr. inspired by Gee’s Bend Quilters

Partially finished mural by Broderick Flanigan honoring Lake City educators Elouise Cooper and Derrick Faison.

“7 Red Wolves” by Joann Galarza Vega

About the work from the above by Joann Galarza Vega–

“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”

Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.

About the installation-

New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project is a socially engaged art project that explores the new history of the Gadsden County, FL. Once a thriving agriculturally center, the county is now the poorest in the state of Florida and the only county with a majority African American population. Working with a team from the State of Florida Archives, we were able to build relationships with over a dozen small farmers trying to address the area’s status as an economic and food desert. These farmers included first generation immigrants, fourth generation shade tobacco farmers, livestock farmers, and organic vegetable growers. The project is presented here through a dining table installation. Embedded speakers play a series of interviews with participating farmers, and each farmer is represented through an individually designed ceramic dinner. The table is set with live plants, seed bombs, and alfalfa hay.

The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.

From the ArtFields website about the installation-

All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.

Finally- while in town it’s also worth checking out the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center and Memorial Park. The Lake City-born astronaut and physicist died tragically in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

NYC Art Shows- Sharon Core at Yancey Richardson

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Illustration, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 112025

For Facsimile, currently on view at Yancey Richardson, Sharon Core has reproduced Flowers, the famous 1980 book of photographs by photographer Irving Penn. Instead of using photographs, however, she has recreated the images by painting them using Epson printer inks and photo paper. These paintings were then photographed to create replicas of the book. The work investigates issues of memory, reproduction, and the authorship of images, while also creating works that are beautiful objects in themselves.

From the gallery-

Through the meticulous recreation of historical still-life paintings, along with more recent artworks rendered through the medium of photography, her work explores the tension between reality and its photographic representation. In Facsimile, Core expands these themes by subverting her usual process. Rather than reproducing painted still-lifes through photography, she has instead turned to Irving Penn’s iconic Flowers series—a masterful collection of photographic still-lifes—and reinterpreted them through painting. This ambitious project both deepens and reframes Core’s exploration of the still-life genre by posing questions not only about photography in the digital age, but about material specificity and the status of the reproduction as well.

At the center of Facsimile is a hand-made reproduction of Penn’s 1980 book Flowers, which originated from a commission for Vogue magazine for its annual Christmas edition in 1967. Each year from 1967 to 1973, Penn focused on a different flower—beginning with tulips and moving on to poppies, peonies, roses and other blooms—capturing their ephemeral beauty in various states of perfection and decay. In 1980, these images were compiled into the popular and widely available book Flowers, published by Harmony Books, now out of print. Core’s Facsimile: “Irving Penn, Flowers” resurrects and reimagines the book as a tactile, meticulously handcrafted object that visitors are invited to handle. Alongside this edition, Core presents a selection of her 73 hand-painted recreations of Penn’s photographs, displayed throughout the gallery to offer a closer look at her reinterpretations of the original works. Rather than a departure, we might see this as a return for Core, who originally trained as a painter. The interplay between painting and photography has always been central to her practice and Facsimile brings this dialogue into sharper focus.

Core’s process for Facsimile is as intricate as it is conceptually layered. Each of Penn’s photographs is recreated as a painting using Epson UltraChrome inks on Canson Photo Rag paper, materials typically associated with digital photographic printing. Through this method, Core subverts the intended use of contemporary materials, transforming them into tools for painting. She then photographed her painted pages, designed a layout replicating that of the original book and bound the final prints into an edition of seven. In Core’s words, “the book is a multiple sculpture or a three-dimensional print that must be handled and touched to experience. My name is nowhere in the ‘book,’ therefore it is not an artist book, per se, but in fact a converted replica or facsimile.” By humanizing and rarifying a mass-produced object, Core’s “three-dimensional print” calls for a different kind of attention from the viewer. It cannot be experienced via a screen and must instead be encountered physically. In this generous gesture, the now out-of-print book is given a new lease on life, taking on a different meaning through a complex process of conversion: transforming photographs into paintings, which are then re-photographed, printed and bound into a book.

Visually, Facsimile diverges from Penn’s original photographs through Core’s expressive, painterly approach. Unlike her earlier series, in which she precisely reproduced certain still-life paintings in three-dimensions and photographed the results, effectively posing questions about the boundaries between illusion and reality, here Core seeks to emphasize the handcrafted nature of all photographs. As she notes, “Ever more so, the photograph is manipulated and collaged and is printed not through time and light, as in analog process, but with a fluid medium on paper. It becomes a machine assisted drawing or painting.” In Facsimile, Core makes explicit the artistry behind the work: the hand-lettered text is visibly imperfect and the images, while faithful to Penn’s compositions, are imbued with the texture and fluidity of the artist’s brushwork. Even the colors in the paintings result from a rigorous process of mixing and diluting the digital hues of cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

There is no trompe l’oeil effect at play here, nor any photorealist painting technique either and the result is therefore not an exact replica but a layered gesture that urges us to reflect on the evolving nature of representation in the digital age. By moving from a mechanical form of reproduction to an analogue process, while using a medium of mass production, Core questions the role of materiality in image-making. This finely crafted body of work seems to slip between painting, photography and sculpture, casting new light on Penn’s original photographs and book, while posing deeper questions about image-making technologies and their supposed ties to representing reality in this post-truth era.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at Gladstone Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Apr 102025

Joan Jonas’s exhibition Empty Rooms at Gladstone Gallery combines drawings, sculptures, video projection, and a score by musician and composer Jason Moran to explore issues of loss.

From the gallery-

“I didn’t see a difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase —memory erased.”

—Joan Jonas, In the Shadow of a Shadow

This presentation includes new work while also exploring the artist’s process of revival. In Empty Rooms, Jonas’ cultivation of a resonant, fragmented space brings together objects and imagery that invite viewers to contemplate the throughlines that connect familiarity with loss.

Typical of Jonas’ practice, her work is not illustrative but highly interpretive; meaning is not fixed but emerges and recedes in poetic layers. Central to the exhibition are a series of 12 hanging sculptures constructed of handmade Japanese Torinoko paper sewn onto custom designed steel wire frames. Simple, white, and austere without adornment or embellishment, the 12 aerial sculptures embody the titular “empty rooms” and float above visitors as specters of absence. Felt as deeply as they are seen, these powerful vestiges vibrate in their repetition and multiplicity.

Jonas includes a video, quoted from the performance aspect of the installation, shown in the U.S. Pavilion, at the 2015 Venice Biennale They Come to Us without a Word. Projected on one wall of the gallery space, this sequence was partly inspired by the ghost stories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Jonas has visited and worked since the early 70s. Incorporating drawings, video, and sound, this performance was restaged at The Kitchen in 2016.

For its most recent installment at Gladstone, Jonas’ long-time collaborator, musician and composer, Jason Moran, will present a newly-configured score. Through the artist’s practice of revisiting and reconfiguring past elements, she enacts a process of transmission and produces a visual archive that has shaped her unwaveringly experimental body of work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 102025

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Indiana at Kasmin

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 272025

“LOVE”, 1967, Oil on canvas

“LIP”, 1960-1, Oil on canvas

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969, currently on view at Kasmin, presents a fascinating selection of the artist’s work from that decade. Several of his well known paintings like LOVE (pictured above) are included, but it is interesting to see his lesser known work as well as the progression in his work throughout this period.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

…Featuring 20 works drawn exclusively from the artist’s personal collection as endowed by Indiana to the Star of Hope Foundation, the exhibition includes an example from the artist’s first edition of LOVE sculptures, conceived in 1966 and executed between 1966—1968, and a vitrine display of archival materials including some of the artist’s journals. This exhibition marks Kasmin’s first collaboration with the Star of Hope Foundation, which was established by the artist in his lifetime, and the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of work by Indiana since 2003.

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969 chronicles the Minimalist origins of Indiana’s signature use of signs, symbols, words and numbers. Pairing canonical works with those rarely seen by the public, the exhibition provides a deeper understanding of Indiana as an artist whose output remains emblematic of American culture. The paintings on view demonstrate the personal iconography the artist ascribed to his artwork: as his peers withdrew from the aesthetics of self-expression, Indiana embarked on a career-defining inquiry into the power of symbols to represent meaning. Organized thematically, the exhibition charts Indiana’s influential depictions of words and numbers in bold colors through his early abstractions, reflections on his personal history and the stages of life, and the poetic inevitability of transcendence—a return to the source.

From the gallery about LOVE and LIP–

After discovering a trove of nineteenth-century packaging stencils in 1960, Indiana began incorporating words and numbers in his paintings, spearheading the adoption of commercial advertisement as a language of art. LIP (1960–61), an early example of a single word painting, features the title word’s yellow letters at the center of two intersecting orbs, whose contours suggestively form a pair of red lips. Unraveling the distinction between sign and symbol, the composition suggests a kiss, a universal bodily expression of love.

More selections and information from the gallery below-

“October Painting”, 1959-60, Oil on canvas

Indiana began this composition, which depicts the shadows of a dracaena plant, in October 1959. “This, I feel, is a very seminal painting,” he wrote in a journal entry the following December, seeking to distinguish his own visual language from artists Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly.

“Ra”, c.1961, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

After painting a series of orbs in 1959, Indiana revisited the theme in Ra (c. 1961), a triptych arranging a number of red, blue, and green circles in flattened pictorial space. This work’s title reflects Indiana’s early interest in mythology, referencing the Egyptian sun god Ra, historically depicted with a red solar orb and cobra over his head.

Circles appear in Indiana’s work as early as 1958 and resound through paintings such as Mother and Father (1963-66) and Hallelujah (Jesus Saves) (1969). The arrangement of orbs in Ra suggests Indiana’s fascination with sequences, an avenue he would explore in paintings of numbers including Cardinal Nine (1966), on view nearby.

“Cardinal 9”, 1966, Oil on canvas

Indiana’s Cardinal Numbers series (1966) depicts the numbers one through zero in red, blue, and green. Adopting the typography of a business calendar, Indiana conceived of each number to represent a stage of life. Cardinal Nine represents the near end of the sequence, just before zero. The palette held sentimental significance for Indiana, who recalled memories of the red and green signage of Phillips 66, the gas company where his father worked, against the open blue sky.

“Mother and Father”, 1963-1966, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

Indiana’s extraordinary diptych Mother and Father (1963-66) depicts the artist’s scantily dressed adoptive parents entering a Model T Ford within two circles, as if observed through a pair of binoculars. Conceived as the first to depict his parents in each of the four seasons, Indiana only realized one iteration of the series, set in the winter. Details of the vehicle’s license plate allude to Indiana’s conception ahead of his birth in September 1928, as if to mythologize the artist’s biography.

In an accompanying artist statement, Indiana described this painting as an essential part of his celebrated American Dream series (1961-2001), which earned Indiana’s first major recognition after early acquisitions by The Museum of Modern Art, Van Abbemuseum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and elsewhere.

Indiana exhibited this painting in an early state in 1964, later adding its stenciled lettering in 1966. He continued to exhibit the work extensively, including in the São Paulo Biennial in 1967 and his traveling institutional retrospectives of 1968, 1977, 1982, and 2013.

“August Is Memory Carmen”, 1963, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

The number 8 held special resonance for Indiana, whose mother, Carmen, was born in the month of August. August Is Memory Carmen
(1963) incorporates the title of a lyric poem Indiana wrote in 1953, four years after her death. Indiana depicted her portrait alongside his father, Earl, in Mother and Father (1963-66), installed nearby.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25. It is presented in dialogue with Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibition Robert Indiana: The American Dream, which will open May 9, 2025.

Mar 262025

Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)”, 2022, Architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas (left) and Steve Wolfe, “Untitled (Bookends)”, 1990, Bronze, lacquer (bottom right)

Unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist, Fang peoples Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema Byeri), 19th Century Wood, metal, pigment (center sculpture), Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking”, 1962 Acrylic and collage on linen, (right) and Judy Linn “James Joyce on 23rd st.”, early 1970s, Archival pigment print (on window)

Ronny Quevedo, “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)”, 2022, Pattern paper, gold leaf, and metal leaf on muslin (left) and Christian Marclay and Steve Wolfe, “La Voix Humaine”, 1991, Wood console, oil and screenprint on aluminum (right)

Larry Wolhandler, “Bust of James Baldwin”, 1975, Bronze, and Rudolf Stingel, “Untitled”, 2016, Electroformed copper, plated nickel, stainless steel frame (right)

Medardo Rosso, “Rieuse”, 1890, Wax on plaster, and picture of Joan Didion

Ellen Gallagher “DeLuxe”, 2004–2005 Grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade and toy eyeballs

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation. Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

NYC Art Shows- Todd Gray at Lehmann Maupin

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 262025

Todd Gray’s photo juxtapositions in While Angels Gaze at Lehmann Maupin challenge the viewer to think about the legacies of the past and the ways in which they affect our perceptions of the world today. From classical statues and European paintings, to pop artists, to the stars in the universe, the eye moves between the various layers finding the connections.

From the gallery’s press release-

Best known for his photo assemblages that feature subject matter ranging from imperial European gardens, to West African landscapes, to depictions of pop icons, to portraits of the artist himself, Gray builds critical juxtapositions in his work that examine accepted cultural beliefs—particularly around ideas of the African diaspora, colonialism, and societal power dynamics. In While Angels Gaze, Gray presents a suite of new pieces that combine images from his music photography archive, work made in the early 2000s, and photographs taken during his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2023…

In his newest body of work, Gray integrates Roman Catholic imagery and architecture with photographs sourced from his own archive, including self portraits, images of the Ghanaian landscape, and figures from pop music. The mining of his multi-decade music photography archive is an important component of Gray’s practice and one that offers a view into the history of music, featuring recognizable figures from Al Green to Iggy Pop. In While Angels Gaze, Gray combines these titans of the music industry with images of Roman Catholic cathedrals and ancient Roman statuary, drawing parallels between religious or mythical personages and the idols of today. In these compositions, modern pop stars are cast as the contemporary equivalents of historical figures—where societies might once have inlaid images of saints in golden basilica ceilings or erected statues of religious leaders on building facades, modern idols play on elevated stages to crowds of tens of thousands, becoming enshrined as mass media icons.

Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s lens extends beyond imaging pop icons, with some works devoid of figures all together. In Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla) (2024), for example, Gray depicts an image of a ship in the foremost panel, which appears to sail out of an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Both photographs are set in circular frames against a rectangular foundation image that shows an ornately decorated ceiling. The ship is a model of a French slave ship from the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) museum on Gorée Island, a UNESCO world heritage site and former center of slave trading on the African coast, while the ceiling is located in Villa Torlonia, the former residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome. Here, Gray’s use of cosmic imagery functions as a conceptual bridge, condensing the time between the painting of the ceiling and the photographing of the ship. In works like these, Gray moves beyond celebrity adoration to examine the veneration of other false gods—commerce, wealth, power—exploring the enduring nature and consequences of such idolatry across centuries.

While Angels Gaze also showcases Gray’s use of formal compositional techniques. The curving ovals and circles the artist employs in this body of work disrupt his consistently rectangular format, creating portals through time that bridge the far past and the present. Throughout the series, Gray creates a sense of visual reverb—body gestures are mirrored from one figure to the next in works like Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos) (2024), architectural shapes blend across images in Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia (2024), and color palettes echo across compositions, from the gold-ground mosaics of St. Marc’s Basilica in Venice to the glittering sequins of Michael Jackson’s shirt in Glitter ’n Gold, 2(St. Marks) (2024).

Although Gray’s scenes are overlaid and juxtaposed, his work is never meant to be dissected—rather, each image can be thought of as a discrete stanza that composes a poem of completed work, reflecting his deeply intuitive process. In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature. Throughout While Angels Gaze, Gray invites us to ask not only who we are, but who we have been—and how much, if at all, this has changed over the course of millennia.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

Older Entries Newer Entries

Delaware Art Shows- “Take A Seat” at The Delaware Contemporary

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Matthew Stone at The Hole

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Saya Woolfalk at Susan Inglett Gallery

Flashback Friday- South Carolina Art Events- ArtFields in Lake City

NYC Art Shows- Sharon Core at Yancey Richardson

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at Gladstone Gallery

NYC Art Shows- Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth

NYC Art Shows- Robert Indiana at Kasmin

NYC Art Shows- “The Writing’s on the Wall” at Hill Art Foundation, Curated by Hilton Als

NYC Art Shows- Todd Gray at Lehmann Maupin