Sculptors / Sculpture – Page 9

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- Lyne Lapointe at Jack Shainman Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 082025

“Hemisphere”, 2024, Wood, ink on paper, hemp, linen, glass beads and frame by the artist

“Corps Astral/ Astral Body”, 2024, Ink, gold leaf, and paper on wood in an artist frame

“In Vitro”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, linen, and blown glass eggs mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

“Okinawa”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, coral, and sand stars mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

Lyne Lapointe’s works for Becoming Animal, her exhibition of new work at Jack Shainman Gallery, natural and hand made materials add dimension to works focused on the body and its connection to the natural world.

From the gallery-

Inspired by a passage in A Thousand Plateaus, written by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the exhibition title recalls the attitude they describe as being essential to the creative process: ‘becoming animal,’ or, an ability to inhabit different material and ontological perspectives. This phrase philosophically expresses a consistent quality in Lapointe’s work, namely her ability to ‘embody’ her materials—whether it be ink or glass beads, coral or abandoned beehives—by allowing them to retain their own specificity while also fully incorporating them into the pictorial spaces of her figures. Just as Lapointe’s materials contribute to the transformation of her figures, so too do they undergo their own metamorphosis as they are integrated into the compositions, a process that reflects the body’s capacity to adapt and change while still retaining continuity with the past.

Over the past four decades Lapointe has created poetic and materially complex works that consider the corporeal and psychological consequences of existing in a world of uncertainty. Her site-specific installations and architectural interventions created throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in partnership with critic and artist Martha Fleming, established many of these essential thematic concerns. At their core was the role that social spaces play in creating and modifying subjectivity, an experience Lapointe has continued to dissect and explore through other media, including the paintings on paper in this exhibition. Together, they demonstrate her consistent focus on the body and its relationship to external factors, whether they be socially constructed or naturally occurring.

Through research, careful sourcing and sustainable practices, Lapointe has expanded her process to include heterogeneous materials and found objects alike. In Beehives Apiarists (2024), the diptych’s beehives have been affixed to the figures while propolis—a resin-like substance produced by bees and typically used for medicinal purposes—has been used to cover the works entirely. In Mother of Pearl (2024), a large shell has been placed at the center of the figure while pearls punctuate the background. In Vitro (2024) brings together blown glass eggshells, hemp and recycled linens. Lapointe’s method of collecting these items, locating additional materials and preserving their respective histories is a process that metaphorically expresses her long-standing desire to use resources that not only describe our world, but that remind us of its innate worth and beauty and thus of our own as well.

By incorporating objects found in nature and the home, Lapointe creates moments that reimagine the body and place it in a point of transition. At times between genders, while at others void of identity altogether, her figures always question the viability of personal expression in our current socio-political context. Though typically characterized by vulnerability and fragility, they also and just as often embody a position of triumphant resistance to a world that seeks to restrict gender expression, categorize sexuality and stigmatize ‘otherness.’ When responding to a world of danger and hostility her figures can don protective armor, as in Black Billed Cuckoo / Magnolia Grandiflora (2023) and Okinawa (2024). In the series The Head and the Body (2024) Lapointe renders each figure in both deep black ink and shimmering gold leaf, suggesting an inner psychological world that the materials merely hint at. This is a world where resilience and radiance take form as proffered by the gold leaf, while tenacity, seen in the deep opacity and outward reaching gesture of the inked figure, takes root.

Though Lapointe’s practice has often centered femininity and womanhood in its many personal and social forms, in Becoming Animal she has gone one step further by creating figures that appear genderless, or which seem to exist outside of such rigid codification entirely. The found objects she uses to characterize these anonymous forms also signify their environmental context and invite viewers to consider the works through the lens of environmentalism. By encouraging each figure to occupy multiple ontological perspectives at once, Lapointe creates both a literal and conceptual connection to the construction of the works themselves. They straddle the line between painting, sculpture and collage, while finding ways to express the body in a fugue state through her singular craftsmanship and mastery of materials—or as Deleuze and Guattari write, they seek to ‘un-human the human.’

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.

NYC Art Shows- Nathalia Edenmont at Nancy Hoffman

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

Mar 202025

For Nathalia Edenmont‘s exhibition Out of Body at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, she explores the symbolism of the egg through photography and sculpture.

From the gallery-

While she is known for her portraits of women wearing dresses she composes of flowers or fruits and vegetables, as well as for her collages of butterfly wings that she magnifies into monumental photographic compositions, she was ready to take a leap into unknown territory inspired by her personal connection to the beguiling goose eggs.

In 2012 the artist acquired a collection of unfertilized goose eggs. When Edenmont was told she was infertile and incapable of bearing a child, she rediscovered these beautiful objects, and realized they were a metaphor for her life, and that she could transform them, turning them into evocative, mysterious sculptural forms she could photograph as subject and object. Mostly white against a stark black background, the eggs are also black, and turquoise and red, each having a character of its own. Her magnum opus sculpture, Out of a Fertile Summer Sun, is an egg within an egg, the larger egg cracked open to reveal a smaller one, bringing to mind images of the Madonna and child throughout art history.

Jean Wainwright writes about Edenmont’s eggs:

“Edenmont’s eggs are different, they are deeply imbued with her feminine experiences, of being a woman unable to bring to life a child and it is in the process of her ‘cracking’ that we unravel the significance of these haunting photographs. Having rediscovered her shells she stored, she set to work to find a new way of engaging with her own life force, bringing new life and creative energy to the empty shells. Now colour is drained from her photographs and the process of working with fragility and delicacy lies in the power of Edenmont’s hand. She moves her fingers and palm around the white goose egg shells in a circular motion as one might caress a womb carrying a child, but then she presses with her fingers and thumb in order to crack the shell exerting different pressures to create the different depths and (amounts of) cracks. Her working method is totally immersive, intense, and time-consuming using trial and error. Many of the experiments do not work; the formation of the cracks and the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. Nonetheless, she persevered trying again and again – tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a previous few to photograph and losing around two hundred egg shells in the process. Each haunting photograph of the egg shell seems suspended in an infinite black universe, a potent evocation of life and loss.”

Edenmont was born in Yalta, and moved to Sweden by the time she was 20, realizing that life in the Soviet Union was disintegrating and held no future for her. Sweden was a country to which she could easily get a visa, being alone in the world after the age of 14, when both her parents died and she had no other relatives. At 27, she was accepted to Forsberg Skola, to study graphic design, where an artist mentor encouraged her to visualize her inner pictures and try to capture them with the camera. It is thanks to Per Hüttner that Nathalia is the photo-based artist she is today.

All of her work derives from her life experience. She says: “I only look inside my head. What I see in my mind is what I create. I do not sketch; the image is complete and sharp within me. I have absolute control over all aspects of what I do.” She uses a large format Sinar camera with 8×10 film and many lenses.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

NYC Art Shows- En Iwamura at Ross + Kramer

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 192025

Currently at Ross + Kramer is En Iwamura’s Mask, an exhibition of his recent ceramic sculptures. The works combine his exploration of masks with the playfulness of children’s toys.

From the press release-

This latest body of work references the cultural and symbolic significance of the mask. As a child growing up in Osaka, the artist recalls being enamored by the global mask display at the city’s National Museum of Ethnology, showcasing masks from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In creating these works, Iwamura drew from the deep sense of mystery that he felt upon viewing the museum’s collection and his curiosity about their origins and variety. While recognizing the historical significance of the mask as a tool for religious, artistic, or ritualistic expression, this body of work reflects on their importance in our contemporary, post-pandemic world.

A driving force behind this collection of work is a reconnection to child-like senses of curiosity, wonderment, and creativity. In addition to Iwamura’s Mask series, the exhibition includes works from the artist’s “Neo Jomon: Stacking Neighbor” series. This series was born from observing his son getting to know the world through play. Much like stacked toys, these ceramic sculptures consist of two parts that fit together in dynamic ways to create a whole. This body of work, with its diverse array of shapes, colors, and expressions, retains the distinct vibrancy of glaze, softness of form, and coarseness of texture for which the artist is best known. To achieve these intricate surfaces, the artist allows his hand-built forms to air dry slightly before drawing various tools across the surface of the clay. The resulting rake-like patterns recall Buddhist Zen gardens as well as the cord-marked pottery that characterizes Jōmon culture (10,500 BCE to 300 BCE). While serving as a meditation on parenthood, this series is also an encouragement to reunite with one’s inner child.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 182025

Robert Grosvenor’s sculptures and photographs on view at Paula Cooper Gallery capture your attention with their familiarity, but on closer inspection their strangeness becomes apparent.

From the press release-

I’ve got this hobby, making things: boats and cars. Until recently I’ve always kept them at a recreational level, just having fun.

– Robert Grosvenor

An exhibition of recent sculpture and photography by Robert Grosvenor will survey his prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery. Since the 1980s, Grosvenor has applied his subtly elusive formal vocabulary to the vernacular of American car culture by transforming obsolete vehicles into inoperable sculptures. A series of exhibitions of uncannily altered vehicles isolated in striking or purpose-built spaces have frequently enshrined these works. Here, numerous sculptures are gathered under one roof in a lively installation that enhances their individual narrative qualities.

In the main room, a reflective deep purple sculpture is flanked with a vibrant green form on one side and a heavily rusted object on the other. Each work is a found object, perfected through small adjustments that enhance its existing form. The purple sculpture (Untitled, 2023) has no windshield and its headlights have been sprayed matt black, but it otherwise looks like it could be spurred into action. The green sculpture (Untitled, 2022) is smooth and pure, rocket-like, inanimately still. The rusted work (Untitled, 2022) was already romantically sculptural, the wooden planks of the truck bed aging like driftwood and its patina warm with wear. The machine still bears the name of its maker on its back, but the roof has been lowered to remove it completely from the realm of functionality. Arranged in a triangular formation facing the street with other smaller works surrounding them, the vehicles recall the gallery’s previous incarnation as a parking garage.

The front gallery contains a nautical sculpture (Untitled, 2023) stripped of its operative apparatus and leaning to one side. Painted in white and vibrant turquoise to accentuate its curves and points, the work is both familiar and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness. On the surrounding walls are photographs of unlikely objects pictured against blue skies and green lagoons, complementing the sculpture in theme and tone. Some images depict vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. Animated with humor and vivid color, the photographs depict a compelling alternate reality.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

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