NYC Art Shows- Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 262024
 

The sculptures in the Charles Ray’s exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, are impressive in their construction and scale. Having just three in the large open gallery space also allows you to contemplate the works individually and without distraction.

From the gallery about the works-

Everyone takes off their pants at least once a day (2024) is a 9-foot-tall sculpture of a woman dressing. The sculpture is constructed from handmade paper and is based on a full-scale model originally made in clay. Merging the contemporary and the classical, the work builds upon ancient traditions of statuary.

Two dead guys (2023) is carved from three solid blocks of Italian marble, one for each figure and a third for the base. It depicts two naked men, just larger than life-size, laying side by side on a rectangular plinth. In some places the smooth surface of their skin presents an eerie perfection, while others reveal their inherently flawed corporeality. As Ray describes, “the finality of death is a window for the viewer to contemplate the mysteries and the inexplicable nature of our existence. Does the spark of our aliveness, the health of our bodies, come from the same fire today as it did for the ancients?”

8FLU100 (2024) is a twenty-four-inch-long paper sculpture of a crashed car. The title refers to the car’s license plate. To make the sculpture, sheets of Japanese paper have been meticulously cut into hundreds of pieces. Each piece is scored and folded, and then assembled by hand to precisely recreate the vehicle. As Ray has written about his paper sculptures, “The work’s fragility and close to zero weight is emergent from drawings. This sculpture is a drawing but drawn with space and time.”

This exhibition closes 6/29/24.

NYC Art Shows- Eva Struble at Jane Lombard Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 222024
 

Eva Struble has created gorgeous worlds for her exhibition Gravity of Small Things at Jane Lombard Gallery. The paintings shift from abstract to realistic and back again as bits of the natural landscapes emerge.

From the press release-

Through painting and textile, Struble explores the concept of embodiment in the landscape, relating the physical act of making to her multi-sensory and visionary experience of place. Contemplating the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature, the works collectively take into consideration our changing environment.

Struble’s paintings distill her physical experience of nature – the sharp touch of Yucca on her local hikes, the early morning smell of the Chaparral, or the disorientation of floating above seagrass in the ocean. Orchestrating a suite of visual constructs, the artist oscillates between chance and control while experimenting with pigments, media, layering, and collaging. Her work suggests a reflective yet speculative vision teeming with biodiversity and notions of cohabitation between species without interference.

The eponymous painting Gravity of Small Things effortlessly blends hazy nostalgia with honest representation and creative world-building. Sharp and soft edges intermingle in shallow focus as the viewer moves through silhouetted trees and gradient purple obstructions flecked with blue and red confetti-like marks. The landscape is at once familiar and remote, existing outside of conventional constructs of time and space. Recognizable elements break up the variegated ecosystem, playing with our perception to reveal effects similar to sunlight illuminating the changing leaves or the sparkle of reflections dancing on the surface of the water.

Snapshots of landscapes morph into organic forms as Struble reconciles her visual and corporeal memories of nature with her own body’s shapes, twists, and turns. In Malajon, layered washes of vibrant greens, blues, and pinks blend together to create a dynamic composition of varying depths, engaging our collective visual memory to suggest the ethereal entrance to an untouched cave, or perhaps a quiet adventure amidst jungle flora. As deliberate as it is exploratory, the artist’s otherworldly painterly manipulation gradually gives way to lend a semblance of reality to the abstracted composition. Drawing upon the viewer’s own experiences to evoke imaginative reflection, Struble’s works straddle the line between the human and natural worlds, simultaneously pushing and pulling to suggest alternative ways of coexisting.

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

NYC Art Shows- Jennifer Coates at Chart and High Noon Galleries

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 222024
 

Taking place at both High Noon Gallery and Chart Gallery is Jennifer Coates’s exhibition Edge Effects. The paintings are dense with imagery that requires the viewer to take a longer look.

From the press release-

Edge Effects is an ecological term that refers to the sometimes problematic changes in biodiversity where different habitats converge. These transitional zones are called ecotones: animal/vegetable environments in flux, like ditches, forest edges, marshes and grasslands. The ecotone provides a metaphorical through line for Coates’s current paintings, in which micro-climates of imagery collide. Zones of color, marks, and depicted elements aggregate and are collaged together, creating a hybrid sense of place.

Coates uses acrylic and spray paint—synthetic chemicals—to represent the landscape, emphasizing the toxicity that now runs through most organisms. Despite this pervasive chemical presence, her paintings present an ecofeminist belief in the possibility of restoring the self through hyper connection with nature.

At the edges of shapes, halos and heightened optical effects take the viewer in and out of spatial logic. She repeatedly depicts plants that flourish in poor soil, found at edges between cultivation and wildness. These ditch weeds are ubiquitous in rural Pennsylvania where Coates works in the summer. Painting them has become a way to reconcile with invasive plant species. She anchors archetypes such as Diana, Pan, Dionysus, and the Maenads to the woodlands where she has spent much of her life, incorporating local wildlife like common birds and butterflies. The butterflies, for example, pollinate as well as “puddle”—a behavior that extracts minerals from mud, carrion, blood, and sometimes tears, signaling the edge between vitality and rot. In Coates’s paintings they also feed on the remains of Classical sculpture.

Portals appear as entrances to bunkers, caves, ruins, and passage tombs. Rocks are a new pictorial element for Coates that provide a further engagement with the materiality of paint. Structures and imagery are built up and broken down through her painterly process and go in and out of presence, at the edge of sense.

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

NYC Art Shows- Dylan Vandenhoeck at Jack Barrett Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 212024
 

“Along the Army Corps Floodwall in Ardsley in Autumn”, 2023-4, Oil on linen

“Along the Army Corps Floodwall in Ardsley in Autumn” (closer)

“NYSC by the Saw Mill River in Winter”, 2024 Oil on linen

“Setting Sun with Entopitc Phenomena During the Canadian Wildfires in Sean’s Subaru”, 2023-4, Oil on colored linen

“LA Fitness in Ridge Hill by the Sprain Brooke in Summer”, 2023-4, Oil on linen

“LA Fitness in Ridge Hill by the Sprain Brooke in Summer” (closer)

Depicting various locations during different seasons, Dylan Vandenhoeck’s paintings for Right Under the Nose at Jack Barrett Gallery, explore the way selective vision creates and distorts our memories of moments and places.

From the press release by Jonathan Crary-

One of the important features of the Western European modern world that begins to emerge in the decades around the year 1500 is a reorganization of the human senses. Taking place over several hundred years is a relentless prioritization of vision and its isolation from the other senses. What some theorists have called “ocularcentrism” is this privileging of the eye and its alignment with rationalized forms of knowledge that distance a human observer from the physical world and estrange them from the multi-sensory immediacy of perception. Since the Renaissance, the arts have been shaped by practices and techniques that have posed the fiction that our vision is a faithful mirroring of an objective external reality. This model has been a crucial underpinning for the rationalized forms of knowledge and utilitarian, extractive priorities of Western modernity. But there have long been artists whose counter-practices have challenged this dominant framework, including, for instance, Hans Holbein and his Ambassadors, William Blake, J M W Turner, Roberto Matta and Stan Brakhage. 

Dylan Vandenhoeck is part of this lineage for the ways in which his work foregrounds the embodied, or subjective nature of our vision. One of many examples of embodied vision is the fact that our optical impressions are shaped by the actual curvature of our spherical eyeballs. Yet the most pervasive systems of visual representation, such as linear perspective, have “corrected” this phenomenon by imposing rectilinear organizations onto perceptual experience. Another feature of lived vision to which Vandenhoeck is attentive are afterimages, the response of our eyes (as part of our nervous system) to  strong stimulation of various kinds, but notably sunlight. Afterimages are vivid evidence of how our vision is a composite of sensations produced by our body and of the diverse effects of the luminous environment in which we are situated. His paintings present this hybridity as a heterogenous field of divergent events with different temporalities, but which nonetheless coalesce into the dynamic world of immediate experience. Using the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, Vandenhoeck creates a smooth space as opposed to a striated one, that is, non-metric, de-centered and open to metamorphoses. 

Around the Mound, for example, manifests some of these qualities in its disturbance of conventional spatial cues, such as altering our reading of what is near and far. It affirms an aggregate field of vision composed of perceptual fragments that don’t cohere into a unified whole. But notably, while Vandenhoeck has crafted a landscape shaped by these disjunctions, he has also interwoven into the work swirling and pulsating flows that engage the viewer kinesthetically. Part of his project is to challenge the ways in which our attentiveness has been regulated and impoverished by the digital milieus in which we are perpetually immersed. The monotonous omnipresence of electroluminescent color and powerful forms of perceptual control, such as eye tracking, have routinized and diminished our visual capacities.  Vandenhoeck conveys intimations of the sensory and libidinal gratifications of a heightened bodily response to the vibrant plurality of a living world. In this sense, there is at least a limited utopian underpinning to the images in this show. Yet if one dimension of his work poses the possibility of revivifying our perception, he makes clear that this can only occur within the broken actualities of the early twenty-first century. His revelatory images are all grounded in the prosaic periphery of New York City, marked by highways, shopping malls, and cell phone towers. Thus, one of Vandenhoeck’s remarkable achievements is the reclaiming of an expanded, transfigured vision amid the familiar terrain of the everyday. 

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

 

NYC Art Shows- Anne Rothenstein at Stephen Friedman Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 212024
 

Anne Rothenstein’s beautiful and mysterious paintings are on view at Stephen Friedman Gallery until 6/22/24.

From the gallery’s press release-

Rothenstein’s dreamlike paintings depict expansive landscapes and intimate interiors drawn from memory, personal experiences, and found material from newspapers and magazines. Whether depicting androgynous figures or melancholic landscapes, Rothenstein’s works blur the lines of identity and narrative, inviting observers to immerse themselves in the ambiguity of her creations. Curator and writer Simon Grant aptly describes the experience of viewing Rothenstein’s paintings, “Looking at these paintings can feel as if we have joined a drama that has been unfolding but of which we may have missed the crucial part.”

Rothenstein’s figures are deliberately ambiguous, conjuring introspection and contemplation. While the subdued and pensive demeanor of her characters might convey solitude, they exude a presence that transcends this. In Three Figures (2023), the artist provides a glimpse into the inherent isolation experienced by human beings within a social context. Positioned on the far left, a figure is wearing a reconfigured tuxedo dress, which obscures defined gender and identity. This attire, also observed in Seated Figure and Thinking about Billy Porter (both 2024), serves as a nod to fashion as a form of political expression, drawing inspiration from actor Billy Porter’s ensemble at the 2019 Oscars ceremony. At once, these figures point to new horizons in gender politics while echoing the longstanding tradition of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century portraiture, reminiscent of artists such as Edouard Vuillard and Edvard Munch.

The power behind these works is further evident in the artist’s application of paint, and her distinctive use of color. Throughout the exhibition, burgundy red tones, pale greens, and nostalgic blues emerge and recede to reveal depth and movement. The color palette pays homage to colorists who inspire Rothenstein: Howard Hodgkin, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Gwen John. In works like Shadow and Heat (both from 2023), the artist rendered two iterations of the same composition. The subtle variations between them evoke the notion of distorted memories resurfacing in our minds. Here, a lone figure and a dog traverse a burning landscape, reflecting concerns about climate change and devastating wildfires. This further evidences how global events influence Rothenstein’s practice: “However much I try to keep the outside world at a distance it always insists on creeping in and often steers the direction the work is taking”.

In her exploration of scale and texture for her New York debut, Rothenstein oscillates between canvas and panel for the first time, introducing a contrast to her signature wood panels. This shift enables the artist to delve deeper into her creative process and further enhance the immersive quality of her work. Through a combination of bold brushstrokes and nuanced color variations, Rothenstein achieves a striking visual harmony, where figures emerge from the surrounding space with a haunting presence. Speaking of Rothenstein’s work, art critic and curator Katy Hessel writes, “When I look at your works, their solitariness comforts me. It’s rare that you see solitude as a happy thing.”

Also on the gallery’s website are the quotes below from Rothenstein that provide additional background on her process-

Speaking of her artistic process, Rothenstein says, “My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting, and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive. Finding a rhythm, searching for balance, alert to missteps, to what is happening, to changes of direction.

I am telling myself a story much of the time and asking questions. Who is this, where is this place, what is going on? This is what I think of as the noise of a painting. And of course, what I am trying to reach is the silence … There is a wonderful Philip Guston quote: “if you’re really painting YOU walk out.” That is what I mean by reaching the silence.”

NYC Art Shows- Martha Friedman at Broadway Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 212024
 

“Claw Foot”, 2024, steel, glass, rubber

“Throughline”, 2024, steel, glass

“Twofold”, 2024, steel, rubber

“Tail End”, 2024, steel, glass, concrete

“Slipper”, 2024, concrete, glass, human hair

There’s something very visceral about Martha Friedman’s sculptures for Divided Subject at Broadway Gallery. The body parts, the strange juxtapositions, and the metal rods which act like skewers, combine to form works that balance humor with something darker and aggressive.

From the gallery-

The Lacanian reference of the show’s title is a tip-off that the artist will continue her ongoing psychoanalysis of Modernist sculpture traditions. Wielding humor and violence in equal measure, Friedman homes in on art historical givens with a critical eye.

A series of monumental steel skewers form the spines of these loosely figural works. Slotted with outsized hunks of meat and sliced vegetables cast in glass, and cast-rubber body parts made from molds of her muscular dancer muse Silas Reiner, Friedman marshals our collective appetites in a sendup of Minimalism. By reanimating and anthropomorphizing modes of staid Formalism, the sculptures disrupt accepted meaning and expectation via processes that are as complex and precise as they are absurdly grotesque.

Elsewhere, in some smaller works, we see cast cement limbs coated in luxuriant graphite and fitted with found footwear and exotic cast-glass foods such as geoduck clams, like a Robert Gober at the farmer’s market. These pieces are sometimes situated on artist-designed stands evoking anthropological museum display and engineered to accommodate their weight and precarious balance.

As a whole, the complex variety of materials and technique, as well as dramatic shifts in scale across the exhibition, destabilize the viewer placing them at a crossroads of technical precision and the bluntly visceral. Just as the sculpted figure in art history is a metaphorical container for meaning, Friedman’s pierced flesh reminds us that the body itself is, in fact, held fast by a delicate, porous membrane.

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

NYC Art Shows- Holly Coulis at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 202024
 

Holly Coulis’s latest colorful paintings for Rubber Band at Klaus con Nichtssagend have a wonderful energy to them, encouraging the eye to move along the various shifting lines.

From the press release-

Outlines serve as unreliable guides in Coulis’s new work. Here, long, colorfully painted strokes adopt a cursive quality, departing from the still life representations they have previously delineated. Squiggles and loops press against each other, moving mischievously through broader fields of layered chromatic brushstrokes. At times, these lines rush like rivulets across the canvas, while elsewhere they form an array of dynamically curving shapes within confined areas. The lines prove unpredictable, veering around hairpin curves and playfully wobbling after crafting graceful arcs. Following their trajectory leads us on detours that challenge our initial perceptions. Glimpses of familiar silhouettes—vases, bowls, fruits—vanish as swiftly as they materialize, as if the line refuses to complete the thought, instead eagerly moving on to the next loop, curl, or helix.

This exhibition is on view until 6/22/24.

 

NYC Art Shows- Aaron Zulpo at 1969 Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 132024
 

Aaron Zulpo has captured the beauty and quiet of the desert in his enchanting paintings for California Deserts at 1969 Gallery.

From the gallery-

Following his relocation to California, Zulpo’s interest in landscape painting has expanded and become a pivotal aspect of his studio practice. This change has inspired a new series of sensitively observed landscape paintings of the American West. He begins his work in plein air during exploratory hikes through rugged desert terrain. Zulpo’s connection to the land imbues his paintings with a sense of reverence.

In California Deserts, the artist presents a series of recent paintings whose subjects range from the canyons of the Santa Ana Mountains, to the peaks of Mount San Jacinto, to the boulders and century-old Yuccas of Joshua Tree National Park. Zulpo captures the changing atmospheric and lighting conditions of the desert sky, as exemplified in works such as Quail Mountain Dust Storm and Joshua Tree with a Red Sky, bathed in golden, peach, and auburn tones that evoke the allure of the desert at sunset. Other paintings, such as Looking at Maze Loop from Quail Springs, highlight the uniquely expressive quality of cloudforms, which appear, at times, to mirror the craggy rocks below.

Drawing inspiration from early twentieth-century landscape painters, such as Rockwell Kent and the Canadian Group of Seven, Zulpo presents a serious and sustained engagement with the natural world. At the same time, he brings a twenty-first century environmental consciousness to the landscape tradition, calling attention to the inherent virtue and beauty of wild spaces and the need to preserve them.

In 2017, Aaron Zulpo and Johnny DeFeo co-founded The Guild of Adventure Painters. This non-profit organization aims to keep nature at the forefront of the arts by offering residency programs, community building initiatives, exhibitions and public events. Since its inception, The Guild of Adventure Painters has been dedicated to inspiring artists to immerse themselves in the outdoors, cultivating a deeper connection with nature and playing a vital role in its preservation.

This exhibition closes 6/15/24.

NYC Art Shows- Ming Smith at Nicola Vassell

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Jun 132024
 

For the exhibition  Ming Smith: On the Road at Nicola Vassell, a variety of work from the artist’s impressive career is on display throughout the space.

From the gallery-

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Ming Smith: On the Road, a selection of photographs from the artist’s archive that encapsulates the arc of her exploratory impulses as she sought and probed new subject matter and formal innovation from 1970 through 1993. Encompassing never-before-seen vintage and contemporary prints of images captured during her travels around the world, On the Road embodies the spirit of adventure and curiosity that advanced Smith’s singular entry into, and scrutiny of, the provinces of urban existence, nature’s quietude, family intimacy, popular culture, military life, and jazz milieus.

In the 1970s in New York, Smith’s practice was propelled by inquiry—both through her immersion in the Kamoinge Workshop and her preoccupation with the ideas of prominent twentieth-century American and European photographers. Cultivating her own radical sensibility in early experiments, she alluded to the virtuosity of Brassaï, Roy DeCarava, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank. These artists set a tempo upon which Smith developed her own dexterity in portraiture, landscape, and street photography—highly attuned to the textures, geometries, and thrums pulsing through every spectrum of life. She recognized the haunting allure of an oil-slicked roadside and the liquid lightning of brass instruments in musicians’ animated hands.

Smith listens through her camera, sensitive to the harmony and dissonance that enliven her subjects and surroundings. At times, it is easy to forget that she works in a static medium, since each photograph transports its viewer into the energetic nucleus of the moment she captures. Through paint application, double exposure, and low shutter speed, Smith pushes photography’s form to the point of its brim and break. Like harnessing a memory, Smith underlines the evanescent—at once vivid and obscure.

This exhibition closes 6/15/24.

NYC Art Shows- Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jun 132024
 

Lucas Arruda’s paintings for Assum Preto at David Zwirner capture moments in time that beckon you to look closer. On his Instagram is a photo of Agnes Varda with a quote that reads “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes”. Standing in front of these paintings allows the viewer to contemplate Arruda’s inner landscapes as well as their own.

From the gallery-

“Assum Preto” continues Arruda’s investigations into the painted medium and its ability to serve as an evocative and transcendental conduit for the unveiling of light, memory, and emotion. The exhibition is titled after a species of blackbird native to eastern Brazil—whose mundane birdsong, according to local tradition, is said to transform into a beautiful melody if the bird’s eyesight has been shaded. As the artist explains: “It’s as if, when the bird has everything in sight, and is full of information and distractions, it can’t organize itself. Only when it’s no longer surrounded by images, can it organize everything in its head. In a certain way, I think this has to do with light.… For me, light is related to remembering.” In the works on view, light takes on a multitude of forms, surfacing in various physical, ideographical, and affective manifestations.

The exhibition is primarily composed of new paintings from Arruda’s established body of seascapes, junglescapes, and abstract monochromes; together, these works bring about a complex understanding of landscape as a product of a state of mind rather than a depiction of reality. The works on view are notable for their fogged colors—exploring subtle but intricate variations within a single hue—that range from dense reds to ethereal and almost intangible veils of white. For the monochromes, Arruda adds layer upon layer of pigment to pre-dyed raw canvas in an attempt to replicate its tinted hue in paint, methodically returning to each work for weeks or even months on end until the composition slowly builds into a hazy and ever-shifting wall of light.



The seascapes and junglescapes, on the other hand, are made on prepared surfaces using a reductive process whereby the impression of light is attained through the subtraction of pigment. Devoid of specific reference points, Arruda’s seascapes are all grounded only by their thin horizon lines. Above and below this border, charged atmospheric conditions engage further dichotomies between sky and earth, the nebulous and the solid, the psychic and the visual. The jungles, by contrast, dwell in verticality; their genesis lies in the artist’s formative memories of the verdant foliage outside his bedroom window. For Arruda, the quasi-mythical scenery of the Brazilian rainforest coaxes out tensions between reality and human imagination. Towering and impenetrable, yet containing a sense of the infinite that surpasses its physical bounds, in Arruda’s work the jungle becomes a site of power and enlightenment as much as it is a harbinger of darkness and uncertainty—a place where one can be lost to the world and find themselves again.

As curator Lilian Tone writes: “[Arruda’s] paintings suggest a tenuous, fugitive, and mediated relation to nature as that which informs an aesthetic language. As viewers, we tend to make sense of the slightest mark within an open field, to immediately perceive a horizontal line as a horizon line, to create clouds from a change in direction of brushstrokes, and to perceive ground from a thick impasto. Arruda makes paintings we experience as at once beyond abstraction and yet before representation.”



In “Assum Preto”, Arruda debuts a group of small-scale, semi-abstract paintings that are constructed from a lexicon of symbolist motifs, marking a new turn in the artist’s practice while also harking back to the planar and architectonic forms that characterize his early oeuvre. In these works, he takes visual cues from the geometries and rich colorscapes found in the Brazilian modernist paintings of José Pancetti (1902–1958), Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), and Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995). Arruda handles his brush lightly but with intense control, creating clouds and thickets of markings that delicately carve through the painted surface of the canvas in a manner recalling the textures and physicality of intaglio printmaking processes. Potent and open-ended, the symbols and motifs that populate these compositions—darkly brewing storms, empty canoes, and strings of outdoor lights—visualize the themes that permeate Arruda’s body of paintings, including the artist’s own dreams, experiences, and intuitions, through the lens of the sacred and the surreal. The images shift in and out of focus, as if hovering at the precipice of memory itself.

Additionally featured is an example of Arruda’s site-specific light installations. These works comprise a pair of vertically balanced rectangles rendered directly on the gallery wall—the top one created through a light projection and the bottom one physically applied with paint—thus translating the genre of landscape into its most elemental form.

This exhibition closes 6/15/24.

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