NYC Art Shows- Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori at Karma

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 112025
 

“King Alfred’s Country”, 2006. Acrylic on linen

“Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater”, 2005. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2006. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2010. Acrylic on linen

The expressive paintings pictured above, currently on view at Karma, are by the late Aboriginal Australian artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori who began painting in 2005, at eighty-one years old. Learning that her paintings are focused on the land she was forcibly relocated from adds an extra layer of poignancy to the work.

From the gallery-

The Kaiadilt artist’s original, nonrepresentational iconography, based on interlocking shapes, passages of pure color, and visible brushstrokes, depicts her primary subject, Bentinck Island, in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, using the language of abstraction. Gestural marks trace the path of rivers; milky white forms indicate the incursion of cyclones; diagrammatic structures map the patterns left on the ocean floor by dugong grazing on seagrass. Rendered from memories of a home she was forced to leave, Gabori’s paintings are, in her words, “about a story place way out to sea.”

Gabori began painting in 2005 around the age of eighty-one. While she started small, working horizontally on a tabletop, the artist soon began using wall-mounted surfaces as large as nineteen-feet wide, moving her body across her compositions as she applied acrylic straight out of the tube and mixed wet on wet directly on her canvases. The resulting paintings, which she made in the last decade of her life, often focused on six significant locations, or Countries, as the Kaiadilt refer to them, on Bentinck: Mirdidingki, Dibirdibi, Dingkari, Makarrki, Thundi, and Nyinyilki. To make these works, Gabori drew on recollections of the island’s topography: its saltpans, reefs, and mangrove swamps; the freshwater pond where she collected waterlilies; the various rivers that run alongside where she, her father, and her husband were born. In 1948, Gabori and the rest of Bentinck’s population were forcibly relocated by Christian missionaries to the nearby Mornington Island. There, parents were separated from their children and the Kaiadilt people were forbidden from speaking their language. Gabori spent the rest of her life on Mornington, only able to visit Bentinck temporarily after the passage of Australian laws that restored Kaiadilt access to the land in 1994.

Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater (2005), one of the earliest works in this exhibition, visualizes Dibirdibi Country, the area of Bentinck associated with her husband Pat through the Kaiadilt system of naming people after places, as well as the Rock Cod, a being that, according to Kaiadilt cosmology, created the island. Concentric, ovoid rings of unmixed color radiate out from a central mass like the ripples of freshwater that flow into the island’s estuaries. The nearly neon Dingkarri (2006) associatively maps the contours of an islet that was an important fishing ground for the Kaiadilt community. Rather than a literal depiction of the Country’s appearance, Dingkarri is instead a pictorial manifestation of tides in flux: by mixing acrylics on the canvas itself, Gabori created morphing color fields that suggest movement.

Though developed autonomously from Western art history, Gabori’s painterly syntax nonetheless evokes the oeuvres of the American Abstract Expressionists. Evidence of Gabori’s hand is everywhere in My Country (2009), which celebrates Mirdidingki, her birthplace. Working rapidly, she brushed together magenta and white to create a variegated field that morphs as it stretches across the vertical canvas. Close looking reveals a subterranean wash of yellow acrylic peeking through from behind Gabori’s urgent brushstrokes, complicating what at first appears duochromatic. Her jagged, brushy edges and embrace of unadulterated black call to mind Clyfford Still; her arcing, interlocking forms provoke comparison with Amy Sillman. The gestural Didirbidi Country (2010) reads as an exploration of the relations between shapes that abut each other, creating craggy borderlands at their intersections. Beyond its formalism, the work is a recollection of the stone fishing trap walls maintained by Kaiadilt women that branch off of Bentinck’s coastline. In addition to specific cultural meanings and associations encoded in paint, the works convey an affective charge that transcends geography, temporality, and identity.  Refracted through memory and mediated by dispossession, Gabori’s paintings are a living archive of a homeland.

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- Catherine Goodman at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 102025
 

“Pahari Picnic”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Abe”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Lago”, 2024, Oil on linen

The paintings in Catherine Goodman‘s Silent Music, her current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, are filled with energetic brushstrokes and bright colors have the eye moving all around the canvas. Although abstract, it’s the hint of recognizable forms that encourage a more contemplative look.

From the gallery-

Opening in January, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ presents a series of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist, where her characteristically expressive brushwork yields animated surfaces that pulse with the dynamic energy of their making. For Goodman, the studio is a place of spiritual meditation. Each painting represents an act of intimate transmutation—a way for her to turn closely held memories and personal vulnerabilities into newfound stability.

As the artist trustee at the National Gallery in London, Goodman has spent hours drawing from the collection and has developed a particular affinity for Old Master paintings, which she describes as her ‘only real teacher.’ Inspired by the intensity and drama of Renaissance masterworks by artists such as Titian and Veronese, and influenced by the poignantly psychological work of such groups as the London School, Goodman’s highly personal paintings transcend her individual experience, opening outward and inviting us in.

For decades Goodman has maintained a daily practice of drawing from observation. Through this she has constructed charged pathways between the physical world she observes and her own inner landscape. In these most recent abstractions, she often begins from landscapes and portraits that hold meaning for her. She then obscures these figurative grounds, building up evocative and densely layered compositions that invite sustained attention. ‘Lago’ (2024), a whirlwind of crimson, cobalt and lush green is one of many works named for a meaningful location or loved one whose spirit they embody. Other compositions, like the exuberant ‘Pahari Picnic’ (2024) or ‘Echo’ (2024)—monumental in scale and bursting with energy—give form to poignant memories. The substantial physical presence of these paintings, with their thick impasto and richly layered pigments, materialize intangible impressions of moments, places and people alike, as well as the psychological terrain encountered during the creative process itself. As the artist has confided to writer Jennifer Higgie, her artmaking ‘was never about problem solving. It’s about releasing something.’

Though rooted in the personal, Goodman’s oeurve uses the intimate act of painting to address the expansive macrocosm of collective experience. Her paintings act as a form of silent communication, resonating beyond the written or spoken word. Persistently forward-looking, Goodman’s latest body of work continues her tireless pursuit of art’s unique capacity to nurture connection.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Emma Webster at Petzel

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 092025
 

“Era of Eternity”, 2025, Oil on canvas

“Era of Eternity”, 2025, Oil on canvas (detail)

“The Material World”, 2025, Oil on canvas

Emma Webster‘s two large paintings for That Thought Might Think at Petzel present unsettling expressions of the anxiety inherent in living through uncertain ecological times.

From the gallery about the work and the artist’s process-

These new works are Webster’s largest to date, and depict expansive, revelatory vistas of genesis and apocalypse. Painted amid the Los Angeles fires, her two paintings offer a front row seat into dramatic, fantastical maquettes of rupturing landscapes. Morphing light, space, and scale, Webster speaks to the precarity of the natural world and the role of artifice.

The artist’s duet of paintings plays with a shifting sense of beginning, end, and causation. The Material World evokes a cool, Proterozoic majesty. Verdant with foliage beneath eclipsed sunlight, the viewer faces a front of cut-out trees, scraggly and bare-boughed. Meanwhile, Era of Eternity is a celestial rapture of a spiraling sunburst, with a flurry of geese cresting the canyon below. Webster casts tense atmospheres, placing her scenes in strange times of day, unclear if they represent daybreak or nightfall. Do these worlds unveil a beginning, a coming dawn, or the serene melancholy of twilight? And with it, an unraveling?

These two paintings are deeply rooted in the context of ecological crisis. Webster says: “It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires.” Yet, Webster celebrates the power and resilience of natural systems, both surreal and sophisticated, through her constructed environments. They are virtual plein-air paintings of supernatural landscapes that do not represent real-world places. However, they are places which absorb the viewer, familiar yet not, further illuminating the complex entanglements of the Anthropocene.

To create her paintings, Webster fuses VR technology, penned sketches, and scans of hand-made sculptures. She translates her digital dioramas to the painted plane, integrating inventive means to advance the genre of still life. With both digital and analog tools, Webster expands on the rich history of artists commandeering technologies, such as the Claude glass or camera obscura. By building an entire set in virtual reality, Webster expands the planes of her enveloping paintings. Her landscapes take on an immersive quality, like a proxy for reality, becoming avatars of the natural world. The unsettling panoramas in That Thought Might Think intertwine the material and the virtual, where the bounds of reality become increasingly elusive. In an era where seamless technologies chase the knife’s edge of sentience, Webster highlights the urgency of our relationship to the natural, the simulated, and the real.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston at Petzel

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Apr 092025
 

“Brownfield”, 2023-2024, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

For Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston‘s exhibition Flash Point at Petzel they have created three series of works reacting to various environmental and political events. The large-scale brightly colored woodcut prints on fabric, three of which are pictured above, created for History is Present, are especially impressive.

From the gallery about all three series-

Their series of large-scale, multi-color woodcut prints on fabric, titled History is Present, considers the age of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human impact and shifting natural geographies. Referencing canonical artworks, Sidhu and Swainston lend iconic visual allegories to lasting social conditions and humanitarian issues; for example, their “Raft” depicts contemporary displaced peoples and a history of forced migrations. Made using a custom-built press to accommodate the scale of these works, these monumental woodcut prints demonstrate a mastery of technique and process, with layers of tonal values building complex compositions.

Their second series, War for the Union, features mixed woodcut with silkscreen prints on paper, looking toward distinctly American political issues from recent history. Layered with appropriated images from news media wood engravings of the civil war, such as Winslow Homer’s Civil War drawings for Harper’s Weekly, this series suggests both the cyclical temporality of images in American journalism and a collective fear of a second civil war in our current climate. War for the Union depicts scenes from pivotal moments of civil unrest, including demonstrations following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, the 2024 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally. Through rigorous, vibrant layers of figures, rally signs, and geographies, Sidhu and Swainston slow down the processing of mass circulated images, the antithesis to our current barrage of news media.

The third series, a group of color etchings made in collaboration with Columbia University Neiman Center for Print Studies titled Spring Wake, highlights environmental issues in various regions, rendering signposts of protest with native plants of the respective terrain. For example, “Japanese Lily” layers images of activists protesting the radioactive water released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, while “Fairy Primrose” depicts protests of the ecocide resulting from the ongoing Ukraine War—each indigenous flora overlaid atop the local environmental threat. Bearing an almost documentarian quality, these prints link political turmoil and climate disaster intimately with the depicted landscapes.

The exhibition title, Flash Point, defines not only the point of combustion, but also the instant at which a person or event flares up, suddenly exploding into action or being. Using woodcut printmaking, one of the oldest forms of mass communication and a means to propel revolutions, protests, and social movements, Sidhu and Swainston address structures of power and our relationship to hegemonic forces. The artists examine contemporary cultural conflicts through an unraveling of modern news media to reveal its canonical underpinnings, reaching back in time to consider how news images are represented, circulated, and consumed.

This show is closing on 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.

Delaware Art Shows- Create Magic Studios Pop-up in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Delaware, Wilmington
Apr 042025
 

Create Magic Studios, made up of husband and wife team Todd and Allison Purse, has recently taken over local book store Huxley & Hiro‘s future home with a pop-up shop and gallery. The space is filled with artwork from local artists and Todd’s bright, colorful murals.

Along with making artwork and comics, Todd Purse also designs artwork for Brandywine Coffee Roasters, including their hand printed bags. In one of the rooms in the gallery several of them are on display.

Tonight, 4/4/25, is one of the last times to see the space and will be open from 5-8pm with live music from Danny and the Darlings.

It is also ArtLoop Wilmington, a monthly First Friday art walk with several venues around the city staying open late.

NYC Art Shows- Merlin James at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 032025
 

“Untitled (Pier, Yellow), 2024-25 Acrylic on canvas

“Hobby Horse”, 2024-25, Mixed materials

 

“Untitled”, 1994-2008, Acrylic on canvas

“Not Titled”, 2024, Acrylic on canvas

Currently on view at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is Merlin James’s solo exhibition, Hobby Horse. The paintings and mixed media works explore the artist’s memories and often use repeating imagery. The exhibition includes James’s earlier work as well as his most current paintings.

From the gallery-

The exhibition title refers to a motif seen in several works, of a small child in a cowboy outfit, riding a hobby horse. Imagery in James’s work, while sometimes suggestive of personal associations or memories, often relates metaphorically to the nature of painting itself. In the classic 1951 essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse,’ E. H. Gombrich examines the way a child’s hobby horse “represents” or otherwise corresponds to a real horse, and uses the discussion to illuminate how illusion, abstraction, expression, meaning, and value all function in works of art. James explores similar concerns, and his hobby horse rider perhaps stands, in more ways than one, for the artist.

Another element appearing in several works throughout show is an elongated, centralized, vertical ovoid or mandorla shape, that has recurred in James’s paintings over many years. The artist describes the form as being neither abstract nor representational, and not symbolic, yet having for him an inexplicable reality and resonance.

Further features add to the complexity of James’s project: non-rectilinear formats with curved sides; unusual, artist-made picture frames; transparent gauzes that reveal the structure of the stretcher bars behind. In general, James does not distinguish between support and image.

James’s exhibitions often place new paintings alongside ones from past years, and the present show includes works dating from as far back as the early 1980s. While his art periodically introduces innovations, he considers all his work current and views the development of his oeuvre as cumulative and recursive rather than linear—a quality that parallels the condition of memory.

Certain recent paintings depict the Arnold Circus bandstand in East London, a location James first painted and drew around 1983 when he had a studio nearby. The bandstand’s polygonal structure, and enclosure by fences and flights of steps, evokes some of James’s other motifs such as piers, toll booths, bridges, and entranceways. These works again speak to an interest in the nature of artifice but also suggest more personal references or memories. In some paintings, figures approach each other or the viewer, while other scenes are marked by a palpable absence of any figures at all.

Hobby Horse overall reflects James’s characteristic diversity of subject: land, sky, and seascape; still life objects; nocturnal darkness and dazzling sunlight; glimpses through windows; apparent abstraction; explicit sex; intersecting rivers and roads; likenesses of individuals; and far horizons.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

NYC Art Shows- Sung Hwa Kim at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 022025
 

Sung Hwa Kim‘s beautiful paintings for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring at Harper’s, celebrate the seasons with jars containing nature scenes and elements that glow.

From the gallery-

Throughout Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the traditional Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to study the passage of time. He refers to these paintings as visual haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that tend to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim uses color liberally: brilliant pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes wherein urban greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the night.

Works like Still Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated only by a crescent moon. But indoors, behind a vast window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Beyond the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the two worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a gentle glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted grey flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo across this ethereal work—the artist expertly stages diverging cycles of life and death.

Kim continues to explore existential proximities in Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, where time folds in on itself, and reality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral warmth over quiet rooftops—an ending and a beginning intertwined. Within an interior space, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in eternal bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A notebook and pencil await just outside of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.

Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal yet precisely rendered compositions, he captures the subtle transformations that flow between opposing forces. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting harmony. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to consider the perpetually converging realities that inform life. Through these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that define both the tangible world and the great expanse of the cosmos.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

NYC Art Shows- Tyler Mitchell at Gagosian

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Apr 022025
 

“The sky is cold but the wing blood hot”, 2024

“Cumberland Island Tableau”, 2024

“Convivial Conversation”, 2024

Photographer Tyler Mitchell returns to his home state of Georgia to capture images that hint at the past histories of the American South for his latest exhibition, Ghost Images at Gagosian gallery in NYC.

From the press release-

“And this beauty carries within itself the intimation that the past can never die because it still exists, intact, on some other plane of time, around which we cannot see directly.” 
—Clarence John Laughlin

“The way we disappear. And reappear.” 
—Robin Coste Lewis

Engaging with Southern gothic themes, Mitchell’s new images of seaside leisure (all works 2024) are rooted in his Southern upbringing and explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photographic tableaux might capture presences that are unseen but deeply felt. They also ask if photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history.

This body of work was shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, when Mitchell returned to his home state in preparation for Idyllic Space, his 2024 exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The images are set among the beaches, dunes, estuaries, park structures, and ruins of these barrier islands—landscapes of natural beauty that are imprinted with significant human histories. In 1858, the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, an event to which the toy boats in Gulfs Between allude. Now protected as national seashore, Cumberland Island is the site of a ruined mansion owned by the Carnegie family, who once controlled much of the island.

Old Fear and Old Joys and Buoyancy are scenes of leisure and evocative compositional suspension. In many of the works, Mitchell veils his subjects. Ghost Image features a boy peering out through a shroud-like net, while the figures of Convivial Conversation and The sky is cold but the wing blood hot are transformed by scrims of sheet and kite that channel the sunlight. The artist further explores layering and ephemerality by innovatively printing photographs onto mirrors, and onto sheets of fabric draped over empty frames. Inspired by photographers who were drawn to intangible aspects of space, spirit, and the human form, including Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Francesca Woodman, Mitchell employs superimposition, multiple exposures, and fragmented composition to assert material presence while picturing apparitions of the past.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

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