NYC Art Shows- Suellen Rocca at Matthew Marks

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Design, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 162025
 

“Night”, 2014, Oil on canvas

“Ocean Ladies”, 1988, Oil on canvas

“Untitled”, 1964, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

NYC Art Shows- Julio Galán at kurimanzutto and Luhring Augustine

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 162025
 

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

Luhring Augustine and kurimanzutto are currently showing paintings by the late Mexican artist Julio Galán in both of their galleries. The captivating paintings are filled with symbolic imagery and reflect the artist’s struggles with identity.

From kurimanzutto-

Galán’s brilliant career, which spanned from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in 2006, was primarily centered in New York City, Paris, and Monterrey, Mexico. While his work has not been broadly exhibited outside of his native country since his passing, his work was exhibited internationally extensively during his life, and he is widely considered the preeminent Mexican painter of his generation. Galán’s nonconformist and expansive multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of identity, gender, culture, and social constructs in works that layer self-representation and aspects of the personal with larger themes of cultural and sexual difference. Infused with an allegorical quality and woven throughout with a complex array of signifiers—enigmatic iconography and cultural references—his works, as well as his carefully crafted public persona, embraced a self-conscious othering and an ambiguous mutability that refused fixed interpretation. As art historian and professor Teresa Eckmann writes, “On canvas, he recounted and constructed illogical visions, teasing out the line between the real and artifice, his artwork deemed an “inaccessible yet formally intoxicating fabrication of self.” Galán hid from the viewer his artwork’s content as much as he revealed it; simultaneously, with his body, he explored fluid identity through masquerade.”

Rendered in a pastiche of styles, with a syncretic approach to culture, Galán’s work blends references and influences from Mexican folk and religious imagery to Surrealism, Pop Art, and graffiti. While he has often been associated with the Neomexicanismo movement of his native country and the Neo-expressionism of his peers in New York, these were characterizations he resisted, much in the way that he deliberately rejected any form of restrictive definition or singular interpretation. Magalí Arriola, former director of Museo Tamayo and curator of Galán’s most recent major retrospective, notes, “Though in some of his work [he] resorted to an iconography associated with popular Mexican culture…the use of stereotypical figures such as the charro of the Tehuana, was also related to his interest in transvestism and disguises as strategies to subvert sexual identities and other cultural constructs.” Galán’s approach exposes the limitations and issues inherent in the interrelated sentiments and systems that create and uphold any form of binary classification or fixed characterization, be they related to sexuality, nationality, spirituality, or any categorization. As writer Evan Moffitt notes, “Galán’s adoption of Mexican stereotypes and Platonic personalities reveals nationalism to be a kind of pompous drag…. There’s plenty of kitsch in Galán’s paintings, to be sure, but that kitsch is fundamental to their radicalism.” Continuing to resonate today are the remarkable energy, intelligence, and theatricality of Galán’s work, and the questions he explored regarding the relationship of individual identity and the creation of the self to oversignified notions of culture and nationalism.

For more detail on Galán, kurimanzutto has provided a link to an excellent essay by Evan Moffit about the artist and his work.

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

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- 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.

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.

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