Gallery shows

Gallery shows

Black and blacker at Studio 10

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Planned with hope and trepidation, “In the Dark,” now up at Studio 10, leans into post-election malaise and dread with work by Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, and Kate Teale – Brooklyn-based artists whose studio explorations are unified through the color black, via shape, mood, and phenomenon. Designed as a positive project for unsettled times, the exhibit coheres as a short list of nascent strategies for coping with darkness writ large before it has been parsed, studied, and conclusively judged. The works share a resistant sense of seduction, anticipation, and opportunity. By virtue of piecemeal construction, the show sustains an alluring in-between emotion, just right for entering voids that are only partly plumbed or viewing objects that are but partly known. 

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Gallery shows

Aggregate: The city as nature

Contributed by Anna Gregor / The anxiety of being unable to distinguish artifice from nature has haunted art since the Ancient Greeks. No one wants to be the prisoner who mistakes the shadow on the cave wall for Truth, or, more embarrassingly, the bird who tries to eat the grapes in Zeuxis’s trompe l’oeil still life. But today, as human-made technology permeates all aspects of life, the difference between what is artificial and what is real is not so clear. This ambiguity is most apparent in the city, where nature manifests itself as a force of decomposition and aggregation that acts on all objects indiscriminately, whether “natural” or human-made. Here, art and nature are indistinguishable. This relation of artifice and nature in the city is the driving force behind “Aggregate,” now up at Studio 9D.

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Gallery shows

Unsung galleries: Notes from a walkabout

Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access…

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Gallery shows

Connecting collage and curation at C24

Contributed by William Eckhardt Kohler / “Make It or Break It,” now showing at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, features a group of artist known for their curatorial practices who use collage or found objects to disrupt, critique, and reflect reality. The implication here that collage in particular has become a prominent part of our visual vernacular suggests a pervasively fractured way of seeing the world and a compulsion to reorganize it. Each artist explores how fragments, juxtaposed images, and collected objects more broadly articulate new associations and understandings that encompass personal history, culture, and art history.

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Gallery shows

A garden grows – on AstroTurf – in Gowanus

Contributed by Michael Brennan / On about 200 square feet of AstroTurf, artist-run Field of Play, which opened in 2022 in Gowanus, is a tiny gallery with big ambitions, staging adventurous exhibitions and offering health and wellness programs aimed at creative people and enterprises. “Bumper Crop,” curated by artist and gallery founder Matt Logsdon, includes work by artists carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku. Timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, she show’s theme is the garden – an intriguingly ironic premise, given that the gallery is located next to an EPA Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal.

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Gallery shows

Bernice Bing’s unsung talents

Contributed by David Carrier / Bernice Bing (1936–1998), a gay Chinese American woman, grew up in San Francisco. She had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was five and lived in no fewer than 17 predominantly white orphanages. She attended local schools, got her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and actively participated in the local art scene. Her teachers included Richard Diebenkorn as well as celebrated local artists, and Bing exhibited widely in Northern California. Now, thanks to Berry Campbell Gallery, which has provided a magnificent catalogue with a fine essay by John Yau, her work is being brought to New York’s attention. 

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Gallery shows

Katy Crowe’s light-and-shadow poetics 

Contributed by Mary Jones / Katy Crowe returns to as-is.la with “Lunar Shift,” a superb second show of eleven lively and resonant abstract paintings. All are oil on linen works completed within the last year, six of them 52 x 42 inches and five 24 x 18 inches. A strikingly linear installation puts two opposing walls of the gallery into play, with the paintings equally spaced. The formality of the presentation underscores the dichotomy between window and object inherent in all paintings but Crowe’s especially, and brings out buoyant rhythms from painting to painting. 

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Gallery shows

Elias Wessel: Exposing social media 

Contributed by Chunbum Park / At Picture Theory in Chelsea, Elias Wessel has assembled provocative installations titled “It’s Complicated” and, with composer and musician Natalia Kiёs, “Systems at Play.“ In “It’s Complicated,” busy photographs that document surfing and scrolling behavior stand on pedestals. Holstered at their sides are headphones piping cacophonic sounds and words – styled “Is Possibly Art” – that AI-based text-recognition software has distilled from the long-exposure images.

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Gallery shows Out of Town

Ying Li and Susan Jane Walp: Innovative traditionalists

Contributed by Elizabeth Whalley / Ying Li and Susan Jane Walp’s paintings on paper, on view in concurrent solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, initially seemed to me to have little to do with each other given the differences in subject matter, its presentation, paint handling, and color. As I thought more about them, though, virtuous similarities emerged in my mind.

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Gallery shows Out of Town

Catherine Haggarty and Dan Gunn: Cerebrally humble and vice-versa

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The direct and unpretentious title of Brooklyn artist Catherine Haggarty’s solo show “Just Drawing,” now up at Geary in Millerton, NY, conveys modest intent: to record on paper the inertial power of everyday life without much prior conceptual mediation. Just draw it. Cats by turns prowling a pyramid and emulating sphynxes on a starry night feature in a couple of drawings, which are meticulous without being fussy, and two others unobtrusively reference Haggarty’s art practice. Together these works and others essay a day in a life grounded by a comforting pet, reveries of icons, an enduring vocation, a familiar room, and scrappy clothing – nothing inherently grand, perhaps, but nothing remotely dismissible, either.

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Gallery shows

Contemporary landscape: Reinvigorated and reinvented

Contributed by Patrick Neal / In New York City galleries, portraits, still lifes, interiors, and landscapes are everywhere, reinvigorated for the twenty-first century. With landscape painting in particular, innovation often arises through a seamless compounding of sources, where past and present, universal and specific, coexist. Three exemplary solo shows drive home the point. With varying degrees of naturalism and mediation, all three artists favor an authentic response to nature, and the titles of each exhibition suggest a phenomenological grounding.

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Gallery shows

Hudson Valley (and vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: May 2024

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Spring is in full bloom and it’s one of the most beautiful times of year upstate. I’m looking forward to Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory, curated by David A. Ross at Kino Saito in Verplanck, NY, opening May 11. Farther north there are two notable shows opening on May 18 in Kinderhook: Other Realities (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms) at Bill Arning Exhibitions and Annie Bielski, Raw Footage at SEPTEMBER. Also opening May 18 is the Wassaic Project’s summer exhibition Tall Shadows in Short Order. I recommend visiting Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson to see Lothar Osterburg’s extensive solo exhibition, A Celebration of the Small, featuring a collection of models, installations, and photogravures from the past twenty-five years. There are too many great exhibitions to mention here, so take a look at the list below and get ready for a road trip.

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Gallery shows

NYC Selected Gallery Guide: May 2024

Welcome to the early edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to May art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Notable, must-see shows in Brooklyn include Emily Janowick at International Waters, Emily Roz at Auxilliary Projects, and Charlotte Zinsser at Haul. In Manhattan, Julia Bland has a new series of monumental woven and painted pieces at Derek Eller and Joanne Greenbaum is having her first solo at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Check out Two Coats contributors Anna Gregor at D.D.D.D. Projects and Natasha Sweeten at Satchel Projects. We also recommend Jennifer Coates at both HIgh Noon and Chart, Lesley Vance at Bortolami, Rachel Eulena Williams at Canada, and Amy Sillman at Gladstone. And then, don’t forget, we will have a slew of art fairs in our midst. We’ll be heading to the Future, NADA, and Independent fairs. See you out there.

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Joe Bradley: Merging night and day

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / On a warm, sunny day that teased people outdoors, I stepped into Zwirner to catch Joe Bradley’s current exhibition, “Vom Abend.” Nine large paintings gleamed within the pristine gallery. I’d in fact been on my way to see another show, but at Zwirner I lingered and I looked, unexpectedly beguiled. Pretty soon I relaxed and accepted I’d be here a while.

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