Group Shows

Group Shows

As long as you want, at My Pet Ram

Contributed by Jenny Zoe Casey / The two-person exhibition “as long as you want,” featuring work by Julia Blume and Heather Drayzen, on view at My Pet Ram on the Lower East Side, is perceptively based on the referenced fragment of poetry written by Sappho over two-and-a-half millennia ago as a reminder of love, endurance and adaptation, and complemented by a slyly kindred show of drawings. Work by Joshua Drayzen is also on view.

Group Shows

Hamlet, art, and “Poem Unlimited”

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Poem Unlimited” a group show at The Alexey Von Schlippe Gallery at the University of Connecticut Avery Point, curator Kenneth Heyne has taken his inspiration from Harold Bloom’s 2003 book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. A revered Shakespeare scholar, literary critic, and professor at Yale, Bloom divides his slim volume into short chapters, each dedicated to different characters and aspects of the play. In tone and style, it is almost gossipy. Reading it made me feel as though I was joining Bloom in catching up on old friends with whom we’d lost touch. Though some have criticized the book as a disjointed compilation of fragmented ideas and unfinished thoughts, for me – admittedly no Shakespeare expert – its charm lies in its casualness.

Group Shows Solo Shows

Jeff Gabel: Subtext rules this fucker

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, annoyed by the knowing ellipticality of a New Yorker cartoon caption, marches into the august magazine’s offices and confronts the editor – portrayed to preppy-geek perfection by the late Edward Herrmann – about its meaning. After offering several generic, pretentious, and abjectly unconvincing interpretations, he admits that he has no idea what the hell the caption is supposed to mean. Jeff Gabel – whose elaborately narrated drawings and paintings, a few site-specific, are presently on display in a solo at Spencer Brownstone Gallery on the Lower East Side and a group show at Jennifer Baahng Gallery on the Upper East Side – runs no such risk, abjuring obscure glibness for mordantly wise, sourly penetrating bloviation.

Group Shows

Revelation and reality at Greene Naftali

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In “Sense of Place” at Greene Naftali Gallery, ten artists unflinchingly explore the nuances of transition, from epiphany to revolution, from getting lost to just moving on. The show is incisively curated and genuinely cohesive.

An Invitation Group Shows

Invitation: “Eraser” in Birmingham

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In 2012, artist, writer, and curator Brian Edmonds founded Curating Contemporary, an online exhibition space that, since its inception, has hosted over fifty exhibitions. Then, in 2019, Edmonds took his project to print, and began publishing Eraser, a biannual book featuring the work of contemporary artists and writers. This year he has organized an exhibition called “Eraser” at Ground Floor Contemporary, in Birmingham, Alabama, that brings together some of the artists who have been featured in his publications. I’m pleased to be included in the fourth Eraser book and also to have two paintings in the show, alongside work by a great group of artists: Matt Kleberg, Jered Sprecher, Jason Stopa, Sean Sullivan, Vadis Turner, Cecilia Vissers, Don Voisine, and Thornton Willis.

Group Shows

Sweet home pandemic at Frosch & Co

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In New York City, during the lockdown of 2020, my neighbors disappeared. Some left town, others stayed in their apartments for weeks on end. Home Sweet, a group show on view at Frosch & Co through January 16, conjures those early pandemic days, when many of us made modest home-bound work that ruminated on our diminished circumstances and involuntary domesticity.

Group Shows

Body Language at The Painting Center

Contributed by Carol Diamond / Now on display at The Painting Center, the group exhibition titled The Body in Question, a phrase cheekily resonant of a coroners report, explores the body as a vessel for communicating experience through painting. Curators Ophir Agassi and Karen Wilkin have adroitly presented a diverse group of ten distinguished contemporary painters connected by their focus on the human figure.

Group Shows

Virtuous tension at Underdonk

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Lockdown called for the safety and comfort of an inner sanctum, but that of course produced the urge for unmediated exposure to nature. In curating Nice to See You Again, now up at Underdonk in Bushwick, Leonora Loeb and Keisha Prioleau-Martin set about finding art that captured that virtuous tension. They have succeeded, presenting varied but thematically harmonious work by ten artists, each of them in some way conveying the hibernation and re-emergence implied in the exhibitions amiable but also multivalent title.