Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Brice Marden’s throwback splendor

Contributed by David Carrier / Brice Marden, who died in 2023, has always had an astonishing mystique. Two generations ago, when painting was often pronounced dead, he identified as a rare heroic survivor and continued to make abstractions. It was possible then to see him as the true successor to Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns – the one artist who kept the New York School alive. But now, in a very different environment, his work has to be understood differently. Gagosian’s museum-scale retrospective “I Am Plane Image,” an exemplary exercise in curatorship, lets us appreciate at once his range and his discipline, both remarkable.

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Solo Shows

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer at the edge

Contributed by Margaret McCann / Celeste Dupuy-Spencer (1979–2026) left too soon, but her candid, cynical expressions of Americana, angst, and injustice leave a powerful legacy. The poetically titled exhibition “Burning in the Eyes of the Maker” (Daniel Lanois lyrics) at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery has less of her colorful work. Even without the great Don’t You See That I Am Burning depicting January 6, the Trump zeitgeist is uncomfortably conjured and conjoined with (by the show’s timing and location) September 11 imagery. In the untitled painting above, nature is a wasteland through which Georg Baselitz’s itinerants, or the struggling painter, might stumble. “For me to paint,” Dupuy-Spencer admitted, “loneliness helps. Real, abject … a gaping maw.” An acrid yellow horizon yawns uneasily in the vast space. Like an unfinished painting, an inscrutable bas-relief gripped by giant hands withholds meaning from the lonely climber. White-collared, lost as the protagonist of the film Falling Down, he looks abandoned by past and future, like the exiled Dante. Disorientation replaces the faith guiding Friedrich’s wanderer, Coleridge’s optimist, Walt Whitman’s roamer.

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Solo Shows

Anna T. Gregor’s shattered compositions

Contributed by Milan Michaud / Anna T. Gregor’s paintings, recently shown at D·D·D·D· Pictures, have a way of changing as they are pondered. Although their strategically shattered composition makes it initially unclear whether they are observational, she does paint from life, albeit by way of distorted mirrors, while also engaging with art history. Rendered in oil paint, rabbit skin glue, tempera, shellac, marble dust, metal leaf, the paintings seem to fold and bend as decorative shapes abruptly give way to convincing depth before conceding images. At that point, the historical paintings stamped into the work also become vaguely apparent. In After the Annunciation, for example, there is a graphic specter of Philip Guston’s early work Martial Memory. Both trick the eye into experiencing depth and flatness simultaneously and substantively reference transformative events.

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Solo Shows

Lisa Sanditz’s provocative omissions

Contributed by Lawre Stone / Lisa Sanditz paints landscapes that explore collisions between industry and the natural world. She has also addressed manufacturing hubs, industrial farms, and junk-food factories. In her solo show “Missing Mountain” at Alexandre, Sanditz turns to the impact of climate change on the Catskill Mountains, and with good reason. In the summer of 2023, the jet stream carried smoke from fossil-fuel-driven Canadian wildfires into the Hudson River Valley, turning the sky a dusty gray, dimming the sun to a hazy orange disk, and impeding views with airborne particles. Sanditz’s consternation inspired the three paintings that anchor this exhibition.

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Solo Shows

The visual poetics of Alison Hall and Pete Schulte

Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / There’s a quiet conversation happening on either side of the Grand Street subway stop between two artists who, measured as they are, have a lot to say to each other. To the west is Alison Hall’s “spirits (where the water tastes like wine)” at Kate Werble Gallery, to the east Pete Schulte’s “Neither-Nor Stone or Not Not-a-Rock” at McKenzie Fine Art. The more you look for correspondences the more you find, and the fact that their bodies of work are not overtly similar means that each stands to illuminate the other.

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Solo Shows

Tim Kent’s zones of mystery

Contributed by William Corwin / “Sojourn,” Tim Kent’s latest series of paintings, at Hollis Taggart, falls into the tradition of the interior paintings, of Fragonard, Vermeer, Boucher, and de Hooch, where the key to the drama is ambiguity. The paintings present events as they are purported to have happened, not how they actually transpired. They are unabashed exaggerations of momentary, often banal reality, heightening the drama, enriching the color, enhancing the décor.

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Solo Shows

Grace Graupe-Pillard: The graphic power of fear

Contributed by P. C. Smith / In a six-decade career, Grace Graupe-Pillard became known as a photo-realist painter of people – her 1986 breakout exhibition was “Urban Life Cutouts” – but in her current show “Burning Point,” also at Hal Bromm, she paints bold near-abstractions that suggest landscapes of destruction. Still using photo-realist methods and starting from news photos, sometimes combining multiple photos, she digitally filters and simplifies them in Photoshop to create complex high-contrast color shapes. She works out the compositions with a computer, at great length, then projects them onto canvas as traced shapes in much the same way she would portraits, but the shapes are larger, bolder, and decisively maintained, painted with smooth edges. Hard-edge work is usually geometric, but the delight of these shapes is their complex organic variety. The drama of her news sources is made explicit in intense color relationships, and high-keyed color keeps shapes separated even when they step chromatically from explosive light to darkness.

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Solo Shows

Jim Sullivan’s slender epics

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / As the British Museum celebrates the 230-foot-long by 20-inch Bayeux Tapestry, Ki Smith Gallery features “Places That Never Were,” Jim Sullivan’s extremely narrow imaginary landscapes. Displayed as a continuous frieze separated by small breaks, Sullivan’s paintings resemble Chinese handscrolls: long, portable paintings produced since the Jin Dynasty in the fourth century. Though these were generally viewed one section at a time and accompanied by commentary and poetry, the antique Asian format resonates in Sullivan’s compositions, which join vignettes of air, land, and sea by avoiding linear seams. Trimmed down to dimensions such as 3 x 36 and 6 x 96 inches, the paintings heighten an emotional connection to nature by suggesting the slimmest glimpse through a crack beneath a door.

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Solo Shows

Sherron Francis: Between delicacy and force

Contributed by Alex Grimley / One of the main currents of abstract painting in the 1970s – much discussed then, not so much now – was the resurgence of painterliness that followed the 1960s trend of hard-edge, geometric abstraction. The subject of the 1971 Art News Annual, for instance, was “Painterly Painting,” while the following year, art historian John Elderfield published an expansive two-part article in Art International titled “Painterliness Redefined,” which traced the emergent tendency primarily through the work and influence of Jules Olitski. At the end of the decade, exhibitions like the Brockton Art Museum’s “Aspects of the 70’s: Painterly Abstraction” offered a retrospective view of this development. “Sherron Francis: Beyond the Stain,” currently at Lincoln Glenn, brings this strain of post-Minimalist abstraction into focus through a particularly assured body of work from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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Solo Shows

Rebecca Morgan: Fear, loathing, and romance

Contributed by Bill Arning / Rebecca Morgan has mounted her sixth solo show at Asya Geisberg’s Tribeca gallery, and one could be forgiven for assuming we already know what it will look like. Morgan has developed a well-loved signature style of crisply drawn, feminist-infused, instantly recognizable images drawn from art history, with large doses of Guston, R. Crumb, and Peter Saul fused with the more confrontational depictions of women by women associated with Lisa Yuskavage, Kathe Burkhart, Betty Tompkins, Judy Glantzman, and Marilyn Minter. Critic John Yau has also linked her work to Li’l Abner and The Beverly Hillbillies, as she brings the denizens of her native Appalachia into fine art.

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Solo Shows

Herman Cherry: Expansiveness and possibility

Contributed by Amanda Church / Who else had never heard of Herman Cherry (1909–1992) until images of his spare and radiant paintings suddenly started appearing all over social media? With two NYC gallery shows up, at Sebastian Gladstone in Tribeca and Shamnoski uptown, plus one at Sebastian Gladstone in Los Angeles in 2025, his work is deservedly in the spotlight after almost 20 years. 

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Solo Shows

Selena Kimball and the art of mincing words

Contributed by Sharon Garbe / Gathering Moss, the title of a work in Selena Kimball’s exhibition “Ice-blink” at Ulterior Gallery, describes both literal activity and metaphorical non-activity. It’s also the title of a book by the bryologist and Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer. I learned from that book that moss and lichens grow on every continent and in all climates, from scorching deserts to the coldest polar regions. While the Arctic is a central motif of the show, Kimball’s work also plays with scale, location, and authenticity more broadly. The larger works in the show have physical gaps that raise questions. Who is missing? Who is the hero of a referenced colonial expedition? Do works that look fragile reflect the fragility of what they depict? Kimball’s works are representations of representations that resist easy classification. Some might call them collages. Others might think of cargo cult replicas. I would describe them as conceptual process pieces resulting in low-relief wall sculptures.

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Solo Shows

Bascha Mon: Mountains to climb

Contributed by Jenny Zoe Casey / In “Kin Terrains,” nonagenarian Bascha Mon’s second exhibition at Tappeto Volante Gallery, Unfinished stands out for its semi-representational approach and for rich, lively colors that reflect Mon’s early-career affinity for Vuillard, among other influences. Made in the 1980s, it is the oldest piece in the show and clearly informs her subsequent work. From the left, the smallest arch reads as a turquoise alcove, a chair resting against it in a space containing other furniture. Behind the alcove are white-barked trees in a purple-green dusk. The color connects the area inside the arch to the trees, but a larger entryway appears blocked, going nowhere. To the right, however, a larger arch is open both to the viewer and a lake in the background. Unfinished’s patented shapes are found in some form in all but two pieces in show, though they become lumpier, irregular, and roughly oval.

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Solo Shows

Joseph Fucigna: No designated endpoint

Contributed by Richard Klein / The ellipsis in the title of Joseph Fucigna’s current show “In Process …” at G-Town Arts signifies a story unfolding. Known for abstract, biomorphic sculpture made with everyday plastic materials, he has given up sculpture for painting. He had, to be sure, ventured into painting earlier with pieces like Indian Yellow_Green Gold_Black Wash Drip, importing onto canvas gravity-induced sags and drips that occurred in his sculpture. But in newer paintings such as Untitled 2_22, which incorporates scraped and sanded acrylic, he reveled immersively in what materials and labor could produce strictly on a two-dimensional surface. In creating the Pressed and Squeezed series from 2024, he employed monoprinting techniques and controlled accidents, applying acrylic paint to homemade clay board panels and then manipulating them to leave an irregular skin of paint that he then pressed onto the painting’s surface, causing wet paint to ooze through the gaps and tears.

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Solo Shows

Lindsay Walt: No guru, no method, no teacher

Contributed by Adam Simon / At one time I would have said the paintings of Lindsay Walt fell within the domain of Minimalism. It’s clear from her current show at Helm Contemporary that the designation doesn’t fit. More representative of that genre was the inspired pairing at the same gallery of Russell Maltz and Li Trincere back in June. By contrast, Walt’s atmospheric grounds paired with geometric forms don’t fit the austerity of Minimalism from the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, these works fuse opposites in a dialectic that tilts towards the infinite space and transcendentalism of an artist like Hilma Af Klint.

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Solo Shows

Luka Carter’s endearing horror vacui

Contributed by Bill Arning / An effusively punky-queer sensibility infuses all 14 ceramic objects populating Luka Carter’s first show at Fireplace Project’s Warren Street storefront. Their image world has a phantasmagoric fantasy feel, something like a 2026 version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. As in that environment, everything in Carter’s world is animate, everything potentially has a face, and any blank area seems destined to be covered with pop flowers and all manner of critters, every one of which could, in theory, engage us in conversation as Chairy, the friendly plush armchair with big eyes on its back and a mouth between its seat cushions, could. Take Carter’s dinner tray, crafted just slightly larger than life and seemingly meant to sit on one of those folding TV tables your folks would set up so you never had to stop watching My Favorite Martian or Green Acres. Its center handle is both a face and another dinner setting, with a ceremonial plate, cup, and bowl. 

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Solo Shows

Roy Dowell’s alchemic formulations

Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / This is Roy Dowell’s fourth solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery since 2020, so it’s not arriving out of the blue. That said, while all his previous shows have been satisfying, this one strikes me as particularly successful, leaving a lasting impression. It’s the tumbled stone dropped into the pocket: pleasing to turn over and reexamine days and weeks later.

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Solo Shows

Christopher K. Ho’s unruly modernism

Contributed by Ben Godward / Mark Greenwold, the painter, once told me, “The best art is dumb.”  He said that I always understood that. I took it as a compliment. I think what he meant was that effective art appeals to our most basic needs, desires, and senses. Christopher K. Ho’s current sculpture exhibition “Waterloo!” at Ellie Rines Gallery – formerly known as 56 Henry but now on 46 Walker Street – fits that humble formulation and does it ever work.

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