Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Rafael Vega and the creative process

Contributed by Riad Miah / Rafael Vega’s work contemplates the act of making art in its entirety. Each of his two-dimensional relief pieces, now on display in his solo show “To See Is To Conjure” at Helm Contemporary, emerges from a series of deliberate actions – cutting, folding, and stitching – that break down and rebuild the existing composition. Leaving unprimed and untouched canvas as a frame of reference, he lets viewers in on his creative ritual. They see, as it were, how the sausage is made.

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Solo Shows

Bascha Mon’s personal cosmopolis

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Tappeto Volante Gallery in Gowanus is audaciously hosting a condensed retrospective spanning decades of Bascha Mon’s painting, selected and arranged by the artist herself. Her more recent work dominates the gallery’s anterior space, with paintings from the 1970s – which remain integral to her ongoing inquiry – populating the rear room….

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Solo Shows

Unskilled Worker: About a boy and more

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Upon entering Daniel Cooney Fine Art, one is immediately surrounded by a colorful crowd of idiosyncratic boys. As portrait subjects, they feel oddly familiar and distinctive, and their haunting visages might stop you in your tracks. With deep, rich colors the portraits radiate a warm glow, each subject is suffused with a stained-glass brilliance and idealized in an almost spiritual aura. The paintings are the work of London-based Helen Downie, who goes by the moniker Unskilled Worker – a tongue-in-cheek reference to her self-taught background….

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Solo Shows

Eleanor Ray: The power of the small

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Many conceptualists, favoring the unconstrained and expansive, balk at the representation or framing of any experience as image. Long after he abandoned painting, the late installation artist Robert Irwin likened it to a mere “keyhole” of perception. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig declared that compartmentalizing experience for viewing made you “a passive observer” for whom “it’s all moving by you boringly in a frame.” Yet surely not every living experience has to be as open-ended as a motorcycle racing across salt flats. While a painting can never capture the full immensity of life, with adequate perception and economy of means – say, Luke Howard’s vision of the sky realized in paper and watercolor – even a diminutive one can provide a meaningful distillation of experience. The paintings of Eleanor Ray, now on display in her third solo show at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, constitute abundant evidence.

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Solo Shows

Whitney Claflin: Forever young

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whitney Claflin’s work, now on view in her solo exhibition “Pinky’s Where” at Derosia, is winningly deceptive, like the title’s double-entendre. Consider the paintings Emma in Tarzana and Mr. Triste. At first blush, they seem nonchalantly wise-ass and a little frustrating, the first an offhand quip about internet celebrity and influencer supreme Emma Chamberlain, and the second…

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Solo Shows

Dannielle Hodson’s infectious imagination

Contributed by Margaret McCann / “Chasing Rabbits,” the name of Danielle Hodson’s show at Kravets Wehby Gallery, refers to the cautionary Chinese proverb, “if you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” Hodson accepts that risk, bypassing clear purpose to embrace multiplicity. Impelled by curiosity – as Alice was, and Grace Slick advised – Hodson’s visual gestalts, though far livelier than Cezanne’s, similarly invite the viewer to re-experience their becoming…

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Solo Shows

Alan Prazniak: Balancing the artisanal and the epicurean

Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Alan Prazniak’s paintings fall into productive intervals between landscape and still-life and between abstraction and representation. His most recent show at Geary comprises sixteen medium and small paintings (all from 2024) that are rigorously composed and wide-ranging in palette, bringing to mind the lyrical abstractions of Philip Guston and the quasi-landscape compositions of Nicolas de Staël. Prazniak has acknowledged as inspirations Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley’s groundbreaking works, which embodied similarly massed shapes in bold, contrasting colors. The modernist tension…

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Solo Shows

Christoph Matthes: Vulnerability of memory

Contributed by Theodora Bocanegra Lang / In his current solo show “Tactical Hugs, Practical Shrugs” at Gratin, Christoph Matthes – born in 1990 in Germany, now based in New York – intuitively explores imaginative childhood reminiscence through doubling, motif, and collage across a dozen cheeky paintings.

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Solo Shows

Pol Morton’s invitation to empathize

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I often want to touch paintings when I go to galleries, but I rarely do. I know I can get away with it, but it doesn’t usually seem worth the risk. What new phenomena could I possibly discover after years of making art? It’s a depressing thought, but one I’m mercifully relieved of when I see a Pol Morton piece. “Get Well,” their solo show at Olympia, is a trove of stuff you want to lay hands on and dig through. I could write a novel going through all the materials. In the interest of brevity, I’ll stick to how it feels to look. 

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Solo Shows

Adam Simon: Jostle, flux, and instability

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Brooklyn-based conceptual painter Adam Simon is known for his cagey synthesis of the graphic symbols and tropes of commerce and civic life into elegant visual statements about the zeitgeist and, more grandly, the world as a whole. He can use text to penetrating effect, as in the small paintings he made a few years ago superimposing the edict “STEAL THIS ART” on the vintage silhouette of a policeman. In one not-quite-Hoffman-esque line and an evocative image, he captured the ambivalence and limbo of the art world between the establishment and the counterculture, having himself cultivated a live community in that space by organizing, with several other artists, the collaborative “Four Walls” events in Hoboken in the 1980s and Williamsburg in the 1990s. In “Great Figures,” his solo show now up at Osmos, he has continued in a searchingly ironic vein, now with a bemused fretfulness that affords it epochal resonance.

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Solo Shows

Mark Dagley’s little god

Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a boy, the sculptor Tony Smith – a canonically important and under-appreciated American sculptor who connects AbEx and Minimalism, equally at home with Pollock and Serra – suffered from tuberculosis so severe that his father built him a small shed in the backyard of their South Orange, New Jersey, home, with fiberglass curtains to minimize dust and a small black stove. Smith lived in the spartan outbuilding for several years. Imaging him there might elicit the melancholy that Van Morrison conveys in his aching ballad “T.B. Sheets.” As an adult, however, Smith noted an upside, at least for an artist: “If one spends a long time in a room with only one object, that object becomes a little god.” I grasped the significance of this observation acutely when I encountered Mark Dagley’s sloop-like sculpture Vāyu-Vāta, which, pointed away from a black radiator and darkly mullioned window, dominates the Abaton Project Room in the Financial District.

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Solo Shows

Jay Stern’s psychological realism

Contributed by Mark Wethli / Jay Stern’s paintings of domestic interiors and landscapes, now on view in his solo exhibition at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us into familiar worlds but take us there in unexpected ways. The first time I saw his work – a series of paintings of a wooden drying rack – I admired how he transformed this humble, intimate household object into something iconic and worthy of attention. On a formal level, I was impressed by how the diamond pattern of the rack’s design served as a strong compositional framework, not unlike a trellis for an array of color patches whose abstract shapes, painterly shorthand, and understated yet luminous tonalities amplify our sense of the paintings’ warmth, intimacy, and human connection.

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Solo Shows

Maxwell Hendler: Painting with wood

Contributed by Katy Crowe / In keeping with Sharon Butler’s recent review of painting that is not painting per se, Maxwell Hendler’s thoroughly satisfying show at The Landing in Los Angeles, his first in ten years, consists of works that fulfill the function of paintings — they are flat, largely two-dimensional, and mounted on walls – but do not involve paint at all.  

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Solo Shows

Sarah Martin-Nuss and the power of water

Contributed by Kun Kyung Sok / “Pouring Water Into Water,” Sarah Martin-Nuss’s first solo exhibition at the Rachel Uffner Gallery, comprises paintings and drawings that immerse viewers in fluid abstract landscapes inspired by marshes she remembers from her youth on Texas’s Gulf Coast. The paintings initially suggest serene swamps, their surfaces reflecting the sky and surrounding features. Deeper scrutiny uncovers two worlds closer by – one above the water paced by reeds swaying in a wet mist, and another below it teeming with aquatic creatures shimmering in the sunlight.

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