Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Charlotte Zinsser: Fine deception at Haul

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Haul Gallery is in the light industrial section of Gowanus, an area typically defined by one- and two-story brick buildings faced with rolling metal gates. These house local non-chain businesses cast as, for instance, “Tool Rental,” “Collision Repair,” and “Switch Electric.” DOS Garbage Trucks, a surplus of Park Slope ambulances, and old-style levered voting machines are warehoused nearby. Big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are present, too. Uncharacteristic patches of big sky often appear above, bisected by a gargantuan elevated section of the BQE. In 2024, post-pandemic NYC, a truly adventurous art space, and perhaps an alternative model, has also emerged in the neighborhood. Premised on the defiantly alternative anti-manifesto of founders Erin Davis and Max C. Lee, the gallery awards residencies to artists who then use the space to present exhibitions. Currently featured there is Charlotte Zinsser’s first solo show. Zinsser’s aesthetic is distinctive, refreshingly peculiar, and not easily categorized. I think of her broadly as a conceptual collator of Americana in the tradition of artists like Walker Evans and William Christenberry. 

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Solo Shows

Philemona Williamson’s threshold states 

Contributed by Riad Miah / Philemona Williamson’s paintings delve deeply into the concept of arrested development. For her, the term signifies a profound state of emotional or psychological stagnation, often linked to unresolved childhood issues. Yet her overall vision is expansive and not unhopeful. In her current exhibition of 15 large and small oil-on-canvas works at June Kelly Gallery, complex narratives inform her paintings and affect the very process of their creation while remaining purposefully unarticulated.

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Solo Shows

Ron Milewicz’s Thoreauvian sensibility

Contributed by Michael Brennan / If you are interested in the ongoing relevance or advancement of landscape, Ron Milewicz’s current exhibition “Second Sight” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery is for you. Milewicz, who has taught for decades, is an expert hand at drawing, painting, and, most importantly, seeing.

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Solo Shows

Lucy Puls: Meaning in obsolescence

Contributed by Talia Shiroma / Pink teddy bears, plastic ponies, and the blank face of a Mac 512 computer peer out from blocks of amber murk. They are among the discarded goods on display at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery as part of Berkeley-based artist Lucy Puls’s solo show, spanning works created between 1989 and 2003. For the series In Resin, which she began in the early nineties, Puls amassed secondhand items from thrift shops and encased them in translucent resin prisms. Ranging from a BB gun to records, these once-coveted objects now register as curiously impotent, floating in their chambers like specimens in jars. Although they are up for sale once more, the encased objects feel unobtainable, as if quarantined from both time and human desire.

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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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Solo Shows

Ian Myers: A painter’s faith

Contributed by Anna Gregor / Ian Myers’ paintings blur the lines between art, nature, and miracle, asking what painting’s vocation is at a moment when anything can be art, nature is under threat, and miracles are unfathomable. His five paintings, on view in his solo show “immortal flub” at New Collectors Gallery, are obviously art. Rectangles do not occur in nature, nor do the white gallery walls on which his rectangular paintings hang. But these rectangles don’t act like windows that allow us to enter an illusionistic space, as we expect from mimetic paintings. Nor do they reveal the human hand or thought processes that we assume to be involved in making abstract work. They eschew the exhibitionist gesture of Abstract Expressionism, the clarity of hard-edge abstraction, and the planned step-by-step process of much contemporary abstraction. 

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Solo Shows

Farrell Brickhouse: The beat goes on

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.

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Solo Shows

Mary Carlson: Timelessly medieval

Contributed by Adam Simon / I happened to visit Mary Carlson’s exhibition “Garden” at Kerry Schuss Gallery the day I finished reading Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, written in the 1950s. I’m not usually drawn to fantasy fiction – this book was a gift – but Peake’s dreamlike rendering of a forbidding castle with clinging ivy and bizarre inhabitants had me in thrall, primed to receive Carlson’s medieval world and its symbiotic relationships between plants and people. One of the characters in Titus Groan uses the ivy to scale the castle walls, while two others take tea on a tree that grows horizontally out one of the windows. While not exactly ivy, vines fashioned from copper piping figure prominently in “Garden,”often dwarfing the mostly female glazed porcelain saints that sit on modest carved wooden shelves. The untamed power of the natural world, and humanity’s marginal presence in it, is an underlying theme in “Garden” and very like the world described by Peake.

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Solo Shows

Lee Maxey: Teasing out the uneasy

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Many years ago, I saw a strange and seductive specter on a cold winter night in Troy, New York, that has haunted me to this day. Through the glass windows of a gloomily defunct department store, a neon shock of orange letters hovered in the air spelling out the word EXIST. This enigma was the work of the artist Sharon Bates, part of an installation in which she cleverly riffed on the authority of an EXIT sign, transforming an everyday sight into a glowing spiritual command. I was reminded of Bates’s sculpture while taking in Lee Maxey’s new exhibition of paintings, titled “Wait Here,” at Olympia.

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Solo Shows

Joan Thorne, painter and artist

Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / Some painters insist on calling themselves painters rather than artists, and it’s clear why. “Art” designates is a broad category that admits almost anything, while painting is a tradition centered on a medium. In his recent book, Duchamp’s Telegram, Thierry de Duve argues that, while Marcel Duchamp did not single-handedly invent art in general, he perceived and announced its arrival. Before that, art was inconceivable outside the context of specific media such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Duchamp’s insight, of course, did not spell the end of painting, Rather, it gave painters the option of retreating into self-sustaining insularity or more expansively embracing how painting and other art overlapped in terms of image, touch, plane, color, space, and voice. Joan Thorne, whose recent paintings are now on view at David Richard Gallery, has taken the latter course, to impressive effect.

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Solo Shows

Eileen O’Kane Kornreich: Embracing fluidity

Contributed by Chunbum Park / A man riding a lion. A canine barking at a red painting of men’s legs. Snow White eyeballing the private parts of a man holding onto a chair. A blue queer person’s reach for blankets and pillows arrayed like clouds of a night sky. “Pleasures of Duality,” Eileen O’Kane Kornreich’s solo exhibition at The Opening Gallery in Tribeca, depicts sensuous figures embracing both sides of their identity. It is an agreeably assertive and highly effective migration away from customary gender-based psychological and aesthetic orientations. 

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Solo Shows

Robert Moskowitz’s visual quartet

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.

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Solo Shows

Janice Biala’s epochal studio

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A striking feature of the paintings and works on paper of Janice Biala (1903–2000), now on view at Berry Campbell in a show craftily curated by Jason Andrew, is their seamless reconciliation of civilizational clutter and spatial order. Fixing that notion is the earliest painting, The Studio (1946), arraying the artist’s active workspace and establishing her intent to embrace the world through it. (Coincidentally, Vera Iliatova’s “The Drawing Room” at Nathalie Karg gamely recaptures and updates kindred impulses.) Biala’s work here, spanning the immediate postwar period almost to the end of the Cold War and blending the New York School and the School of Paris – she lived in both cities – also bears the considerable weight of twentieth-century history, art and otherwise, with extraordinary grace and weightless cohesion, free of the strain of obvious contrivance.

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Solo Shows

Vera Iliatova: Women in the studio, now and then

Contributed by Larissa Bates / Vera Iliatova’s solo show “The Drawing Lesson,” on view at Nathalie Karg Gallery, offers cinematic montages of female artists at work in a Brooklyn studio. The nine gestural oil paintings in warm greys and buttery mauves, with skirted figures moving indoors to backlit space, mark a departure from the haunted pastoral landscapes of Iliatova’s previous exhibitions. The dappled light, painterly marks, and muted pallet of the composite narrative interiors bring to mind Susan Lichtman as well as Manet. Gritty barges, a consistent motif of Iliatova’s, chug up the East River, glimpsed through single-paned industrial windows. These and concrete floors are reminders of the post-industrial spaces carved into the Brooklyn studios where Iliatova has spent decades working. As Dudley Andrew observes in the press release, she renders the place of rendering, depicting young women as simultaneously busy and solitary.

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Solo Shows

Beatrice Caracciolo: Exquisitely stealthy

Contributed by David Carrier / What does it mean for a contemporary artist to be inspired by an older text or artwork? The Gospel of Matthew 15:14 says: “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Moved by those words in 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Blind Leading the Blind, which hangs in Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Now stirred by that picture, Beatrice Caracciolo, a young artist who grew up in that city, has drawn The Blind 16: one large image of the blind beggars and several smaller details also derived from the Bruegel. Between Matthew and Bruegel and then Bruegel and Caracciolo, there’s a kind of creative slippage whereby the meaning of the prior statement is transformed. At each stage, Matthew’s basic conception is partly preserved while something is added or subtracted. He doesn’t specify, for instance, that there are six blind men. Caracciolo shows his entire work, but without color, in grisaille. In smaller rectangular works on paper, she focuses on the trees and on some of the individual blind men.

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