Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Eyal Danieli: Embracing history in abstraction

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Israeli-American artist Eyal Danieli passed away earlier this year. I met him a few times, but I didn’t know him. I was impressed by the force of his personality, or more specifically of his presence. It was not that he was intimidating. In fact, he struck me as a tender soul – a gentleman – but also a man weighted with a distinct and uncommon gravity. His painting, in its blunt sensitivity, is similar. Sadly, Danieli’s first exhibition with 57W57 Arts, solemnly called “Preoccupied,” is effectively a memorial show. But nothing can diminish the innate power of his small pieces.

Solo Shows

Dana Schutz: Too big to fail?

Contributed by Peter Malone / The airplane-hangar dimensions of the top-tier commercial art gallery can be justified by the flexibility they offer both dealer and artist. In 2017, I watched David Zwirner adapt his Chelsea location on 19th Street to accommodate Alice Neel’s modestly sized portraits, then open it up to create the parking lot rug sale vibe that suited Josh Smith’s 2019 “Emo Jungle” bazaar. Those two events occupied my thoughts as I walked through the grandiose layout of Dana Schutz’s recent “Jupiter’s Lottery” exhibition.

Solo Shows

Beyond time: Brice Marden’s last paintings

Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / The dreamtime, as understood in Aboriginal culture, is a fully integrated reality lived daily, a total experience that holds past, present, and future in balance. From this perspective, the late Brice Marden’s last paintings feel both old and new, evoking an ancient mindset while embodying a new sentience and haptic presence born of the vulnerability and fragile urgings that arose as he grappled with his aging body and the ravages of cancer. The show’s title, Let the painting make you, is apt. It is fundamental to Marden’s work that painting spoke through him from the inside out: although he always adhered to his own set of rules, he never imposed an intellectualized concept on his creations. 

Solo Shows

Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom: Heirs to Nozkowski

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski was widely and deservedly recognized for making intimately scaled abstract paintings using an idiosyncratic visual language that was derived from the visual and emotional stimuli of everyday life. Since his death in 2019, I’ve often wondered who might be the next Nozkowski. Given the trend towards figuration, mixed-media surfaces, and massive scale, precious few painters seemed to be walking in his humble footsteps. Now we have Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom.

Solo Shows

Brice Marden’s valedictory courage

Contributed by David Rhodes / Brice Marden died at the age of 84 in August 2023. His first exhibition was in 1966 at the Bykert Gallery, located on East 81st Street, only a few blocks northeast of his current exhibition at Gagosian. A long life, years in the studio, immeasurable time spent with other artists’ work, travel, and an abundance of courage led to the paintings he made at the end of his life. 

Solo Shows

Louis Fratino’s happy equilibrium

Contributed by Margaret McCann / Louis Fratino’s paintings in “In bed and abroad” at Sikkema Jenkins depict varied social situations, from intimate scenes to foreign climes. Snapshots of memories, many from Italy, read like a travel diary. In Duomo, light seems to dissolve a church façade into a gossamer veil, like Monet’s series of Rouen. Milan’s iconic gothic cathedral is strikingly illuminated, as are most monuments in Italy at night. Silhouetted throngs of young people in front of it have gathered after their evening stroll to aid digestion, take in the sumptuous surroundings, and see what’s happening in the local piazza. This saunter or “passegiata” is also “a walk in the park,” and the painting’s mellifluous drama demonstrates Fratino’s impressive facility, as it captures the Italian relish of visual and other small pleasures, which Americans often mistake for sunny dispositions (see Fellini’s La Dolce Vita).

Solo Shows

David Diao: Impeccable touch

Contributed by Adam Simon / Sometime in the early 1980s, a mural appeared on West Broadway between Spring and Broome streets in New York City, declaring in multi-colored capital letters, “I Am The Best Artist” signed, René. This, and other versions of the mural, were generally considered an embarrassment in the local artist community. I thought the mural, by René Moncada, was an interestingly unsubtle parody of artists’ competition and quest for uniqueness. I thought of this mural while viewing David Diao’s solo exhibition, On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023, on view at Greene Naftali. The exhibition comprises twelve paintings dedicated to the work of another painter, including works that look like an archivist’s inventory.

Solo Shows

Colin Brant’s communion with the inconstant

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / You might consider the title of Colin Brant’s quietly inspiring exhibition “Mountains Like Rivers,” currently on view at Platform Project Space, an invitation to a world flipped on its end: what’s inherently solid becomes liquid, what’s up is now down. You would not be entirely wrong. Indeed, in Lake Louise/Poppies, the eponymous body of water mirrors the snowy, majestic range that anchors the painting. Red and yellow poppies in the foreground form a joyous tassel punctuating the band of blue, their stems waving like the arms of children eager to be called on.

Solo Shows

Charles LeDray: Securing memory

Contributed by Barbara A. MacAdam / In his solo show “Shiner” at Peter Freeman, Inc., Charles LeDray continues to frolic in his own past, fixing memories and cultural landmarks in tightly condensed, shrunken garments sewn up and assembled into sculptures, and in self-constructed objects turned on a potter’s wheel. He thus creates a home in which he is master and exercises total control over how the artifacts of his life are perceived. He draws our attention to miniscule objects, thereby empowering them. Welcome, then, to a Lilliputian jamboree, in which little people are at once quarries and intriguers.

Solo Shows

Hannah Antalek’s crystal ball: Magical and disconcerting

Contributed by Heather Drayzen / “Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Seminal Landing, the largest work, projects a haze of cobalt blue and violet that feels both subterranean and post-apocalyptic. Antalek’s signature “daisy dupe” swollen flowers are clustered together – glowing pearl yellows, tinged with pastel pink, in lilac shadows – as they reach towards twisting branches, dripping goo, and unexplained crystalline forms nestled around them.

Solo Shows

Nancy Davidson’s wandering carnival

Contributed by Fintan Boyle / A sense of serious satire has pervaded Nancy Davidson’s work for years, and it is on prominent display in her show “Braids Eggs and Legs: A Wandering,” installed in two large galleries at Catskill Art Space alongside Matt Nolen’s work. Davidson has long been a fan of morselized language and sundered bodies, which in theory would make her work fertile ground for the psychoanalytically inclined. Yet here she elides the sexual menace and violence that, say, Melanie Klein offers. Instead, she wanders, as her title announces.

Solo Shows

The evolution of Justine Hill

Contributed by Riad Miah / It is a pleasure to watch an artist evolve and see surprising changes, as in the case of Justine Hill with her current exhibition “Omphalos” at Dimin Gallery. Over the course of four solos, elements of her work have remained consistent. These include the cut-out shapes that jostle to fit together, and the color that complements (or contradicts) abutting forms. Hill’s earlier work has been likened to the masterful Elizabeth Murray’s. The comparison was apt enough insofar as she, like Murray, worked on irregularly shaped canvases, but it didn’t seem to go much deeper than that until now.

Solo Shows

Katherine Bradford: Heaven on Earth

Contributed by Rick Briggs / To one growing up Catholic, heaven and hell were in no way, shape, or form mere metaphors for possible destinations in the afterlife. They were very real places to spend all eternity, either heavenly salvation or eternal damnation. Forty years ago, Katherine Bradford proposed an exhibition to Chris Martin and me titled “3 Catholics.” While it never took place, the idea was to gather three lapsed Catholics who shared that particular cultural grounding and also similar painting values, and who were all now earnestly in pursuit of our new religion – Painting. This memory came wafting back to me the morning after viewing “Arms and the Sea,” Bradford’s solo show of remarkable new paintings at Canada.

Solo Shows

Ann Craven’s wistful nighttime tales

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / As children, we learn that nighttime is for hushed voices, unlit rooms, and the chance to briefly disappear into our dreams. In her latest show “Night” at Karma, Ann Craven fully embraces the enchantment of the wee hours. Her paintings, swathed in darkness, capture quiet moments, and the imagery could easily have been conjured from bedtime stories. Yet they’re not all warm and fuzzy.