Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Time Will Tell,” Don Porcaro’s boffo solo sculpture exhibition at Westwood Gallery, is at once aesthetically rigorous and culturally resonant, and neither quality ever compromises the other.
Solo Shows
Taney Roniger and the miracle of charcoal
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I spent spring break at Studio 34 with Taney Roniger, mostly silent, measuring the depth of her drawings. Her solo show there, “Drawing is a Verb,” includes eight works on paper, mostly made of charcoal drawn on slightly textured hot-press watercolor paper. Each drawing is mounted directly on the wall, unframed, using hidden magnets. Her presentation of drawing as a primary medium – not something to be imported into painting or something else later, not for studies – is authoritative. Too often, drawing shows read as frame shows. Drawings presented like these, unmediated by glass or frame, preserve subtle surface incident that would be lost if they were conventionally sealed-off and protected. The collective series title, Myyrmaki, refers to a Lutheran church in Finland, a source of inspiration for the artist, known for its architectural engagement with fluted light.
Miyoko Ito: Past ordeal to beauty
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / When I walked into the large middle gallery at Matthew Marks, where the stunning work of Miyoko Ito (1918–1983) from the 1970s is concentrated, a person in the gallery turned to me and said, “Give me a coffee machine and a cot and I can spend the rest of my life here.” I completely understood. I first encountered Ito’s work when I was in graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. Along with my teachers Ray Yoshida and Richard Loving, Ito joined my roster of painting heroes. The current exhibition includes three small, figurative lithographs, but the thrust of the show is the paintings – painstaking abstractions with allusions. Sixteen, spanning the period 1942 to 1983, the year of her death, are on view. All are modest in scale and, though there are color constants, each has its own particular – and novel – composition.
David Humphrey: Art is an ass
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / As “Ass Backwards,” the title of David Humphrey’s new show of paintings at Fredericks & Freiser, suggests, they are less in-your-face than much of his recent work. But they remain as busy, visually precise, and narratively provocative as ever, suggesting that it is not Humphrey’s approach to painting but rather his apprehension of the world and his place in it that have changed.
Gale force: Alyse Rosner at Rick Wester
Contributed by Riad Miah / “Bracing Against the Wind,” the title of Alyse Rosner’s solo exhibition at Rick Wester Fine Art, can be read literally and poetically. While her paintings depict dynamic elements of nature, they also reveal the intuitive hand of the artist. This allows the viewer to decode her process in making them, which includes rubbing, repetitive application, imparting decorative motifs, and more.
Mining Krzysztof Grzybacz’s oblique gestalts
Contributed by Margaret McCann / “At the Center of the Onion is Another Onion” is Polish painter Krzysztof Grzybacz’s first solo show at Harkawik. Sturdy yet subtle, his paintings are as elliptical as they are intense. Beyond unpeeling their complexity, his work offers consideration of a larger onion, that of figurative painting’s path through eastern Europe.
Paul Mogensen’s ordering formulations
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Paul Mogensen dismisses the Renaissance. Not its considerable artistic achievements, of course, but rather its excessive emphasis within conventional art history. Mogensen is experiencing a renaissance himself with “Paintings: 1965-2022,” at Karma, a de facto mini-retrospective that includes 20 paintings and works on paper. Karma, a gallery known for its adventurous curatorial program and savvy publishing arm, has done a great deal more than most museums to sustain a variety of NYC-specific historical discourses since its inception in 2011. In the case of Mogensen, along with fabled colorist Robert Duran, Karma’s program is potentially the second coming of the legendary Bykert Gallery. This is a considerable achievement in a contemporary art world often characterized by “context collapse.”
Kahori Kamiya’s expansive intimacy
Kahori Kamiya’s New York debut solo exhibition “Long Eclipse” at Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn is a powerful and personal exploration of her Japanese cultural identity and experience of womanhood. Through her works, Kamiya delves into her own existential and spiritual contemplations, reflecting on acutely personal experiences such as breastfeeding her baby, facing racial discrimination during the pandemic, and grieving the loss of her mentor.
Chris Dorland, historian for the future
Contributed by Sharon Butler / As curators Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick pointed out for their 2022 summer show “The Painter’s New Tools,” most painters use computers in the studio, whether to make composite image studies, scan and print 3-D models, create animations, or simply display large-scale imagery. To a greater or lesser degree, all artists are engaged in digital practice these days. Chris Dorland goes at least a meta-step farther. His dazzling paintings, on display in “shellcode” at Lyles & King, are indeed made with digital tools. But Dorland’s new work is primarily about the evolution of the digital environment itself.
Gyan Shrosbree: Fluorescent beauty and the feminine gaze
Contributed by Rob Samartino / Gyan Shrosbree’s first solo show at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Gowanus, “The Dress / What Touches the Floor,” is a radical vision of a conquering race of women. These larger-than-life chromatic experiments loosely adhere to the female-identifying body and have a confrontational aspect, as if approaching a mirror to affirm a kind of armored readiness for the world. Spawned and respawned, the women in these paintings at once blend into and stand out from a generative matrix made for, by, and of them.
Julie Heffernan’s splendid circuses
Contributed by Margaret McCann / En masse in Hirschl & Adler’s brimming rooms, Julie Heffernan’s colorful, busy paintings overwhelm like a pride of peacocks. Her solo show “The Swamps are Pink with June,” a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, evokes the hope nature can inspire. This plays out in iconography, a saturated palette, and the adoption of tree diagrams as compositional trellises, which poise the accretion of experience against spontaneous flowerings from the unconscious.
Chase Cantwell: Satisfying transitions
Contributed by Sharon Butler / While working on “The Portrait Project” – the incisive and absorbing set of paintings depicting various artists (including me) now on display at The Painting Center – Chase Cantwell was also exploring his personal relationship to gender…. As progressive ideas about gender and transition gained traction, Chase switched pronouns and began identifying publicly as a man. Painting portraits after working abstractly for twenty years clearly reflects his transition as an artist. Beyond that, it may somehow echo his defining personal experience of transition.
Multi-dimensional: Eozen Agopian’s string paintings
Contributed by Lisa Taliano / It’s no easy task to determine how many dimensions there are in the string paintings of Eozen Agopian, now on view at High Noon Gallery on the Lower East Side. The artist’s heterogeneous low-relief assemblages consist of scraps of patterned fabric and colorful second-hand threads on soak-stained canvases littered with brushy paint effects. They produce a multiplicity of frayed and contradictory edges that make it hard to situate points in a single position in space. Being in more than one place at the same time synchronizes her nomadic state with her interior worlds.
Michele Araujo: A straight-in shot
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “The Vulnerable Paintings,” on view at OSMOS Address through March 4, Michele Araujo has decisively found her voice. After working on rigid aluminum panels for years, Araujo has shifted to sheets of vellum, unapologetically embracing the beauty of color and the seductive nature of process. The result is a handsome and satisfying kind of arrival.
Stephen Maine’s hands-off abstraction
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Stephen Maine’s abstract paintings, on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, hit you head-on with their optically charged surfaces and imposing presence. The gallery, which has a penchant for showing large-scale work, is exhibiting in its main space several of Maine’s signature “residue paintings” – spongy, all-over compositions with gorgeous, saturated colors in acrylic on canvas – that are over eight feet by six feet.
