Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Stephanie Deady and the structure of intimacy

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Stephanie Deady’s coolly seductive oil-on-birchwood paintings now on display at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin – all archly titled, like the show itself, Emotional Calculus – draw you in like mirages of serenity. For that purpose, they incisively deploy beauty: tawny, fluid backgrounds envelop rhythmically interacting shapes of red, blue, or white, lending each package of images visual harmony and compositional stability. In due course, the paintings reveal deeper intent, which is to complicate and enrich your ultimate apprehension of the presumptively simple life.

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Solo Shows

Meg Lipke’s supple resistance

Contributed by Lawre Stone / Meg Lipke makes enormity relatable. The immense Slanting Grid welcomes visitors to her exhibition “Matrilines” at Broadway Gallery. Monumental in scale, soft in countenance, this 8 x 16-foot work of painted and stitched fiber-filled muslin rises above the viewer, floating grandly along one of the gallery’s longest walls.

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Solo Shows

 Clintel Steed’s careful daring

Contributed by Margaret McCann / In Clintel Steed’s show of paintings at Shrine Gallery, “Different Time Zones, Different Dimensions,” temporal experience is evoked through formal language as much as subject matter. In most, dynamic fragmentations of contemporaneity are fixed in static tessellations of paint. Richly varied shapes, packed in shallow space on dense surfaces, lead from abstraction to illusion.

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Solo Shows

Analia Saban’s wildly probing art     

Contributed by David Carrier / Arriving at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, I was surprised that someone had hung a puffer jacket on the entry wall. Such galleries are usually immaculate. I walked on, for there was a lot to see in Analia Saban’s extraordinary show “Flowchart.” Upstairs, Core Memory, Plaid (Black, White, and Fluorescent Orange), a woven paint construction on a walnut frame, visually alludes to both weaving and magnetic-core random-access memory, a building block of early computing. In the downstairs gallery, five large tapestries picture playful flowcharts – hardly the traditional subjects of woven art – that marry the handmade and the digital.

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Solo Shows

Noa Ironic: TMI in a good way

Contributed by Mary Jones / The old joke begins, “A horse walked into a bar…” That could be one of the titles of the 15 new ceramic pieces in Noa Ironic’s lively show, “The Good Chyna,” now up at bitter.nyc. Ironic’s horse, however, would be high on ecstasy. Fantasy and desire abound as she negotiates identity, social anxiety, memory, and a little poker. “I like oversharing,” she says. Ironic’s work explores gender, and particularly masculinity, and in “The Good Chyna” she proves a prescient and empathetic observer.

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Solo Shows

Liz Ainslie’s masterful oscillations

Contributed by Jason Andrew / There is a bound wildness to Liz Ainslie’s new paintings at Deanna Evans Projects. Across 18 paintings, three of which are over six feet tall and the largest she’s made to date, Ainslie introduces an eclectic menagerie of loops, halos, and squiggles penned in by stripes, checkerboards, and color fields. The works are beguiling hybrids of perception and abstraction in their pursuit of free-form reverie with formal discipline.

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Solo Shows

Shirin Mirjamali’s exquisite intensity

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Iranian government has looked askance at political assertiveness and social progressivism since the revolution of 1979. The pressure under which women operate is especially heavy. Political protest, however, cannot be a way of life. Day to day, Iranians are compelled to avoid confrontations that could place them in jeopardy, discreetly acknowledging anguish and resolving to sublimate it. Shirin Mirjamali, whose exquisitely intense works on paper are now on display in her solo show “Hidden Longing” at Anita Rogers Gallery, exemplifies this essentially pensive disposition.

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Solo Shows

Richard Bosman at Headstone Gallery

Contributed by Bill Arning / Long-time Bosman watchers often recall his work as a firehose of imagery—gunfights and car chases, sinking ships, kidnappings, and robberies pouring out in rapid succession. Fans might therefore be surprised when entering his first solo show at Kingston’s beloved Headstone Gallery, a venue known for its ambitious program of younger artists. In inviting an older master like Bosman, the gallery has delightfully broadened its scope.

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Jodie Manasevit’s minimalist portent

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Until viewing the concurrent exhibitions up now – one at Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston, the other at Ghostmachine in New York – the last time saw I so many of Jodie Manasevit’s fine, fierce paintings was at the start of 2020, in a previous incarnation of artist-curator David Dixon’s Cathouse Proper project space in Carroll Gardens.

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Solo Shows

Fran Shalom: Merging vernaculars

Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve been aware of Fran Shalom’s paintings for a while and have been interested in how at times they seem like a comic version of abstract painting. She excels at what I would call formal wit, eliciting not a belly laugh but a knowing smile from those familiar with the vernacular. Her humor is a foil of sorts, providing cover for a serious investigation into the way shapes can carry associations and embody feelings. Looking at one of Shalom’s paintings can be as psychologically charged as an encounter with an eccentric person. My assumption is that the paintings are arrived at, as the title of her current show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, “Everyday Improvisations,” suggests, through trial and error.

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Intermedia Museum Exhibitions Solo Shows

Peter Doig’s tropical opera

Contributed by David Carrier / Upon entering Peter Doig’s show at Serpentine South Gallery in London, you see Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), a vibrant depiction of a half-finished mural he photographed in the Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city. If Henri Rousseau had actually gone to the tropics, and they had inspired him to intensify his pigments, he might have painted something like Doig’s three large-scale works, which feature sensuous, saturated colors depicting the Lion of Judah, a Rastafarian symbol, freed in the streets of the city.

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Solo Shows

Alexandra Smith’s poignant restraint

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Auxier Kline is a small hallway gallery on the fringes of Chinatown. Alexandra Smith’s previous shows there had an intimate sweetness – tender images of touch, flesh rendered in unnatural pinks and yellows, hands everywhere, faces rarely shown. “Doppelganger,” Smith’s current show in the gallery, turns into darker territory. Overall, the mood is creeping dread – a sense that “something bad is going to happen, probably to me.”

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Solo Shows

Andrew Shea’s domestic enchantment

Contributed by Jonathan Agin / Andrew Shea’s work in recent years has evolved from geometric, high-contrast scenes of city bustle to impressionistic vignettes of home life where hues interact with considerably more freedom. Steeped in a quiet domesticity, the paintings in “Grocery Slips” at JJ Murphy Gallery seem idealized only at first glance…

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Solo Shows

Heather Drayzen: Painting as faith 

Contributed by Lucas Moran / In times of great political upheaval and unrest, art has held us and guided us towards compassion. Picasso’s Guernica set the most titanic example of this in 1937. As we slide closer to authoritarianism and watch the world grow less familiar, artists continue the noble task of showing us how to live through it. Sasha Gordon set a tone in her recent show at Zwirner, depicting herself sitting on a lawn clipping her nails while the world – seemingly all we know – erupted in a mushroom cloud behind her. Less sardonic but in a similar warp are Alexis Rockman’s melting icecaps and Richard Mosse’s documentation of Amazonian deforestation. “Towards the Sun,” Heather Drayzen’s compelling solo show at My Pet Ram, feels just as urgent. The question she asks, though, isn’t What’s happening to us? but rather, What still matters?

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Solo Shows

Susannah Phillips: A grave luminosity

Contributed by John Goodrich / The act of painting is enough to befuddle the ordered mind. We can grasp its basic ingredients: the lines that divide a surface, directing the eye and locating forms and details; the tones that lend mysterious weight to light, fleshing out volumes and intervals; the colors that recast tones with a new dimensionality of hues and intensities. But each of these ingredients continuously rejiggers the others. Where to begin? How to finish? The challenge is hardly new. In 1765, addressing the jury of the Académie Française, the great painter Chardin pictured how “a thousand unhappy painters have broken their brushes between their teeth out of despair.” Every artist, of course, ends up finding their own way, favoring one or another of these ingredients. For some, the actions of color are especially crucial, and do more than cast objects in a luminous light; the pressures and intervals of color leverage an overall design, illuminating how objects occupy the world framed by a painting. Judging by the work now on display at Lori Bookstein Projects, Susannah Phillips is one such colorist. 

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