Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Lauren Clay’s organic sanctums

Contributed by Will Kaplan / In her solo show “Solarium” at Picture Theory, Lauren Clay compresses different scales of time into tight, enchanting wall sculptures. In modernizing the timeless form of the archway, her work reflects the structure’s progression from functional to aesthetic. The series of torso-sized works foster an intimate viewing experience, comparable to an altarpiece. Traditionally, altarpieces hover behind the altar itself. The faithful kneel beneath them for their sacraments, like the Eucharistic transformation…

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Alan Butler: Data-driven

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Assets,” on view at Green on Red Gallery in Dublin through December 13, Alan Butler – no relation – practices what could be called digital-age synesthesia, the neurological quirk by which the senses get their wires crossed. Synesthetes may taste color or see it as numbers. While Kandinsky had the insight and talent to create arguably the first Western abstract paintings by translating music into painting, Butler has taken on a distinctly twenty-first-century project: transforming open-source digital information – stock quotes, climate data, video game coding, and other assorted online effluvia – into playful physical objects that directly engage the senses.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Betsy Kaufman: The more you see

Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / At first blush, Betsy Kaufman’s self-titled show at Bookstein Projects, a concise survey of work made from 2008 to 2025, seems simply to present a handsomely cerebral group of paintings and drawings. In time, it becomes clear that the work smuggles in something more. Kaufman’s output is a kind of two-sided coin that can oscillate between her embrace of bold, saturated color and strategies of stark reduction.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Darren Bader: Flossing

Contributed by Lucas Moran / Making sense of art is not easy. You can’t pin down meaning when it keeps moving. Darren Bader’s new show “Youth,” now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery, vividly illustrates the point. Bader has been called a prankster and an absurdist, elevating the ridiculous into high art. His earlier projects included injecting lasagna with heroin, stuffing a brass instrument with shrimp, and giving away live kittens. He provides bits of text that hint at deeper meaning while refusing to settle into it. Filling a gallery with art that plays conceptual games with history and humor and still looks good is no easy trick. But Bader pulls it off.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Karin Davie: Totally tubular

Contributed by Amanda Church / Conjuring The Cure’s 1987 song Just Like Heaven – which proclaims “you’re just like a dream” – Karin Davie’s eight new large-scale paintings on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, all oil on linen, transport us to a realm of sensation and association. Here her wavy imagery, which she has been developing in one form or another since the 1990s, immediately evokes the swells and dips of the ocean’s surface as well as recalling the fluid lines essential to the work of painters like Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Bridget Riley, Moira Dryer, and late de Kooning, albeit to varying effect.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
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.

Continue Reading →
1 2 3 4 5 … 41