Solo Shows

Solo Shows

JoAnne Carson: Raucous retro-futurism

Contributed by Mary Jones / Exuberance is a word frequently used in describing the work of JoAnne Carson, and, in “Cosmic Chatter,” her first solo show at DC Moore, it’s in hyperdrive. Twelve large, colorful paintings share the main gallery space with one eight-by-six-foot monochromatic sculpture of an intricately crafted white flowering tree. Placed near the entrance, the sculpture serves as a three-dimensional model and introduction to the paintings. The fragile delicacy of this surprising and marvelous object resembles an encounter with a conjured specimen preserved in ice, a fact among fiction. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Robert Yoder: The gravity of modesty

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If On Kawara’s monumentally quotidian work was about the objective significance of the simple passage of time, Robert Yoder’s may be, in turn, about the subjective importance of each passing moment however uneventful. “I Was the Other Conversation,” his solo exhibition of untitled paintings (and one beguiling wooden carving) now up at Frosch & Co., continues his discerning visual exploration of how, psychically, people live.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Claudia Parducci: Catching the falling dust 

Contributed by Doug Milford / Good art can have multiple sources of meaning – material, color, scale, intention, chance, change, process, metaphor, ontology, epistemology, philosophy, biography, zeitgeist, history, and more. These may or may not be apparent or even deliberate, but they make up the work’s internal structure and shape its style. Ideally though certainly not always, these influences operate in concert while remaining distinct. The nine works in Claudia Parducci’s exhibition “Blue”, at Ochi Gallery in Los Angeles in February and March, achieve this balance, both as individual pieces and as an ensemble. The six years that had passed since her previous show included a three-year hiatus from painting after the death of her husband, the artist Peter Alexander, in 2020. This body of work was a response to his passing. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Tom Butler’s emotional twilight zone

Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer.  Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s lush life 

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s current show at the Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side, comprising close to 50 works, sheds generous light on her process, range and subject matter. The exhibition’s title, “Beneath the Trees it Rains,” conveys the dynamism of Whittaker-Doe’s landscapes, which demonstrate nature’s seasonal abundance and power.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Hannah Barrett’s alchemical archivists

Contributed by Wells Chandler / Inserted in extravagant interiors, the hybrid creatures in Hannah Barrett’s paintings, now on view at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown alongside the work of four others, embody both psychic and material liminality, performing the delicate work of chronicling personal and cultural becoming. As seraphic intermediaries contemplated by the likes of Hildegard von Bingen, Barrett’s elastically protean tricksters play as queer homunculi, perhaps resurrected from the margins of illuminated medieval manuscripts, reanimated and thriving in Victorian polychrome. Cloistered in very gay Akashic libraries, they are fierce androgynous gatekeepers, summoning rune light from somewhere over the rainbow.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Harvey Weiss’s wistful transformations 

Contributed by Marcy Rosewater / “Cautionary Tales,” a retrospective of works on paper by artist Harvey Weiss, is located in Holden House, a grand old mansion in historic Newburgh, New York, now restored and hosting occasional art exhibitions. Both the work and the house beckon melancholic remembrances. The show comprises paintings, drawings, and collaged and manipulated magazine pages and photographs, spans almost 40 years, and presents twelve distinct series. Each begins with a familiar image that undergoes a transformation revealing the artist’s emotional, physical, conceptual, and spiritual processing, yielding a narrative duet between what is seen and what is felt.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

The Somatic Paintings of Erika Ranee

Contributed by Wells Chandler / Skin is the largest organ of the body, home to over four million pores, each one a threshold. The epidermis is not merely a boundary but a porous membrane between self and environment, a breathing eye through which consciousness meets the world. The canvas, like the body, is an envelope of sensation, holding a field of awareness that does not end at its edges.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Beck Lowry: Fusing Modernism and global craft

Contributed by Will Kaplan / Beck Lowry’s sculptural paintings act as vessels. But what do they hold? Memory? Sensation? Labor? Five such pieces comprise “First Storm,” at Yossi Milo Gallery, the artist’s first New York solo show. In its earthen palette and irregular construction, the work resembles ceremonial objects, though the associated eras and cultures remain mysterious. For understanding the art’s function and what it contains, Lowry’s process is key.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Polina Barskaya’s richly simple world

Contributed by Peter Schroth / Artist Polina Barskaya – born in Ukraine, raised in Brooklyn, now living in Italy – paints intimate portraits of domestic life. In “The Good Life,” her current exhibition at Harkawik, the life in question encompasses a self-contained triangle of father, daughter, and mother, the latter being the artist and observer. It’s hard to take such a title at face value – especially, perhaps, in light of current events. Except for one painting set in a courtyard, the strictly interior world of the home – be it a private residence or a hotel room – is depicted. Each scene is rendered within a symmetrically balanced box in one-point perspective and contains a central anchoring element. These snug spaces take on a womb-like character, suggesting not only nurture or shelter but also isolation.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Georges Rouault: The spirit of the visual

Contributed by John Goodrich / Georges Rouault’s star has fallen considerably since 1945, the year the curator and collector James Thrall Soby dubbed him “one of few major figures in 20th century painting.” The artist’s religiosity and stained-glass-window style are not so captivating today. …The 21 paintings now on view at Shin Gallery invite a reassessment. Organized in conjunction with Skarstedt Gallery, the exhibition offers a particularly strong selection of the Rouault’s work.

Continue Reading →
Conversation Solo Shows

Glenn Goldberg and Mary DeVincentis

Artist Glenn Goldberg sat down with painter Mary DeVincentis during her recent solo show at Tappeto Volante Projects to explore the connections between personal experience and artistic expression. Their conversation reveals an artist whose work emerges from a lifetime of witnessing — from childhood visits to a state hospital where her mother worked as an art therapist, to her journey through loss and spiritual questioning. They discuss her latest series — paintings of solitary women who inhabit liminal spaces between memory and projection. DeVincentis discusses how her recent discovery of aphantasia — the inability to form mental images — has shaped her simplified visual vocabulary. She also draws inspiration from mythological women punished for disobedience, reimagining them as empowered by their behavior.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Lina McGinn’s whimsical gravitas

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Dear John” – Lina McGinn’s absorbing and ostensibly playful solo show of sculptures at the expansive Europa Gallery in the Two Bridges neighborhood – manifests fine technique and a conceptual sensibility deeper than it might first appear. Using fiberglass resin and polymerized gypsum to isolate and fix discarded and distressed cardboard boxes in a range of anthropomorphic poses, she achieves something quite familiar in art – the personification of inanimate objects – in a singularly inventive way. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Ridley Howard: Sky high

Contributed by Amanda Church / In his exhibition of similarly sized small-scale paintings titled “Sky,” now up at Marinaro, Ridley Howard applies his usual paint-handling panache to celestial expanses of blue. The surfaces are flawless and smooth, as are the porcelain faces of the women he depicts. The skies’ shades vary, and clouds make an occasional appearance, but there’s a pervasive sense of clarity and tranquility punctuated by partial views of treetops, cocktails, and impassive female faces. The usually stark tableaux sometimes border on the surreal. Howard’s Summer Moon, for instance, echoes Magritte’s The Banquet, minus the figure. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Michele Abramowitz’s improbable terrain

Contributed by Suzanne Joelson / I needed to write about Michele Abramowitz to understand the uncanny allure of her paintings, now on view at Kate Werble Gallery. She brings life, or something like it, to familiar conventions. Shifts in figure and ground trick the eye as it negotiates improbable terrain, that looks more like a dream than a product of twentieth-century formalism. Resemblances abound, shift, dissolve, mimic, repeat. Each painting is at once assuring and destabilizing. 

Continue Reading →
1 … 3 4 5 6 7 … 41