Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Jim Osman: Multiplicities of balance

Contributed by Rachel Youens / The sculptures in Jim Osman’s show “Walnut 3,” now at McKenzie Fine Art, are both architectonic and playful. His constructions, placed on pedestals, are formalist balancing acts made of found lumber, some elements lightly reworked, that are stacked and arranged. Osman’s overall intention is to find a complex situation for entry, where forms assembled from Euclidean solids generate stability or dynamism through exquisitely contrasting proportions and scale. The experience of seeing unfolds in the extended time required to walk around each small free-standing work.

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Solo Shows

Vincent Szarek’s odysseys

Contributed by Ben Godward / Vincent Szarek’s current solo exhibition at R & R, a joint venture between Chart and Marvin Gardens at the juncture of Ridgewood and Bushwick, is his first in New York since moving back to the city from LA. The show is exquisite in itself and enhanced by an ideal location. His works are predominately black with hints of color that flash against the grey and brown industrial trappings of the space. Whereas the preserved vine-covered brick wall behind the largest painting echoes Old Europe, the pitted, patched, cracked, and grooved concrete hosting the central sculpture is pure Brooklyn/Queens. The swells of Szarek’s glossy surfaces flatter both settings, and vice-versa. 

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Solo Shows

Jadé Fadojutimi’s glorious self-restraint

Contributed by Millree Hughes / Painters in their twenties and thirties, particularly those whose work is figuration bordering on abstraction and somewhat gestural, may be trying to do too much. Too often it features too many colors, too many forms, too much of everything. It’s hard not to sympathize. Such artists have grown up in a time when communication occurs in morphing, moving pictures at high speed, and when consumer culture assaults mass consciousness. For some, the most honest response is to be overwhelmed and paint accordingly. Jadé Fadojutimi, whose enigmatically titled solo show “Dwelve: A Goosebump in Memory” is at Gagosian, sees another way. 

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Solo Shows

Dannielle Tegeder’s freighted abstraction

Contributed by Riad Miah / Informed by early modernists such as Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Stuart Davis, Dannielle Tegeder’s abstract paintings are in themselves traditional, painted with acrylic on stretched canvas. When displayed, however, their import extends beyond the canvas edges into wall paintings, immersive installations, and even musical collaborations, encouraging a searching and interactive viewing experience. Her solo show “Signals,” currently on view at Standard Space in Sharon, Connecticut, incorporates new elements into her visual vocabulary, including ladder mobiles, stained linen, and walnut panels, freshly drawing on other aspects of art history.

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Solo Shows

Matthew Lusk: Offhand dystopia at Elijah Wheat

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Located in rough-and-tumble Newburgh beyond the pale of riverfront commercial development on a piece of land just yards from the Hudson and insouciantly flush with its waterline, Carolina Wheat and Liz Nielsen’s grandly unvarnished Elijah Wheat Showroom has the Bunyanesque vibe of a frontier museum. Then it suavely wrongfoots its patrons with the fearlessly avant-garde attitude of 1970s Soho. Matthew Lusk’s deviously clever sculptures and installations exploit and reinforce both attributes…

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Solo Shows

Morandi’s pointed timelessness

Contributed by David Carrier / Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964. After the 1910s, when his art had some affinities with that of Giorgio de Chirico, he painted only still lives – bottles or flowers – and landscapes. “Time Suspended, part II” at Mattia de Luca Gallery, part I having been staged earlier in Italy, is a blessedly large presentation of 45 paintings and fifteen works on paper that reveals how little other artists or current events – indeed, anything outside of his studio life – affected his work.

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Solo Shows

Liz Scheer: Intimacy, isolation, and the rewards of elusiveness

Contributed by Sarah Friedman / Liz Scheer’s “Nocturama,” now up at Galerie Shibumi, is a trippy journey into multimedia works that combine everyday objects, religious texts, and human emotions. The style of the vignettes evokes Mexican votive paintings, conjuring the viewer’s longing for coherent narrative. However, the enigmatic captions do not always seem to explain the scenes they are paired with.

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Solo Shows

Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Inside to outside

Contributed by David Carrier / As the title “Tapes, Fields, and Trees” indicates, the exhibition of ten works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Craig Starr Gallery draws on three bodies of her early work. In the mid-1970s, she made Minimalist paintings of tape measures. Pieces like Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor, however, reveal a surprising poetry in seemingly prosaic subjects. Then she painted grids, like the one in Painted Graph Paper. Finally, in a remarkable transition, she drew a window looking out on a landscape….

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Solo Shows

Lisa Hoke’s visual rodeo

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Information overload has understandably been a popular theme for artists, and many have explored it poignantly….Lisa Hoke is one – a game and capable bull rider in a visual rodeo. In her solo show “Relative Uncertainty” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, she meets the challenge with consummate skill, persistent wit, and, not least, a kind of stoical grit that firmly rebuffs any attempt to cast her outwardly joyful approach as sheltered or clueless, utopian or oblivious.

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Solo Shows

Teak Ramos’s case for beauty

Contributed by Talia Shiroma / It is safe to say that beauty has become an incidental quality in visual art over the last century, taking a back seat to, among other things, art’s expanded range of aesthetic values, its social and political dimensions, and capacity for novelty. So it was surprising to find, at Teak Ramos’s solo show “In Traditional Fashion” at Ulrik Gallery, a self-conscious display of visual delight. The exhibition featured 14 panels clad in white silk and tulle, which ran along the walls like errant pearls. The works are impassive, delicate, and thoughtfully constructed. They are lovely and empty forms. 

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Solo Shows

Rafael Vega and the creative process

Contributed by Riad Miah / Rafael Vega’s work contemplates the act of making art in its entirety. Each of his two-dimensional relief pieces, now on display in his solo show “To See Is To Conjure” at Helm Contemporary, emerges from a series of deliberate actions – cutting, folding, and stitching – that break down and rebuild the existing composition. Leaving unprimed and untouched canvas as a frame of reference, he lets viewers in on his creative ritual. They see, as it were, how the sausage is made.

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Solo Shows

Bascha Mon’s personal cosmopolis

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Tappeto Volante Gallery in Gowanus is audaciously hosting a condensed retrospective spanning decades of Bascha Mon’s painting, selected and arranged by the artist herself. Her more recent work dominates the gallery’s anterior space, with paintings from the 1970s – which remain integral to her ongoing inquiry – populating the rear room….

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Solo Shows

Unskilled Worker: About a boy and more

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Upon entering Daniel Cooney Fine Art, one is immediately surrounded by a colorful crowd of idiosyncratic boys. As portrait subjects, they feel oddly familiar and distinctive, and their haunting visages might stop you in your tracks. With deep, rich colors the portraits radiate a warm glow, each subject is suffused with a stained-glass brilliance and idealized in an almost spiritual aura. The paintings are the work of London-based Helen Downie, who goes by the moniker Unskilled Worker – a tongue-in-cheek reference to her self-taught background….

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Solo Shows

Eleanor Ray: The power of the small

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Many conceptualists, favoring the unconstrained and expansive, balk at the representation or framing of any experience as image. Long after he abandoned painting, the late installation artist Robert Irwin likened it to a mere “keyhole” of perception. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig declared that compartmentalizing experience for viewing made you “a passive observer” for whom “it’s all moving by you boringly in a frame.” Yet surely not every living experience has to be as open-ended as a motorcycle racing across salt flats. While a painting can never capture the full immensity of life, with adequate perception and economy of means – say, Luke Howard’s vision of the sky realized in paper and watercolor – even a diminutive one can provide a meaningful distillation of experience. The paintings of Eleanor Ray, now on display in her third solo show at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, constitute abundant evidence.

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Solo Shows

Whitney Claflin: Forever young

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whitney Claflin’s work, now on view in her solo exhibition “Pinky’s Where” at Derosia, is winningly deceptive, like the title’s double-entendre. Consider the paintings Emma in Tarzana and Mr. Triste. At first blush, they seem nonchalantly wise-ass and a little frustrating, the first an offhand quip about internet celebrity and influencer supreme Emma Chamberlain, and the second…

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