An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, December 19, 2025
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.”
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I saw my favorite piece of Cady Noland ephemera before I ever saw one of her sculptures. On Instagram, a gallery posted a photo of a tee-shirt. It’s well loved and sun-faded, advertising the opening of Noland’s solo show at American Fine Arts on Wooster Street. The date of the opening is September 11, 2001. Opening the same day, across Canal Street on Broadway, was a show by Gelatin (Gelitin since 2005) at Leo Koenig’s gallery. The year before, the group had gone up to the 91st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and hung out a window. Josh Harris, founding Silicon Alley millionaire/internet pioneer/legendary liar, took photos from a helicopter. The Gelatin show was sparsely attended. I don’t know if anyone made it to Cady’s.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Good Art,” Anna Gregor describes a cultural hospice. The caretakers are a set of bad actors. They’re online critics who have replaced the labor of criticism with the catharsis of complaint, trading in “likes and clicks” for a smooth, sugary candy that requires only passivity and attention from its audience while it rots their teeth. This feedback loop, she argues, drowns true engagement and criticism in a “deluge of mediocre art.” It is a compelling diagnosis, but one delivered from the one place a critic cannot afford to be: behind a veil. Gregor deals exclusively in archetypes and generalizations while allowing the reader to “fill in the picture.” The playboi, the intellectualist, the yelper, and so on. She’s built a perfect haunted house and populated it with ghosts of her own making.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / It would be hard to miss the overarching theme of Lydia Baker’s show “Sonnet,” up at Massey Klein Gallery: metamorphosis. But rather than relying on overused signifiers, she gently guides us through life’s whitewater rapids, her work practically whispering “the only constant is change.”
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I often want to touch paintings when I go to galleries, but I rarely do. I know I can get away with it, but it doesn’t usually seem worth the risk. What new phenomena could I possibly discover after years of making art? It’s a depressing thought, but one I’m mercifully relieved of when I see a Pol Morton piece. “Get Well,” their solo show at Olympia, is a trove of stuff you want to lay hands on and dig through. I could write a novel going through all the materials. In the interest of brevity, I’ll stick to how it feels to look.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Images are everywhere. This simple (perhaps obvious) fact is driven home in various ways all the time. Most often in NPR bullet points indicating how many images the average person consumes daily. The number is often greeted with dull terror. Yet images are so prevalent that they disappear, coating the world in an invisible film. This dual quality of ubiquity and invisibility is what makes images such an attractive and important subject for artists to tackle. The current show at Miguel Abreu is kind of a who’s who of artists who study images and their rhythm.
Contributed by Jared Hoffman / “Various Artists,” Pop Gun Gallery’s current group show, ostensibly invites art fans to glimpse the future in works by some rather big names: Jordon Wolfson, Kim Gordon, Joe Bradley, and Mike Kelley. But not all is what it seems. The show, organized by Jacob Patrick Brooks and Gunner Dongieux for the artist-run, DIY gallery, starts by gently wrong-footing viewers. Four of Brooks’s large, slick oil paintings appear, each riffing on the phrase: “Glamour, it’s back.” In successive iterations, Brooks eases the phrase into abstract scenes, pushing large brush strokes into soft forms. A bit of Lois Dodd is felt in his color palette. The paintings give me the feeling of sipping tea in a Danish wood.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / The group exhibit “Medium Rare” – on display at Subtitled NYC, a second-floor Greenpoint gallery with a skylight – features paintings by Amanda Ba, Jacob Patrick Brooks, Marcus Civin, Sam Cockrell, Kevin Ford, Annette Hur, and Kate Liebman. It was curated – or rather, prompted – by Jaejoon Jang, who instructed the artists to select examples of what they considered unfinished work. Without knowledge of this specification, it would be difficult for a viewer to consider the pieces unfinished. The overarching cohesiveness of the show makes each one seem resolved. In light of Jang’s command, though, they can also be seen as hovering just outside of the artists’ respective oeuvres, meeting only some of their criteria for finished work.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I take it as a bad sign when galleries seize an opportunity to “respond” to something. At best, it’s slightly out of touch. The nature of putting on a thoughtful show is that it takes time and effort to pull off. Generally, the result is that it misses the moment. “New Images of Women” at Shoot the Lobster avoids this pitfall. It manages to be both provocative and timely. The work is carefully chosen, the message well-crafted and delivered like a perfectly timed punch in the stomach.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “Plus,”Geoffrey Chadsey’s inventively grotesque show of drawings at Jack Shainman Gallery, the men are endlessly customizable, like sets of Mr. Potato Heads, but with dad bods instead of plastic blobs.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Titled “PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS:),” Louis Osmosis’s debut solo show at Kapp Kapp Gallery in Tribeca feels like a 1,000-piece puzzle that’s been dumped on a table. Everything fits together, but it’s not immediately clear how.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / People love to categorize stuff, however silly it sometimes seems. Despite the best efforts of post-modernist artists to remove separations among media, they have proven surprisingly resilient. If you subvert categories, new ones tend to take their place. Jobi Bicos, whose work is currently on display at Lubov on the Lower East Side, is a savvy and interesting artist not because they�re trying to destroy them outright, but because they�re straddling several at once.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / As you walk into Honoring the Dog-Legging Horizon at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, something feels off. The sense is vague at first, but it becomes clearer as you alternate between hunching in close or backing up more than usual. The show is hung low, by about a foot, to encourage sitting down, and the work is well worth taking in fully.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I try not to go to galleries alone. If I dont have someone to moderate me and make sure that I spend an appropriate amount of time viewing work, I can speed through without sufficiently absorbing it, to my own detriment. Yet, even on my own, I was immediately captivated by Andrew Cranstons deceptively quiet, soft paintings in his current show Waiting for the Bell at Karma.
Despite Matthew Wong’s relatively banal subject matter essentially, nature the way it is handled in the exhibition on view at Cheim and Read elevates the art and makes it enthralling, like secrets gently whispered.
