Tag: Jonathan Stevenson

Screens

The Christophers: NFS

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art caper is a rich sub-genre of the crime film, populated by some clever and inventive movies. Customarily, they’ve focused on the complexity of a heist; think of Topkapi, Gambit, or Oceans Twelve. More recent ones – The Best Offer, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and The Mastermind – have delved fastidiously into the mentalities of the thieves or fraudsters, and in particular their perverse but rarely inauthentic relationships to beauty. Now there’s one in that vein from Steven Soderbergh, who also directed Oceans Twelve. The Christophers is slick and penetrating…

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Museum Exhibitions

Paul Klee, degenerate for the ages

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Branded a degenerate artist for his “insane childish scrawling” by the Nazis, Paul Klee, once anointed at the Bauhaus, left Germany for Switzerland in 1933. Scleroderma was already affecting his will and ability to paint, and his theretofore prodigious output waned. But as Germany’s onslaught in Europe effloresced into World War II, he regained purpose and productivity, yielding over 1,250 works in 1939, the year before his death. During this period, he downplayed his signature sublimation via color in favor of succinct line to expose the toxicity of fascism. Everything that concerned him as a citizen of the world seemed to catch light in his art. This valedictory turn is the subject of “Other Possible Worlds,” the Jewish Museum’s superbly curated show, uniquely centered on his final decade. 

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Biennial

At the Whitney Biennial: Ali Eyal’s mirthless amusement park

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The 2026 Whitney Biennial is rightly dialed into the world’s abundant strife, most of the selected artists witnessing and declaring it through materials, context, or concept. Ali Eyal, with his knockout of an oil painting Look Where I Took You – arguably the jewel of the exhibition – takes an exceptionally straight-up approach via content. Composed from the memory of a Baghdad amusement park he and his sister visited before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was nine, the piece spans the strategic arc of the twenty-first century with improbable lyricism while bravely carrying its immense geopolitical freight.

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Group Shows

Springs Projects: Concerted vibes

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Personal Space,” the group show now up at Springs Projects, is especially impressive for the steady, uninflected confidence it reflects in art as a part of life, devoid of commercial pandering or sheepish self-doubt. Considerable credit for this virtue goes to Tommy White, co-founder of the gallery. As he hung the work, all made by his adult students from the Art Students’ League, and forged the show’s overall coherence, White consulted the artists to ensure that each individual voice was preserved. His curatorial hand is masterful, harmonizing seeming divergence and distinguishing apparent similarity. For a group show to sing, of course, the artists themselves need to possess a sufficiency of talent and heart. This gang does.

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Screens

2025’s intrepid cinema

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2025, movies seemed to catch up with and confront the Trump era. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another – based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and nimbly arraying multiple stars with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead – is a deeply informed outcry of conscience and resistance, chiseled by satire into a grand statement. Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ creepily penetrating and funny…

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Gallery shows

Jeffrey Bishop and Mason Dowling: Worldly phantoms

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The lithely flirtatious and somewhat Boschian primary elements in Jeffrey Bishop’s acrylic-and-collage Sidewinder series of screenprint-painting-collages – now on display at McKenzie Fine Art – are centered, unabashed things-about-town, decidedly abstract but, in their verticality and jazzy affect, firmly digital-biomorphic.

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Solo Shows

Mitchell Kehe’s targeted irresolution

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The title of Mitchell Kehe’s solo show at 15 Orient – “Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt” – encapsulates the ambiguity and contradiction in which he traffics. Doubt is fundamentally divisive and isolating, a fraught source of any bond in the sense of affection or solidarity. Maybe he means “bonded” in the sense of “certified,” the way American whiskey is, uncertainty and doubt being such pervasive phenomena that no work of art can claim validity or integrity without somehow imparting them. In his beguiling paintings, this idea is manifested in a casual tension

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Solo Shows

Peter Plagens’ portals and vortexes

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Peter Plagens’ bracing new abstract paintings don’t so much as invite you in as dare you not to enter. Each canvas consists of three basic components: a painted frame of washy gray or brown; a pristinely rendered hard-edge shape, assertively opaque, centrally positioned, vertically symmetrical, and horizontally striated; and scattered, seemingly directional slashes. The second feature propels the paintings, but the other two steer them. The distinctly dilute vagueness of the frames might impart risk, the pesky shards impulse, and the vivid, intuitively color-coded ramps expansive fate – humble versions of Jacob’s Ladder, vouchsafing a future that need not be feared, at least distantly echoing one of Dave Hickey’s blithely peremptory and eminently arguable mantras: “Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.” 

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Group Shows Studio Visit

Matthew Miller: Hand to a humble god

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For over twenty years, Matthew Miller rendered arduously meticulous yet mysteriously otherworldly portraits, mainly of himself as subject and almost always against a maximally opaque black background betraying no brushstrokes, evidently free of human imperfection.

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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

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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Group Shows

Spring Projects’ epic subway series

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Most New Yorkers couldn’t live without the subway. It is their savior if occasionally their oppressor. They love it so much that they hate it when it lets them down, but the opprobrium is often oddly affectionate. Barroom arguments have fulminated and flourished over which subway line is worse – the F or the 7, the 2 or the L. Patronizing the subway can be a point of gritty cosmopolitan pride: real New Yorkers don’t use Uber. And it’s a great social equalizer, as reflected in Ralph Fasanella’s 1950 folk-art painting Subway Riders, now ensconced in the wall of 53rd Street/Fifth Avenue Station and as idealistic as ever. “Subway Riders” the group show is now up at Springs Projects. It keenly captures the subway’s pervasive, multivalent thrum through New York life with work by over 100 artists and a few eager amateurs (one is me).

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Screens

Paul Thomas Anderson: Raised on promises

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson/ Among the syndromes that make the current American moment so vexing is a liberal contingent duly alarmed but bereft and flummoxed in the face of unprecedentedly heedless and unrestrained illiberal forces. Concerned citizens – including elected officials – don’t know what to do, and they are clamoring for a sensibly energized way forward. Movies can reflect the zeitgeist quite resonantly and animate civic discourse. Lately, though, they have tended to divert to smaller-bore social issues and wistfulness for Americana or the counterculture without confronting what could happen to the country overall, Alex Garland’s Civil War excepted. Last week, however, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another landed. It is a fully sussed cri de coeur of liberal conscience, resistance, and resilience inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, and the first great political movie of the Trump era.

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