Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / Jihoon Cho, a South Korean-born artist-in-residence at WIP Space in Wandsworth, London, recently unveiled his latest spatial poem “Open Canopy” in the studio building’s gallery. It is above all an exhilarating environment. The four constituent works fall somewhere between Minimalist sculpture and architectural artifice, suggesting Cho’s preoccupation with his own rootlessness as an artist experiencing the unstable liminality of the immigration process.
Contributed by Laurence Hegarty / Daniel Wiener’s naming system for his own work is quite precise. On his website, he states of the piece titled Clutching: “Genre: Sculpture | Like: Bowl | Placed: On A Shelf. ” Most would recognize that it is, well, a sculpture like a bowl, wherever it is placed. Wiener’s work dallies on a threshold between aesthetic bliss and mundane function. Into his semi functional world Wiener has smuggled images of faces: toothy grins, mouths agape, and wide-awake eyes returning the viewer’s gaze. In his current show at Satchel Projects, “Out in Front of the Back of Beyond,” the faces have migrated and are now sculptural objects. The viewer is placed in a direct encounter with a face. For Wiener, this shift is vital and intentional, as “the space of intimacy” – “two beings face-to-face in close proximity” – is the subject of his work.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In Mark Webber’s conceptual world, on display at Anita Rogers Gallery, trees gently but surely infiltrate the architecture humans have contrived in their space. They embrace it, disorient it, crack wise about it, and generally take manmade structures down a peg, reminding them – us – that they were here first and have survived the longest. Here there are at least remote echoes of Malcolm Peacock’s massive sculpture of a redwood at the Whitney Biennial and louder ones of Giuseppe Penone’s Arte Povera tree-based sculptures unifying art and nature.
Contributed by Millree Hughes / With precisely targeted color, texture, and feel, Ross Knight’s sculptures in his solo show “Continuous Squeeze” at Off Paradise get at what physical artifacts mean in terms of our fears, fantasies, and daily struggles. Color is critical in Knight’s work. He keeps the palette small and specific, the colors he chooses leaning towards youthful nostalgia: the baby-blue of 1960s cars in Coupled Prop, a buoy yellow with custard drips in another Coupled Prop, the creamy hue of a rawhide dog chew-toy in Device. The band in Adjusted resembles an old, spent balloon, once yellow-orange but turned raw sienna with time. Does anyone ever get over a popped balloon? It’s a toddler’s tragedy. The fleshy knots, like umbilical cord buttons, are rendered useless.
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.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Making deeper sense of some abstract art past its initial visual impact can require extended consideration. Not so much Chakaia Booker’s sculpture, now on view in her solo show “Public Opinion” at David Nolan Gallery. Composed predominantly of exactingly configured pieces of black rubber tires along with wood and metal, the work immediately grips you like a confident advocate, calm and insistent. In Minimum Wage, a shovel entwined in flowing ribbons of rubber appears to struggle to do what it is supposed to do.
During my first visit to Daniel Wiener’s studio, we talked about his Apoxie-Sculpt head series that fuse a 1960s psychedelic sensibility with collective angst, his idiosyncratic process, and an exploration of other unusual projects during the lockdown.
Carl DAlvias show at Hesse Flatow, “Sometimes Sculpture Deserves a Break,” is a playful, irony-laden take on the hyper-masculine minimalist sculpture canon.
Brooklyn artist Beth Dary thinks about the individual bubbles in which we all live. She was settled in a new house in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, and […]
Contributed by Julia Couzens / Carol Saft�s plainspoken exhibition, “Fallen Men,“ in the project space at Lesley Heller, is a suite of small-scaled, wall-based bronze figures engaged […]
Contributed by Sharon Arnold / In her solo show �No Regrets,� Brooklyn-based mixed-media installation artist Nancy Baker winningly advances her trademark style of accretion, integrating […]
Contributed by Loren Britton / Berlin-based artist�Judith Hopf,�known for idiosyncratic combinations,�is invested in post-painting practices coming out of Fluxus conversations between George Brecht and Allan […]
Contributed by Loren Britton / Anna Uddenberg�s “Sante Par Aqua” (Health Through Water) comprises objects that propose spaces adjacent to furniture that bodies might occupy. Shapes […]
