Tag: Will Maddoxx

Group Shows

Immersion at Fugue Gallery

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / At first, Fugue Gallery’s new Chinatown space seems like an apartment gallery or DIY space: the walls are brick, the windows are curtained, soft music plays on speakers, a few paintings and photographs hang on the wall. The works by the 16 artists in the inaugural show “Forbidden Fruit” are strong. The first to catch my eye was Justin Wood, an oil painter enamored with academic painting, chiaroscuro, and Baroque still lifes. His Purple Grapes recalls Rachel Ruysch’s work, rendered with immaculate technique. Rotting Apple, referential to Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, expands upon his adoration for art history with perfect paint application. Alexa Huang’s Rehearsal for a Forgotten Tableau is pastoral and open, its paint handling not unlike Cecily Brown’s and its palette like that of a Tiepolo. Vincent Sachtler’s Comarum palustre is firmly contemporary – a mesmerizing moving light à la Dan Flavin and Olafur Eliasson.

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Solo Shows

Daniel Correa Mejía: Harmony and flow

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about surface. Daniel Correa Mejía’s show “El amor se esconde como un animal salvaje” (“Love hides like a wild animal”) at P.P.O.W encouraged me to think harder. The paintings are oil on jute, and that surface’s rough, toothy quality is a very active ingredient in the viewing experience. Mejía himself responds to it with the same emotion – generally speaking, love – that his figures show one another. As the wispy jute falls back and comes forward, swirls, curves, and delicate brushstrokes cooperate. In El viaje de Pan, for instance, a small curl made by a thin stroke ensconces another curl rendered by the hair of the jute. It’s a quietly stunning effect.

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Group Shows

Harsh Collective: Forlorn eyes

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / “Thief of Joy,” Harsh Collective’s first show at its new location on the Lower East Side, brings together three emerging Gen-Z painters who explore contemporary anxieties about identity and self-image. Shows like this can feel confined to the present moment, but this one offers sufficient nuance to escape the trap. 

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Solo Shows

Emma Webster: Peculiar but pleasant

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / Last summer, the New York Times  reported that someone impersonated Lady Gaga to buy a painting of Emma Webster’s. The piece highlighted the market for these paintings and coincided with an impressive show at Petzel displaying two huge canvases at once grand and sublime. Seeing that “Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone” was opening so soon after that last show, I wondered whether the work would be rushed and uninventive. In fact, the new paintings are very good.

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Gallery shows

“Hyper-meme” at Living Skin: Immaculately funny

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / On Valentine’s Day, I walked into Living Skin, a “project space and persons hub” in Bushwick that had piqued my interest when I read its manifesto and perused promotional images for the group show “Hyper-meme.” I came to the show with some hesitation, as I have been to countless group shows that seemed unfocused and vague. Smatterings of “work about histories of images” or “art of a contemporary landscape” have gotten old and deflating. “Hyper-meme,” however, is sharp, original, and hyper-specific. It blew me away.

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