Category: Art History

The painter, printmaker and sculpture Oliver Lee Jackson was also an educator, activist and member of the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s a testament to his achievements that his works on view at Andrew Kreps, which span from the 1970s to today, are utterly confident abstractions. This isn’t to say that… Continue reading Oliver Lee Jackson @ Andrew Kreps Gallery (Mar 25th — May 7th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

Zak Kitnick’s “The Weather” is centered around a series of industrial-material sculptures that resemble, at once, works by Donald Judd and Lego bricks: metal cylinders of different heights are set on warm wood bases. Despite their trued edges and well-tuned aluminum knobs, the works seem to operate through free association—including with titles like Winter, Spring, Summer,… Continue reading Zak Kitnick, “The Weather” @ C L E A R I N G (Mar 24th — May 8th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

If Sam Bornstein’s dreamy and soft-spoken paintings have a subject, it’s the mystery of proximate unknowability in a city like New York. “Variety Lofts,” which inaugurates Charles Moffett’s new space in Tribeca, nods to the city’s architecture and artistic history. The title, inspired by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, evokes a sense of life in close vicinity: a… Continue reading Sam Bornstein, “Variety Lofts” @ Charles Moffett (Mar 12th — May 7th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

The universal, according to Leidy Churchman, begins with the specific. “New You,” an exhibition of new paintings and monotypes at Matthew Marks, is as good a beginning as any. We have reproductions of course workbooks, paintings of animals, branches of cherry blossoms and purely abstract works with a talismanic quality to them. I initially read… Continue reading Leidy Churchman, “New You” @ Matthew Marks Gallery (Mar 11th — Apr 23rd, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

You’ll leave Elaine Reichek’s second solo exhibition at Marinaro, “MATERIAL GIRL,” with a slapdash bachelor’s in art history. An artists’ artist, Reichek has thrown a little bit of everything in this prolific show, which includes 50 works made only in the last few years, and spans both floors of the gallery with painting, embroidery, text,… Continue reading Elaine Reichek, “MATERIAL GIRL” @ Marinaro (Mar 5th — Apr 9th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

In “The Hands of Strange Children,” his first solo show with James Cohan Gallery in New York, Christopher Myers treats the subject of six 19th-century revolutionaries: Wovoka, Nongqawuse, Nat Turner, Hong Xiuquan, Te Ua Haumene and Alice Lawkena. He uses the linear and color-saturated vernacular of children’s books (the artist is the son of young-adult… Continue reading Christopher Myers, “The Hands of Strange Children” @ James Cohan (Mar 4th — Apr 2nd, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

Accompanied by an uncustomarily brief press release, the Israeli visual artist Keren Cytter makes her pithy but absorptive debut at Jenny’s with the three-work show titled “Bad Words.” Cytter makes multilayered, multimedia work that spills sparsely yet richly across the gallery’s small space. In fact, the room is barely enough to hold her work: trawling… Continue reading Keren Cytter, “Bad Words” @ Jenny’s (Feb 26th — Apr 9th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

In Ramona (La Pachua) (2022), a woman shuffles her feet, looking out from the left side of a split canvas. She wears a large suit with a broad lapel and drooping pockets at her hips, on one side delineated in a white-on-black negative, while on the other, rendered in a light graphite wash, like a draft or… Continue reading Troy Montes Michie, “Dishwater Holds No Images” @ Company Gallery (Feb 24th — Apr 15th, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

“Trophy,” a group show of recent work by Raymond Pettibon, Andra Ursuta and Sven Sachsalber at Ramiken, calls to mind something more nefarious than a gilded prize perched upon a shelf. The works on view depict human bodies in raw, vulnerable and moving states, signaling trophies of war—the carnage and display of conquest and pillage.… Continue reading Raymond Pettibon, Sven Sachsalber, Andra Ursuţa, “Trophy” @ Ramiken (Feb 24th — Apr 2nd, 2022) [TheGuide.art]

The quilters of Gee’s Bend, a Black community in Boykin, Alabama, have been creating boldly innovative and quietly tender tapestries for more than five generations. Many of the town’s residents, such as artists Sarah Benning, Lizzie Major, Missouri Pettway, Sally Bennett Jones and Mary Lee Bendolph, are descendants of enslaved people who lived on a… Continue reading “The New Bend” @ Hauser & Wirth (Feb 3rd — Apr 2nd, 2022) [TheGuide.art]