Featured Events in New York in May, 2024 (February Updated)

The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation presents Milton Resnick: 811 Broadway, 1959-1961. Three large paintings from his short lived time at a studio on Broadway. Geoffrey Dorfman, Resnick's biographer, sets the stage for these large works in his essay on the paintings, the time, and the artist: The three huge paintings featured in this exhibition, Botany, Curtain for Tomorrow, and Octave, mark a pivot point in the career and indeed the life, of Milton Resnick. The year was 1960, and one might say that the Abstract Expressionist phenomenon had attained the very summit of its acceptance, captivating the imagination of the art public, the magazine writers, and finally the newly burgeoning marketplace for contemporary American painting. Ironically, at this victorious moment the collapse of the Abstract Expressionist movement was on the immediate horizon.

Flapping from fence to post in the yard, an injured white bird was pursued by feral cats (I once counted seventy). I put out some oatmeal and a bowl of water on the windowsill. The oatmeal blew away so I replaced it with rice. Around five next morning a loud tapping on the metal fire window woke me. A white blur was visible through the frosted wire glass. When I opened the window, he flew up but returned, and I replenished his food and water. Later, after shopping, about to drop the grocery bag in my chair, I was startled by a loud flutter - the white bird was sitting there (I'd left a side window ajar). The Italian bookie down the block told me what pigeons ate and recommended a good source. Milton named this unusually large bird (19 inches - as long as a raven) Morgan, for J. P. Morgan, because like J.P. he had a large formation on his beak. Morgan's dinner arrangement - all in a row - consisted of a bowl of water, a cracked wooden salad bowl holding his food, and a large dirt-filled tub meant for a tree. He learned to rock the salad bowl to and from his water bowl to save getting down and walking. Sated, he'd hop on the tub, peck around in the grit I had sprinkled there, and curl up for his after-dinner nap. The trouble was that an after-dinner urge would awaken him; he'd back up politely, poop, and lay down again in it. One day, idly watching this procedure, without expecting any response, I motioned for him to back up some more. He peered at me and did as I asked. So I motioned him back and up onto the rim, which pleased him no end, because from there he could poop overboard. I put newspaper down, and Morgan was paper trained. The whole neighborhood loved that bird. When Morgan felt like showing off, the fire escapes filled with admirers—even Esteban (Vincente), sunning on his roof across the street, would stand up to watch. Added to his impressive size was the glow of his plumage (healthy birds develop a fine protective powder against mites which literally glows in the sun). Morgan's acrobatics – he would fly loops around other birds and execute amazing maneuvers, taking him in a figure eight from the spire atop St. Marks around the Con Ed clock on Fourteenth Street. Indoors, he explored every inch of the loft and chose the highest place, the front stovepipe, as a sleeping perch. When my friends visited, he liked to swing on top of the bathroom door, which meant you couldn't close it without chasing him. Herman Cherry got a kick out of this chase: he'd pull out a large handkerchief and flick it at Morgan, the two of them running and skidding around the loft. As the conversation picked up, Morgan would begin to coo. The louder we talked, the louder he cooed. Perhaps the sound resembled the soothing sounds of the coop. Anne Arnold wanted to sculpt him and tried to make some drawings. This attention made him self-conscious, and he curled up more tightly in his grit tub, leaving Anne with an uninteresting pose — just a cushion of white feathers. Fall chill brought a new problem: the draft from the open window. I had to build a window extension with a swinging door—and teach Morgan how to use it. By winter, he was flinging himself in and out expertly. From his bedtime perch on the stovepipe, Morgan looked straight across the room at my painting wall. One painting in particular excited him. He would coo, bow, and try a little strut on the short length of stovepipe. One day he took off and flew directly into my painting, sliding down the six-foot height of it and smearing inharmonious oranges, blacks, and greens over his pure white bosom. I cleaned him enough so that his feathers didn't adhere. After the painting was finished, a few of Morgan's contributions incorporated, I stretched it and leaned it against a corner. He flew right to it and spent hours strutting along its top edge, courting the lady in the picture: bowing, crowing, and fanning his tail. I called the painting, Promenade For a Bachelor.

This exhibition offers an intimate survey of paintings and works on paper by Raditsa and Yamin that allows for the nuanced comparison of two painters and their evolving approaches to abstraction.

“There is design in everything,” wrote Clara Porset, the innovative Cuban-Mexican designer. She believed that craft and industry could inspire each other, forging an alternative path for modern design. Not all of Porset’s colleagues agreed with her conviction. This exhibition presents these sometimes conflicting visions of modernity proposed by designers of home environments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela between 1940 and 1980. For some, design was an evolution of local and Indigenous craft traditions, leading to an approach that combined centuries-old artisanal techniques with machine-based methods. For others, design responded to market conditions and local tastes, and was based on available technologies and industrial processes. In this exhibition, objects including furniture, appliances, posters, textiles, and ceramics, as well as a selection of photographs and paintings, will explore these tensions. The home became a site of experimentation for modern living during a period marked by dramatic political, economic, and social changes, which had broad repercussions for Latin American visual culture. For nearly half a century, the design of the domestic environment embodied ideas of national identity, models of production, and modern ways of living. The home also offered opportunities for a dialogue between art, architecture, and design. Highlights of the exhibition include Clara Porset’s Butaque chair; Lina Bo Bardi’s Bowl chair; Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy’s B.K.F. Chair; and Roberto Matta’s Malitte Lounge Furniture.

In the Now unites nearly fifty women artists who are resisting traditional ideas of gender and nationality, as well as of photography itself. The first museum survey of photography-based works by women artists born or based in Europe, this exhibition interrogates the continent’s legacies of nationalism and patriarchal power structures—which continue to shape everyday life, particularly for women. In the Now highlights the expansive nature of the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection at the Brooklyn Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Made entirely after 2000, the exhibition’s more than seventy artworks offer a window into the first decades of the twenty-first century. In the section titled “Gender,” photographers such as Bettina von Zwehl and Elina Brotherus contend with (mis)representations of women’s bodies and experiences, bucking against oppressive beauty standards and the male gaze. “Nation” unpacks the promises—and realities—of contemporary Europe and the ongoing fallout of European nationalism and colonialism. The controlled explosion in Sarah Pickering’s Landmine (2005), for example, underscores the relative peace in England as British troops supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And in “Photography,” women artists upend this male-dominated medium with experimental approaches—as in Shirana Shahbazi’s Farsh-13-2006 (2006), a Vermeer-inspired photographic portrait translated onto a carpet hand-knotted in her native Iran. Together the works defy outdated definitions of a woman, an artist, a nation, and a photograph.

This mini-retrospective features over 35 pieces that demonstrate Liu Shiming’s (1926-2010) stature as a leading figure in modern Chinese sculpture, and an artist whose vision resonates across cultures and countries.

Hotel rooms take on an array of meanings, associations, and possibilities for each of their inhabitants. For some, they feel personal and cozy, like a safe haven. For others, they’re simply a space to put their things. They can be sites of nefarious, taboo activity; a blank slate on which to place romantic ideals; or even spaces of extreme isolation and sadness. A wide range of events take place in these rooms that are not what the they supposedly promise, and Fischl explores each one of these potential outcomes in this new body of work, a perfectly fresh continuation of the ideas that have haunted his paintings for so many years. The experience of travel is latent with a, perhaps false, sense of promise and possibility, making it a prime activity on which to project one’s innermost fantasies—one can be someone else when in a different city. Similarly, there is a certain familiarity in the experience of a hotel room: one can more or less expect the same outdated patterned carpet, drab wall art, a couple of chairs, and a bed. At the same time, one remains keenly aware throughout their stay that they are transient, and that this space does not belong to them. Within this dichotomy of the familiar and unfamiliar lies further, tenser juxtapositions between interiority and exteriority, public and private, dislocation and comfort. Each painting vibrates with an almost tragic stillness—a feeling that the artist likens to a muffled scream. In , for example, a smartly dressed woman, poised to go explore wherever she is visiting, is instead frozen in place with her eyes glued to the television as it emanates that classic blue glow, projecting a real-time, real-world horror right as she attempts to remove herself from the realities of life through this vacation. Although we do not see what is unfolding, we understand its darkness through the stiffness of her body. The question of where emotions live in the body, particularly those more forbidden feelings of shame and violence, echoes across the works in the exhibition, such as in . A man sits on his bed, strumming his guitar. There is a looseness to his posture, an ease borne out of a level of self-assuredness and self-awareness. Yet, the simplicity of this serene moment is complicated by the AK-47 that rests by the window. If we are invisible spectators to tragedy in —an emblem of the interiority hotel rooms provide—then works such as reveal the hotel room’s complex position as a public space through a kind of erotic fantasy. A woman sits nude on her hotel room bed, a towel wrapped around her head, her body partially covered by a pillow while two spaniels sit by her side. Although her face is calm, her eyes stare directly out at the viewer (as do her dog’s), implicating us as the reason why she had to suddenly cover up. Throughout his career, Fischl has consistently asked what role the viewer plays in these moments. When that idea is expanded outward from one individual painting across a series or a body of work, then it becomes a question of what role we play in society writ large. Dislocation is similarly present throughout these paintings, an effect Fischl partly achieves by bending the realities of time. In some, the juxtaposition of two figures who do not cohesively interact prompts the viewer to consider if they are, in fact, observing the same room across different nights and different guests. In Snapshot of a Marriage, one person is seen holding a shopping bag, dressed and ready to go, pointing towards the door; the other, fresh out of the shower, is about to put her hair in a towel. Is he ushering her to get ready so they can head back out, or do they even see each other at all? These kinds of questions reveal that we are simultaneously always alone and never alone—a pervasive sentiment that can be found in even the most quotidian of moments.

Titled from Aristotelian Philosophy, eudaimonia translates to a combination of well-being, happiness, and flourishing. As Gillen investigates the space between tension and release in her intricate fabric compositions, she is guided by the Greek principle in her pursuit of creative expression, emotional resonance, and fulfillment. Focused on materiality and abstraction, Gillen uses synthetic fabric to amplify movement and dimensionality in her work. Strategically bent metal wires are compiled to build a custom armature, or interior framework, for each piece. Gillen then places fabric atop the armature, twisting with precise methodology to create crisp ridges. The physicality of pulling and stretching results in novel canvases, where the elasticity of the material is manipulated to create a new, sculptural surface.

The artist will be present. This presentation coincides with his first major museum exhibition in the US at the Milwaukee Art Museum, opening to the public on April 5. After… showcases several exciting developments in Khan’s practice. The exhibition introduces a process whereby the artist deconstructs art historical masterpieces to rich pallets of color referencing the volume and importance of the original painting’s power. Khan’s newest explorations focus on color and music, and their abilities to contain a world of memories, associations, and emotions which resonate on a universal level. Utilizing technology as complex as it is sensitive and poetic, Khan scans photographic reproductions of these artworks into a sound software that reveals their tone and color density. He then creates separate oil and water-based ink works with the dimensions of each color corresponding to the percentage in which it appears in the original painting. Each artwork is comprised of a grid-like structure of individually framed elements denoting the original work’s specific color palette. Khan also assigns musical notations to each hue and transcribes them to create a score for each painting. The panels are repeatedly stamped, in Khan’s signature style, with each works distinctive notation and overlaid with collaged sheet music, carefully selected for its shape and pattern. With this new body of work, Khan moves from representing a collapse in time to making evident the soundscape of each masterpiece. After… takes as its source iconic paintings so familiar that they now form part of the collective unconscious, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, and his Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Idris Khan’s oeuvre draws on diverse cultural sources–literature, history, art, and music–to shape a distinctive narrative featuring densely layered images that metaphysically condense time into single moments. After… marks an important evolution in Idris Khan’s artistic practice and pays homage to the twentieth anniversary of Every…, Khan’s MFA exhibition from the Royal College of Art in London. It signifies a compelling shift in Khan’s artistic paradigm, inviting viewers to take a nuanced and multi-level approach to how they perceive a work of art. The exhibition includes a selection of new oil and water-based ink works and gesso on aluminum panel paintings, for which Khan is known, incorporating into the work a striking new palette. Idris Khan’s first US museum solo exhibition, Repeat After Me, opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum on April 5, 2024. Featuring major works covering every facet of Khan’s career, the exhibition includes new works that respond directly to paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will be on view through August 11, 2024. Idris Khan lives and works in London, United Kingdom. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Chateau la Coste, France; The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK; the Whitworth Gallery, the University of Manchester, UK; Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag, Austria, and K20, Dusseldorf, Germany. Khan’s design for Abu Dhabi’s memorial park, Wahat Al Karama, was awarded the 2017 American Architecture Prize, and he was appointed an OBE for services to Art in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honors List. His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Museum, New York; The British Museum, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

is an installation conceived of by Crowner in her Brooklyn studio, where the perception of the form, shadow, and color of the works shifts constantly throughout the day in conjunction with the movement of the sun. Often edging their way toward monochromes, the abstract paintings—created by joining panels of painted and cut canvas—are rendered in assertive shades of orange, red, and magenta, interrupted here and there by moments of night-black and off-white. A series of new bronze sculptures sit atop pedestals painted in a shadowy blue-black; installed throughout the space their highly reflective and curved surfaces float somewhere between the potency of the paintings and the openness of the room. Just as color is not a static element, Crowner’s works shift and morph according to their environment. Dapple and spill sometimes supersede gesture and brushstroke, while the vibration of her saturated hues feels heightened by the sun’s comparatively languid light. In Crowner’s paintings extend beyond themselves, doubling as both the subjects and foils for the bronze stones. The sculptures’ polished surfaces reflect and refract the paintings, and in moments their curves look stained with color—a red, a magenta. The new paintings and sculptures installed in together conduct a rousing contemplation on the temperature and temperament of color. Sarah Crowner earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2002. In 2023, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation hosted , an exhibition of three new site-specific artworks responding to the architecture of the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando building and Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental wall sculpture, . Also in 2023, the Hill Art Foundation presented , a project by Sarah Crowner placing site-specific works by the artist in dialogue with sculptures and paintings from the Hill Collection, as well as key loaned works, most notably works by Cy Twombly. Other notable recent solo presentations of Crowner’s work include Serpentear at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico (2022), a recently published catalogue for the show is now available through DAP; a 2022 commission by the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX for a site-specific tile installation that will remain on view into 2024; and a 2016 solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA that was accompanied by a major monograph. Her work is in the collections of major international institutions including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Contemporary Austin, TX; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN.

Mrs. is pleased to present A Curtain, Not a Door, Meghan Brady’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. For this expansive presentation, Brady’s new paintings will be displayed in two parts: the first opening March 16 at Mrs. Maspeth, NY, with the exhibition’s companion opening March 30 at Dunes, Portland, ME. Like the sinking light of late afternoon, advancing between the forest’s dark trunks and limbs—a light that seems to observe as well as illuminate—Maine-based painter Meghan Brady’s recent work exerts a radiance that is both forthcoming and secretive. Curved, rhythmic shapes welcome the viewer in Brady’s compositions, as open as a hand extended in generosity. Sequences of musical angles pinion upwards from horizontal to diagonal to vertical, arching forms hug bigger and smaller contours, and sweet hits of color move from barely-distinguishable values to richly saturated contrasting hues. In No Such Light, reds shift to pinks shift to whites, the analogous palette noisily embracing harmony. Smaller works, such as Wrong Number and Dogs Agree, use opacity to create both image and aperture, modular tesselated flowers engaging the language of a verdant garden. At the same time, a sense of withholding emerges in Brady’s newest body of work. Powerful geometries introduce an impediment to deep space, and movement is checked and slowed. And in place of an open invitation to witness and join the joyful clangor of the paintings, a sense of mutual observation has emerged. In Overheard, we are blocked from entering a space of rich darks by the most seductive series of pink, olive, and lighter pink stripes; in Nothing Fixed, a set of shapes resembling earnest eyes returns our gaze with unwavering intensity. Colors in this painting, and in works like Strange City, shift dramatically in hue from rich cobalt blue to a light-absorbing rust, never swerving to extreme lightness or darkness. Through this careful calibration of color and image, with quicker moments of revelation offset by more complex moments of slowed access, we are offered a sense of reciprocal observation between viewer and painting. In A Curtain, Not a Door, Meghan Brady's newest paintings push aside the veil that daily life tends to shut between perceptual states, empowering us to add our own voice to the wild noise of her colors; setting the speed with which we are allowed into the compositional space; and actively watching back as we observe. — Hilary Irons

Joan Jonas creates meditations on bodies, space, time, and nature. As she has explained, “The performer sees herself as a Medium: Information passes through.” The most comprehensive retrospective of Jonas’s work in the United States, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, unprecedented access to archival materials, and fresh historical perspectives on Jonas’s work. Drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations, drawn from MoMA’s collection and institutions around the world, will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape.

On the centennial anniversary of the birth of artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011), The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum announced its forthcoming major touring retrospective and monograph centered on her work and life. This will be the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in twenty years. To coincide with the exhibition, the Museum will publish a new monograph in association with Yale University Press. Also titled Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, it represents the most ambitious monograph on an American ceramic artist to date. The retrospective is organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum with assistance from the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation and the Takaezu family. It is co-curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, Noguchi Museum Curator Kate Wiener, and composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. The exhibition was conceived and developed with former Noguchi Museum Senior Curator Dakin Hart. The show at The Noguchi Museum will feature approximately 200 works from private and public collections around the country. Following its presentation at The Noguchi Museum, the exhibition will travel to several additional venues across the United States.

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and two collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus,’ as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment. The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered. This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time. The 2024 Whitney Biennial is organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker. View the film and performance program.

Banal forms—a dish-drying rack, floral bed sheets, a windowpane, shelf brackets; to name a few—are painted from her Queens apartment with a careful likeness. Porter’s canvases appear to be a window into her existence; each edited view is marked with relational specificity. By capturing and redistributing her apartment-as-subject, Porter imparts the psychological affect of the objects she represents. Although her paintings depict what is ordinary and recurrent, each work reflects the symbolic potential embedded within each subject. The kitchen, bedroom and bathroom are organized environments. Each room, in accordance with its respective utility, is recognized by its familiar appearance. Domestic spaces are predictable; their invariable purpose is attached to the unchanging functions of everyday life. Being contained within domestic interiors, inhabitants are confronted with the signification of the things that surround them. Porter’s painting entitled Drain III depicts a discharge of bubbles from a circular drain in a common sink or tub. As seen from above, the drain is flush against the white-enamel void of the basin. This self-evident composition becomes increasingly expressive because of its similitude. Seeing a sink from this perspective implies a vantage of staring downwards into the depths of its depression. The strainer, with its gridded network of holes, is an architectural signifier, but one without a fixed meaning. The home is a common structure that, in its own organization, gives criteria for the organization of the landscape that contains it. The architectural limitations of any home are attached to a repeating sense of being in something, or of locating something else within another thing. Endlessly traveling within a three-dimensional enclosure, the body experiences its spatial boundedness. Lodged in the interstices of lived experience, these relations overlay and interfere with the part of the mind that is not fully aware but which influences feelings and actions. With psychological elasticity, Porter’s paintings reverberate the existential conditions that are transposed onto the home and its contents. The painting “Two Pillows” positions the viewer in a crevice above a bed and below a shelf. The painting’s resemblance to a common interior relates it to a common dialectics of psychic interiority. The represented bedroom, without causality, is organized through a system of relations that can only be resolved by the viewer’s belief in the combined elements. Each element is cropped on the canvas edge, leaving the space betweenthe two pillows centered in the image along with the radiant, artificial light above. The corporeal elements of the home are constantly being reimagined and recombined. Porter’s paintings synthesize the contents of her home with a veritable state of consciousness. Her possessions and surroundings, as both physical and nonphysical manifestations, momentarily fulfill a role within a symbolic reality. This transformation, however unstable, calls attention to a discursive, mediating process. The subject, contained in the moment of Porter’s representation, is not itself. – Matt Taber

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Stillness is the Move, an exhibition of recent work by North Carolina-based artists Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson in the The Skirt. The exhibition runs from March 23rd - May 12th 2024, with a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 23rd from 6-9pm. Stillness is the Move is curated by OyG Co-Director Clare Britt. Long time collaborators Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson paint fantastical ecofeminist narratives in Stillness is the Move. Their paintings conjure precarious choreographies between women and wilderness, perilous partnerships that only exist because they are frozen on the surface of the canvas. A spooky humor surprises viewers into playful reimaginings of human-nature relationships. Are the subjects in these paintings friend or foe? In harmony or conflict? The raw materials of these stories (a spider, a web, a rock, a snail, a woman, the moon…) combine and recombine. The paintings resist a singular interpretation of what happens next, encouraging spectators to remain open to multiple conflicting narratives. Fluorescent colors and crisp lines contrast with mushy grays and muted hues, highlighting the artificial stillness of the scenes. A stone skipper stands frozen mid-throw for so long that a spider builds its web in the crook of her arm. These paintings delight in their own immobility, poking fun at their ‘timeless’ medium, while also contemplating the relative longevity of a skipped stone, a spider’s web, a sunrise, a lifetime, and a rock’s lifetime. Artist’s BioGeddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack both grew up in Miami, FL. Their collaborative art practice grew organically from their childhood friendship. In 2013, while attending separate graduate schools, they formalized this collaboration and have been creating and showing work exclusively as a duo ever since. In their paintings and installations, they explore the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable. Blazejack received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston/ Tufts University in 2013, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2014. Notably, Blazejack and Levenson have installed solo shows at Lump Projects, Raleigh NC; Anchorlight, Raleigh, NC; The Carrack, Durham, NC; The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Placeholder Gallery, Miami, FL; and The White Page Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. They have also shown at The National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; and Norte Maar Art Space, Brooklyn, NY.

Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present "Paintings," a solo exhibition by Rodney Dickson, a New York-based artist born in Northern Ireland. The show comprises 15 abstract oil paintings in the main gallery, along with more than 100 portraits in the newly established lower-level exhibition space. Dickson’s large- and medium-sized abstractions are characterized by extremely thick paint and rich color. Fundamentally influenced by the Troubles, the civil strife that desolated Northern Ireland in his youth, the artist explores the human condition with a bitter yet aesthetically ravishing emotional intensity. Dickson reflects with deep empathy on socio-political conflicts, inviting viewers to unravel the intricate nature of our moral selfhood. The artist’s expressionistic approach reflects his inner turmoil, ranging from political grievances to personal obsessions. Dickson has said that the more psychologically threatening a subject is, the more exhilarating and necessary it is to explore. This selection of built-up gestural works, created post-pandemic, traces his multiple psychic changes. Many of the works on view depart from Dickson’s early aggressive somberness. The brighter, more colorful compositions suggest a more serene state of mind. In 13, for example, a soft cream-colored surface and gentle painterly touch signal Dickson’s deeper comprehension—and greater acceptance—of himself and his past experiences. Dickson’s portraits memorialize his travels. During a 2018 residency in the mountains of China, where art materials were scarce, he began to paint on white bed sheets that he purchased from his landlady. The way the thin bed sheets moved in the gentle breeze, animating the figures, inspired Dickson to create more likenesses of friends he has made across the world. In these works, Dickson also aims to blur the line between figurative and non-figurative paintings. He claims, “Painting is painting. If it is successful, it should affect the human spirit and one gets there in any way one can.” "Paintings" is accompanied by an unconventional, biographically based catalog that explores Dickson’s complex psychology and myriad painterly motifs. The volume combines Dickson’s life stories with his personal beliefs regarding war, artistic craft, and interpersonal relations.

The art of Kato Izumi is characterized by a series of captivating humanoid figures, their identities veiled in mystery. This recurring motif acts as an archetype revisited by Kato again and again, encapsulating “a visual anthropology of not-exactly-human-but-humanoid figuration.” These figures evoke reminiscences of Kodama, tree spirits seen in Japanese anime, bearing qualities reminiscent of fictional extra- terrestrial beings. In Kato’s work, these small figures have slender limbs without hands or feet and are frequently described as “alien-like,” “humanoid,” “expressionless,” “Sphinx-like,” “ghostly,” “primitive,” and “totemic”... They often appear in pairs, gazing out from the canvas with round, hollow eyes. Are they ancestors of humans or future-evolved humanoid forms? Their heads are typically the most developed, with faces being the most formalized with evolved palette. In some cases, their eyes are even crafted from various stones, creating reflections. These figures are connected to the tradition of pantheistic polytheism in Shintoism and the devout animism of Japan’s indigenous culture. Kato’s upbringing in Shimane Prefecture in western Japan, a coastal area renowned for its myths and legends, serving as the backdrop of Kato’s childhood, gradually becoming a significant influence on his visual language. While many viewers are already acquainted with the mysterious humanoid figures in the artist’s portfolio, works in this exhibition reveal a recent shift: the introduction of animal figures and their significant connection to anatomy. In Kato’s previous works, animal elements often appeared in an anthropomorphic manner, but now they have evolved into independent and tangible forms, coexisting with the perennial protagonists, the humanoid figures. In some paintings, animal figures even assume dominant roles, relegating human figures to secondary positions. These works depict animals standing on or lying beneath humanoid figures, whispering to them, or swimming alongside them in the ocean. If the previous works conveyed a sense of loss through the humanoid figures’ perpetual search and solitude, it seems that they have now found companions for their journey. This intriguing role reversal depicted in the new works naturally evokes connections with the growing discourse of posthumanism and animal studies in recent years. It may signify the imagination of re-forging cross-species kinship or serve as a reflection of our reality in the post-pandemic era and global climate crises. These humanoid figures also exhibit features that resemble both animals and plants. In some past paintings, their legs and feet become stem-like branches, flowers blooming at the tips, leaves growing on top of their heads. They sometimes stand on all fours, resembling centaurs or beings that are half-human, half-deer. The facial structure and palette become increasingly complex and intricate, with contrasting colour blocks and bold lines, offering insight into the artist’s fascination with anatomy. Dualism is another recurring theme in Kato’s works. The figures in his paintings and sculptures are frequently divided into two halves, a structure seen consistently in his style. The new works introduce additional dualisms, including the interplay between the interior and exterior, and the juxtaposition of humans and animals. In the plastic sculpture pieces, an intricate skeletal structure is enclosed within a transparent vinyl shell, with animal characters serving as anatomical counterparts. The works in this exhibition seem to emanate from a series of nine sculptures from Kato’s solo exhibition in 2023 at Perrotin Paris, where figures and groupings form new archetypes. Notably, elements of landscapes begin to emerge in both sculptures and paintings, resembling dioramas with mountains, rocks, and vegetation. The small humanoid figures are seen riding fish on the water’s surface or standing atop an erupting Mount Fuji. An apocalyptic undertone permeates the works, which stage an encounter and recombination of various prototypes. The somewhat mechanical presentation of animal anatomy originated from educational toys related to animal anatom –prototypes of prototypes.. The creative process, starting from models to paintings, and then from paintings to sculptures, sculptures back to paintings, forms a closed loop. In a somewhat speculative interpretation, the evolution of these figures, as I perceive it, indicates that in the early 1990s, Kato leaned towards an almost unified monochromatic palette with earthy and mineral hues. Intense colors were occasionally reserved solely for the heads and genitalias of the small humanoid figures. Their shapes were rawer, conveying distinct expressions of despair and anxiety. In recent years, the works have become more vibrant in color, with relatively richer backgrounds. However, emotional signifiers have become more ambiguous, with the gaze of the humanoid figures displaying a sense of confusion and loss. The treatment of facial expressions and the internal aspects of the bodies resemble landscapes. The deadpan expression of the small humanoid figures and the malleability they bring may be considered one of Kato’s core methodologies in his creative process. This intentional blurring, and consistent use of untitled nomenclature, render the identity of the protagonist mysterious. One can also observe layers and layers of transformations, seemingly representing the artist’s refusal to adhere to a specific set of interpretations. The figures do not speak, they do not commit. In Kato’s ambiguous symbolism, they are both spirits floating in deep forests and mountains, and witnesses of modernity’s disillusionment in the Capitalocene. Text by Luan Shixuan About the Artist Izumi Kato was born in 1969 in Shimane, Japan; now lives and works between Tokyo, Japan and Hong Kong, China. Children with disturbing faces, embryos with fully developed limbs, ancestor spirits locked up in bodies with imprecise forms—the creatures summoned by Izumi Kato are as fascinating as they are enigmatic. Their anonymous silhouettes and strange faces, largely absent of features, emphasize simple forms and strong colors; their elementary representation, an oval head with two big, fathomless eyes, depicts no more than a crudely figured nose and mouth. Bringing to mind primitive arts, their expressions evoke totems and the animist belief that a spiritual force runs through living and mineral worlds alike. Embodying a primal, universal form of humanity founded less on reason than on intuition, these magical beings invite viewers to recognize themselves. Kato graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at Musashino University in 1992. Since the 2000s, he has garnered attention as an innovative artist through exhibitions held in Japan and across the world. In 2007, he was invited to take part in the 52nd Venice Biennale International Exhibition, curated by Robert Storr.

Bringing together historical works with his most recent paintings, the exhibition showcases his continually evolving perpetual practice. For more than two decades, McGinness has established a personal lexicon of icons that he continually references in his work. His iconography, both imagined and drawn from a slew of reference material, include everything from spiraling mandelas and skateboarders to mirrored hands and chandeliers hanging from the top of the canvas. Rendered in fluorescents and core colors alike, McGinness screenprints his symbols to create deeply-layered enigmatic compositions. Catch a glimpse of his painted cryptograms and you find yourself drawn in, look closer and delight in decoding the iconography, which unfolds like a non-linear story, crescendoing in every direction. “WYSIWYG is a time-capsule as much as a dictionary, but also a marker of a new chapter for Ryan McGinness,” writes Julie Baumgardner, “When anyone, especially an artist, is secure in their fundamentals, space is made for evolution. Mark our words: dive deep in these works now to decode what’s soon to come.”

For the first series, Alfred documented his recent travels from Osaka to Brooklyn, and the Dominican Republic to the West Village. Snapshots of personal moments shape an exhibition of serene vignettes. The accompanying suite of paintings, installed in an adjacent gallery space, is comprised of nine portraits of contemporary musicians. Spanning genres from electronic to folk, the paintings celebrate the power of music in shaping the world around us, as well as the artist himself. Alfred’s process, honed over the past two decades, distills his source imagery to its most essential forms, layering idyllic elements together and segmenting forms into two dimensional planes of mostly-solid color to reveal a sense of stillness that can be tranquil, unsettling, or both. His compositions are reminiscent of architectural ukiyo-e prints, both in technique and style, while his exploration of collage continues to inform the resulting paintings. “Alfred captures the ephemeral, silencing the noise of the world and focusing solely on the composition,” writes Annabel Keenan. “In every image, there is a sense that he is not only preserving the memory of a place, but also the essence of a specific time. This show… is more personal than his others.” Beauty is a Rare Thing casts a newfound appreciation on the everyday, presenting an aura of hope over our ever changing world. Brian Alfred (b. 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from Yale University. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Salon 94 Video Wall, New York, NY; and the Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville, TN. In the summer of 2024, a retrospective of his work will be exhibited by the Williamsburg Biannual. His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; Denver Art Museum, CO; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Alfred’s work may be found in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, NY; Denver Art Museum, CO; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Alfred is the host of SOUND & VISION, a podcast of conversations with artists and musicians about the creative process. Guests have included Diana Al-Hadid, Jules de Balincourt, Inka Essenhigh, Dominique Fung, Kahlil Robert Irving, Byron Kim, Hein Koh, Tony Matelli, Hilary Pecis, James Siena, Alexandria Smith, and Chloe Wise. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Morgan Presents is proud to inaugurate its new gallery space in Chelsea with “Linger Longer,” a show of recent paintings by Sam Jablon, the New York-based artist and poet. It follows “Color/Code,” a two-person show with Jablon and Odili Donald Odita that opened at Morgan Presents in September 2021. “Linger Longer” is Jablon’s first solo show in New York since 2018, and comes after recent exhibitions of new work in California and Europe. For the last decade, Jablon has been pushing two forms, painting and poetry, to their limits, exploring the notion of how the two can collide with each other to an obsessive degree. Jablon studied with Anne Waldman at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and then got a MFA in Visual Art at Brooklyn College. Backed by these heady dueling apprenticeships, Jablon exploded on the scene with paintings heavy on language that also pushed language to the brink, never shying away from the slap in the face of the right word. The title of this show comes from a full poem in which the chosen phrases both denote meaning—love and loss, chaos and redemption—but also glorify the combinations of characters on a blank page. Taken as they are, the letters are long-limbed diagrams of aesthetic brilliance to be adored, existing to be worshiped. The love of the look of language has been a driving force behind Jablon’s groundbreaking visual art practice, which I’ve had the pleasure of watching evolve over this last decade. These newest works—forged from a place of immense contemplation into how humans both inspire and infuriate each other—are monumental things, confident, with no subtext needed. The brushwork is ballsy, intentional, embracing a big lushness, unafraid of being paintings. And yet they open up upon contemplation, as the poem’s fragments echo off the canvases and harmonize. The stanzas weave their way through the suite, and Jablon’s kinship with the words means he can push them, hide them, scuff them up, kick them while they're down, or even completely erase them from the frame. The canvases display the disembodied fragments of the poem—“DESIRE,” “LOVER LOVER LOVER,” “WHIPLASH PLEASURE,” “GLAMOROUS VOIDS”—and the fragments appear as runes from an ancient time until that glimmer of denoted meaning sends a chill up the spine. Taken as a whole, “Linger Longer” amounts to a new peak for Jablon. “The works are about being alive in moments of chaos,” he told me. Chaos may reign, but after spending time breathing in these new paintings, in a marvelous brand new gallery space, we can talk ourselves into living the good life. —Nate Freeman

Tracey Ryans currently serves as a Cultural Counsel for Kunstmuseum, Basel Switzerland, Factory International Manchester UK, Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands Danse Theater. He is also a co-owner/founder of Neuehouse, as well as iconic NY establishments such as La Esquina, Miss Lilly’s, Odo, Metrograph Theater, and Soho House Grasmere in Rhinebeck, NY. Ryans’s commitment to the arts extends to serving on the boards of The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Zen Center, Powerhouse Arts, The Mondrian Initiative, The National Black Theater, and the branding committee for The Central Park Conservancy. Additionally, he has contributed his expertise to the marketing committee for The New Victory Theater and notably serves as a consultant to Frieze Art Fair NY and Vanity Fair. Ryans is an accomplished international public speaker. He was invited to speak at “The Business of Design” in Hong Kong. He is also developing a podcast and book titled “Thé Cérémonie." He is a co-founder of the artist activist collective “Wide Awakes” with Hank Willis Thomas, Black Thought, Alicia Keys, and Jose Parla. Nancy Caton is a Fountain House Gallery member-artist who conceived the exhibition’s theme. Her art is greatly influenced by her study of physics and mathematics and articulates the endless natural geometric structures of reality. Prior to her foray into creating art, Caton had an extensive career in the fashion industry, including owning her own high-end atelier, Nancy Whiskey & The Sewing Factory. Participating artists: Christine Albane, Madeleine Hope Arthurs, Sydni Ann Baker, Judith Berman, L.B. Berman, Nancy Caton, Joellyn Cheng, Miguel Colón, Nicholas DiMichele, Gayle Dorsky, Nelia Gibbs, Glenn Goldstein, Bryan Michael Greene, Garvin Henry, Issa Ibrahim, Roger Jones, Michael Kronenberg, Vincent Lamberti, Ambar Martinez, Monica Mei, Tzu Moy, Nicolaus J. Myers, Ariel Navarrete, Anthony Newton, Tanya Nickolan, Shear Noble, Saverio Penza, Mathew Reith, Jared Rem, Angela Rogers, Thomas Schneider, Barry Senft, Solange Singer, Susan Spangenberg, Guy Szeto, Alyson Vega, Boo Lynn Walsh, and Karen Zechowy. This program is funded, in part, by generous support from the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

Martha Tuttle’s practice embeds natural elements in the forms of her paintings. The compositions emphasize materiality, employing physical processes such as dyeing, weaving, and sewing that permeate each of the works that are colored with naturally derived substances. Passages of translucent stretched silk are dyed with plant matter and iron while others are painted with stone pigments, creating pools of subtle elemental colors. Visually, the marks on the silk begin to suggest the cracking of a geological topography. Shapes of thick wool, which the artist spins and weaves herself, as well as painted linen, add sculptural fields to the converging materials. Appearing to emerge and recede behind these sections, visible stretcher bars create compositional balance rather than solely serving as support. Many of the diagonal bars are blackened by torch fire, further reinforcing the invocation of the elemental. The addition of carefully integrated found and fabricated stones punctuate these multi-paneled compositions. Extending the space of the paintings beyond and between the individual stretchers, these sculptural objects further the presence of physicality, touch, and the use of natural materials in Tuttle’s wall works. The stones are sourced from the Southwestern United States through Tuttle’s own collecting and that of people with whom she has an affinity, creating a web of knowledge and connection around the minerals. Other “stones” included in the exhibition are cast into glass or aluminum, which appear alongside the found rocks. For the artist, this represents an attempt at a dialogue with substances and timelines that often feel outside of human reach. Together the minerals and stone simulacra resonate with the larger geological questionings of the exhibition concerning how relationships can be established with the geologic. The convergence of macro and micro elements within the works begins to interweave with the artist’s larger practice of bringing together vast expanses, such as landscape or skyscape, with the focused examination and study of details including the geological and biological. As Tuttle suggests, these connections ultimately visualize expanded, and often overlooked, kinships. She asks whether these panels can serve as metaphors for our own human intimacies with our surrounding world and geologies. And further, if these sensitives to our surrounding natural environments can further empathize and enhance our human connections with one another. Reflecting on the meanings of the word “touchstone” and its connotations, and the relationship between stones and compassion, Tuttle writes: “It can be so tender to bond with a stone. To move it from apartment to apartment, to give it a prime spot on your windowsill. Perhaps, to be personally invested in something geologic is in a small way to care more about connections than boundaries. Whatever can grow our empathy, even an iota, is worth keeping in hand.” Aiming to conjure these notions, Tuttle’s tactile paintings intuitively connect touch with matter. Martha Tuttle (b. Santa Fe, NM, 1989) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2015) and a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2011). Institutional exhibitions include Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX (2024); Storm King Arts Center, New Windsor, NY (2020-21); and Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2021) among others. She participated in a Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL (2019); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, Brooklyn, NY (2017); and received a Josef Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship (2014). Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and The University of San Diego, CA among others.

The exhibition’s title reflects the energetic nature of the paintings, along with the visual aspect of the letter X, seen in the intersecting lines that cover the canvases. A continuation of her practice, XSTATIC further explores the influence of pioneering computer art on contemporary abstraction. In a departure from her first exhibition with the gallery in October 2021, Benson’s compositions have turned to emphasize fine line work made with an airbrush. From afar, warped planes buzz with motion; when the viewer steps closer, densely-scribbled marks are revealed as the source rather than solid blocks of color. The paintings are rendered in color combinations from monochromatic palettes to power clashing hues, creating harmony in the unexpected. “Here is a downright paradox, a whimsical aporia: albeit abstract and self-reflexive, the luxuriously colored and highly intricate paintings of Trudy Benson are imbued with rich art-historical and present-day references,” writes Raphy Sarkissian in the exhibition’s catalogue, “Within Benson’s methodically constructed pictorial fields, where geometric structures and painterly gestures cohabit, autonomy and allusion register as being cut from the same cloth, as inextricable sides of the same coin. To confront the compositionally innovative and chromatically lavish paintings of the recently realized series titled XSTATIC is to come face to face with a self-contained formalist language that is nonetheless inseparable from the boundless archive of modernist abstraction and the visual grammars of its canonical masters.” Trudy Benson (b. 1985 in Richmond, VA) received her Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in 2010 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; SUNNY, New York; Massif Central, Brussels, Belgium; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; and Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna, Austria; Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY; m.simons, Amsterdam; Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; and Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany. Benson’s work may be found in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Portland Museum of Art, ME; Saatchi Gallery, London; Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; and the Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York. The artist lives and works in Newburgh, NY.

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is excited to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings by Peter Hoffer, Impressions de la Région Toulousaine, ie. Impressions from the Region of Toulouse. It will be Hoffer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and will take place at the gallery’s 529 West 20th Street location from March 28th to May 4th, 2024. “When in a natural setting such as a forest, we are sensitized to our surroundings in a manner that we don't experience in any urban setting. The silence of a tree, blade of grass, or a moss-covered stone fills our periphery with a sense of familiarity and comfort.” - Peter Hoffer Hoffer’s paintings are more relational than representational - he explores trees as protagonists. His approach to each painting is narrow, he singles out a tree and positions it at eye level. As a result, he creates an uncertain vantage point of the tree's dimension - either the viewer is close to it and it is small, or further away and the tree happens to be massive. Regardless of the viewer’s perception, a confrontation happens that humanizes the tree itself. In Hoffer’s words, “the forest becomes a stage; the tree becomes an actor.” Each painting in the exhibition is coated with a layer of resin, simultaneously distancing and immersing the viewer. Surfaces have been marked, scratched, cracked, and seared, much like the terrain itself. The surface layers of these works are dynamic, balancing between the various states of the seasons. The random etching of the surface calls to task a questioning of materiality and value. The works fluctuate between rest and discontent. The preciousness of the objet d’art, as well as the peripheral landscape represented, is rediscovered like an artifact. The suggested neglect through time is salvaged, preserved, and displayed. The markings on the paintings, inconsistencies in the resin surface, and the unrefined finishing of the canvas structure allude to elements outside of the artist’s control. The result invokes a sense of abandon and a hint of a work in transition. As the paintings draw attention to areas of the landscape that can be considered “less than spectacular," they force the viewer to search for landmarks or meaning within the composition. Peter Hoffer lives and works in Montreal, Canada, and Paris, France. He exhibits extensively throughout Canada, the eastern United States, and internationally. His work is placed in private collections worldwide including the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montréal, the Musée Du Québec in Québec City, Bombardier, Royal Bank of Canada, and the corporate collections of Fidelity Investments USA, Banque Nationale, and Michelin Canada Inc.

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Reafsnyder, on view at 525 West 22nd Street from 28 March through 11 May 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 28 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This is Reafsnyder’s eighth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Julian Hoeber. Reafsnyder’s exuberant and celebratory paintings relish in delight, glee, and exhilaration. They refuse the notion that gestural painting emerges from the anguish of life; they reject both easy existentialism and sentimental pathos. The sheer pleasure of viewing Reafsnyder’s nuanced surfaces is stimulated by their abundance of vividly saturated colors, their profusion of painterly gestures, and their array of enigmatic compositions. Rather than romanticizing a past set of values, or anticipating future ones, the paintings render palpable a present moment in our experience of visual imagery. In his art, the actual contingencies of viewing and the pictorial conditions for communication meet in a cacophony of all-or-nothing enthusiasm. Julian Hoeber writes, “Paint is a material. It is organized in a painting by play and discovery. That organizing will inevitably produce arrangements of paint that generate meaning, be they ghostly faces or histories or sense tingling fields of color. The sensations have affect and are not neutral. The histories aren’t either, but Reafsnyder won’t let them be albatrosses. He comes to them with other things— his proclivities and tastes, his peculiar banks of knowledge, the limits of his particular physical self— that let those histories go off on tangents, turn into jokes or open up on more possibilities for play.” Michael Reafsnyder (b. 1969 in Orange, CA) received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 1996 where he studied under Mike Kelley and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Reafsnyder has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; Blum and Poe, Santa Monica, CA; Las Vegas Art Museum, NV; Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; W.C.C.A., Singapore, and elsewhere. His work has been included in group exhibitions including “Step Into Liquid” (curated by Dave Hickey), Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles; “Los Angeles Ceramic Museum of Art,” ACME, Los Angeles; “Fresh Paint,” Galerie Eugene Lendl, Graz, Austria, “Black Dragon Society,” Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles; and “New Work: Abstract Painting,” Todd Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, among others. Reafsnyder’s work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Las Vegas Art Museum, NV; Portland Art Museum, OR; Weisman Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, among others. The artist lives and works in Southern California.

Bibeau Krueger is pleased to announce Sonya Rapoport: Digital Mudra (1986–1989), an exhibition presenting original photographs, 35mm slides, and an artist-published edition by Sonya Rapoport (1923–2015). This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York City since 1981. Sonya Rapoport (American, b. 1923, Brookline, MA; d. 2015, Berkeley, CA) is considered a pioneer in new media. Rapoport used the personal computer in interactive gallery exhibitions as early as 1982 to explore what she called “soft material:” data about domestic spaces, sentimental objects, her shoe collection, and emotional states, subjects that she characterized as explicitly feminist. Rapoport's tenacity in developing material methodologies for creating artwork in relation to the accelerated information age in which she lived included multivariate participant-based installations with an emphasis on pattern-finding and organizational similarities shared between humans and their data sets. By cataloging human behavior, Rapoport analyzed the personal and the political through data, performance, and photographic media. Digital Mudra grew from Rapoport’s fascination with the way meaning can be expressed through gesture. She began with a set of photographs of participant’s hands derived from her computer-mediated performance Biorhythm (Works Gallery, San José, California, 1983), in which she gathered data about viewers’ personalities and emotional states. Searching for preexisting systems to categorize and decode these ambiguous gestures, she identified the mudra gesture language used in South Indian kathakali dance tradition, in which the positions of the hands and fingers translate to specific words or concepts that can be used to tell a story. Anchoring the exhibition are thirty-five wall-mounted plexiglass frames arranged in an irregular grid pattern that relate to a poem, providing a visual sequence for photographs from Biorhythm. Each photograph is mounted in an acrylic shadow box and superimposed with a mudra that visually matches the gesture in the photograph. These are labeled with phrases that participants used to express how they were feeling, as well as translations of the mudras. This work was first exhibited in the computer-mediated “audience participation performance” Digital Mudra, at KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, in 1987, in which Rapoport worked with esteemed kathakali dancer K.P. Kunhiraman (1931-2014). The current exhibition also includes a projected 35mm slide show featuring hand gestures clipped from newspapers in the mid-1980s. These images include world leaders and public figures, as well as comic strip characters, each matched with a mudra gesture. The juxtaposition of reportage of political violence and international conflict with bizarre or childish humor is both jarring and typical of Rapoport’s practice, which is both a serious attempt to create new systems of understanding of the human condition, and a lighthearted parody which pokes fun at itself. Rapoport offers the paranoid suggestion that there exists a secret gesture language which, analyzed by computer, can be used to decode subconscious patterns in human relationships. The final element of the exhibition is an artist book and software publishing project Digital Mudra (diskette), (1988), which contains documentation of the interactive exhibition, an instructional booklet, thirty-five digital mudra cards, and a floppy disk with an interactive program that prompts viewers to select mudras and compose a poem. This reflects Rapoport’s active participation in early computer-networked creative communities, including Fine Art Forum and Art Com, which distributed Rapoport’s software. A related version of Digital Mudra was also published online in 1989, predating the World Wide Web.

Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Carol Wainio, in partnership with Trépanier-Baer Gallery, Calgary, Alberta. As if emerged from the fever dream of an abstract painter, Carol Wainio’s pictures blend history, ecology, traditional children’s literature and children’s art, into a single unified surface. She employs superimposition, palimpsest, and layering in her pictures, as well as a variety of formal juxtapositions — virtual collage, incongruous symbols, accidental defacement, and childish scribbles — to evoke the hybrid emotions that are unique to her richly allusive practice. Born of Finnish immigrant parents, Wainio’s family lore of repeated displacements and invasive neighbors have infused her work with a strong interest in history, a subject she has studied at the graduate level. Her recent pictures are formally and thematically consistent with earlier work, while the confidence of maturity has increased their complexity with assured paint handling. Wainio interweaves evermore elaborate landscapes and vignettes from the fables that we have traditionally taught children in the West, stories of magic, anthropomorphism and cruelty. Her use of found commercial iconography implicates the larger culture, while her incorporation of found children’s drawings introduce a dream-like poignancy to an urgent message slowly delivered. Although she paints in acrylic, Wainio’s palette and facture alternate between the somber wood tones of the oil-based old masters, and the cheerful, faded color of vintage commercial imagery from the dawn of mechanical reproduction. The succession of historical styles and pictorial idioms acts as a metaphor for the dire multigenerational legacy of climate change, species extinction, and humanitarian emergencies. Wainio is broadly represented in major Canadian museum collections and is the recipient of numerous prestigious distinctions, notably the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts, a career defining honor for a Canadian artist. She lives and works in Ottawa and Montreal. This is Wainio’s first solo exhibition in New York. Carol Waino was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1955, She studied at Halifax’s storied Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1976, at the height of the school’s fame as a bastion of advanced training for intellectually ambitious artists. Known for its emphasis on conceptual rigor as a basis for serious contemporary practice, NASCAD’s interdisciplinary curriculum and stellar faculty encouraged critical thinking as an artistic virtue. Wainio went on to pursue history at the University of Toronto, and graduate studies at Concordia University in Montréal from which she obtained an MFA, and where she began to focus her practice on painting. Trépanier-Baer Gallery is a leading Canadian art gallery based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Founded by Yves Trépanier and Kevin Baer in 1991, the gallery specializes in contemporary art and supports senior and mid-career artists including Vikky Alexander, James Carl, Chris Cran, Christian Eckart, DaveandJenn, Alicia Henry, Chris Millar, Luanne Martineau, Kent Monkman, Evan Penny and Carol Wainio. It also presents the work of promising emerging artists, most recently the sculptor Jen Aitken. The gallery also advances research and showcases the work of historical modern artists such as Marcel Barbeau, Oscar Cahén, Marion Nicoll and Fred Herzog. TrépanierBaer is a member of the Art Dealers Association of Canada (ADAC) and the Association des galleries d’art contemporain (AGAC).

GHOST SHIP is a “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Historically known as Kunstkammers or Wunderkammer (wonder-rooms), these cabinets of curiosities were encyclopedic collections of objects with undefined categorical boundaries. Much like its traditional counterpart, GHOST SHIP explores the wondrously impossible possibilities of objects, their interaction with each other and the world around them, and the value we embed them with. Bringing together a diverse group of multidisciplinary artists, the exhibition is an exploration of the relationship between space and objects, in all of their inner, outer, physical, and metaphysical iterations. Through questioning the elements of art-making, such as intention, influence, atmosphere and environment, and interaction, the idea of quantum entanglement emerges and guides the viewer on a wondrous exploration of everlasting entwined fundamental connections, both intentional and accidental. Drew Bennett’s oil on wood paintings are a practice in active observation. His work seeks to establish a deeper awareness of and connection between the human body and the natural world, and represent an ongoing exploration into a painting’s ability to convey Bennett’s gratitude for the world around him. His paintings celebrate the natural world, taking inspiration and source material from the landscape of Northern California. The artist lives and works in Oakland, California. Scott Benzel’s interdisciplinary works investigate the development, processes, and inherent contradictions in contemporary mass media systems of production, collective cultural identities, and mythologized cultural histories. As a visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer, Benzel’s work blurs the distinction between representation and abstraction and challenges the viewers’ perception of space and reality. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Tanya Brodsky’s sculptures explore the poetics of futility in the structures that govern everyday life. Her work approaches incongruities within the built environment as a tactic for revealing the hidden logic and relationships concealed by familiar use. Brodsky’s work modifies elements of architecture and technology, recreating, isolating, and generating new, and often absurd, interrelationships. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Jonathan Casella’s work is a personal investigation into the rearticulation of visual language. His work explores how human perception is informed and influenced by form and pattern, color, and coded visual languages. Casella’s distinct hard-edged, painting-weaving technique challenges and deconstructs pre-existing understandings and visual syntax. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Preston Douglas is a multidisciplinary artist who works between painting, fashion, and performance. His work challenges the traditional limitations of painting by incorporating sculptural elements, and explores how performative forms can create spiritual, non-religious atmospheres of faith for collective unity. Through surfaces that allude to both beauty and darkness, Douglas provides viewers with the space to question contemporary cultural conviction. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Emily Endo’s multidisciplinary practice pulls from the disparate, yet conjoined, histories of science and mysticism. Working in glass, organic media, and aroma molecules, Endo’s work references the transformative relationships between body, material, and space. Adornment, corporeal self-expression, and the fragmented body intersect with historical and imagined material animacies to create mythopoetic objects and figures. The artist lives and works in Joshua Tree, California. Roberta Gentry’s work is inspired by the natural world and the balance of order and chaos that exists within it. Through her paintings, which incorporate color and contrast as a rhythmical element, Gentry explores the connections and conflicts that occur between architecture and biology, questioning the divide between natural and artificial. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. History of Frogs is a collaborative project by multidisciplinary artists Antonia Pinter and Chase Biado to explore form, the shape of things, the change of forms, and how playing with the forms we live with can change the way we live. Their collaboration is an experiment to destabilize form through play-logic to find new relationships between people and objects, with both the idea of self and their constructed objects being conceptualized as ever-evolving and fluid. The artists live and work in Los Angeles, California. Sarah Ippolito works in sculpture, installation, and drawing to explore biomorphic exuberance and immanent vitality, alongside a deep interest in how humans identify with, desire, or eschew the bodies of other organisms. The distinct and vivid color in Ippolito’s work is informed by the natural world, referencing states of ripeness, warning,toxicity, defensive posture, camouflage, or sexual maturity. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Robert Levine’s sculptures play with the often-indistinct differences between art and things. With a focus on common, everyday objects, the artist embraces banality to challenge and expand the viewers’ perception, not only questioning familiarity but also what classifies as “art.” Levine meticulously crafts these objects in sculpted and painted wood, or precise and realistic paintings, allowing the artist’s hand to be visible only upon close inspection and validating the artist’s ability to transcend the common and quotidian. The artist lives and works in Venice, California. Ryan Martin’s paintings and drawings place his subjects in surreal, dream-like environments. Influenced by his childhood in the 1980’s and 1990’s in Southern California, vivid hues dominate his work. The artist nods to both his Native American and Russian roots by incorporating haloes of vibrantly-hued flora and fauna, a reference to warbonnets, which are attributed to males and masculinity during Native American rituals, and kokoshniks, which are solely attributed to the feminine. The artist lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Joshua Miller’s painting practice is compiling a visual thesaurus, which both enables and necessitates a wide array of subjects and painterly techniques. His work winds its way through the mundane, pop, technology, iconography, and conceptions of the other. Drawing inspiration from popular culture, Miller’s paintings explore the phenomenology of the visual language, assuming the form of an imagery atlas that will tell the history of painting.The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Adam Rabinowitz’s works are manifestations of appearance and disappearance through matter, space and light. Rabinowitz’s works are influenced by Walt Disney animation films, as well as by abstract post-war American art. His paintings are marked with psychedelic configurations and seem to be affected by heat or stuck by war, recalling the burnt landscapes of the Sinai Desert. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California and will have an exhibition at BOZO Mag in April 2024. Kristopher Raos’ expansive and technical range of visual language is communicated through colorful paintings, sculptures, and drawings, each created through an intense focus on his development as an artist. Generating content Massey Klein 124 Forsyth Street New York, NY 10002 masseyklein.com from a spontaneous array of sources including music, found objects, and ‘On The Fly Photographs,’ Raos’ work is of a particular contemporaneity. Raos’ work illustrates his interest in humor, precise (DIY) techniques, and attention to craft.The artist lives and works in Bakersfield, California. Erica Vincenzi’s work explores the implication, cropping and balancing the visual weight of her paintings in a way that is emotionally and philosophically informed by literature. Her subjects are recognizable, though defamiliarized to the point of representing more fiction than fact. Like replaying a memory, fantasy weaves in and out of her work with an ominous absurdity. Vincenzi zeroes in on an emotional atmosphere where delicious and alluring sensations call from unexpected settings, and the goal of visual completion is always out of reach. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California. BOZO Mag is a gallery located in both Cresthaven and Pasadena, California. Run by Danny Bowman and Alexandra Grunbeck, the gallery exhibits many of the artists included in GHOST SHIP including Jonathan Casella,Drew Bennett, and Adam Rabinowitz. The gallery was recently featured in the Los Angeles Times.

The story ends at impact but the song persists I don’t see anything, you aren’t looking. As it persists tragedy lights the way in dying once a day. - Carly Burnell, 2024 Carly Burnell traces her roots as a granddaughter of the Southern California light and space movement. Her works, first incubated by natural light, find their ultimate meaning in the viewer’s perception of their visual plane. Her practice is informed by a tradition and spirit of transcendentalism – Burnell’s paintings are simultaneously individualistic and infinite. The paintings follow a strand of the expansive Zen Buddhist subject/object duality. There is no object and therefore no subject. There is just seeing. There is no painting, but instead something disguised as a painting. At one distance what you think you are seeing hovers as a mirage of what we think we understand to be a painting; you move in closer and you’re a thousand miles above the surface of the plutonian body, you move out farther and you’re just experiencing a photopsia. When spending time with Burnell’s paintings, one may exercise a muscle that has perhaps lain dormant within us for too long now – whether a literal interpretation of muscle through the use of our optic nerve adjusting to the subtle ways in which Burnell employs her oil paint with wax, silicone, and resin; or a metaphorical, psychic muscle, one reaching for the language required to give form to an intrinsic feeling that the paintings stir within us. The word muscle is used loosely as there is no real flexing required in the act of looking at Burnell’s paintings, the exertion comes with doing rather the opposite: you simply must do nothing as the paintings wash over you. And perhaps listen to them as you move in closer, out farther, from side to side, back and forth. There is a whisper at times, something uncanny that you can’t quite place your finger on – is the painting bruised? The paintings on view in but the song persists occupy these incorporeal spaces with a subtle certainty. The mezzo-piano self-assuredness of reykjavik (2021) finds its equal and opposite force reflected back in stomped (2024), whose confident frenetic brushwork evokes a mezzo-forte energy; creating a bright tension, in the vibration of which the paintings find their balance. precursory signs (2024) joins the song with its baritone cadenza. beneath the eye (2024) appears anthropomorphous in its physicality however behaves almost like a punctuation mark, giving either pause or emphasis, one cannot fully say as it depends on where in the sky the sun is, to the lilting phrase it forms with its companion the eye (2022). The sun then shifts further West a degree and you’re no longer with the same painting you thought you were with; you’re faced with an enigma. Perhaps you feel a pang of precariousness at first, it’s not as you thought, but you let your eyes adjust and soon enough you think you see clearly once more, the bruise was just a stain after all. The sun then shifts further West another degree.