Nanette Carter: Simply Semiotics, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Berry Campbell presents its second solo exhibition of work by Nanette Carter (b. 1954). Nanette Carter: Simply Semiotics is comprised of 24 recent collages that respond to the fraught political, social, and cultural issues of the 21st century. Drawing on influences ranging from African American quilt-making to jazz to Abstract Expressionism, Nanette Carter constructs an intricate and unique visual symphony using Mylar and oil. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 20-page, fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jason Stopa.

Six series form the basis of this exhibition: The Group, Destabilizing, Shifting Perspectives, Black and White, Bright Light, and Afro Sentinels. With a common visual language, these series respond to the disequilibrium that permeates every corner of our society. Consequential issues such as climate change, America’s racial divisions, the pandemic, the rise of far right authoritarianism, and global war are addressed with a mixture of hope and uncertainty. Stopa says in his essay: “The off-kilter presentation of her works combined with the uncanny surfaces and curvilinear forms present us with a complex set of relations, which in turn, mirror back to us our own strange predicament.”

Nanette Carter has received many grants, fellowships, and awards including in 2021, The Anonymous was a Woman Award. Carter has two upcoming solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, opening in late 2024 and at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio opening in 2025. Berry Campbell exclusively represents Nanette Carter.

Thu 21 Nov 2024 to Fri 20 Dec 2024

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Kate Shepherd: ABC and sometimes Y Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, presents a solo exhibition by Kate Shepherd, entitled ABC and sometimes Y. On view are new paintings, sculptures, and watercolors made with Shepherd’s signature use of architectural logic to situate geometric configurations in space. The exhibition presents new forms, colors, and the artist’s largest sculptures to date, demonstrating Shepherd’s ongoing innovation of and expansion upon her decades long practice engaging in abstraction and perspectival space.

A large-scale, site-specific wall painting commands the main gallery space. In this installation, Shepherd uses various tones of color to generate the illusion of translucent overlapping shapes. The construction implies a three-dimensional perspectival space on a single wall—flat colors layered atop one another create depth where they appear to circle around one another and overlap. The emotional impact of color is most evident in this wall mural, whose monumental, horizontal scale engages with the viewer’s body in both time and space.

In a selection of paintings in enamel and oil on aluminum panel, Shepherd paints her constructions—her diagrammatic configurations of linear forms—in thin lines of black and white painted on smooth, reflective surfaces rendered in a variety of colors ranging from pastel pink to vibrant yellow to black and white. For Shepherd, her choice of colors is dictated by innate emotional reaction to each individual composition, thereby evoking a relationship between color

and form. In a selection of works, Shepherd divides the background of the painting between two tones, adding another plane to the pictorial field. The glossy surface of the enamel painting reflects its environs, placing the painting in a perpetual, dynamic conversation with its viewers and surroundings.

These paintings present entirely new constructions, hand-rendered on Shepherd’s pictorial planes, that convey varying degrees of stability and tension like sculptures made with translucent planes. Some works see many forms overlap, building a sturdy core, while others see delicately balanced configurations of barely touching shapes. In a series of watercolors on view in the small gallery, monochromatic planar shapes are rendered in contrasting tones to stir a sensation of movement and dynamism. Shepherd’s background in figurative painting is hinted at by way of the attention to naturalistic gravity and credible space.

Throughout the gallery, a selection of large-scale painted plywood sculptures prompts a dialogue with the paintings on view. The sculptures mirror the lexicon Shepherd develops throughout the painted works, revealing the logic behind the line work. The concept for these sculptures stems from experimentation on a smaller scale eight years prior, beginning with forms that emerged as byproducts of works on paper. Composed in plywood to allow them to maintain the thin profile that characterizes Shepherd’s constructions, these works recontextualize the artist’s signature forms in three dimensions.

Thu 12 Dec 2024 to Sat 8 Feb 2025

528 West 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Margherita Manzelli Le signorine

Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Viale della Repubblica, 277, 59100 Prato PO, Italia

14 December 2024 – 11 May 2025

Curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol

Supported by ValeriaNapoleoneXXArtists (VNXXA)

Centro Pecci is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Margherita Manzelli, opening on 13 December 2024. Margherita Manzelli. Le signorine, an exhibition project in which Intesa Sanpaolo is partner, features a selection of paintings from the 1990s to the present, displayed alongside a series of drawings and a group of works created specifically for the exhibition, one of which is inspired by the cathedral of the city of Prato.

 The title, Le Signorine, reflects the artist's way of referring to the female figures that have long populated her works. Independent, proud, timeless, and androgynous, Manzelli’s “signorine” take centre stage and determine their own modes and forms of representation, challenging deep-rooted conventions and claiming their independence from family ties.

Since the beginning, the artist's practice has been centred on the exploration of three elements: painting, performance, and writing. Manzelli's desire to connect these seemingly disparate areas of interest has allowed her to develop a body of work unique in Italy. After studying in Ravenna, she moved to Milan in the early 1990s, during a decade that regarded the return of painting with some scepticism after the excesses of the 1980s.

In her subjects, the female body — along with the exploration of her own visionary obsessions — becomes a pretext for delving into painterly experimentation and for indiscriminately pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic genres. Ultimately, it allows for a playful engagement with the ambiguity of the artist’s condition, suspended between the need to expose and circulate her work and the desire to withdraw to protect herself on a human and personal level.

The signorine are figures who have always and consistently populated the artist’s imagination and work. With determination, Manzelli has explored their psychological tensions, revealing both their fragility and resilience. Hyper-alert and pale, nude or semi-nude, they seem ready either for dissection or to defy convention; restrained by the thin barrier of their own skin and with gazes that spill over and pierce those who look at them, these women overturn the assumptions of representations of the female body in art history, typically conceived for the male gaze.

In the paintings, the young women are placed within an abstract spatiality, composed of broad fields with geometric patterns and floral motifs, evoking the designs of imaginary or real fabrics — even those of the artist’s own garments — or in spaces defined by coloured vertical bands. Central to Manzelli’s work is the relationship between the subject and the background, held in a constant tension where the figures seem to both emerge from and merge with the context. In this perceptual exercise, with background colours shaping the facial features of the signorine, Manzelli captivates the viewer.

For more than thirty years, the head has been the starting point of the artist’s exploration, from which her vision takes shape and her obsessions are given a voice. In the drawings presented in the exhibition, the head emerges from a white field, as often seen in Manzelli’s works on paper. Through her works, Manzelli seems to evoke an awareness of the fragility and resilience of the human condition, a sentiment experienced globally during the recent pandemic. The head is less a site of neurosis, and more a complex formal element capable of synthesising and conveying facial features with stories and emotions. A boundless source for the expressive possibilities of art.

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A Promise I Want To Resolve - Carole Ebtinger

December 7 – January 25, 2025

Gallery open hours: Wed–Sat 12–5pm

Sarah Brook Gallery

5229 Hollywood Blvd,

Los Angeles, CA 90027

Sarah Brook Gallery is thrilled to present Une promesse que je veux résoudre / A promise I want to resolve, the second exhibition of French artist Carole Ebtinger. The show opens on Saturday, December 7, and will be on view through January 25, 2025. 

Standing before Promesse IV, you may see light flickering atop ruffled waters, streaming through leafy trees, or enshrining in gold, if for a moment, a pond’s mottled floor. But what you feel—what it makes you feel—is harder to place, harder yet to name. The rise and fall of light and shade across the twelve paintings comprising Carole Ebtinger’s A promise I want to resolve leads you toward the indescribable. Harnessing velocity, color, composition, and contrast, she renders interior experiences tangible, distilling all the intensity of emotion, sensation, and rumination in paint.  

Unfastened from representation but still of this world, her forms evoke the phenomena of light and her palette, the natural world of verdant meadows, gardens, grottos, bogs, and forests. In Promesse III, where wispy olive, mauve, and indigo daubs congeal and disperse, and citrine-chartreuse washes dissolve in colorless incandescence, it’s easy to think of water lilies. Yet, simply consigning her work to the enduring legacy of Claude Monet’s impressionism misses the novelty of her mark-making and her formidable ability to move through the emotional registers—from solemnity to ecstasy, placidity to frenzy—in a single compositional frame without even one recognizable shape. 

Rather than preserve the image of a particular place or vignette, Ebtinger reifies the volatility, malleability, and, at times, all-consuming nature of emotional states. Stirring miasmic gestures are skewered by sudden vertical slashes, limpid pools of color are smeared, and feathery textural strokes are overrun by opaque Twombly-esque scrawl. Elsewhere, variegated pastel hues are engulfed by an ever-encroaching murkiness if not entirely subsumed by lush yet acerbic shadowplay. This rhythmic interplay between harmony and turmoil renders the abstractions indefinitely absorbing, enchanting even. Look away, and you may miss the light fade and flare as despair turns to delight. What are moods but moments of enchantment? 

The dynamism of the work arises in part from the artist’s bifurcated process, which balances chance and deliberate acts. Ebtinger begins by moving a mixture of pigment, water, and glue across the paper. Using a large brush, she follows her intuition to imagine an initial composition that is as free of intentionality and premeditation as possible. To maintain a level of urgency and spontaneity, she works on two sheets simultaneously, moving quickly back and forth between them before either can dry. In the second phase, she returns with fine brushes and pastels, shaping the image’s final form by both embracing and resisting the underlying base. While the first stage happens quickly, the second may take several months.

Comparing this exhibition to her last in June 2023 reveals the artist's growing confidence in the intuitive aspects of her process. The heightened tension between restless and meticulous lines, between impassioned and refined gestures, affords the series its distinctive voice—a candor that is rigorously intimate, kinetic, and entirely original. 

In this way, coming to the final painting, hung on the rear-facing wall in the back of the gallery, where a blazing white form floats like a fallen flower upon a night-dark lake, you see a lily belonging to no other but Ebtinger. And experience a feeling, however ineffable, that this mixture of pigment on paper alone could affect. —Tara Anne Dalbow

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Mika Obayashi: Gospel of the Three Dimensions

Sat 16 Nov 2024 to Sat 4 Jan 2025

CARVALHO PARK, 112 Waterbury Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Thu-Sat 12-6pm & by appointment

CARVALHO PARK presents Gospel of Three Dimensions, introducing the work of Japanese-American sculptor, Mika Obayashi, through a site-responsive installation in the gallery’s 110 Waterbury St. space. Suspended through cotton string, hundreds of handmade sheets of fibrous abaca paper float between floor and ceiling in a delicate, drifting gradient of dark to light indigo. Obayashi invites viewers into this airy, floating matrix, which appears to swell skyward, filtering light through its stratifications like sunlight dappling through trees. This marks the artist’s first exhibition with CARVALHO PARK.

Absorptive of light and its surroundings, the work expands upon a previous iteration, in which a central, monolithic form could be circumambulated and stepped into on one side. Here, Obayashi has reimagined an ethereal forest through which visitors are led on individual journeys in a metaphysical, gauzy grove of hand-dyed indigo paper—a natural pigment chosen for its “living” character. Simultaneously solid and airy, the layered material is poised with delicate tension between gravity and weightlessness, calling on the rich history of paper as a repository for cultural and ancestral knowledge.

Obayashi first began working with paper during a Japanese paper-making class in her studies, drawing on an ancient craft tradition and prying open a world of material and sculptural possibilities that connects her to her cultural heritage. While living in Japan, she visited paper artisans in their studios, learning the layered history of the medium. She also began noticing what she describes as “sensitive collaborations with nature” everywhere she looked—a synthetic rope or bespoke wooden crutch supporting heavy tree limbs—in which human intervention supports or nurtures other living things in a poetic reciprocity between nature, medium, and necessity.

With this installation, the artist invokes the three-dimensional form as a method of directing a viewer’s experience through space. Obayashi derives the title of her work from Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which traces the exploits of a square in a world that exists only in two dimensions. Conceived as a commentary scrutinizing the hierarchy of Victorian society, the story is narrated by a gentleman square who guides the reader through his realm, illuminating a reality in which women are lines and men exist as polygons. The tale takes a turn when the square dreams of a one-dimensional place in which men are lines and women are “lustrous points.” In waking life, he insists—despite a threat on his life from the powers that be—that the dimension must be real. The square is then visited by a sphere, which moves in and out of his familiar flat plane, appearing as circles of increasing and decreasing size. The square is only capable of comprehending the sphere as a disk, so the sphere takes him to a land of three dimensions. Finally convinced, the square returns to his realm and preaches what he has seen: “The Gospel of Three Dimensions.”

Reading Flatland, Obayashi was fascinated by how the polygon—bearing witness to a sphere traveling through his familiar, flat world—presented a metaphor for spiritual experience. In Gospel of Three Dimensions, Obayashi merges properties of gravity, light, and movement to summon a space for contemplation, the gradient urging our sightlines skyward. Akin to the transformative process of evaporation, the fundamental essence of the medium is not lost, but transmogrified, permuted from one state to another. Moving through the columns, Obayashi leads the viewer through an elegant, freeform choreography of transcendence. We enter a space in which our own ideas and sense of being in the world resonate in a personal, contemplative reflection. She encourages us to consider new perspectives, discerning myriad impressions of the world that exist simultaneously and offering ways to understand or appreciate one another—even reorienting how we see ourselves.

Text by curator and arts writer, Kate Mothes.

Mika Obayashi (b. 1995, Michigan) is a Japanese-American fiber and installation artist. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College, Massachusetts, and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Expanding her studies, Obayashi was a research fellow in textiles at the Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2020. Her first institutional solo exhibition was held at Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (2022). Additional solo shows include those held with CARVALHO PARK, New York (2024); LaunchPad Gallery at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts (2022); Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan (2020); and with GalleryGallery, Kyoto, Japan (2020). Obayashi is a recipient of the Amherst-Doshisha Fellowship, Amherst College and Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan; the American Craft Council Emerging Artists award; and the Amelia Peabody Award for Sculpture, given by the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston; among others. She has received grants from the American Craft Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Residencies include Studio Kura in Kyoto, Japan, and with the Women’s Studio Workshop in New York.

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18 Women:50 Years

Tue 19 Nov 2024 to Sat 25 Jan 2025

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm and by appointment

The presentation features over forty works in painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, ceramic, and textile produced between 1918 and 1968 by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ruth Asawa, Mary Bauermeister, Lee Bontecou, Claire Falkenstein, Nancy Grossman, Blanche Lazzell, Louise Nevelson, Agnes Pelton, Irene Rice Pereira, Anne Ryan, Betye Saar, Esphyr Slobodkina, Toshiko Takaezu, Lenore Tawney, Alma Thomas, Charmion von Wiegand, and Claire Zeisler. In the spirit of the large group exhibitions of vanguard artists organized by legendary curator Dorothy C. Miller at the Museum of Modern Art, 18 Women: 50 Years provides a representative showing of each featured artist and, collectively, a survey of the women artists consistently championed by the gallery’s program.

Though much progress has been made in contextualizing women artists within the larger narrative of twentieth-century art, 18 Women: 50 Years seeks to emphasize the diversity of practices among the artists on view. Featuring traditional oil-on-canvas paintings, radically nontraditional found-object assemblages, as well as a rich selection of works executed in mediums traditionally designated as craft and unjustly excluded from fine art settings, the presentation highlights the originality of these artists’ conceptual, material, and stylistic approaches. Each featured artist asserted a singular voice within the arena of modernism and its descendants while resisting the patriarchal strictures of the creative and institutional circles in which they moved. Bringing together standout works representative of a range of movements and milieus, 18 Women: 50 Years provides a vivid summary of these artists’ incomparable contributions to the history of twentieth-century art.

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Pouran Jinchi & Ruba Salameh: Cipher, Gazelli Art House, London

Fri 4 Oct 2024 to Sat 30 Nov 2024

39 Dover Street, W1S 4NN

Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-7pm

Artists: Pouran Jinchi - Ruba Salameh

The exhibition Cipher at Gazelli Art House London presents the work of two female painters with roots in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Pouran Jinchi (b.1959, Mashhad, Iran) and Ruba Salameh (b.1985, Nazareth).

The artists come from different generations, but share an innovative and emotionally affecting use of abstraction and pattern. Their paintings are deeply connected to the traditions of Islamic calligraphy and geometric design, while also in dialogue with multiple moments and styles from across the Western modernist and post-modernist canon.

The exhibition title Cipher points to the shared interest of Jinchi and Salameh in abstract painting operating as a coded system of communication – a language simultaneously impacting the senses and operating as an enigmatic puzzle of sorts. Additionally, the etymology of the word highlights a significant historical moment of scientific and cultural influence and exchange. Originating from the Arabic word for zero (sifr), the term ‘cipher’ spread to Europe as part of the Arabic numeral system during the Middle Ages, where it crucially supplemented the Roman numerical system which lacked the concept of zero, which today is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. Tracing the lines of connection back further still, in the last decade there has been the discovery of the earliest recorded use of a symbol for zero in the Bakhshali manuscript, an ancient Indian scroll dating back to the third or fourth century.

Pouran Jinchi’s works in the exhibition bear testament to her ongoing exploration of how architecture, objects, decoration, and the written word can be imbued with symbolic power. Trained as a mathematician and classical calligrapher in Iran, Jinchi went on to study art in Los Angeles and New York. A constant across

her decades of work is the way she explores a productive tension between the seeming control of Islamic calligraphy and the fluid spontaneity associated with Western abstract painting.

In this exhibition, Jinchi presents a group of works in which she quietly observes the unspoken traces of war, conflict, and militarism embedded within language and culture. Reflecting on specific examples, such as phonetic alphabets, military insignia, medals, war paint, and camouflage, Jinchi used wood and enamel to produce individual tiles. She created sculptural paintings marked with finely calibrated brush strokes painting fragmented Persian letters corresponding to the military’s phonetic alphabet—B is for Bravo, P is for Papa, Z is for Zulu. Colour plays a crucial role across all of Jinchi’s work, and in this series, the tones came from battleground camouflage, the stripes of military ribbons, and the coded shades of naval flags. The resulting pieces feel emblematic, striking, and playful like children’s games.

Palestinian painter Ruba Salameh presents a series of paintings in which blocks and lines of concrete greys and pale hues evoke aerial views of a city or electronic circuit boards. This visual language draws on Constructivism, Bauhaus, Minimalism, and even the 1980s Neo-Geo work of American painters such as Peter Halley (b.1953). Yet notions of balance, harmony and firm geometry are disrupted by Salameh. The shapes on her canvases are far from regular and constantly shift and jostle in front of the eye. On the surface of the pictures can be seen small black dots, which on close inspection are revealed as depictions of ants. Some gather around shapes as if to carry them away, others seem to be stuck in corners or forced along paths. The addition of the ants to the pictures suggests a meeting of the man-made and organic, the disruption of a pure surface, and alludes to the resilience of communities suffering oppression.

Through their dynamic recalibration of the many strands that exist within the history of abstract painting, Jinchi and Salameh subvert fixed readings of place and nationality. Their works celebrate hybridity and lines of global connection, while allowing insight into the specific qualities of time, place and lived experience.

Emilija Radojicic: Curiosa Continua, Adrian Sutton Gallery, Paris

Sat 12 Oct 2024 to Sat 18 Jan 2025

11 rue Michel le Comte, 75003

Wed-Sat 1pm-7pm

Adrian Sutton presents “Curiosa Continua”, an exhibition of textile works and drawings by Serbian artist Emilija Radojicic, the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

The exhibition features Emilija Radojicic's most recent woven wall-hangings, offering a glimpse into her psyche while evoking both personal and collective experiences, emotions, vibrations and natural phenomena. These pieces explore the tactile nature of abstraction and highlight her interest in the three-dimensionality aspect of her practice.

Beginning her artistic journey in drawing and painting, Radojicic draws inspiration from the serenity of nature and the symphony of its elements. However, her creative process extends far beyond mere observation. Her artistic lineage reveals a deep well of intuition and spirituality that drive her to explore new avenues of expression through diverse techniques and materials. A few years ago, motivated by a desire to experiment with the spatiality of drawing, Radojicic started shifting from the pencil line to the loom thread, marking a pivotal transformation in her practice. This transition allowed her to weave her inner world, and the cultural influences that shaped her, into vibrantly textural three-dimensional forms. Deeply rooted in her heritage and echoing the geometric designs of the traditional Serbian Pirot kilims, her weavings serve as a testament to the enduring power of this ancient craft while reinforcing her cultural identity. They blend playful shapes and vibrant colours reminiscent of the aesthetic of the modernists, reflecting her quest for balance in nature through contrasting elements.

Emilija Radojicic's latest work epitomizes a dynamic fusion of tradition and innovation, underpinned by her relentless desire for expression. Viewing creativity as a means of cleansing the soul, a philosophy reminiscent of Picasso’s methodology, she embraces the daily act of courage and dedication necessary to maintain an artistic integrity. Central to her approach is the idea of "games," emphasizing exploration and discovery as essential components for her artistic growth. This strategy is reflected in her diverse repertoire, which spans painting, drawing, weaving, sculpting, and working with stone and wood. Through her skillful combination of various media, she creates a harmonious blend of traditional and contemporary compositions - from the delicate traces of her drawings on Burda paper, to the rich textures of her textiles, the wooden sculptural forms, and the functional beauty of her furniture design, Radojicic's practice is proof of her boundless imagination and versatility. Her ability to merge artistic expression with functional design highlights her unwavering commitment to creativity, effectively bridging the gap between fine and applied arts - a hallmark of the Bauhaus ideals. Radojicic's work honours the lasting influence of tradition while exploring the limitless possibilities of innovation, creating a visual language that invites viewers to delve into the intersection of tradition and modernity.

Essay by Luana Hildebrandt.

Somaya Critchlow: Triple Threat, curated by Hilton Als, Maximillian William, London

Thu 21 Nov 2024 to Sat 8 Feb 2025

47 Mortimer Street, W1W 8HJ

Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-6pm

Maximillian William presents Triple Threat, an exhibition of drawings by British artist Somaya Critchlow curated by Hilton Als.

Comprising a selection of over 40 new works on paper (2023-2024), Triple Threat is the artist’s first exhibition to focus solely on drawing. Working in graphite pencil, ink with a brush, or traditional Japanese glass dip pen, images are composed and repeated with the delicate immediacy of memoranda, yet retain their own unique sense of place and narrative. The result is a wide-ranging series of drawings that serve as both ends in themselves and living dialogues.

Critchlow’s subjects often reside in worlds where contextual signs are subverted and undermined. Some figures emerge from an almost entropic barrenness, as in Tiny figure, replete or Surprised, while others are adorned with uncanny surroundings and familiar symbols. In Study for The Bride, a bride holds up her veil, not quite lying nor kneeling, but arched backwards; there’s a tenderness in her face undermined by doubt. While in Study of a Bride, the veil billows around a triumphant and defiant figure as she removes a stocking. Critchlow’s use of the bridal veil, whose pre-Christian roots were intended to protect the wearer from malevolent spirits, emphasises how hope is displaced onto the body’s embellishment; and, consequently, how the myth of nudity as a space devoid of meaning can never be realised.

Evident throughout Triple Threat is the artist’s preoccupation with the sketches and prints of Francesco Goya (The Sketchbooks; The Caprices; The Disasters of War). Critchlow has returned to these series again and again over the past year, at times making daily copies. Alongside two studies of Wicked Woman and Woman with a little black boy, Goya’s motifs creep into Critchlow’s own imaginings, such as in Owls, Bats and Cats and In Darkness II; while a general sense of Goya’s influence can be seen in a propensity towards the cruelty and folly that often underlies beauty and power, as well as in the hallucinatory synthesis of psychic and mythic worlds.

When discussing the drawings in Triple Threat, Critchlow has referred to Hogarth as exemplifying the blurred line between portraiture and caricature. If I loved you less shows two figures in an almost Hogarthian melodrama; however, it’s as though the moral of its story has been lost to time. While Bonnet, perhaps a play on Hogarth’s self-portrait The Painter and his Pug, seems to contemplate notions of gravity and self-reflection. These themes are often intermingled with a haunting mood of intimacy, as found in figures inspired by the private photography of architect Carlo Mollino, or with written narratives such as The Canterbury Tales: “The more it burns the more is its desire / To burn up everything that burnt can be”.

As a collaboration between Critchlow and Als, Triple Threat underscores a harmony between these two voices. Als’s own portraiture-in-writing in The Women is a prime example of employing the personal, historical and poetic in order to complicate reductive approaches to Black femininity. Similarly, Critchlow’s subjects refuse to shy away from sensuality as a mode-of-life within which snippets of identity and meaning can be made.

Als reflects on these themes in a new piece of writing for the exhibition, which can be found in an illustrated accompanying publication.

Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Thu 24 Oct 2024 to Sat 21 Dec 2024

525 West 22nd Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Franco Klein’s debut exhibition will present a selection of works from her seminal series Break In Case Of Emergency, Proceed To The Route, and Positive Disintegration. These series evolve with no definitive beginning or ending, taking shape through continuous emotional exercises and explorations of social behavior and states of solitude within ambiguous spaces and time.

Franco Klein’s practice centers around the examination of modern anxieties and the performative stresses that come from living life online: a constant fixation on self-improvement and productivity, an endurance of media overstimulation, and a propensity to profile ourselves, and others, to fit into today's eclectic and fragmented realities.

Often using herself as the subject, Franco Klein creates vivid, cinematic photographs. In her work, female characters inhabit a visually rich world, recalling the psychological film noir dramas of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. Franco Klein juxtaposes a nostalgic affection for and disillusionment with the narrative of a woman trapped in the loneliness of domestic settings, as seen in Toaster (Self-portrait), 2016 or within the dystopian western landscape of Car, Window (Self-portrait), 2018 and Valley, (Self-portrait), 2019. Her figures cannot escape the tension of their environment, or the stress of how they are seen by others. As the artist explains, “We are always trying to create identities with social media to express the good part of ourselves, as if there is some kind of shame in knowing what we are on the other side... because we feel that we have failed in what we are supposed to be.”

Tania Franco Klein, born 1990 in Mexico, received her BA in Architecture from Centro Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City, and her MA in Photography from the University of Arts London. Franco Klein will be featured in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, the 40th anniversary edition of MoMA’s celebrated New Photography series. She was the recipient of Artproof Schliemann Award supporting Artist Residencies in Arles, France, and her work is in the prestigious collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA.

Cristina BanBan: 14th Street Madonna, Skarstedt, New York

Thu 7 Nov 2024 to Sat 21 Dec 2024

20 East 79th St, NY 10075

Mon-Fri 10am-5pm

Skarstedt presents Cristina BanBan: 14th Street Madonna. The word “Madonna” has many origins and connotations. Tracing its roots to the Latin mea domina, or “my mistress,” which is the feminine form of dominus, or “master,” it took further shape in the old Italian ma donna, or “lady.” Within these phrases lies a duality of the soft feminine lady and the more dominant dame or madam. This juxtaposition of the many faces of femininity, seen through the lens of contemporary society, binds together the new works on view.

While BanBan’s work is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the word, there is something personal and diaristic in each of her paintings. Taking influence from such things as major life events, all the way down to the little things she notices as she traverses the city, the works on view in 14th Street Madonna reveal who BanBan is in the moment in which she makes each work—what excites her, what intrigues her, what piques her curiosity. Sometimes, these influences are a conscious choice, such as the benches, plants, and windows that crop up in several paintings. Other times, they are unconscious, an element BanBan does not fully understand until the work is complete.

This shows up through the abstracted architectural elements that appear throughout some of the works on view. Women lean on railings, sit on benches, or stand in front of a window as if they are moving between boroughs on the subway alongside BanBan. Continuously charting a path between pure representation and pure abstraction, these elements are discovered through looking closely at these compositions. Whether consciously noticed or not, they lend a newfound sense of groundedness and contemporaneity. This modern aura continues in the accessories worn by many of these figures. A mainstay of her earlier work, the inclusion of things like underwear, high heels, or knee-high socks are donned in all kinds of colors and patterns. Whether an elaborate hat or exaggerated bow laces, they simultaneously heighten the femininity latent within her oeuvre, lend a sense of kitsch, and further place them as a contemporaneous women. The shoes, in particular, allow the viewer to take a proverbial step back. Whereas recent work has engulfed its viewers through the sheer scale of each figure, in 14th Street Madonna we start to get a look at the full figure, set in a nebulous yet still particular place and time.

BanBan is not new to painting the contemporary female experience. Still, it has taken on a new framework in 14th Street Madonna thanks to one of the other major influences on this series: the early films of Pedro Almodóvar and Sofia Coppola. Both thematically and aesthetically, their respective filmographies are well-considered throughout the exhibition. Whether it be rich cherry reds or soft pastel pinks, the palettes of these filmmakers become part of BanBan’s own palette, underscoring two different ways to view girlhood or feminine tropes such as femme fatales, mothers, or heroines. For Coppola, girlhood is a place of fantasy, experimentation, evasion, or transcendence, shown through stories in which a woman’s strength and desire are often underestimated. In Tres Mujeres y el Horizonte, for instance, there is a tenderness in the positioning of the three bodies and a kind of girlish shyness as two of them turn away from the viewer, hiding their eyes, while the woman on the left turns her head so swiftly, we see it like a film strip, her different expressions highlighting the multitude of emotions latent within women. Meanwhile, Almodóvar’s women are openly strong, intense, and complex—a guiding thread for emotions. In Striped Socks, a woman stands confidently in a set of red undergarments—echoing Almodóvar’s palette—and knee-high striped socks, her hips tilted to one side; she appears comfortable and alluring, as if she has complete ownership over the gaze inflicted upon her.

Cinematic language is a way to draw a line between the real and the imagined, something BanBan charts in her use of contemporary markers and well-defined women juxtaposed against amorphous backgrounds and details that fade into the overarching composition. This balance was fodder for the work of Willem de Kooning, a constant influence on BanBan, who was specifically inspired to create the series of narrow paintings in this exhibition after looking at de Kooning’s paintings on narrow wooden doors he made following his move to the Hamptons.

If the women of BanBan’s previous paintings were more universal in their scope, those shown in 14th Street Madonna

Lydia Baker: Sonnet, Massey Klein Gallery, New York

Lydia Baker: Sonnet

October 26 – December 7, 2024

Massey Klein Gallery,

124 Forsyth St. New York, NY 10002

Sonnet is a discovery and a personal r/evolution. Whereas the drawings in Baker’s debut solo exhibition In Between (2022, Massey Klein Gallery) depicted a sharply focused, somber world—small and distant female figures were often shown navigating difficult terrain on their own, despite their proximity to one another—the paintings in Sonnet realize the artist’s fantasy: a once-sought utopia, now discovered. The painter’s surrealist eye takes on a softer glow, as if gazing through a foggy, winter window to look upon the warmth inside a family home. “I have an image in my mind, where I am forehead to forehead with my partner; we’re sometimes asleep or just paused momentarily, taking each other in. Our bodies create a shape that holds everything,” the artist writes.

Unlike the third-person drawings set in Baker’s anthropomorphized landscapes, these first-person paintings bring two female figures to the fore. Sonnet’s protagonists become a cistern in which expansive, romantic love runs to reservoir. Emotional security, previously depicted as elusive and ephemeral, can now be captured (seen most directly in “A pool of our hopes and dreams,” where the composition and color overlay impress certain intimacy, and gesture toward multiplicitous futures). Each painting is a crucial component of the whole Sonnet, fourteen pieces in which the two women traverse an array of environments and imaginations together: ovum both literal and figurative in “Bird nest inside a flower” symbolize the birth of family, and also the creative ideas of artistic muse; arched, layered bodies create a haven in “Forming a window for previous selves,” protecting the children they once were; and “Daughters and cells flying side by side” casts the figures into a speculative future of queer reproductivepossibilities.

An obsessive color theorist, Baker continues to challenge her palette in her latest exhibition, drawing inspiration from painters like Lisa Yuskavage and Matthew Wong. With Sonnet, Baker employs jewel tones across textured surfaces, favoring a range of blues and ochres, to create new visual harmonies and vibrations. The effect is both dreamy and visceral, sensual and cerebral.

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Lydia Baker (b. 1990 Virginia) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Baker received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 and MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2020, where she was awarded the Merit Scholar Award (2018-2019) and the Post-Graduate Chubb Fellowship She has been awarded numerous artist residencies, including the High Line Nine x Sugarlift Residency, NYC (2021); the Saltonstall Foundation Residency, Ithaca, NY (2021) and the Vermont Studio Center (2023). Baker was also awarded the IEA Art Heals Grant (2020) and NYFA’s City Artist Corps Grant (2021).

Her works have appeared in print and online with publications like West Branch, The Wick, New American Paintings, FAD, Artnet, Juxtapoz, Art Maze and Artsy. Special projects have included David Zwirner’s PLATFORM Pride Curation, in partnership with Gayletter (2024), and their 2022 November Selection. Recent group exhibitions include CHARTA, Fortnight Institute, NYC (2022); A Suitable Accomplishment, Trotter & Sholer, NYC (2023); The Drawing Stall Fair, Monopo New York, Brooklyn, NY (2023); Future Fair, Massey Klein Gallery, NYC (2023); and Aura, Wilder Gallery, London (2023). Solo exhibitions include In Between, Massey Klein Gallery, NYC (2022), London Art Fair with Wilder Gallery, London (2023) and Sonnet, Massey Klein Gallery, NYC (2024).

Learn More Here

Lap of the Gods, Caro, Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles

Lap of the Gods,

CARO

October 26 - November 30, 2024

Sarah Brook Gallery

If it’s true that attention is the highest form of prayer, in the words of Simone Weil, then the luminous textiles comprising CARO’s debut solo exhibition, “Lap of the Gods,” are devotional objects. One doesn’t need to know that the show represents more than a thousand hours of labor or that the creation of one of the tapestries spans five years to see the cumulative effect of such durational attention: a sometimes contemplative, other times ecstatic, interiority.

Using silk filament, sequins, and beads, bullion knots, picot stitches, and surface couching bind color to light, the workings of hands to the vision behind closed eyes. CARO’s consonant interests in jewelry and embroidery—they received their BA in Metalsmithing from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and continued onto Embroidery School at École Lesage in Paris, France—produce the dynamic tension between the tangible and intangible at the heart of their practice. Diaphanous organza trimmed with iridescent beads is stretched taut across obdurate metal frames.

Here, with each pass and pull of needle and thread, that which is mysterious and ethereal threatens to escape the staid ore to which it’s bound. In Is it the same for you?, the frothy night sky is fixed within a hand-fabricated brass and silver frame covered in radiating tines that emphasizes the dissonance but also the interdependence of the materials: the fabric would fall slack without the structural tension; the frame would lose its context, its meaning. Imagining the tapestries in rectangular frames rather than embroidery hoops, CARO collapses the tired distinction between fine and applied arts. Their use of luxuriant untwisted silks, rarefied jewels like sapphires and rubies, and precious metals elevate the decorative premium of the textiles and give the works their illusory and ambiguously reflective surfaces. By relegating the metalwork, historically considered a man’s trade, to bracing and displaying the textiles, the long-underestimated women’s pastime further subverts convention. —Tara Anne Dalbow

CARO (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary craft artist based in London, UK. They received their BA in Metalsmithing from Earlham College and continued onto Embroidery School at École Lesage in Paris, France. CARO then learned bobbin lacemaking at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY. Currently they are pursuing their Masters in Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the Royal College of Art. They blend hand embroidered tapestries with hand fabricated metal framework to recall a sense of the sacred and to preserve the cultural identity of craft. CARO has exhibited their work internationally. Recent group shows include Aurora Borealis at Abigail Olgilvy, LA; Whisper In The Roots, My Pet Ram, NYC, NY; Eternal Flame, Fredericks & Mae, NYC, NY, Red Thread, Latitude Gallery, NYC, NY; Summer Crush, Arden Asbaek, Copenhagen, DK; Act II, Yellow Cube Gallery, Paris, FR; & Craft in Contemporary Art, Site: Brooklyn, NY.

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Rema Ghuloum: Atmospheres,Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Sat 21 Sep 2024 to Sat 2 Nov 2024

3342 Verdugo Road, Ste A, CA 90065

Wed-Sat 11am-5pm

Philip Martin Gallery presents “Atmospheres,” its first solo exhibition of paintings by Arab-American, Los Angeles-based artist Rema Ghuloum. As Ghuloum's show title suggests, her paintings are atmospheric, engaging pictorial and narrative instincts, optical sensation and proprioceptive awareness.

Rema Ghuloum’s medium and large scale oil-on-canvas works are produced over weeks and months of studio practice. Ghuloum works in layers, initially covering the canvas with paint applied with traditional tools - like brushes - and non-traditional ones - like spray and squeeze bottles. Ghuloum then sands the layers to create subtle gradations of deep painterly space. This space appears to stretch away from the viewer to infinity; at the same time, the viewer is physically oriented by a 'frame’ of brushstrokes that run up, down and side-to-side in narrow bands at the top, bottom and side edges of the canvas.

The optical sense in Ghuloum's atmospheres plays off the physicality of these frames. The tactile raised, painterly marks of the frame invite the viewer’s touch; the atmosphere of the picture points to deep painterly space. The viewer feels a space into which their mind might travel optically, as well as the gravity of the actual space in which they stand.

There is a sense of openness and mystery in Ghuloum’s work. There is a feeling of the known and the unknown. Her paintings have a sense of the intense emotion of American painter Mark Rothko and the healing instinct of Swiss artist Emma Kunz. There is also a sense of displacement and erasure that comes perhaps in part from Ghuloum’s own experience as an American of Lebanese descent.

Ghuloum notes the careful mood of Etel Adnan, a landmark Northern California artist who used painting and poetry as keys to express inner feeling. The lives of Etel Adnan and Ghuloum's own grandmother overlap in many ways: born the same year, each fled Lebanon as refugees of war - Ghuloum's grandmother first from Haifa in 1948 - and then like Adnan, from Beirut. Adnan writes,

Clouds pile up,
turn into human
forms
on riverbeds
the same inscription
always dissolves,
then reappears,
as the sky has
already told me.

A Reiki healer, Ghuloum moves energy in her paintings. With this energy she finds the gravity of the painting. Sensing this energy, the viewer finds their own gravity, too. We get out of these works what we put into them. Rema Ghuloum invites us on a journey; to participate in an exchange between maker and viewer; to consider our own experiences and those of the people around us; to think about what we want for ourselves, for each other, and the world in which we live.

Rema Ghuloum (b. 1978, North Hollywood, CA) received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach (Long Beach, CA) in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA) in 2010. Recent projects include "The Sky Has a Thousand Windows" (Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA) and "When the Day is Done" (David De Boer, Antwerp, Belgium). Recent institutional projects include, "Color Fields" (2023, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA) and "Shaping Gravity: Art Beyond the Picture Plane" (2023, Forest Lawn Museum, Los Angeles, CA). In 2022, Ghuloum was included in “The Holographic Principle” at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Solo exhibitions include Et al. (San Francisco, CA); Emma Grey HQ (Los Angeles, CA); Edward Cella Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Five Car Garage (Santa Monica, CA); Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY); Contemporary Art Matters (Columbus, OH); Hawthorn Contemporary (Milwaukee, WI); Jacob’s (Los Angeles, CA) and Sonce Alexander Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Group exhibitions include The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); Make Room (Los Angeles, CA); La Loma Projects (Los Angeles, CA); Odd Ark LA (Los Angeles, CA); Part 2 Gallery (Oakland, CA); Harris Gallery, University of Laverne (Laverne, CA); Five Car Garage (Santa Monica, CA); Nathalie Karg (New York, NY); Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY); Taymore Grahne Projects (London, UK); Meyer Reigger (Berlin, Germany) and Baik Gallery (Seoul, Korea). Ghuloum’s work is included in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Works on Paper Collection at the Legion of Honor Museum (San Francisco, CA). Ghuloum’s work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Hyperallergic, CARLA, the Los Angeles Times, Fabrik, and LA Weekly. Ghuloum lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Mariah Robertson: Many Mini Moons, Halsey McKay Gallery, New York

Sat 19 Oct 2024 to Tue 31 Dec 2024

79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

Wed-Sun 11am-6pm

Halsey McKay Gallery presents the first solo exhibition with Mariah Robertson. Primarily known for photographic work experimenting with darkroom techniques and materials, her practice began in the late 1990’s with improvisational performance work inspired by 1970’s conceptual art. Many Mini Moons finds her at a place in between and amongst her established strategies. The show begins with an installation of photograms that serve as catalyst for paintings at varying degrees of finish and experimentation. The installation will be augmented throughout the duration of the exhibition and will be accompanied by writing that documents how she came to and is finding her way through her process.

Developments will be updated throughout the run of the exhibition on the gallery webpage and will culminate in a printed risograph publication. We begin with her proposal for this show:

Since 2015, I have been working on a commissioned project for a large non-commercial entity building at a facility in a foreign country far from the US. Over the years there have been technical requirement changes and other challenges to the point that it would be impossible to make the work as originally proposed. At some point last year, I re-proposed making painted copies of my photograms. This came about in part because I saw a painter I admire use lens based source imagery in a way I found lazy, and a critical amount of friends had said to me that my work was “painting.” I’m able to talk endlessly about how my work is a conceptual analysis of photography as a system and grows out of my performance practice, but my understanding of painting is a bit stunted, being frozen where I was at age 13 spray painting all my belongings black.

And so, I thought I would “learn by doing” and hitch my immediate prospects to this project so I could not turn back.

It’s been a really strange, destabilizing inner and outer journey. I have been keeping a choppy journal of a person who has achieved some skill in one field, trying to learn another, failing and making scary bad decisions, all while contemplating what it means to copy, to interpret, to reproduce. I’ve worked on various aspects of materiality of photography, inverting the gendered gaze, and now the double helix relationship with drawing/painting. It’s actually terrifying me as we speak and I think it would best be expressed with writing, but there’s also all the detritus of making along the way.

Currently, I’m trying to “copy” 2 photograms, or interpret them via memory or translation or reproduce them in a new medium.

-Mariah Robertson
September, 2024

Mariah Robertson (b. 1975) received an MFA from Yale University and a BA from UC Berkeley. Select solo exhibitions include Van Doren Waxter, New York; 11R, New York; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; M+B, Los Angeles. She has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as MoMA, New York, NY and MoMA PS1, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Robertson’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Gallery of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Art Institute of Chicago and National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. Her work was featured on the cover of Elton John’s 2016 album, Wonderful Crazy Night.

Robertson’s work was recently included in three museum shows: The Sky’s the Limit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, October 21, 2023 – February 25, 2024. The Surrealist Impulse at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC, August 12, 2023–January 28, 2024, and The Art Institute of Chicago February – August, 2024.

Book of Details, a self published artist book had its debut at the 2024 at the NYABF at the table of Van Doren Waxter. A book tour series of events began in Chicago in June 2024 and will include stops in Kansas City, Houston, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco.

Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong, Gagosian West 21st St, New York

Thu 12 Sep 2024 to Sat 19 Oct 2024

522 West 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Gagosian presents Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong at 522 West 21st Street, New York. The exhibition consists of two new moving-image works presented in specially designed pavilions and an extensive body of new photographs. This is Goldin’s first exhibition of new work since joining Gagosian in 2023.

Stendhal Syndrome (2024) is a moving-image work that juxtaposes photographs Goldin has taken over the last twenty years of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces with portraits of her own friends, family, and lovers. Photographs of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world including the Galleria Borghese, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prado flow seamlessly with images of Goldin’s community, crossing centuries to resonate in harmony with each other, revealing uncanny resemblances in composition, color, form, and emotional tone. Goldin’s ability to draw such precise visual connections raises profound questions about traditional hierarchies within art, and the enduring human compulsion to memorialize beauty in works fueled by love, and grief.

You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024) is a home movie centered around the totality of the solar eclipse, filmed in Super 8 and 16mm. The soundtrack includes a mournful piece by Valerij Fedorenko, a chilling new score composed by Mica Levi, and ambient sounds of nature recorded during the eclipse. It is Goldin’s first abstract work, born from an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun.

The moving-image works are projected within freestanding pavilions designed by Goldin in collaboration with Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé. Each structure is conceived to echo the corresponding film therein, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that fuses architecture, image, and sound.

Drawing from the same associative impulse that informed Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin created an expansive body of new grid photographs in which her own autobiographical images are mirrored by photographs taken in museums of artworks spanning millennia. The grid format, which has been a key element of Goldin’s work for three decades, echoes the cinematic structure of her moving-image works, encapsulating her understanding of history and time. These photographs line the walls of the gallery, surrounding the pavilions. Many of the grids explore stories of love and loss from antiquity, as in Orpheus Dying (2024), in which an 1866 Baroque painting by Émile Lévy of Orpheus is paired with a 1977 photograph of Goldin’s lover Tony. The visual parallels are striking, as both figures lie in nearly identical, seductive positions. Their pronounced rib cages create a haunting symmetry, and both bodies are draped against rumpled blue sheets that further unify the images, despite one being a classical nude and the other of a modern man wearing jeans. The shared palette and eerie shadowing of the two scenes blur the lines between past and present, high art and personal narrative, making their connection almost surreal—and evoking the pleasure and terror of the Stendhal Syndrome.

Throughout her storied fifty-year career, Goldin has fearlessly probed the depths of the human condition, capturing raw moments from everyday life that reveal universal experiences of love, loss, and the truths that connect us all.

Beverly McIver: Entangled, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Thu 17 Oct 2024 to Sat 16 Nov 2024

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Berry Campbell presents its first solo exhibition of paintings by contemporary artist, Beverly McIver (b. 1962), after announcing her representation last year. Beverly McIver: Entangled is comprised of 18 recent paintings created in the artist’s North Carolina studio with subjects ranging from reflective self-portraits that capture her emotional ebbs and flows of the past year, to portraits of her family, friends, and neighbors, including tributes to her mentors, Faith Ringgold and Philip Pearlstein. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 44-page, fully-illustrated catalogue with essay by Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and introduction by Dorothy Moss, Director of the Hung Liu Estate.

The central paintings of the exhibition are a series of emotional self-portraits entitled Entangled that depict the artist’s head being wrapped and strangled by colorful chords or rope or netting, showing the artist at her most vulnerable. While the subject matter of her paintings can be challenging, McIver’s virtuoso painting technique is unrivaled. McIver says: “The commonality is the human part, I think people are just refreshed to see somebody telling the truth, being authentic.”

McIver often chooses to paint the grittier side of her life: depression, poverty, illness, death, and the life of her developmentally disabled older sister. McIver’s artistic journey serves as a testament to her perseverance and the complexities that shape her identity such as stereotyping, self-acceptance, family, otherness, and, ultimately, freedom to express one’s individuality. McIver states: “I think it gives others hope that you can be on welfare, from the projects, and everybody around you doing other things like selling drugs and you can actually get a college degree and be a professor at Duke and have this great gift of sharing your voice and offering it as sort of a hug to what it means to be a human being and what it means to suffer.”

The exhibition coincides with McIver’s involvement in People for the American Way’s Artists for Democracy project, in which McIver is working alongside other renowned contemporary artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, Shepard Fairey, and Titus Kaphar to promote voter mobilization through art in advance of the 2024 presidential election.

Beverly McIver is a Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and recently had a museum survey organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Art, Arizona, that traveled to Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina. Last month, The National Academy of Design announced Beverly McIver has been elected as part of the class of 2024.

Mary,Mary - London’s Artist Garden Dedicated To Women Artist

M A R Y M A R Y, a major exhibition of public, outdoor sculpture in central London by nine women artists. The exhibition features commissioned works by Rong Bao, Candida Powell–Williams and Alice Wilson, adapted works by Lucy Gregory and LR Vandy and existing works by Olivia Bax, Frances Richardson, Holly Stevenson and Virginia Overton.  It is on view at The Artist’s Garden, a vast and once neglected half-acre roof terrace on top of Temple tube station, which is now the world’s first sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists, established in 2021. Thought to lie partially over the seventeenth century formal garden of Lord and Lady Arundel in which they amassed and displayed England’s first classical sculpture garden, The Artist’s Garden continues to be a place to contemplate the human/nature relationship through sculptural interventions.

3 October 2024 – 3 September 2025

The Artist’s Garden, on the roof of
Temple tube station, London, WC2R 2PH

More Information Here

Shirazeh Houshiary: The Sound of One Hand, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles

Sat 14 Sep 2024 to Sat 26 Oct 2024

1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, CA 90038

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

For her first solo show in Los Angeles for over a decade, the British artist Shirazeh Houshiary presents new and recent works, exploring the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos, from a microscopic cellular level, to the stratospheric phenomenon of the aurora borealis. The show’s title relates to a Zen Buddhist teaching that instructs the student to listen to the sound of one hand clapping, in order to open their mind to such a possibility and transcend the constraints of the physical body. Despite not being a Zen practitioner, Houshiary realised that her work revolves around the insistent sound made by one of her hands, making tiny, looping, scratched marks in pencil onto large aluminum surfaces, building up worlds through the silence of her inscribed words.

Houshiary’s abstract paintings emerge from an initial pour of liquid color that floods the surface in irregular pools, before she then covers these areas with her own calligraphic gestures in graphite, which are in fact tiny repetitions of the Arabic phrases: “I am” and “I am not”, which she also likens to the natural act of inhaling and exhaling. For one of the two largest works in the show, entitled Enchanter (2024), Houshiary applies red pigment and pencil to a black ground in five ring shapes, recalling structures of carbon particles linked in a chain. Matching this in scale but cooler in tone, is the painting Earth Lament (2023), with two silhouetted blue figures that somehow materialized from the sedimented pigment, one appearing to soar and the other seemingly being dragged down. This accidental figuration also occurs in the work Cicada (2023), which could just as easily be a depiction of the wings of this insect as it could be a representation of its rhythmic song. At the other end of the scale are the galactic indigo swirls of So Far So Near (2024) and the bands of ethereal light crisscrossing the work titled Aurora (2023), recalling those seen occasionally streaking across a night sky.

Occupying the floor is a sculptural installation in nine parts, made from an open latticework of aluminum bricks in blue and green hues, each with the same footprint, but all at different heights, growing at increments of one layer at a time (the shortest has five layers, the highest thirteen). Entitled Maelstrom (2022), these curved forms, both hard and supple at the same time, recall not only the molecular structures of the red painting Enchanter, or “that primeval storm within the spiral of creation where something grows,” as the artist puts it, but also the shape of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail.

A second sculpture, seemingly another form defying logic and gravity, bursts from the wall. Its two sinuous, entangled lines are the artist’s approximation of the movement of a solitary wave – lending it the name Soliton (2024) – which is a type of swelling or surging motion that is not dependent on previous pulses, or followed by other waves. From such unfathomable objects, to minute molecules and gigantic expanses of space, Houshiary’s art works represent a journey through everything from the chaos and messiness of the Big Bang to the silent contemplation of the resulting energies that surround every one of us.

Danielle Mckinney: Haven, Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 15/16, Berlin

Sat 7 Sep 2024 to Sat 26 Oct 2024

Bleibtreustraße 15/16, 10623

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Mckinney’s interior scenes capture moments of human introspection with painterly lyricism. Depicted in darkly lit domestic interiors, the artist’s exclusively Black and female protagonists sleep, read, smoke, or lounge languidly across sumptuous furniture, wholly immersed in their inner worlds.

It is here that Mckinney’s figures find refuge – a state of being that permeates the fifteen new works on view. The titular painting, Haven, acts as a central work. A woman lounges on her golden bed as light filters in through the curtains to illuminate a small painting of a resting unicorn enclosed by a fence. The artist here imagines a mythological corollary to her protagonist, who finds a place of repose – a haven –amidst a turbulent world.

Trained as a photographer, Mckinney arranges her subjects cinematographically, with an astute awareness of space, atmosphere and mood. The compositions are built from an all-black canvas, creating scenes which seem to emerge from darkness, echoing both the chiaroscuro of Spanish Golden Age painting and the evolution of a photograph in a darkroom. Shimmers of light and colour, rendered with thick, dappled brushstrokes, punctuate this eternal twilight: the faint glow of a lit cigarette, the glimmer of a velvety sofa or the piercing red of carefully applied nail polish.

Mckinney’s atmospheric interiors are both anonymous and welcoming, often incorporating imagery from social media, 1960s magazines, or art history itself. In Rhythm with Blue, a nude figure dozes off, sprawled under a rendition of Henri Matisse’s The Dance, while several of the artist’s other reclining figures conjure Edouard Manet’s Olympia. Uninhabited by our gaze, these women command the spaces in which they find themselves.

Through painting, Mckinney revels in the interior spaces we hold and inhabit. Her compositions are at once cryptic and soulful, translating private yet universal gestures of solitude and contemplation with extraordinary sensitivity. ‘I’m kind of putting myself into those spaces’ the artist notes, ‘I just hope I leave them open enough for people to feel comfortable coming in.’

Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981, Montgomery, USA) lives and works in Jersey City, USA. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions at Kunsthal n, Copenhagen and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (both 2024); and group exhibitions in institutions including Columbus Museum of Art; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Dallas Museum of Art (all 2023); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Contemporary Austin; Rudolph Tegners Museum and Statue Park, Dronningmølle; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (all 2022); Asia Art Center, Taipei; and Flag Art Foundation, New York (both 2021), among others.

Mckinney’s work is in the collections of Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Columbus Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.