Lucia Wilcox: LUCIA, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Thu 22 May 2025 to Sat 28 Jun 2025

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

She was a true Surrealist...constantly letting all we know emerge from her subconscious. Thus reinventing herself every few minutes.
- Phyllis Braff, Independent Critic and Curator

Berry Campbell Gallery presents its first exhibition of the work of Lucia Wilcox (1899–1974), whose extraordinary life began with her youth in Beirut and unfolded at the center of the Paris and New York art worlds. Residing in East Hampton from the 1940s onward, Lucia Wilcox served as a vital link between European émigrés, such as Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy, and Abstract Expressionists, such as Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. With solo exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in the late 1940s and Leo Castelli Gallery in the early 1970s, the New York Times described her life in 1973 as “intertwined in the history of twentieth-century art.” This marks the first exhibition of Lucia Wilcox’s work by the gallery after announcing the representation of her Estate.

Lucia Wilcox: LUCIA focuses on her vividly hued and wildly imaginative Surrealist works from 1939 to 1949. Known professionally as “Lucia” (she was married three times), she referenced Fauvism, Primitivism, and Symbolism, creating Surrealist compositions that stood apart for their joyous embrace of life, freedom, and sensual pleasures. She often used the female nude—along with color and line—to construct a realm of uninhibited sensual pleasure, drawing inspiration at times from Henri Matisse. However, in ironic and tongue-in-cheek depictions, she transformed traditional tropes of female angels, reclining nudes, and dancers—often emblems in works by male artists (including Matisse) of women’s ethereality and sexuality—into affirmations of women’s freedom and pleasure. These “fantasyscapes” pose an understated feminist challenge to a Surrealist ethos in which male artists often used women as muses and mediums for visions laced with erotic violence and hallucinations. Like other women associated with Surrealism—including Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, and Remedios Varo—Lucia found a voice in Surrealism in the 1940s, a time when as Whitney Chadwick notes in Women, Art, and Society (1990), women artists replaced such ideologies “with an art of magical fantasy and narrative flow.”

While the dreamlike lyricism of Lucia’s work often evokes that of Marc Chagall, she expressed an exuberant zest for life in the moment—contrasting with Chagall’s frequent retreat into memory and spiritual longing. “Painting is your own reflection,” Lucia stated in 1948. “It is a handwriting, a personal speech. I paint because I have to paint and this is my only way of writing poetry.” The ideology shines forth in works such as Jungle Path (1946), in which tiger-like creatures and human faces are growing within a dense tropical landscape. A wide-eyed lion stares toward the viewer, evoking the lion in Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York). But here, the creature does not threaten; rather, it invites the viewer to enter a mystical space where boundaries among human, nature, and the environment dissolve—symbolically rejecting hierarchies that undergird patriarchal structures. Lucia likely drew the swirl in the “a” of her signature from the snake in Rousseau’s Dream, turning its connotation of Eve’s danger and temptation into a gesture of irreverent delight.

Lucia’s overarching theme was freedom—expressed through immediacy, change, and movement, and a merging of the figurative and decorative. She achieved the latter by blending Eastern and Western traditions in dynamic, flat patterns that reference both Islamic and Byzantine art she experienced in her youth in the Middle East as well as her textile design background. Her works from the War years reflect not only her own 1938 flight from Europe but also a broader meditation on humanity’s resistance to oppression: paths stretch into the unknown (sometimes becoming towering angels), spectral figures move fluidly between terrestrial and celestial realms, and a ship sails beneath a coral reef. In the late 1940s, Lucia often used architecture as a compositional framework. In Invaded City (1948), the walls of a European town appear graffitied in floral and geometric designs—as if the interior mosaics of a Byzantine church had turned outward—while spirits fly overhead. The title plays on a double invasion—by war and art. In Everyone Was a Church Within Himself (1948), Lucia depicted the facade or chapels of a Moorish-Baroque church, with women occupying every shrine and archway—as mothers with babies, angels, saints, queens, muses, and dancers. The title suggests a vision of individual spirituality within a universal humanity. Featuring only women, the work imagines a new all-female pantheon.

Maria Antelman: Conjurer, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Thu 29 May 2025 to Thu 3 Jul 2025

525 West 22nd Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Yancey Richardson presents Conjurer, an exhibition by Greek artist Maria Antelman, her first with the gallery. Bringing together work made over the past five years, the exhibition highlights Antelman’s unique approach to photography in which her lyrical and experimental approach to imagery and montage is combined with a sculptural sensibility and attention to the photograph as an object in three dimensions. Through her merging and splicing together of images—those from the body and from nature—Antelman endeavors to re-mystify our understanding of the natural world.

Over the past twenty-five years Antelman has worked across and at the intersection of several mediums, including sculpture, video and photography, to explore not only the rapid development of technology and the near total entanglement of it with our personal lives, but also how these same technologies reshape our experience of the world. Rather than see it as merely being a tool or appendage, Antelman understands technology as having the capacity to create a new reality around us which, when considered alongside the ever-increasing capacity of science to explain how nature functions, disrupts our ability to connect with and relate to the natural world in more spiritual, even magical, ways.

Conjurer features Antelman’s photographic works that show the intertwining of humankind and nature, though in ways that defy logical or rational explanation. Working predominantly with 35mm film, her works are often composites of multiple images, with fragments of the body—a limb, a nose, a pair of eyes or set of hands—set alongside or even interrupted by an image of a natural form, such as a tree trunk or a stone. Antelman constructs her works to communicate metaphoric meaning, first through the image and then the object as a whole. More than simply providing a container for the images, she treats the frame as a form in its own right and explores its relationship to the space of the image. Instead of functioning as a passive or neutral component, she instead uses the frame to dynamically shape what the images show. In some cases, the frame even provides a graphic quality as well, as their rounded and curved shapes evoke the organic forms found in nature.

Thinking of these juxtapositions as a kind of montage, Antelman is able to create novel and unexpected combinations, with some that reflect upon how we instrumentalize nature, while others show how we can still be reunited with it. Just as often, she merges these different worlds together into a single visual field, resulting in images that recall the bizarre, subconscious spaces of Surrealism or the photomontages of early modern photography. Though they remain beguiling for their novelty and invention, these works also consistently reveal moments of contemplative and serene beauty, moments which are philosophical in their construction yet poetic in tone.

Antelman both deconstructs the body and then reassembles it, not just as a way of imagining a deeper connection with nature, but also as a way of expressing how malleable the very idea of it has become. In place of a techno-utopianism, in which the steady advance of technology is uniformly celebrated, Antelman expresses an atavistic position instead, one which delights in the complexity of nature rather than seeking to explain or instrumentalize it. Her work reminds us that what is mysterious in the world often connects us to what is mystical in it as well.

Born 1971 in Athens, Greece, Maria Antelman received her MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the Complutense University, Madrid. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Pioneer Works, New York; Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin; Botanical Garden I&A Diomidos, Athens; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Benaki Museum, Athens; Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo, Cerillos, Chile and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Antelman’s work was included in Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been the recipient of grants from the Onassis Foundation USA, as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, Athens. Antelman has taken part in artist residences including Silver Art Projects, Pioneer Works and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. Antelman currently lives and works in Athens.

Barbara Nicholls: Between the Tides, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London

Fri 9 May 2025 to Sat 28 Jun 2025

11 Church Street, NW8 8EE

Wed-Sat 12-5pm, or by appointment

Oscillating between chance and control, Barbara Nicholls investigates the possibilities and limitations of pigment, water and paper, translating her experience of the landscape into abstract watercolours. While drawing, she reflects on natural formations encountered or imagined: tide mark lines on beaches, creeping glaciers and moraine deposits, cliffs and quarries with their shifting forms of geological strata revealing traces of past events and the slow movements of the earth.

The final works are visual embodiments of the experimental processes conducted in her studio - a space that functions as both a laboratory and a site of discovery. Fluid shapes intersect, colours bleed and evolve into one another, and organic lines, reminiscent of the earth’s shifting edges, emerge through her methodical yet intuitive approach.

Nicholls’ operations begin at times with large-scale sheets of heavyweight paper laid flat on the studio floor. The physicality of her practice is vital; she moves across and over the surface, first guiding water into pools or creating delicate lines with transparent washes. Once water touches the paper, it no longer remains flat, requiring Nicholls to carefully manage the buckling surface as she introduces pigment, experimenting with how much liquid the paper can handle. The drying process can be natural or carefully controlled through appliances like electric fans and heaters, which create microclimates that accelerate evaporation, allowing layers of colour to settle and crystallise over time.

Nicholls’ studio practice is a continuous commuting between spontaneity and precision, frequently at the crossroads of deciding whether to accept or resist the direction the liquid pigment takes her. “It’s important to get lost, but not completely,” the artist states. The feeling of self-loss is conveyed in Mesosphere, contemplating the piece is like gazing into a vast lake, drawn in by what lies hidden beneath its layers of water. For Nicholls, the creative process mirrors this sense of tentativeness, yet in reverse. As she makes the work, she can only imagine how it will ultimately appear. The translucency of the watercolour offers a glimpse through time, revealing all past actions in a single work.

In her recent works Nicholls went through stages of liberation, breaking boundaries she once imposed on herself. Earlier works carefully maintain the white margins around the central shapes or never cross the margins of the paper. In works such as Airwave, she allows colours and compositions from underlying applications to spill beyond the lines and fill the voids, expanding the composition past the outer edge. These colours, applied with a wide brush from the edge, become spectral tracings of distant landscapes. Yet, they also integrate into the drawings through what Nicholls describes as "fleeting winds”, the marks left behind by a high tide on the sand, transient in time yet defining in its traces.

Cornelia Parker: History Painting, Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square, London

Fri 16 May 2025 to Sat 5 Jul 2025

17-18 Golden Square, W1F 9JJ

Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm

Frith Street Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by Cornelia Parker. For this show Parker has created a series of paintings: seemingly abstract oil-on-canvas works inspired by historic newspaper and magazine covers and the colour analysis charts of American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939). Also shown are a series of colour plots, made with home-made pigments produced from objects she has used over decades of her practice.

Vanderpoel’s pioneering 1902 volume Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color presented colour analysis in a way that appealed across disciplines, breaking down key theories in a series of experimental and visually striking illustrations that were easy to understand. While it was underappreciated in its time, her expression of colour anticipated major developments in modern art by nearly half a century, inspiring abstract artists like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers.

Parker was drawn to Vanderpoel’s collection of coloured grids, geometric expressions which deconstruct the colour palettes of everyday, antique and natural objects. Egyptian sarcophagi, Assyrian tiles, early Greek vases, butterfly wings and leaves were all under inspection, their palettes scrutinised in 10 x 10 grids of coloured squares, where shades were laid out next to each other in a method of colour analysis that was revolutionary at its time. Parker was struck by Vanderpoel’s maxim: ‘Until our attention is called to it, we are unconscious what apparently unpromising material may yield new and beautiful motives for colour-harmonies.’

A website dedicated to Vanderpoel’s methodology includes a generating algorithm that allows one to take any image and break it down into an analytical colour grid. Using well-known newspaper headlines, magazine covers and iconic photographs as her source, Parker used this to create her own colour charts. The headlines themselves are from over a century of tragic, awe-inspiring and shocking events, from the sinking of the Titanic to Martin Luther King’s famous speech, through the death of Princess Diana to the trial of Donald Trump. Newspapers have appeared in the artist’s works before, in her News at series in which children copied headlines onto blackboards and the films Left, Right and Centre and Election Abstract produced when she was the UK’s official Election Artist (all 2017). This source material highlights absurdity, humour and tragedy of the human condition at a time when print ‘heritage’ media is in decline.

The artist’s paintings are abstract but tied to representation by the narrative in the appropriated headline titles. Her colour charts are rendered in impasto oil on canvas, using a palette knife, an incongruous technique, not readily associated with the precision of modernism. She exhibits the paint palettes used for each painting, its formal alter ego, displaying conscious, versus unconscious mark making, to be considered as equal.

Throughout her career Parker has also created her own pigments. In her Explosion Drawings (1999-2004) she used the ingredients of gunpowder; fine charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur for their potential, (when combined) to explode as well as for their hue; black, white and yellow. Over the years she has amassed her own table of very curious elements including snake venom and anti-venom, charcoal from a Texan church struck by lightning, 70-million-year-old fossilised dinosaur bones, hoover bags from the House of Commons and Lords, burnt cocaine, chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover and beachcombed bricks from a house that has fallen off those cliffs, turned into pebbles by the churn of the tides. For this exhibition she has revisited some of these materials, grinding them up to make paint, creating a series of abstract colour charts which map the curious histories of their constituent parts.

Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire in 1956. She studied at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and Reading University. Over the last three decades, she has presented numerous major commissions and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including a career retrospective at Tate Britain (2022); at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); Westminster Hall, Palace of Westminster (2017); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016), The Whitworth, the University of Manchester (2015), British Library, London (2015), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010), Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru (2008), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2007) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2006).

Antonia Showering: In Line,Timothy Taylor, New York

Thu 8 May 2025 to Sat 21 Jun 2025

74 Leonard Street, NY 10013

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

Timothy Taylor presents In Line, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Antonia Showering. This is Showering's first solo show in the United States and her second exhibition with Timothy Taylor. This new body of work features atmospheric paintings that explore the complex dynamics of intimacy and its expressions.

In Showering's radiant canvases, the artist translates processes of remembering and forgetting, capturing the ways in which we create narratives that shape our experiences of the world. Working intuitively with automatic mark-making, she leans into chance encounters with paint, coaxing form from spontaneous gestures. In the resulting layered compositions, figures inhabit familiar but ambiguous scenes haunted by spectral traces of underpaintings. Pentimento serves as a metaphor, reflecting the strange, nonlinear passage of time and the way distant experiences can remain forever present. Often, her subjects are physically entwined in scenarios that might be romantic, sexual, pained, therapeutic, or platonic-some, as the artist describes, "half-remembered, half-invented." In ambered, earthen hues, these scenes take on new dimension through moments of chromatic harmony and dissonance; each canvas possesses a luminosity achieved through accumulated washes of colour, evoking the hazy worlds of memory and dreams.

Showering's new paintings focus on the inner workings of personal relationships, reflecting on the pronounced shifts that occur in one's intergenerational roles, particularly the changing flows of responsibility and care. The canvases here revolve around the experience of assuming the duties of child-rearing while also confronting the mortality of one's elders. There are other shifts, too: since her debut exhibition with the gallery in 2022, the artist has moved from London to the countryside in Somerset, where nature surrounds her remote studio. Her paintings often include mountains that face the valley where her maternal family are from in Switzerland-a topography that has long recurred in the artist's work. As the contours of her life evolve, the artist explains, the mountains seem to be a constant.

In Secret Language (all 2024-25) a woman paints while holding a small child on her hip; her gaze is fixed on the painting. At the centre of the composition is the artist's gloved hand, indicating an authorial zone between the duo and the painting she is creating. Yet the vivid, animated marks on the pictured canvas bleed into the space of the painter and her child as well as the palette she works from, suggesting the contexts are ultimately blurred. A digger-a favourite subject of small children-that appears in the lower right-hand corner of the depicted painting anchors this notion.

5L features a classical composition, in which four figures huddle over another who appears to have passed away. They embrace, each seemingly engaged in a personal moment of intense emotion. The figures emerge from and retreat into the boldly painted ground, where active expressions of fluid paint are tempered by rhythmic vertical strokes, like the gusts and gales of grief. Elsewhere, a rare unpopulated painting, After Life, depicts an Edenic landscape in which craggy mountains surround a peaceful inlet. Painted with broad, ecstatic strokes, the sky recalls the appearance of aurora borealis. Three cars are parked on the shore, as if in conversation, while two foxes sip from the water. Here, personal symbology comes together in an uncanny, transcendent scene.

Élise Peroi: For Thirsting Flowers,CARVALHO PARK, New York

Tue 8 Apr 2025 to Fri 23 May 2025

112 Waterbury Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Thu-Sat 12-6pm & by appointment

CARVALHO PARK presents the first United States exhibition of French artist, Élise Peroi. Her debut New York solo, For Thirsting Flowers, features eight standing wooden structures, encasing her delicate tapestries.

A series of screens emit a soft light like windows facing the sun at dawn. Nothing definite can be glimpsed, just a suggestion of the pastoral: an efflorescence of petals, stems and leaves, floating biomorphic forms. The luminosity of Peroi’s woven paintings is such that we might feel ourselves carried outside to watch the sky brighten, the air soft against our skin. As you move around these structures, free-standing to enable this three-dimensional view, unwoven warp threads let light and air through. These segments, comprised of thin fibrous filaments, have the appearance of gills, as though to allow the textiles to breath. Peroi’s fiber works together constitute an installation that situates the viewer around a shifting, porous set of frames that intermingle interior and exterior.

These structures resemble architectural thresholds, window embrasures and doorways that stand in ambiguous relation to each other without the solid walls that typically enfold them. Peroi’s use of architectural imagery suggests she is not so much interested in containment — what the house tends to both enable literally for those who inhabit it and to figure in the cultural imagination — as she is in emptiness, a preoccupation that chimes with certain strands of Buddhist thought. ‘Form does not differ from emptiness nor emptiness from form,’ theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, quoting the Heart Sutra. Sedgwick goes on to discuss how dynamic and living emptiness is in Buddhist thought, a quality that resonates with Peroi’s sculptural textile pieces. The screens are arranged to suggest interrelation, a dialogue energetically conducted through the play of each screen’s empty space; between fabric and frame, a gap opens through which a sliver of another screen is visible.

Peroi produces an emptiness — or rather a shaped, textured emptiness — in the images created by the painted woven silk. Comprised of a chain of diamond forms, Région de passage I and Région de passage II, construct a pattern of subtle recesses whose emptiness is made more visible through proximity to abstract floral forms that run up the centre of the compositions. In Faire pont vers le ciel, the vastness of the sky — a signature motif of void — is conveyed through an expanse of pale, silvery silk, the green thread at its heart like cirrus. In otherwise plain threaded units, exposure of the warp gives a sense of gravity, as though its pull has been given a concrete visual correlative.

In Peroi’s work emptiness never excludes abundance; instead, there is a generative mutuality between these states. What is remarkable is how much diversity of line, texture, and color can still express and embody emptiness. Peroi’s surfaces oscillate with lines of thread, their distinctive texture producing a lively background onto which the painted image sits. In Métamorphose, opaquely woven units are interspersed with those identical in form, but so sparsely woven that the surrounding room can be seen through the delicate cascade of threads. La lune uses patches of luminous white thread against a dark ground to evoke moonlight; Le Soleil is its inverse, with white thread illuminating brightly hued floral shapes that appear as if seen through the sun’s glare.

Architecture is certainly on Peroi’s mind. However, the rectangular dimensions of the textiles are those imposed by the loom, as her wooden structures’ vertical orientation remind us of their origin. In Songes II, Peroi makes the reference even more explicit with a frame that juts out horizontally like the beam of a large loom. Architecture and craft historically possessed different statuses because of their associations with gender and intellectual authority. The built environment was part of the public realm, a stage for finance and politics imagined and inhabited by men. Craft, because of its frequent embeddedness within domesticity in practices like embroidery, needlework and weaving, has traditionally been associated with women and as such has been excluded from histories of fine art. Peroi’s monumental structures align architecture and textiles, a reminder of their common etymology (teks), and in doing so she challenges a patriarchal aesthetic value system that has insisted on their separateness as disciplines.

Peroi keeps the loom within the frame and through it we might glimpse her hand at work. The madeness of the fabrics, the intricacies of the process that forged them, is one of Peroi’s central preoccupations. Peroi paints loose, expressive floral motifs directly onto silk. The canvas is then cut into thin strips that will eventually be woven back together. Slowly, through a delicate choreography of tool and gesture, through repetition and endurance, the painting is recomposed with new orientations, planes and patterns. The effect is partly one of defamiliarization. Flowers are broken apart and dispersed across the composition, becoming sinuous abstract forms. But more than anything this technique opens a space for a formal self-reflexivity. Demanding patience, slowness and a meditative attention, Peroi’s methods recall the philosophy of Simone Weil. In Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: ‘we do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.’ Like Weil, Peroi is not interested in revelation, but rather in uncovering something fundamental about how art is conceived. The doing and making of an artwork, all the physical, intellectual and emotional acts that feed into its gestation, tend to disappear once it is finished. A traditional oil-painting, for instance, contrives to conceal all its preparatory work. But it is precisely this essence, this vital sense of materiality and process, that Peroi spotlights in her textile sculptures. Peroi explains that she is interested in ‘what comes before,’ the ‘bud’ of the artwork in the studio.

Peroi’s titles reflect her interest in the liminal space of creativity. Région de passage refers to a connecting way through which people might travel, a journey rather than a destination, preparation rather than product. A similar emphasis is discernible in Faire pont vers le ciel, which translates as building a bridge to the sky. Métamorphose only titles one work, but all of Peroi’s fabric sculptures are arrested in the state it describes: that of transformation, metamorphosis — the final state unclear.

Camilla Moberg: Over The Rainbow, Galerie Maria Wettergren, Paris

Mon 10 Mar 2025 to Sat 31 May 2025

121, Rue Vieille-du-Temple, 75003

Tue-Sat 11am-7pm

Galerie Maria Wettergren presents the exhibition, Over The Rainbow, the first solo show of Finnish artist Camilla Moberg. The rainbow represents hope in many cultures, and Moberg’s large luminous sculptures, with their vibrant colors, radiate a particularly joyful beauty—despite their otherwise serious underlying message. Handcrafted in blown glass in Nuutajärvi, Finland’s oldest glassmaking village, Moberg’s sculptures reflect her thoughts on biodiversity and its preservation. Their totem-like structure is inspired by the stacking of natural stones observed throughout history and across various cultures, symbolizing unity and the connection between humans and nature.

The different glass elements in her sculptures feature intricate patterns inspired by the colors and patterns of insects and birds, such as beetles, dragonflies and owls. By transposing and enlarging these patterns into abstract glass forms, the artist highlights their extraordinary beauty while also emphasizing the threats facing certain animal species. Moberg is fascinated by the colors, shapes and functions of these little creatures, which are not only stunningly beautiful but also vital members of our ecosystem. Through her art, she seeks to remind us of nature’s splendor and its essential role, a theme also reflected in the subtitle she has given to her works: Messengers in Glass.

Graduating from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1992, Camilla Moberg is considered as one of the most important contemporary glass artists from Scandinavia. Moberg has participated in many international exhibitions and has been awarded several scholarships to support her artistic work from the National Council for Design, Finland. Her glass sculptures can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including The Finnish Art Museum, Riihimäki, Finland; the State Art Collection, Finland; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland; and the Art Center White Block, Seoul, Korea, among others.

* Rise and Repaint Member Exhibition * Margaret Lipsey: Montreal Arts Council

Margaret Lipsey joins the Women’s Art Society of Montreal’s latest group exhibition, Momentum, hosted at the Montreal Arts Council this May.

Lipsey’s contribution, The Only Way Out is Through, is a deeply evocative piece from her 2024 Wild Collection. This body of work channels the emotional upheaval that arises when one confronts their shadows — the parts of themselves and their past they’ve hidden or suppressed. “In this piece, I step out of the illusion of ease and into the wild truth,”

Lipsey says. “It’s a journey into anger, grief, and ultimately, release — a reclaiming of emotional sovereignty.” Created following a powerful retreat with 85 women in the woods near Bo

Dates: May 1 – 31, 2025

More Information Here

* Rise and Repaint Member Exhibition * Margaret Lipsey: Galerie Lucien Michele

Cater Art proudly announces Prelude, the dynamic launch of its third season of exhibitions, featuring an exciting mix of emerging and established contemporary artists. Margaret Lipsey will present her newest work, Seeing Beauty, from her Borders Not Limits collection.

Borders Not Limits explores the boundaries—physical, emotional, and conceptual—that shape and sometimes confine us. With her signature abstract approach, Lipsey challenges the notion of limits, reinterpreting them as opportunities for transformation and strength. Seeing Beauty offers a vibrant meditation on self-acceptance and empowerment.

During the run of Prelude, Cater Art’s innovative mobile gallery will make three pop-up appearances across the city. Lipsey’s work will be showcased at one of these mobile stops, expanding the reach and accessibility of contemporary art to new audiences. Join us on opening night at Lucien Michel Gallery to experience this powerful collection firsthand and catch the mobile gallery throughout Montreal.

Dates: 2-15 May 2025

More Information Here

Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!

Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes presents her first U.S. solo institutional exhibition, featuring 13 large-scale, fabric-based sculptures suspended outdoors. Rooted in Afro-Brazilian craft traditions, Gomes's work transforms found textiles into evocative forms that explore memory and cultural identity.

Storm King Art Center, New York

May 7 – November 10, 2025

More Information Here

Niki de Saint Phalle & Yayoi Kusama: Inner Child, Opera Gallery, London

Thu 3 Apr 2025 to Tue 27 May 2025

65-66 New Bond Street, W1S 1RW

London

Mon-Sat 10am-6.30pm

Kusama and Saint Phalle’s candid reflections on the lasting impact of their challenging childhoods suggest that engaging with their archetypal inner child through their art has provided a transformative path toward emotional healing and resolution.

Central to the exhibition is Niki de Saint Phalle’s Last Night I Had a Dream, a monumental 1968 wall installation collectively made up of 18 sculptures that evoke childlike imagination and surreal elements of subconscious exploration. Concurrently, several paintings from Yayoi Kusama’s long-running Infinity Nets series, inspired in part by hallucinatory visions she experienced as a child, highlight the artists’ shared exploration of how childhood experiences have shaped their significant aesthetic developments.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama has frequently spoken about her complex relationship with her mother growing up in a strict household. “From the time I was a child,I wanted to run away from my mother,”Kusama remarked, adding “I ran into my art.” As a child, Kusama experienced hallucinations of dots and flowers crowding her vision, which laid the groundwork for her ongoing use of the dot motif in her work. “I began painting polka dots and nets as a child and they continue to inspire me. The Infinity Nets represent my own obsessive- compulsive neurosis and my fear of hallucinations.” said Kusama, speaking to the transformative role that art played in channeling childhood memories and experiences into resonant artworks.

Born in 1930 in Neuilly-sur- Seine, France, Saint Phalle also frequently referenced in her oeuvre her difficult childhood marked by trauma and abuse. From her iconic Nana sculptures to the monumental Tarot Garden sculpture park in Pescia Fiorentina, Italy, Saint Phalle’s oeuvre radiates a free-spirited sense of vitality and playfulness, running counter to her own experiences in childhood. “I transformed my childhood pain into something magical. My monsters became my friends, my fears became my work” , she noted. By creating works that celebrate innocence and embrace the imaginary, she invites others to find solace and strength in their inner child.

For both artists, engagement with the proverbial inner child can interpreted as an act of liberation, reclamation and healing. Underpinning the sense of play and wonder seen in this diverse presentation of works is an understanding of childhood as a core tenet of both artist’s ongoing interrogations into self actualisation.

The title of the exhibition honours Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung, who introduced the ‘child archetype’ and celebrates his 150th anniversary this year. For Jung, the child archetype symbolises renewal and potential. He believed that adults could revisit this aspect of themselves to reconnect with forgotten parts of their identity—an idea that both Kusama and Saint Phalle explored in their work.

Carmen Herrera: The Paris Years: 1948 - 1953Lisson Gallery, New York

Thu 1 May 2025 to Fri 1 Aug 2025

508 West 24th Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

From 1948 to 1953, Carmen Herrera lived in Paris, immersing herself in the city’s dynamic postwar artistic community while frequently traveling to New York and Havana. This period marked a decisive shift in her practice, as she moved from biomorphic forms and fevered, gestural compositions to the rigorous geometric abstraction that would define her career for the next seven decades. A new exhibition at Lisson New York, Carmen Herrera: The Paris Years: 1948 - 1953 - the most comprehensive presentation of her work from this period to-date - examines a young artist deep in experimentation, subsuming the seismic influences of many colliding midcentury art movements, in order to develop her own breakthrough language of painting.

Herrera’s years in Paris were a time of creative freedom and intellectual exchange, particularly through her participation in exhibitions such as the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where she exhibited alongside prominent figures such as Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill, and Piet Mondrian, as well as younger artists associated with Venezuela’s Los Disidentes, Brazil’s Concretists, and Argentina’s Grupo Madi. The city exposed her to key modernist movements such as Bauhaus and Russian Suprematism, which deeply influenced the shift toward her own uniquely minimal language. During her time in Paris, Herrera began employing shaped canvases while also becoming a pioneer in solvent-based acrylics, a material still novel in postwar Europe. Notably, an important work from this period, Iberic (1949), is currently the oldest work in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to use this particular medium, a fact that was discovered through scientific analysis by the museum in 2021.

Key works on view include Way (1950), an early example of the hard-edged, dichromatic abstraction that would later become her signature. The painting’s four symmetrical ochre-colored triangles against a black background prefigure later masterpieces such as Black and White (1952) in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Another major work from this period, Thrust (1950), exemplifies Herrera’s precision and spatial tension, featuring a striking white dart slashing across a cobalt blue ground. The work, both in its palette and bold linear composition, foreshadows Herrera’s future direction while also underscoring her approach to painting as object. This idea is further emphasized by the use of an artist-made frame, which was intended to prevent a buyer from re-framing the work. This concept evolves in subsequent pieces where she allowed her compositions to wrap about the edges, transforming them into fully three-dimensional forms.

Herrera’s Habana Series marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s development, showcasing her experimentation with gestural abstraction and Informalism during a brief stay in New York in 1950, as argued by Roxane Ilias in her essay, “Carmen Herrera and the Paris School.” Created in response to transnational developments in Abstract Expressionism, these works contrast with the structured geometric compositions of her Paris paintings. Like others from this series, Conquete de l'air (1950) features spontaneous brushstrokes, unruly lines, amorphous forms, and vibrant colors applied without Herrera’s typical preparatory sketches. Modest in scale, the paintings emphasize a tactile graphic quality with thick, rough surfaces. Named after her first solo exhibition at Havana’s Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club (December 1950 - January 1951), the series reflects Herrera’s synthesis of Tachisme and Expressionism, blending the gestural techniques of Hans Hartung with those of Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition also features Early Dynasty (1953), the largest painting from this period, which demonstrates Herrera’s ambition and evolving style. In this work, she layers multiple colors and geometric forms, referencing motifs from earlier paintings to create a composition in constant motion. The deep blue, mushroom-like form at the top left echoes a similar shape in other canvasses from this period including Logique Coloree No. 5 (1949) and The King in Jail (1948) both on view in this exhibition. This tendency to revisit and refine geometric forms would become a hallmark of her later work, reinforcing her relentless pursuit of visual clarity and balance.

Herrera’s move back to New York in September 1953 presented challenges, as the art world’s gender and racial biases delayed her recognition. However, the radical developments of her Paris period laid the foundation for the rigorously precise, minimalist works that would define her later career. This exhibition builds on recent institutional recognition of Herrera’s artistic contributions during this period, including her inclusion in Women in Abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 2021–22) and Americans in Paris (Grey Art Museum, 2024). It also precedes Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith, a major touring museum show curated by Dana Miller, who also curated Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016.

* Rise and Repaint Member Exhibition * 21st Regional Juried Exhibition at the Freeport Art Museum

Exhibition Dates: May 10th, 2025- July 19th, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday,  May 10th, 5-7PM

Freeport Art Museum

121 North Harlem Avenue

Freeport, Illinois 61032

This annual competition is open to artists living in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The Freeport Art Museum's annual Regional Juried Exhibition (RJE) mission is to offer established and emerging artists the opportunity to debut work created in the last two years. Opening on Saturday, May 10, 2025, the show runs through July 19, 2025. As FAM has gained a distinguished reputation for displaying a wide range of contemporary art, this exhibition has become a visitor's favorite. Each year, FAM invites a new juror to select approximately 50 artworks for inclusion, and to give awards for first, second, third place, and honorable mention. Award winners are announced at the opening reception.

* Rise & Repaint Member Exhibition * RESONANCE: Shawna Miller and Lucia at HELM CONTEMPORARY

In Resonance, artists Shawna Miller and LUCIA engage with the generative force of feminine energy—expressed not as ideology, but as an embodied presence: attuned, receptive, and deeply relational. The exhibition is an invitation into a space of emotional proximity, where oil painting and interactive installation converge to reflect on what it means to hold and to be held.

Miller’s figurative paintings depict moments of quiet connection, often between mother and child, yet her subjects transcend biographical specificity. These gestures—of rest, of embrace—become universal forms of care, suggesting that stillness and intimacy are not passive states, but active, structuring forces. LUCIA’s light and sound installation extends this logic into the environment: as viewers approach, a 528 hertz frequency swells, and light expands in tandem, making visible the ripple effects of co-regulation and presence.

Rather than assert a fixed narrative, Resonance offers a somatic experience—one that prioritizes sensation over statement, attunement over spectacle. It arrives at a moment when the themes of care, connection, and quiet power feel both urgent and underexplored. This marks the New York debut for both artists, whose collaboration began at R2 Gallery in Colorado.

HELM Contemporary

132 Bowery, 3rd Floor, NYC, NY

May 3rd 3-6pm

* Rise & Repaint Member Exhibition *: Hard Edge - THIS GALLERY

The term hard-edge is often associated with a strict formalism—clean lines, flat colour, and an almost mechanical precision that emerged in contrast to the gestural urgency of Abstract Expressionism. Yet, as this exhibition demonstrates, the language of hard-edge abstraction is not confined to a singular visual or material approach. Instead, it is a conceptual framework that artists can push against, subvert, and redefine.

In HARDedge, nine Canadian artists engage with the aesthetic principles of hard-edged abstraction while deliberately bending its historical rigidity. The works in the exhibition span painting, fibre, and sculptural forms, each taking an unconventional approach to the call. Some artists introduce unexpected textures, disrupting the traditionally smooth, flat surfaces associated with the style. Others play with irregular geometries, where precision becomes a starting point rather than an end goal. Still others use unconventional materials, applying the language of hard edges to mediums that inherently resist it—soft fabrics, organic forms, or layered constructions.

This exhibition challenges the notion that hard-edge abstraction must be purely optical or rooted in rigid formalism. Instead, it proposes that the movement’s defining characteristics—clarity, structure, and contrast—can serve as a foundation for experimentation rather than limitation. By embracing diverse processes and perspectives, the artists in HARDedge expand the vocabulary of precision, proving that even within strict boundaries, there is room for fluidity, nuance, and redefinition.

HARDedge is a juried group exhibition featuring the work of nine incredibly talented Canadian artists.

268 Keefer St (Chinatown, Vancouver, BC)
Exhibition: April 25 to May 3, 2025
OPENING: Saturday, April 26, from 12 to 4 pm

More Information Here

Queer Love, Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York

Thu 17 Apr 2025 to Wed 21 May 2025

54 Franklin Street, NY 10013

Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 12-6pm

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Queer Love, an exhibition bringing together a selection of significant and recently discovered erotic drawings by British artist and key Bloomsbury group member Duncan Grant (1885–1978) in dialogue with new works by contemporary queer artists including: Soufiane Ababri, Leilah Babirye, Anthony Cudahy, Kyle Dunn, Alex Foxton, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Wardell Milan, Sola Olulode, Tom Worsfold and Jimmy Wright.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Charleston, the UK charity that cares for the modernist house, garden and studio of Grant and fellow Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961). Located in East Sussex, UK, Charleston was a gathering place for the wider Bloomsbury group and today is open year-round to the public, giving access to its world-class collection of Bloomsbury work. Shown publicly in Charleston’s galleries in 2022, this exhibition is the first time these drawings have been seen outside the UK.

In 1959, Duncan Grant gave his friend and fellow painter, Edward Le Bas (1904–1966), a folder marked with the words: “These drawings are very private”. Inside was a collection of over 400 erotic drawings that expressed Grant’s lifelong fascination with the joy and beauty of queer intimacy. Made during the 1940s and ‘50s, when sex between men was still illegal in England, the drawings were believed to have been destroyed after Le Bas’ death for their explicit portrayal of homosexual desire. They were, in fact, rescued and have remained in private hands ever since – a secret collection passed from lover to lover, friend to friend, for 60 years. After they came to light, this incredible collection was gifted to Charleston.

Influenced by Roman mythology and contemporary bodybuilding magazines, Grant’s drawings were created with pen, pencil and gouache. Charged with desire, they depict muscular bodies performing subversive, often kink-related, sexual acts. The artist’s fluid use of line accentuates his subjects’ impassioned movements. Several of the works also explore interracial sex, adding further potency to the scandal these would have caused if exposed at the time they were made.

Ten contemporary queer artists have responded to Grant’s drawings. From Leilah Babirye’s sculptural explorations of sexuality in the African LGBTQ+ community, to Sola Olulode’s tender paintings of gay love, the works reflect the radical defiance of Grant’s sensual works. These artists’ bold celebration of their identity highlights the significant progress made since Grant’s covert documentation of queer intimacy over 75 years ago.

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital booklet featuring new essays by Jack Parlett (writer, poet and author of Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise) and Dr Darren Clarke (Head of Collections and Research at Charleston).

Zanele Muholi: SawubonaYancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Thu 17 Apr 2025 to Fri 23 May 2025

525 West 22nd Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Yancey Richardson presents Sawubona, an exhibition bringing together work from five different series made between 2002–2013 by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi. Their fifth exhibition with the gallery, Sawubona reveals both the historical depth and visual complexity of Muholi’s overarching project of empowering the Black LGTBQIA+ community in South Africa through a collaborative process of representation. Sawubona is also the first gallery exhibition outside of Africa to feature their early work.

For more than twenty years Muholi has studied the multifarious and ever-evolving nature of Black, queer life in South Africa, specifically through a group of projects centered around forms of portraiture both intimate and disarming, personally descriptive and socially incisive. Though widely-known and celebrated for their ongoing series of self-portraiture titled Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail, the Dark Lioness”), which they began in 2012, Muholi had by that point either completed or begun several other bodies of work that addressed the discrete circumstances and challenges—including for basic civil rights and for visibility and recognition free from stereotypes—being faced by different members of the queer community in South Africa. These early projects, including Only Half the Picture (2002–2006), Being (2006), Beulahs (2006), Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing) and Miss Lesbian (2009), each seek to empower Muholi’s participants and by extension the queer community at large, with images defined by affirmation, dignity and joy rather than struggle, tragedy or trauma.

Muholi’s first project, Only Half the Picture, grew out of their work with the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, which works with survivors of hate crimes living across South Africa and its townships and which Muholi co-founded in 2002. Rather than emphasize the visceral details that would attest to the suffering endured by each participant (a term Muholi uses in place of “subject”), these photographs instead show fragments of bodies at rest or in repose and faces that are contemplative rather than vindictive. Muholi often isolates body parts and garments as well, creating pictures that complicate whatever normative assumptions about gender and identity we may hold.

The challenge to stereotypical and queerphobic representations was further developed by Muholi with their series’ Being and Beulahs. For the former, Muholi made portraits of queer couples in settings and circumstances at times intimate and domestic, in others casual and public. Each photograph demonstrates the bond of love between two people regardless of personal difference or public challenge. If the Being photographs were largely situated in private spaces, those Muholi made for the series Beulahs were just as often situated outdoors and in public spaces. In South Africa the term “beulah” refers to a gay man that the queer community deems beautiful. The “beulahs” that Muholi photographed demonstrate how malleable masculinity can be—their self-presentation is their own as opposed to being socially prescribed.

In their Miss Lesbian series Muholi used the conventions of pageantry as the aesthetic and conceptual framework to critique social definitions of beauty and success. These self-portraits take the staging and presentation used by beauty pageants as a pretext for exploring how they have historically expressed gender as a social construct and how that has defined what “success” or “acceptance” so often looks like.

Muholi’s project Faces and Phases is a vast collective portrait that both commemorates and archives the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa. Many of these portraits are the result of long and sustained relationships and collaboration, as Muholi often returns to photograph the same person over time. In the title, “Faces” refers to the person being photographed, while “Phases” can signify the transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression to another, while also marking the changes to the participants’ daily lives. As with so much of their work, Faces and Phases acts as a living archive that visualizes Muholi’s belief that “we express our gendered, racialized and classed selves in rich and diverse ways.”

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, South Africa and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. They studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. Their work has been exhibited at the 2020 Biennale of Sydney; the 58th International Venice Biennale; Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. They are currently the subject of a mid-career survey at the Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paolo. In 2024 they were the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in 2020, the Tate Modern mounted a major mid-career survey which traveled to Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and Bildmuseet, Sweden.

Other notable solo exhibitions have taken place at the Tate Modern, London; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo; Schwules Museum, Berlin and Brooklyn Museum, New York. They received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2016, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016, an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2018, and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography in 2021. Their work is included in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the High Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others.

Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Thu 17 Apr 2025 to Sat 17 May 2025

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Berry Campbell Gallery presents its first exhibition of the work of Mary Ann Unger (1945 – 1998). Organized in conjunction with the Mary Ann Unger Estate, the exhibition coincides with a renewal of critical interest in the artist and includes a fully illustrated scholarly exhibition catalogue with essays by Glenn Adamson, Independent Curator and Author, and Jess Wilcox, Independent Curator.

On May 1, 2025, the exhibition will feature a panel with Eve Biddle, artist, co-founder of the Wassaic Project, and daughter of Mary Ann Unger, Seph Rodney, PhD, Writer, Editor, and Curator, and Stephanie Sparling Williams, Ph.D., Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. This panel will mark the commencement of a special three-day activation featuring a stylized lighting of Unger’s sprawling, monumental magnum opus, Across the Bering Strait (1992–1994). This exhibition presents the installation in its entirety for the first time in New York City.

Mary Ann Unger was a pioneering sculptor, curator, and unabashed feminist who made space for other female artists and artists of color while working through years of illness. She is remembered for works that evoke the body, bandaging, flesh, and bone, with recurring themes of growth, regeneration, care, and support. Her oeuvre includes large-scale sculpture, small bronzes, works on paper, and public art commissions. In her New York Times obituary, Roberta Smith wrote that “[Mary Ann Unger’s] works occupied a territory defined by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. But the pieces combined a sense of mythic power with a sensitivity to shape that was all their own, achieving a subtlety of expression that belied their monumental scale.”

Across the Bering Strait is the artist’s most monumental work and arguably her career masterpiece. A daring early example of installation art, the work is the culmination of over thirty years of artistic development and experimentation. Comprised of thirty-four sculptural elements, the heroic scale of the abstracted, interlocking parts fully immerses the viewer in a world entirely of Unger’s making. Across the Bering Strait debuted at Trans Hudson Gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1994 and Vivien Raynor of The New York Times observed that “Any way it is viewed, the installation packs a huge punch” and that the work’s “blend of the erotic and the macabre represents a climax [in Unger’s work] that had been building since the mid-1980s.” The work deploys the signature techniques and unique visual language that have come to define Unger’s practice: expressive, modular forms that deal with structure and armature, and by extension, care and support. The installation is a powerful example of how “Unger’s sculptures [do] not allow consideration of the singular body apart from its interrelationship to other bodies,” notes Carla Harryman. A meditation on human migration in general and the American experiment in particular, Across the Bering Strait is Unger’s reminder that “the heaviness of the body and its suffering is lightened through the redistribution of the burden of the body into a collective and shared world” (Harryman).

Also on view, Unger’s early sculptures and works on paper establish themes and reveal interests seen throughout her career: the combination of organic forms with geometric, and a tendency for parts of works to rest against, hold, support, carry, or cradle one another. These load-bearing works are deceptively simple, but their underlying structures were finely engineered. Drawings of repeated modular forms foregrounded on networks of triangular grids from the late-1970s are where Unger, “saw and realized the possibility of using these patterned experiments to move with intention from drawings to three-dimensional forms at heroic scale,” remarked Horace D. Ballard, curator of the landmark 2022 exhibition Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone at the Williams College Museum of Art. Later works from the mid-1980s until her death in 1998, including her patinated and smooth armatures Maine Wishing Stones and Red Tooth/ Red Palm Nut, resemble small objects one comes across in nature, such as stones and seeds. In Unger’s hands, these forms turn inwards and morph into organ or bone. The surface of works such as Seed Pod, Basket Piece, and Ganesha reveal visible strips of cloth coated in a gritty substance and layered with care, in a process not unlike casting broken limbs. As described by Arlene Raven in the Village Voice “Unger’s columns, pillars, monoliths, prehistoric skeletons are imposing. Yet […] they are also endowed with a beautiful elegance.”

“During Mary Ann Unger’s life, critics and curators spoke of her work as primordial, mythic, the gothic element of late modernity coming to the fore in a postmodern moment,” Ballard asserted in his revelatory scholarship (Marquand Books, 2022). “I think it was futurity Unger was after, the fact that we all return to the earth, all return— through bodily translation or ash—back to the elemental, to regenerate and harbor new life.”

Martha Rosler: Truth is/is notGalerie Lelong & Co., New York

Thu 10 Apr 2025 to Sat 10 May 2025

528 West 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Galerie Lelong, New York, presents the first solo exhibition with the artist Martha Rosler, Truth is/is not.

Since the 1960s, the Brooklyn-based artist's practice has been defined by a sharp and unfiltered perspective on contemporary social and political issues of the public sphere, often through addressing the unexamined acceptance of the systems that create and define them. Drawing from works across decades, the exhibition examines how political consciousness is molded through the dissemination of ideas and truisms by mass media, reinforced by constant repetition. The exhibition's title is borrowed from a recent essay by the artist published on The Brooklyn Rail's Critics Page, "truth is, or is not," in which Rosler unpacked the changing landscape of ideological approaches toward truth and its place in the contemporary art world.

Truth is/is not begins with an exercise in decision-making. Rosler positions an ordinary turnstile at the entrance and exit of the gallery, alongside a television and Xbox console with the game "Just Dance" which uses a sensor to detect the movements of players as they follow the moves on screen. Visitors must decide whether to pay a quarter to go through the turnstile and enter the exhibition or to play the game for a dollar. This choice juxtaposes instant gratification with an open-ended opportunity to explore complex representations of the consequences of institutional systems.

Upon entering the gallery's main space, visitors negotiate Reading Hannah Arendt (Politically) for an American in the 21st Century (2006). This forest of hanging panels displays passages in English and German from the writings of the German Jewish émigré philosopher on authoritarianism and subject populations. Glimpsed through the translucent panels, pertinent selections from Rosler's photomontage series and gallery visitors become a backdrop.

The entirety of the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2003, 2004, 2008) will be on view. Rosler's photomontages join journalistic images of war with high-gloss magazine advertisements, exploding the belief that the middle-class American home is safely insulated from wars abroad and instead implying that the two are inescapably intertwined. This series marks the restart in the face of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of Rosler's earlier series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967-72), of which selections are also on view. Further examples of the artist's photomontages from the series House Beautiful: The Colonies (c. 1969-72) and The Rewards of Money (c. 1987-88/2022) tie the promise of the domestic to an imperialist vision. The former presents the universe as a new frontier for colonization while the latter introduces the infiltration of destruction into the upper-middle-class home. Meanwhile, selections from the feminist series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (c. 1966-72) center the impact of high-gloss marketing on women, a perspective that has always been a cornerstone of the artist's practice. In their interrogation of the interconnectedness between domestic ideals and imperialism, Rosler's photomontages echo sentiments from Arendt's writings, including what the philosopher describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as "the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest."

The small gallery space is anchored by Rosler's It Lingers (1993). This photographic tableau is composed of visual and narrative representations of war and politics—new and old, actual and fictive. Displayed on monitors in the room are reels of photographs taken by the artist during demonstrations held in New York City between 2012 and 2025, lending weight to individual and community driven efforts that contrast with the mass-media narratives interrogated throughout the exhibition.

Élise Peroi: For Thirsting Flowers, CARVALHO PARK, New York

Tue 8 Apr 2025 to Fri 23 May 2025

112 Waterbury Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Thu-Sat 12-6pm & by appointment

CARVALHO PARK presents the first United States exhibition of French artist, Élise Peroi. Her debut New York solo, For Thirsting Flowers, features eight standing wooden structures, encasing her delicate tapestries.

A series of screens emit a soft light like windows facing the sun at dawn. Nothing definite can be glimpsed, just a suggestion of the pastoral: an efflorescence of petals, stems and leaves, floating biomorphic forms. The luminosity of Peroi’s woven paintings is such that we might feel ourselves carried outside to watch the sky brighten, the air soft against our skin. As you move around these structures, free-standing to enable this three-dimensional view, unwoven warp threads let light and air through. These segments, comprised of thin fibrous filaments, have the appearance of gills, as though to allow the textiles to breath. Peroi’s fiber works together constitute an installation that situates the viewer around a shifting, porous set of frames that intermingle interior and exterior.

These structures resemble architectural thresholds, window embrasures and doorways that stand in ambiguous relation to each other without the solid walls that typically enfold them. Peroi’s use of architectural imagery suggests she is not so much interested in containment — what the house tends to both enable literally for those who inhabit it and to figure in the cultural imagination — as she is in emptiness, a preoccupation that chimes with certain strands of Buddhist thought. ‘Form does not differ from emptiness nor emptiness from form,’ theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, quoting the Heart Sutra. Sedgwick goes on to discuss how dynamic and living emptiness is in Buddhist thought, a quality that resonates with Peroi’s sculptural textile pieces. The screens are arranged to suggest interrelation, a dialogue energetically conducted through the play of each screen’s empty space; between fabric and frame, a gap opens through which a sliver of another screen is visible.

Peroi produces an emptiness — or rather a shaped, textured emptiness — in the images created by the painted woven silk. Comprised of a chain of diamond forms, Région de passage I and Région de passage II, construct a pattern of subtle recesses whose emptiness is made more visible through proximity to abstract floral forms that run up the centre of the compositions. In Faire pont vers le ciel, the vastness of the sky — a signature motif of void — is conveyed through an expanse of pale, silvery silk, the green thread at its heart like cirrus. In otherwise plain threaded units, exposure of the warp gives a sense of gravity, as though its pull has been given a concrete visual correlative.

In Peroi’s work emptiness never excludes abundance; instead, there is a generative mutuality between these states. What is remarkable is how much diversity of line, texture, and color can still express and embody emptiness. Peroi’s surfaces oscillate with lines of thread, their distinctive texture producing a lively background onto which the painted image sits. In Métamorphose, opaquely woven units are interspersed with those identical in form, but so sparsely woven that the surrounding room can be seen through the delicate cascade of threads. La lune uses patches of luminous white thread against a dark ground to evoke moonlight; Le Soleil is its inverse, with white thread illuminating brightly hued floral shapes that appear as if seen through the sun’s glare.

Architecture is certainly on Peroi’s mind. However, the rectangular dimensions of the textiles are those imposed by the loom, as her wooden structures’ vertical orientation remind us of their origin. In Songes II, Peroi makes the reference even more explicit with a frame that juts out horizontally like the beam of a large loom. Architecture and craft historically possessed different statuses because of their associations with gender and intellectual authority. The built environment was part of the public realm, a stage for finance and politics imagined and inhabited by men. Craft, because of its frequent embeddedness within domesticity in practices like embroidery, needlework and weaving, has traditionally been associated with women and as such has been excluded from histories of fine art. Peroi’s monumental structures align architecture and textiles, a reminder of their common etymology (teks), and in doing so she challenges a patriarchal aesthetic value system that has insisted on their separateness as disciplines.

Peroi keeps the loom within the frame and through it we might glimpse her hand at work. The madeness of the fabrics, the intricacies of the process that forged them, is one of Peroi’s central preoccupations. Peroi paints loose, expressive floral motifs directly onto silk. The canvas is then cut into thin strips that will eventually be woven back together. Slowly, through a delicate choreography of tool and gesture, through repetition and endurance, the painting is recomposed with new orientations, planes and patterns. The effect is partly one of defamiliarization. Flowers are broken apart and dispersed across the composition, becoming sinuous abstract forms. But more than anything this technique opens a space for a formal self-reflexivity. Demanding patience, slowness and a meditative attention, Peroi’s methods recall the philosophy of Simone Weil. In Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: ‘we do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.’ Like Weil, Peroi is not interested in revelation, but rather in uncovering something fundamental about how art is conceived. The doing and making of an artwork, all the physical, intellectual and emotional acts that feed into its gestation, tend to disappear once it is finished. A traditional oil-painting, for instance, contrives to conceal all its preparatory work. But it is precisely this essence, this vital sense of materiality and process, that Peroi spotlights in her textile sculptures. Peroi explains that she is interested in ‘what comes before,’ the ‘bud’ of the artwork in the studio.

Peroi’s titles reflect her interest in the liminal space of creativity. Région de passage refers to a connecting way through which people might travel, a journey rather than a destination, preparation rather than product. A similar emphasis is discernible in Faire pont vers le ciel, which translates as building a bridge to the sky. Métamorphose only titles one work, but all of Peroi’s fabric sculptures are arrested in the state it describes: that of transformation, metamorphosis — the final state unclear.

Exhibition text by Dr. Rebecca Birrell