picks April 05, 2023

Leah Ke Yi Zheng

Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s recent paintings thematize the vanishing act. In Untitled (rose island), 2021–23, a neon structure radiates before a deep-sea-colored ground and depicts an isometric projection of the Republic of Rose Island: a man-made, autonomous micronation on stilts dreamed up by Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa during the late 1960s. Located in the Adriatic Sea, Rosa’s political yet deeply utopian project was dissolved by outside authorities—and eventually demolished—barely two months after it opened. The fleeting saga of this artificial principality corresponds with the precarious state of

picks November 22, 2022

Anthony Coleman

Looking at an Anthony Coleman is like hearing a familiar riff in a new song—it takes a moment to recognize the sampled source in a fresh context. In his solo exhibition here, the self-taught, Philadelphia-based artist presents ebullient reworkings of beloved pop-cultural characters across eleven drawings—made with graphite and colored pencil on paper—that were produced between 2018 and 2022.

Observe Tweety Bird on Red, 2022: The image is hardly a dead ringer for the animated Looney Tunes canary, but his iconic silhouette—an ovoid head atop a svelte torso with bulbous feet—gets remixed. Hallmarks

picks September 02, 2022

Johann Mun

Ocher washes and rust-toned streaks mask deposits of underpainting across the sixty-three-inch width of Med(al)$, 2021. The oil-and-sumi-ink-on-canvas composition by Los Angeles–based Johann Mun recalls a cave painting, its surface punctuated by crude and mysterious markings. Some of the artist’s interventions in this piece ape nature: The ridges of his brushstrokes echo wrinkles in a crag, for instance, while an arc of black erupts like an obsidian shard between passages of turquoise and smatterings of earthy beiges. These rugged areas are embellished by inscrutable sequences of dots and lines.

picks March 28, 2022

Sean Sullivan

The warble of a chord emanating from a rigged toy organ fills the room in Sean Sullivan’s exhibition “In the shade of a tree.” It quivers and rings and hums and then, as if sound could be an image, fades out of view. Your concentration moves elsewhere.

More than twenty mixed-media works are hung in a single line around the gallery like an optical poem, taking up surprisingly little space. No composition is larger than a square foot. Yet upon these little surfaces, Sullivan expresses a lot.

By animating a hodgepodge of materials, textures, and patterns, these pieces exhibit the makeshift peculiarities

Alexandra Drexelius