Chinnie Ding

• 

  picks August 19, 2022

  Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

  Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s paintings have a proprioceptive pull. Their gulfs of color are fed by the late artist’s sweeping ken of the sandbars, salt pans, and billabongs of her native Bentinck Island, off Queensland’s northwestern coast. In 1948, the entire Kaiadilt people, including a newlywed Gabori, were forcibly uprooted from Bentinck by missionaries; forty-five years passed before she and fellow survivors could revisit home. Gabori began painting only in 2005, when she was already in her eighties. She unleashed onto the canvas habitats long harbored in her inner eye, clenched

• 

  picks May 10, 2022

  Wallen Mapondera

  To create the wall assemblages in his solo exhibition “Chikokoko (Little Pleasures That Counts),” Harare-based artist Wallen Mapondera layered cardboard supports with scraps of kitenge fabric and newspaper. He then painted over the new surfaces, sanded them down, and attached an arrangement of repurposed everyday materials. Colorful threads and twine-swaddled palm seeds spill from nests of tree bark, while pulp egg cartons pucker into honeycombs and hives. Elsewhere, tight stacks of these trays recall ribbed concrete, the fore edges of books, or even rope fiber. When flattened and blackened,

• 

  picks March 12, 2022

  Evan Ifekoya

  With a mist of essential oils at its doorstep, Evan Ifekoya’s exhibition “Resonant Frequencies” opens onto a meditative, reparative spa steeped in color and polyphonic sound. As daytime ebbs, the ambient chakra-spectrum light phases from orange to turquoise. Five complementary installations—“portal units”—compose a soundscape of chimes, drums, waves, and vocal recitations from Oceanic Sage, the artist’s alter ego. Drawing on the teachings of Yoruba cosmology and psychoacoustic healing, Oceanic Sage channels the diasporic depths of the sound arts, an inheritance shaping the Nigerian-born,

• 

  picks February 03, 2022

  Jung Lee

  In Jung Lee’s first solo exhibition outside Asia, the South Korean artist reveals the acheiropoetic power of the simple neon phrases she installs and photographs in desolate landscapes. Among the ten large-scale C-prints on view, the eponymous message of Promise Me, 2018, irradiates wiry brambles with its turquoise glow, while the hot-pink letters in I Love You with All My Heart #2, 2020, stand out against a blanket of undisturbed, ultraviolet-tinged snow. By contrast, the three photogravures in the show relinquish such immersive drama: Barely the size of a human face, each dusky print features

• 

  picks September 05, 2016

  Michel Houellebecq

  French writer Michel Houellebecq is notorious for his novels of ideological sci-fi, set in the apocalyptic near present with faithless, feckless protagonists drawn from Europe’s self-consciously dying-white-male demographic. Given an exhibition here to curate as he pleases, the author has staged an elaborate nexus of chapter-like chambers, furnishing them with personal artifacts and artworks (by himself and others, such as Robert Combas and Renaud Marchand) that engage some of his favorite topics—sex, death, tourism, capitalism, and art. “Il est temps de faire vos jeux” (Time to place your bets),

• 

  picks July 21, 2016

  Shooshie Sulaiman

  Sift dirt, sniff roses, skip about polygons of dewy grass tiling an earthy floor in starry geometries: Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman’s first solo exhibition in Europe unites gardening and drawing to explore the transmission of identity across time and space. In Married to a Malay in Paris (all works 2016), Sulaiman has grafted a ceremonial rose popular in Malaysia, the mawar, taken from a bush at her mother’s Johor grave, to a rose of a species native to France; the resulting hybrid now awaits full bloom. Meanwhile, clustering at hopscotch scale and forming Malay motifs such as the mangosteen,

• 

  picks September 25, 2015

  Mark Grotjahn

  The vibrant weaves and prisms of splintering, bundled lines in Mark Grotjahn’s well-known “Butterfly” and “Face” paintings are matched in complexity only by their art-historical lineages. In the artist’s latest sculptures, finger-painting, drips and throws of paint, and hole-punched visages tease at Grotjahn’s indelible formal awareness, as does the long, skinny tube that he has pierced into a nose’s position in each work, evoking breath, death, erection, and deception alike. While earlier exhibitions presented more varied shapes, here the artist prefers repeated forms: tall, slender bronze

• 

  picks June 19, 2015

  Harold Ancart

  The cosmic nightscapes riotously abloom in Harold Ancart’s new works on canvas land us on an exotic planet. Vibrant plants, bonfires, and astral confetti in the show’s seven oil-stick paintings thrum in tropical colors against abundant, magnetic fields of black that concentrate contemplation, evoking lacquerware worlds. But if believable blossoms top stems here, so do moons and gradient disks resembling telescopic iris shots onto other planet floors, upending figure-ground certainties. The echo between a restless treelike shape in one painting and airborne sawtooth blobs in another (all works

• 

  picks March 27, 2015

  Ren Hang

  Beijing-based photographer Ren Hang has devoted his first New York exhibition to naked bodies deviously posed in surreal, emotional configurations. Figures find puckish fit with one another or amid flora and fauna—a nocturnal lily pond, a butter-yellow python. The protagonist of Untitled 14 (all works 2014) gazes neutrally at the camera as five manicured hands pinch her neck into a comely five-point necklace of skin. In Untitled 6, three kneelers interlock their heads for a triskelion of sexless backs. Locations keep to the anonymous urban spaces of white-wall apartments, rooftop edges, and

• 

  picks February 20, 2015

  Petra Cortright

  Petra Cortright’s latest paintings are born of plebeian Web tools and swatches, then printed onto clear Plexiglas. The artist mounts these images on mirrored or regular acrylic, where they take on a more resolutely physical feeling: Their stacked surfaces implore the viewer to peer between them; their underside imprints beg to be compared to their reflected marks. They also look better in person than on Instagram, which is not always the case with digital art incarnated into gallery solids. In chess and buffy keepers+kick.rom, both 2015, foregrounds of holiday GIFs or shiny blackberries, some

• 

  picks October 24, 2012

  O Zhang

  Surfaces sans image, the disused billboards in O Zhang’s series of road-trip snapshots from across America, “I Am Your Mirror,” 2011–12, present inquiring signs of the times. Captured at varying distances and angles, often through car mirrors or rain, they appear lonely, sometimes woozy against the sky, shabby yet orderly monuments to commodified desires along the open road. Some announce themselves “Available,” listing a phone number—the tersest personal ad. Others, dismantled to their skeletal armatures, linger as modernist grids partitioning the horizon. Most simply face us as widescreen

• 

  picks February 17, 2012

  “A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance”

  For all its coordinated means and forcible ends, North Korea’s official footage relaying the nation’s demonstrative mourning of Kim Jong Il may have let other woes escape into view. Coat-swaddled, sob-buckled—bare fists beating pavement—this suddenly visible public seemed possessed by still older grievances, vaster grief, deepened in Kim’s lifetime, irredeemable by his death. Or so observers outside “the hermit kingdom” might be tempted to glean, forced to parse through the country’s tethered tourism and constricted traffic of abductions and defections. The eight artists in this show roam just