picks May 06, 2019

Erin Stafford

By sifting through the wreckage of a vexing breakup, Erin Stafford has created elegiac curios, vignettes, and sculptures that serve as heirlooms and evoke the dread of erasure. With their perishable items, personal mementos, and baroque motifs, the fourteen works in “Lovesick” make up a Havisham-esque mausoleum and attest to the emancipation that mellowed acceptance can bring.

In A Lover’s Picnic Followed by Post-Coital Tristesse, 2019, a richly patterned crimson rug holds silver platters glutted with figs, pomegranates, honey, and pears; an absent couple is evoked through two velvet cushions,

print May 2019

“Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to British parents, and from the age of three was raised in Middle England, moving between the industrial city of Birmingham and the surrounding environs of rural Warwickshire. His lifelong interest in Germanic lore and languages—Finnish, Gothic, Old English, Old Norse—was the genesis of his mythological cosmos, Middle-earth, and the staggeringly complex millennia of histories, races (of gods, elves, dwarves, and men), dialects, and crusades that he created. From an encyclopedic “legendarium” of Elvish civilization

print March 2019

Rachel Ostrow

Rachel Ostrow’s oil-on-panel paintings—which feature kaleidoscopic abstract forms nearly engulfed by pitch-black grounds—evoke two of the most mysterious, enthralling regions of human fascination: outer space and the oceanic abyss. Imagination compensates for what we don’t know about these places, and Ostrow utilizes this magical territory to initiate dynamic relationships between gelatinous marine shapes, cosmic nebulae, concertinaed ridges, and the yawning expanses they inhabit. Wonder and terror, magnetism and apprehension: These forces were key to the mesmerizing visual impact of the nineteen

print January 2019

Matthew Leifheit

Fire Island is a sliver of sand, forest, and dunes four miles off the southern shore of Long Island. The hamlets of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines have been—since the 1930s and ’50s, respectively—havens of gay emancipation and barometers of American queer experience. The locale has become a near-mythic ark, encompassing wild bacchanal and funereal poignancy for the generations that sought sanctuary within its pelagic atmospherics. It’s this hallowed ground that Matthew Leifheit took as his subject in the forty-three photographic works exhibited here.

Most of his nocturnal tableaux

print November 2018

Gertrude Abercrombie

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) painted gloomy nightscapes and forlorn domestic scenes that revealed her internal state more than the outside world. She also made portraits, landscapes, and still lifes often influenced by the Midwestern environments of Aledo, Illinois, where she spent much of her childhood. The seventy works in this show, made between 1930 and 1971—dolorous vignettes in hushed blues, greens, and shadowy grays—utterly beguiled.

Abercrombie moved to Chicago with her parents in 1916 and lived there until the end of her life. She was primarily self-taught, although she

picks March 09, 2018

Amy Talluto

Opting to paint complex landscapes almost exclusively in one color could make for undistinguished results, but in the ten oils here, Amy Talluto has produced symphonic arrangements of green, ranging from deepest phthalo to honeyed laurel. Dashes of pink, crimson, and yellow also crop up, to shimmering effect. The technical proficiency of her sumptuous compositions, based on forests around the artist’s Catskills home, parlays them into sites of ethereality.

In Measured and Divided, 2017, several dark trunks dissect the foreground, framing a nearby clearing. A haze of impenetrable celadon foliage

picks February 16, 2018

Peter Plagens

Each one of Peter Plagens’s eleven abstract paintings and collages here can be regarded as trinities, made up of three visual elements that frame or obscure. Spaghettilike marks along the works’ perimeters jut and race about. They surround and jaggedly collide with flat inner plains of purple, gray, pink, or turquoise. At the heart of these works lie geometric units of blazing color, akin to tangram puzzles.

Plagens, also an art critic, has said that he manages to keep his writerly tendencies out of his paintings. He is, however, not entirely successful. His images feel a lot like discussions—heated,

picks February 04, 2018

Bror Anders Wikstrom

Bror Anders Wikstrom arrived in New Orleans from his native Sweden in the early 1880s. Although he worked as a portraitist, printmaker, and cartoonist, he is particularly noted as a designer of Mardi Gras floats and costumes—this exhibition's focus—for the krewes of Rex and Proteus, the oldest in carnival history and still active today.

“Bror Anders Wikstrom: Bringing Fantasy to Carnival” includes almost sixty watercolors in bound and individual formats that make up a Saturnalian cavalcade of imaginative whimsy and illustrative splendor. In “Twenty Float Designs for Krewe of Proteus ‘The Alphabet’

picks February 02, 2018

Dirk Stewen

In the upstairs gallery here, Dirk Stewen presents thirty-two individually framed pages of color reproductions of works by twentieth-century icons—such as Matisse, Picasso, and Klee—likely taken from old art catalogues. They have been torn, redacted, and reengineered with newly added elements. Indecipherable slivers of the original prints, with text in the form of artwork captions (primarily in German and French) and page numbers, read as fragmented calderas now overlaid with amorphous blots in gouache and watercolor. Muted browns, blues, and reds commingle with brilliantly hued moments

picks September 15, 2017

Deborah Brown

Riotous storms of thrashing color formed into woodland scenes are the hallmark of Brooklyn-based artist Deborah Brown’s paintings here. Among forested tableaux under tempestuous skies are recurring motifs: birds, a dog, and a lone female figure. While there are notes of modern civilization—a railing, a pathway—the bent of this exhibition is toward natural, rather than human, architecture.

In Birch Trees (all works cited, 2017), the woman, arms hanging limply by her side, looks forlornly at a bird perched on a nearby branch. As close as she is to her avian friend—a signifier of beauty, freedom,

picks August 04, 2017

Dana Powell

Refreshingly, Dana Powell’s twelve oil-on-linen paintings here are titled to succinctly convey their subjects: for example, Pale pool or Smoke screen (all works 2017). The approach is confident, allowing the viewer to engage visually without superficial complication. Subjects include seemingly benign situations, such as the white cloud in Puff or earth’s celestial companion in Daymoon, both delicately rendered and modest in scale. Test site and Hotbox, however—a picture of an explosion and closed elevator doors leaking smoke—complicate matters with their deadpan representations and grim humor.

picks June 16, 2017

Maira Kalman

The county of Dorset in southwest England is characterized by rolling hills, rugged coastline, and wooded valleys. It’s this idyllic landscape that serves as the subject for Maira Kalman’s current show of ten gouache-on-paper paintings in the gallery’s project room, which focus on the gardens and domestic curiosities of the region’s stately, ancestral houses. (In the main space is a separate exhibition of paintings from Kalman’s 2005 edition of Strunk and White’s classic guide to writing, The Elements of Style.)

With illustrative flair and fondant-fancy colors, Cream Teas, Sherborne Castle (all

picks May 19, 2017

Peter Howson

Scottish artist Peter Howson is known for dramatic paintings of brutal melees in urban settings and muscular working-class men in noble combat or heroic poses. Elements of his own tumultuous experiences are often writ large, including his upbringing in a God-fearing environment and his struggles with depression, Asperger’s syndrome, alcohol, and drugs. In 1993, he was Britain’s official artist for the Bosnian conflict. In this role he created a work so horrifying that London’s Imperial War Museum, which had commissioned him, did not accept it into the permanent collection. During a 2000 treatment

picks May 15, 2017

Mark Todd

For his solo exhibition “Don’t Go to Hell Without Saying Goodbye,” Mark Todd has tweaked the aching sentimentality of crooner ballads, as well as blues and American standards in the vein of Dean Martin, Bobby Rush, and Johnny Mercer to make humorous illustrated album covers. The results of Todd’s topsy-turvy wordplay with songs and band names seem nearly authentic but land just beyond the believable, wittily employing amalgams of lyrics to form titles you almost think you know.

The acrylic-on-wood LP covers are rendered in a scrappy, cartoonish style somewhere between King of the Hill and Raymond

picks April 14, 2017

Stephen Irwin

Pornography isn’t often concerned with subtlety and wistful reflection, but Stephen Irwin treated it, in works on view in this posthumous exhibition, as a vehicle for elusive delicacy that repels our expectations. Pages from vintage magazines, gay and straight, have been removed, treated with solution, bleached, and carefully scrubbed of most imagery, transforming them into sculptural sheets of sepulchral timelessness. The remaining visual elements open the work to a reading as something like classical statuary, after the inevitable compulsion to discern the original compositions has been

picks March 17, 2017

Paul Chan

For his current exhibition here, Paul Chan has made nylon figures—hooded, tapered, or headless—fixed atop fans that inflate and animate them in wild contortions and macabre dance. Electrical cables run from power outlets via concrete-filled shoes, a grounding device that connects each “breather” to the corporeal and domestic. Some forms are presented with props such as a rug, a flag, or turf, further pointing to human connectivity. On the walls hang symbolic ink-on-paper charts of stitching patterns used to achieve particular airflows and movements. Individually and in groups, the works play

picks February 10, 2017

Peter Caine

Much Trump-related art pokes at the president’s perceived physical inadequacies, faltering at superficiality and failing to elucidate concerns within our body politic. Peter Caine’s exhibition “The Old Man and the Sheep” is an eviscerating exception.

Known for videos and installations of animatronic sociopolitical tableaux and pop-cultural critique, as well as animal husbandry presentations, Caine has an idiosyncratic on-screen persona lightened by cynical wit. Here, he shows three kinetic works with four life-size figures of a rapturous Trump in various stages of sexual degradation. Aping the

picks January 06, 2017

John Dante Bianchi

For his solo exhibition “Unavoidable Encounter,” John Dante Bianchi has made sculptures that initially register as paintings attempting to escape their supports. Concertina-like folds of what seems to be canvas—but is actually immaculately engineered strata of wood and aluminum—wrest from their stretcher bars, rising and jutting forth in sharply angled planes, revealing trusses and screws beneath. Acrylic paint is applied to the surfaces in layers, then sanded back to form warm clouds of pinks, purples, and oranges, with patches of iridescent gray where the metal is exposed. The abstract visual

picks March 02, 2015

Loris Gréaud

Loris Gréaud is best known for expansive multimedia installations concerning grand themes often culled from the natural sciences. Executed in collaboration with architects, engineers, and physicists, the sculptural components of his immersive environments reference the firmament and biological forms. Gréaud set up the entire gallery as a fictional civilization’s natural history museum, titled The Unplayed Notes Museum, 2015, which was then attacked and partially destroyed by actors, as directed by the artist, during the opening night performance. This staged act can be seen as mimicry of humanity’s

picks August 12, 2014

Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins is known for her large public works composed of airplane parts, boats, televisions, mattresses, and other detritus mined from the boneyards of industrialized consumerism. Here she presents four sculptures formed from conglomerations of aluminum animals typical of fairground rides and children’s playgrounds—horses, ducks, and elephants among them—tightly bound together by wire cables. Three floor-based works rise from pedestals, expanding into multicolored cornucopias, while the largest piece, Our Friend Fluid Metal, 2014, also the name of the exhibition, emerges from a wall like

Darren Jones