Amy Sherald

The subjects of Amy Sherald’s meticulous, nearly life-size oil portraits confront the viewer with ambiguous expressions that are neither joyful nor melancholic. Their impassive gazes suggest interiorized contemplation and recognition of being seen. This intimate, seven-piece retrospective of her output from the past three years focused on works depicting one or two subjects standing against a flat monochromatic field, cutting bold totemic silhouettes out of bright voids. The outlier—also one of the more recent pieces, debuting in this show—situates a pair of women holding hands against the low

picks July 19, 2013

Lari Pittman

Through a mere twenty-four works of immodest scale, curator Kelly Shindler draws a nuanced, retroactive arc connecting Lari Pittman’s recent painterly tendencies to select pieces (dating, at the earliest, to the mid-1980s) that presage his current approach. Taking its title from Pittman’s 1993 painting Untitled #17 (A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation), this exhibition—the artist’s first museum retrospective in some twenty years—foregrounds Pittman’s use of a marginalized style (decoration) as an analogy for a marginalized identity (queer) and medium (painting in the ’70s).