picks January 19, 2018

Katherine Bernhardt

There’s a lot to parse in “Green,” Katherine Bernhardt’s enormously bananas show of paintings and sculptures. Take, for example, Climate Change (all works 2017), a spray-painted picture filled with melty Nike swooshes, cigarettes, deranged fruit, and rectangular birds. It could be a riff on poisonous consumerism and how it’s upsetting nature’s delicate balance. Or, seeing as Bernhardt is an artist who works with a very particular set of colors and shapes from the contemporary landscape that pique her interest (or gag reflex), it could be a straightforward example of unencumbered formalism.

picks December 01, 2017

Libby Rothfeld

Libby Rothfeld’s exhibition here, “Noon and Afternoon,” is chock-full of vessels not exactly yearning to be filled. Ruined cardboard boxes prop up seemingly flimsy laminate desk legs in Desk / System (all works 2017). Several empty and half-empty plastic water bottles sit atop the table and other sculptures in the show. Many of her titles include the word “system,” as if there’s some kind of steadfast order that needs to be reckoned with in these existentially unsettled and haunted objects. Both Rack / System and Chair / System are geometric, quasifunctional support structures for clothes that

picks October 27, 2017

Sheila Pinkel

Though you wouldn’t guess it, the cube in Sheila Pinkel’s multidimensional object study Manifestations of a Cube, 1974–79, is a glass dish stolen from a Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. For the show here—which one could characterize as a biography of the item—Pinkel tried capturing the form’s essence through xeroradiography, color Xeroxes, and other imaging techniques. At certain points in her investigations, the thing becomes exceptionally rich, strange, mercurial, and vivid, pulsating with a mysterious energy. The press release calls the twenty-nine-foot-long presentation of

picks August 11, 2017

Sara Rabin

The drawings and paintings in Sara Rabin’s current solo exhibition illustrate the body as something curious, cute, stupid, or alien. The artist’s images are quite funny and very weird. The woman in Greetings, 2017—made with pencil and pastel on brown craft paper—gazes back at us, her ass facing the viewer while she’s on all fours with a pair of googly eyes drawn into the dark cloud of her bush. There’s a clown getting a blow job in That Girl; She a Real Clown Pleaser, 2014, and two more pop up as cappuccino art in the dopily titled I Had a Dream There Were Clowns in My Coffee, Clowns in My Coffee

picks July 07, 2017

Satoshi Kojima

Satoshi Kojima’s exhibition of pastel-drenched, otherworldly oil paintings here—his first show in New York—speaks of being a stranger in a strange land and liking it. The artist moved from Japan to Germany to study art, and found in Düsseldorf a city where “it’s quite normal for numbered women in lingerie to strike poses in windows,” according to Peter Doig and Parinaz Mogadassi’s text for the show. Pleasure-seeking, primal instincts and a trippy search for self are the subjects of these pieces.

The settings, futuristic-looking and Op-inspired, are hallucinatory. In Last Dance, 2016, a pair of

picks May 26, 2017

Tobias Pils

Tobias Pils’s monochromatic exhibition here opens with Untitled (Viennese Head), 2016, a black-and-white canvas featuring the profile of a deformed human head with a huge black void for a cheek. The eyes, however, gaze directly at you—they peer through a field of swaying lines that could be melting lashes, or even seaweed. It appears to be kissing a tangle of zigzags, some of which have edges that bleed delicately, as if they were rendered by an inky pen dragged down a sheet of wet paper.

To call the artist’s paintings surrealist seems a bit limiting—they play quite liberally with a kind of mushy

picks May 22, 2017

Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari’s latest museum show consists of his own work and, just as crucially, work from the Arab Image Foundation—an institutional archive of photography from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. Zaatari often uses photographs and paraphernalia from the collection as material. For instance, in the descriptively titled A Photographer’s Shadow, 2017, he has re photographed a picture from the collection of a cameraman’s body blocking light, spotlighting the person framing the shot. Throughout the show, one notices the artist identifying patterns—absurd studio props or cars,

picks March 03, 2017

Jochen Klein

Jochen Klein’s current show of paintings, collaborations, and studio ephemera makes plain how deeply enmeshed the artist was in his community and the larger world. Klein was taught painting under the classical master-student model at the Munich Kunstakademie but was doubtful of the medium’s potential. He stopped painting for years and became involved in activism and other forms of artmaking. Thomas Eggerer, a close friend, collaborator, and fellow student at the Kunstakademie, worked with him on writing and a site-specific work. In the 1994 essay “The English Garden in Munich,” Klein and Eggerer

picks February 03, 2017

TM Davy

TM Davy’s suite of eight horse paintings comes from a blood connection to this gallery’s street address—the artist learned of his patrilineal great-great-great-grandfather’s livery stable via an old photograph that had “195 Chrystie Street, 1880” scrawled on its back. Three large canvases of equine bodies stand in the front gallery. One, horses (xo) (all works 2016), shows a mare and scared-looking foal bathed in a rainbow of colored light that streams in from the window of a claustrophobic stall. This otherworldly halo appears in horse (x) as well. Davy has long held a fascination with light,

picks January 13, 2017

Hannah van Bart

At first glance, Hannah van Bart’s current exhibition of paintings appears to be nearly all portraits of one woman. A figure with soft breasts, solid legs, and a face of fleshy innocence stares out from the middle of each canvas. Depending on her garb and demeanor, she’s either louche or enticing, with clothes that cover or reveal a warm body ripe for bruising. The appearance of a lit cigarette held by an arm that’s slowly vanishing into the pinky-brown miasma of Untitled, 2016, seems subtly violent. The artist plays with an abundance of patterns as well, such as stripes and lattices. In Untitled

picks December 02, 2016

Eve Fowler

The dull throb of light from the neon sculpture that spells out the title of Eve Fowler’s latest exhibit and of the artwork itself––with it which it as it if it is to be (all works 2016)––bathes the entrance in a soft glow. The artist’s other piece that shares the same name, a black-and-white 16-mm film transferred to video, consists of a series of studio visits with women artists in New York and Los Angeles. Fowler captures each maker doing her particular actions, workaday on the surface, that produce art. Different sets of hands, like dancers, shape clay, pour paint, attach drill bits, and

picks November 04, 2016

Martha Friedman

High above Martha Friedman’s three-piece exhibition “Some Hags” is a seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry that depicts the moment after Circe used her magic to turn Odysseus’s men into swine. Freaked out and pissed off, Odysseus looms like a hulk behind the sorceress, sword in hand, as she sits before a large book. It is one likely source of her power, a tome of spells that Friedman renders as the sculptural Circe’s Book (all works 2016), an enormous, odd, and interactive collection of elastic pages on a table below, its sticky-smooth rubber sheaths requiring some strength to turn. The work

Yin Ho