picks February 06, 2023

Odili Donald Odita

Odili Donald Odita’s colors are not easy. Like those of Ellsworth Kelly or Ad Reinhardt, they sear into the eye with deep chromatic intensity. For Odita, hue produces a complex set of relations, a rhythm. In the artist’s show here, his abstract paintings—made on wood panels topped with striated wood veneers—glow with acrylic shapes arranged into scintillating configurations, which touch and then break away, dehiscing into what feels like ceaseless multiplication. While looking at Odita’s works, I forget their edges, for it seems that his patterns could spin out beyond the boundaries of the panel,

picks December 06, 2022

Igshaan Adams

Vastrapplek translates from Afrikaans, Igshaan Adams’s native language, to mean “hold fast and stomp in place.” Adams’s exhibition here takes this word as its title, which alludes to a dovetailing of stasis and release, as this relates to a body fixed yet driving energy outward. The Riel dance, traditionally performed by young people from the Northern Cape region of South Africa known as Vastrappers, embodies this form of movement in an intricate choreography of heels and toes beating into the ground, blurring the boundary between flesh and earth while leaving clouds of dust in their wake.

Adams’s

picks May 25, 2022

Shikeith

Grace is the condition of being blessed. It also describes a certain effortless movement: it is meant to come to us with ease. But for his debut exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery, multidisciplinary artist Shikeith warns us via the show’s title that for Black queer people, “grace comes violently.” The gentle yet tense photographs, sculptures, and five-channel video-cum-sculpture work here redefine this quality of ease and divinity with remarkable power.

For the artist, grace is burdened by the past: like a spirit, it can be imperceptible but everywhere. Shikeith’s photographs indicate as much: They

picks March 21, 2022

Kahlil Robert Irving

For his solo exhibition here, Kahlil Robert Irving has frozen the act of surfing the internet and transposed it into wallpaper that covers an entire gallery on the museum’s first floor. Bringing to mind images of laptop screens crowded with infinite windows and tabs, Irving immerses us in the clutter and clamor of online life via memes, social media screenshots, e-newspaper headlines, and more. On a number of walls, this seemingly endless universe of signs is set against a background of clouds, as though this digital realm were heaven.

Irving’s frenetic tapestry is specifically concerned with

picks January 18, 2022

Raymond Saunders

Perhaps universally, blackboards conjure images of a teacher’s neat handwriting, lines of arithmetic, or other mundane memories of rote instruction. But touched by Raymond Saunders’s wayward, hermetic mark-making, these objects are transfigured into a dazzling realm of play and expression. At Andrew Kreps Gallery, sixteen mostly untitled paintings—several of which feature a blackboard as a substrate—hang in the artist’s first New York solo show in more than twenty years. But these dark surfaces are not merely backgrounds: They hum with myriad textures and rhythms and goad the pictures into

picks May 20, 2021

Rindon Johnson

Whether lurking in corners or suspended above courtyards, Rindon Johnson’s artwork meets the viewer in unexpected places. Paired with deliciously poetic and stream-of-consciousness titles, his anarchic forms spill across SculptureCenter, suggesting a largeness that cannot be contained. The artist’s solo exhibition here, “Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies,” luxuriates in our ache for corporeal freedom by throwing two topics into tension: first, the titular law of large numbers, a mathematical theory holding that as an experiment’s sample size grows, its average will inch closer to its expected

Zoë Hopkins