In July 2020, New York–based painter Justin Liam O’Brien opened “Damned by the Rainbow,” a solo show at GNPY Gallery in Berlin. It bloomed across Instagram; he had caught the confusing spirit of lockdown, when the company of others was simultaneously desired, feared, and redefined. A number of his oils on linen featured men together—dancing, having sex, reluctantly hanging out—their voluptuous bodies flushed not so much with blood, but with an expansive, billowing fondness. When O’Brien depicted crowds with his warm and comforting palette, they were buoyant, bustling. But when he portrayed

After studying sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education, Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015) relocated to New York in 1964 and quickly established herself within the city’s Fluxus community as a facilitator of events, a maker of objects, and a performance artist in her own right. Yet the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium,” staged at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery (the artist reviewed the show for the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo), and the invention of the Sony Porta-Pak (an affordable compact video camera with instant playback) irrevocably changed the way she would

Georges Mathieu (1921–2012) took painting where it had never been before—not just in pioneering lyrical abstraction but also, remarkably, in opening it up to include performance. A prototype of the artist as global citizen, Mathieu collaborated with members of the Gutai group in Osaka, Japan; staged tour-de-force events and exhibitions throughout Europe, South America, and Israel; and was an active participant in New York’s art scene. On occasion, he’d make his cinematically scaled canvases in the street. Sometimes he wore incredible kimono-style ceremonial garb to create his pictures for museum

The English polymath John Dee—mystic, renowned mathematician, and trusted adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, among other things—talked to the angels. Dee claimed they introduced him to an ancient tongue spoken by divinities . . . even God himself. The letterforms of this language, Enochian, are voluptuous, like a more sensuous version of the uppercase Greek alphabet. Occult scholars have for centuries failed to completely crack the code behind the celestial messages Dee recorded in his journals. I regard abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019) as a breed of seer similar to Dee. The artist was

For his solo exhibition “Pleat,” Richard Rezac transformed the gallery into a cabinet of wonders. All fourteen of the objets d’art on display—two mobiles, two stabiles, and ten wall pieces—were curious constructions, at once eccentric and rarefied. His sculptures occasionally call to mind pieces by Alexander Calder in their formal inventiveness, but are more gnomic and, of course, less monumental. Each work is crafted from an ingenious combination of contradictory materials, such as hard inorganic metal or cement (aluminum, bronze, Hydrocal) and soft organic wood (cherry, maple, pine), the

A moldering loin of carrion glistened within a Plexiglas case like a precious geode in “Relativity Clock,” a small Paul Thek survey at Alexander and Bonin. Butchered to reveal an interior cavity of incarnadine entrails and pearlescent fat, Untitled (Meat Piece with Chair), 1966, is from the artist’s well-known 1964–67 series “Technological Reliquaries”—waxworks of severed body parts and chunks of flesh enclosed in sleek vitrines. This piece in particular had a unique feature: a top compartment that housed a miniature bronze chair—a premonition, perhaps, of Thek’s 1968 series of “Chair” sculptures,

Conventional relationships between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between drawn forms and their volumetric realization, are deranged in fascinating, supremely elegant ways in Diane Simpson’s sculptures. The eighty-six-year-old Chicagoan, who began studying art in her mid-thirties and really only started showing in earnest outside of her hometown about a decade ago, has developed a trademark approach to creating work across her forty-year career. Starting with photographs typically depicting elements of architecture, she produces detailed isometric drawings that home in on particular

Wallace Berman showed  in New York only once in his lifetime (at the Jewish Museum in 1968), and his work has been seen only fitfully in the city since then. It’s surprising to realize that he was a native New Yorker—Staten Island born—given that he was central to the art and counterculture of California from the mid-1950s until his death on February 18, 1976, his fiftieth birthday. The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum’s great exhibition of 2006, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle”—which, luckily, traveled to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery the following

The unsung moment of real terror in classic Hollywood monster movies happens when the camera pushes in for a close-up on some bloodthirsty fiend, only to reveal a pair of human eyes peering through the prosthetics. It’s a momentary rip in the fiction, divulging the fact that a person, an actor no less, is at the center of the fear, mayhem, and death unfolding before us—proving that underneath it all, we ourselves are the monsters. Michael Mahalchick’s aptly titled show “US” starred approximately four hundred latex masks cast from the cheap store-bought kind, to which he then adhered still more

Joey Terrill’s Remembrance, 1989, a seminaturalistic stylized acrylic, appeared in “Once Upon a Time: Paintings, 1981–2015,” a modest but powerful survey of the artist’s work at Ortuzar Projects. In this canvas, Terrill and a former boyfriend are depicted within a lush tropical forest, foraging for birds-of-paradise while surrounded by towers of agave whose spiny tendrils cast black shadows that give the background a striking sense of depth. The painting was made the same year Terrill discovered he was HIV-positive, at a time when the diagnosis was considered a death sentence. In that somber

All cops are bastards! This antiauthoritarian rallying cry originated in England about a century ago and pervaded certain pockets of New Left activism during the 1960s and ’70s, a period when Jill Freedman (1939–2019) found her footing as a self-taught documentary photographer. She picked up a camera for the first time in 1966; two years later, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she participated in the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, and documented the Resurrection City protest camp around the National Mall. Having witnessed mass arrests and police brutality, Freedman

“Won’t you join us in this great new national crusade?” Nancy Reagan’s cold, scripted words echoed across the gallery and between dozens of Quaker church pews that, for Onyedika Chuke’s exhibition here, had been arranged into an enormous maze titled The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Labyrinth, 2020–21. The sound bite was cut from President Reagan’s 1986 national address on the perils of drug use among America’s youth. Ron and Nancy appealed to the public on live TV in the guise of two concerned grandparents, welcoming the country into the Oval Office for a fireside chat. Yet, as history