Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, the first Ivorian artist to have a survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was born in 1923 in Zépréguhé, Côte d’Ivoire. Yet on March 11, 1948, as if by some miracle, he was reborn—Bouabré had a mystical vision on the way to his clerical job at the General Security Directorate in Dakar, Senegal. Of this experience, he wrote, “Since the sky opened to my eyes and the seven colored suns described a circle of beauty around their ‘Mother-Sun,’ I am the one that must from now on be called ‘Cheik Nadro,’ the Revealer.” Following this astonishing event, Bouabré experienced

Just when you think you’ve fully parsed the historical significance of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), more is revealed. Kudos to New York’s Rauschenberg Foundation for collaborating with three exhibition spaces—Gladstone and Mnuchin Galleries in Manhattan, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria—to open the vaults on the artist’s practice with a concentration of rarely shown works made between the 1970s and the 1990s, following his momentous move in 1970 from New York to Captiva Island, right off Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The trove situates us at an important dividing line in his career. Rauschenberg’s

Just when you think you’ve fully parsed the historical significance of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), more is revealed. Kudos to New York’s Rauschenberg Foundation for collaborating with three exhibition spaces—Gladstone and Mnuchin Galleries in Manhattan, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria—to open the vaults on the artist’s practice with a concentration of rarely shown works made between the 1970s and the 1990s, following his momentous move in 1970 from New York to Captiva Island, right off Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The trove situates us at an important dividing line in his career. Rauschenberg’s

The trio of pieces that greeted visitors at the entrance to this memorable survey of Kazuko Miyamoto’s art at the Japan Society succinctly triangulated the intellectually nimble, technically adroit artist’s practice. These three works—Stunt (181 Chrystie Street, 1981), 1982, a photocopy collage featuring Miyamoto, nude except for a Mardi Gras–style mask, executing a yogic leg raise in her studio in front of a pair of Sol LeWitt cube constructions; Untitled, 1973, a wall-mounted grid made from black cotton string and nails; and a large acrylic-on-canvas painting from the same year called Ways of

Nicole Eisenman’s “Untitled (Show)” could at first appear either as a painting exhibition with a few sculptures, or a sculpture exhibition with a couple of paintings, depending on which floor of Hauser & Wirth’s Chelsea redoubt you stepped into first. After absorbing it all, I couldn’t help wondering if any other artist working today can make as plausible a claim to equal mastery of both mediums. Having taken up sculpture only a decade ago, Eisenman is now clearly an artist for whom painting and sculpture are part of a single continuum: analogous ways of materially engaging with the making and

Working primarily in film and sculpture, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, seeks to give visibility and voice to displaced and marginalized communities, often through the use of what theorist Marianne Hirsch has called “testimonial objects,” i.e., physical repositories of memory that retain the agency to narrate these recollections. Tackling the lingering trauma of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of this exhibition—which also featured a selection of sculptures and photographs—was The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022, a feature-length film shot in the

Five of the ten portrait paintings in this Francis Bacon exhibition, “Faces & Figures,” were studies, indicating that they may have been works in progress. The artist’s hyperactive, agitated brushstrokes seem to imply that a person’s true essence can never be definitively nailed down. Thus, Bacon (1909–1992) offers us Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground), 1964, bizarre embryonic renderings of his burglar lover (who committed suicide in 1971), and Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976, a visceral excavation of some unknown soul with disagreeably wormlike lips. The show also

As those who have thoroughly embraced the cinematic experience in a theater can attest, a film can seem to have its own time, and somehow, somewhere, that time continues forever, even without us. Over the past twenty years, several of Rosa Barba’s film-projection installations have expanded on a Borgesian question of how we might be able to see time’s essential infinitude. Along the way, Barba has discovered various methods for reconstructing cinematic time within the sculptural realm. To do this, the artist often utilizes her own documentary footage, embedded within large spatial constructions.

Sinuous chronicles of hallucinatory concentration, the paintings of Evelyn Statsinger (1927–2016) float the possibility of an ecological subconscious, their patterns evoking the life that teems beneath the microscope’s lens. In this way, they recall Leo Steinberg’s famous “flatbed picture plane,” a term necessitated by a “tilt” that had, according to the art historian, occurred circa 1950. In this manner, the traditional vertical orientation of easel painting had given way to a horizontal substrate that served not as a continuation of space but as a receptor for information—think desktops, maps,

Smoke literally and metaphorically suffused Kiyan Williams’s solo exhibition “Un/earthing” at Lyles & King. Also lingering in the air were the smell of soil, vegetable oil, and flour, along with assorted seasonings used for summer cookout dishes. Channeling rage and a desire for representation at this turbulent moment in history, the show opened only weeks before the commencement of the January 6 select committee hearings into the Trump-instigated insurrection. Just inside the gallery’s entrance, Williams had installed a dozen four-by-six-inch nylon souvenir American flags that had previously