Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Gary Simmons is a Los Angeles based artist with New York roots. On view at Metro Pictures, New York is ‘Screaming into the Ether’ consisting of a collection of paintings that expands Simmons’ examination into cultural nuances. ‘Screaming into the Ether’ confronts the propagation of racial stereotypes which continue to frame the world. Review by Sheena Carrington
Bortolami, 39 Walker St, New York, NY 10013, United States
Every few years or so, the death knell of painting is sounded. Critics, artists and gallerists proclaim that the time of painting, is over. But for Rebecca Morris, the Los-Angeles based artist known for her ambitious abstractions, painting continues to surprise. “Abstraction never left, motherfuckers,” Morris proclaimed in her manifesto, written in 2006: “Don’t pretend you don’t work hard… Be out for blood….” Review by Claire Phillips
Today as the boundaries between the personal and public are so murky, sousveillance is both a form of protection and an act of surrendering personal identity to corporate data banks. The act itself caught between an effort to control and shape one’s image and a helpless compulsion to either hand over aspects of private life or deliver an expected idea of self to an imagined audience. Keelin Montzingo’s paintings reflect on this grey area, neither criticising nor celebrating but rather trying to decode the way we have turned the camera on ourselves and use digital space to reclaim ownership of the female form and redefine the gaze. Referencing 20th Century male painters, Montzingo uses the image of the cutout female nude, weaving compositions of layered bodies which appear in nondescript digital spaces. Figures float over pixelated backgrounds, washes of colour and digital glitch in a non-physical realm of disruption and static. Text by Gabriella Sonabend
signs and symbols, 102 Forsyth Street, New York, NY 10002
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Sharon Louden & Hrag Vartanian’s latest collaborative project, ‘Origins’, draws on years of conversations, exchanges and shared experiences. First iterated at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Residency Program in 2018, the project remains a living thing. It changes in step with their longstanding friendship. Review by Rosanna van Mierlo
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA
The 2017 edition of the Whitney Biennial is remembered for the animated debate surrounding the inclusion of a controversial painting by Dana Schutz titled ‘Open Casket’ (2016). It spurred an open discussion about cultural appropriation, white privilege and freedom of creativity. It divided much of the art world and prompted a discussion panel with The Racial Imaginary Institute titled ‘Perspectives on Race and Representation.’ The painting ultimately remained. Despite the best intensions of curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, this year’s Whitney Biennial wallows yet again in controversy. Review by Anaïs Castro
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W 21st St #1, New York, NY 10011, USA
Brazilian artist Laura Lima’s work has infamously flouted even the most provisional classifications art discourses run on today, let alone the traditional ones. Based in Rio de Janeiro, and initially spurred on by interests in law and philosophy, Lima continues to cultivate a body of work that builds on post-relational art concerns and the aesthetic, if not political, principles espoused by the fallout of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete Movement, in both theory and practice. Review by Arthur Ivan Bravo
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, USA
Mexican-born, Berlin-based multimedia artist Mariana Castillo Deball’s practice interrogates the junctures between fields of knowledge as disparate as archaeology, anthropology, material culture, art and history. More specifically, Castillo Deball’s works probe into the hows and whys of objects transformed – (re-)activated, granted agency, even fetishized – into art objects, with all due implications. Review by Arthur Ivan Bravo
Joshua Liner Gallery, 540 West 28th Street, New York, NY 10001
Benjamin Murphy speaks to painter Andy Dixon ahead of his upcoming solo exhibition 'Look at This Stuff Isn’t It Neat' at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York.
Transfer Gallery, 1030 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Contrary to the exhibition’s title, which suggests a state of stasis, Holberton’s work oscillates between analogue and digital, animate and inanimate, in order to destablise the notion of these binaries, and explore the possibility of a third space. Review by Grace Storey
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10021, USA
Like Life, current on view at the Met Breuer, is a sweeping paean to historical contemporaneity, but where crowded chaos or a pandering sense of prurience could easily reign, co-curators Sheena Wagstaff and Luke Syson manage to imbue the eerie magic of mimesis with an academic bent that won’t intimidate fair-weather tourists. Review by Torey Akers
Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W 17th St, New York, NY 10011, USA
Currently at the Rubin Museum, New York, is A Lost Future, a yearlong exhibition on view through January 28th, 2019, showcasing explorations of the future, a theme that in this context is applied specifically to Bengal and South Asia by Shezad Dawood, Matti Braun, and the Otolith. Review by Louis Soulard
Art in General, 145 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA
Zach Blas’ debut US solo show, Contra-Internet, at Art in General, New York, is a 28-minute long film, ‘Jubilee 2033’, inspired by the opening sequence of Derek Jarman’s seminal queer punk film ‘Jubilee’ (1978). Blas’ film imagines the jubilee of the internet in 2033 and evidences his broader endeavour ‘to explore contemporary technology in relationship to feminism and queerness’. Review by Grace Storey
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, USA
While each painting on view in the 2018 Triennial: Songs For Sabotage, at the New Museum, New York, might pack a punch on its own, when grouped, this pervasive, globalized homogeneity only undercuts the swollen pomp ascribed to Songs of Sabotage by its organizers, and points, perhaps, to a more sinister condescension afoot in the galleries themselves. Review by Torey Akers
Lisson Gallery, 138 10th Avenue, New York
In the first exhibition at Lisson Gallery, New York, by Californian artist Channa Horwitz, her seminal Sonkinotography series of permutational drawings, created from1968 until her death in 2013, are presented. The exhibition shows an artist who in 1969 had her early compositions dismissed by a critic of the Los Angeles Times as 'Pretty Notations by Valley Housewife' finally receiving the recognition that she deserves. Review by Grace Storey
