In the late sixties, Hantaï abandoned the rounded biomorphic contours for an all-over approach, seeking an increased flatness in the finished paintings, a project that occupied him for the rest of his career. It is this period of intense production, from the late-sixties through the seventies, that the current show surveys.

This year, the annual is organized by Mary Manning, an artist whose own practice revolves around mindful observation and the poetics of sequencing. Venturing out to see art during the pandemic became a welcome escape for Manning, while at the same time offering a space to contemplate everyday reality.

For his first solo exhibition with Lehmann Maupin, Soft Shadows, Dominic Chambers showcases four autobiographical life-sized paintings.

Taking shape through glistening metallic scales and boundless oceanic interiors, Tess Bilhartz’s Follow Me Down grants viewers entry and exploration into a new terrain, yet offers no certainty of an escape.

If we understand the world Corbett’s art builds through the pressure of fingers and brush to extend beyond the gallery’s reach, we find a powerful model for problem-solving poised to yield an ever-adapting environment flexible enough to accommodate needs that are, as of yet, unknown.

In response to David Novros’s exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

Chris Martin has shown with Anton Kern enough times to know how to manipulate the unique characteristics of the place. Because of its essentially linear structure, the exhibition space sets up a loose expectation for some form of narrative.

Snow days are coveted by those who tire of winter gray, bringing the excitement of flurries and the stillness of bright snow banks to an otherwise bleak landscape. The ten artists exhibited in Snow Day, the Drawing Room’s latest exhibition, tap into this attraction. Snow as a subject goes to the heart of something in all works of art: the attempt to capture something fleeting.

A stupendous exhibit. I won’t put an exclamation point there, for that punctuation would be repeated, excessively. Here is a fine example of what a gallery can do in an exhibition if the focus is on a specific kind of thing, in this case on an historic collective and collaborative art-making activity, repeated differently as an off and on ritual event.

Beverly Semmes’s current show at Susan Inglett Gallery represents the multitude of modes and media with which she has been engaged for the last thirty years while introducing notable new elements that invite reflection on the relationship between her signature dress and ceramic sculptures and her “Feminist Responsibility Project” (FRP), an ongoing series in which she paints and draws over ’90s-era porn magazine pages.

It has been said that Jasper Johns’s Painted Bronze (1960) was generated by an offhand remark uttered in 1960 by the Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. The Dutchman was apparently grousing about Johns’s suave dealer, Leo Castelli, and his ability to market works by emerging artists. “Give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans,” de Kooning supposedly snarled, “and he could sell them.”

Three concurrent exhibitions in New York expand on Cuban resilience through the aesthetics of the Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África, y América Latina (OSPAAAL), a revolutionary art movement focused on Third Worldism during the Cold War.

It is a bit difficult to characterize Ramírez’s structures—not quite buildings, but clearly aligned with them. Although the artist worked at a time that saw the beginnings of our contemporary culture, there is something both ancient and properly modernist about his efforts.

Soth’s own pictures consider the metaphorical and emotional weight of photographs but also the nature of his engagement with his subjects

Paintings from 2017 to 2021 make up this exhibition of Bill Jensen’s remarkable recent work. This period was one of growing instability capped with a pandemic, unforeseen in 2017 and still very much in progress in 2021.

It is understandable that there is so much interest in Mirza’s work; his freshness, originality, and apparent joy in producing his installations puts him in that position.

There are two Rackstraw Downes in this remarkable show of 33 drawings and one oil on canvas. The range is huge, from 1975 until 2020, but with the bulk of the drawings made in 2020. Not exactly a retrospective, but enough of one for us to see two discrete phases in his career: his mature style and his late style.

Entropic, phenomenological, gendered, and ecological ideas are all brought forth to display an exceptional sculptural practice that might otherwise seem disparate. But the strength of interconnected concepts and form presents Larner as an endlessly fascinating, endearing, and unique sculptor who coolly traverses art historical movements.

Across this exhibition’s unprecedented gathering of works, Yoakum’s unique visual language becomes apparent. A vocabulary of parallel lines, doubled lines and tessellated organic shapes dovetail, merge and proliferate below skies of blue and faded peach.

The recent exhibition, Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden, follows in the spirit of this change, although it is drawn from the brilliant depositories of the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden. These collections are largely focused on drawings produced during the Northern Renaissance and Baroque period, although they also include more recent works.

The recently opened exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism, is a Pissarro retrospective which, instead of uncertainty, would likely bring a lot of pride to the artist. Curated by the museum’s director, Josef Helfenstein, and Christophe Duvivier, this exhaustive show gathers nearly 200 works by the artist, including 100 paintings.

It’s an illuminating show. Instead of confronting lots of sculptures lite, as some would have it, this retrospective illuminates the changing role objects have played in Koons’s career. Digging deeper, you’ll notice, too, that the terms statues and sculpture are not interchangeable. Though paintings and prints are on display here, the large, three-dimensional works primarily draw our attention.

The Jewish Museum’s present show is a spinoff of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, the best-selling book from 2010 by the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, an elegant, erudite, auto-biographical, and equal parts devastating and elevating family memoir. Designed by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and curated by Stephen Brown and Shira Backer in collaboration with the book’s author, the exhibition documents through 450 objects the rise, fall, and perseverance of the Odessan grain-merchants-turned-bankers Ephrussi family over a century and across three continents, and the odysseys of their prized possessions.

While Sophie Taeuber-Arp is perhaps best known in Europe—given the majority of readings on her work stem from translations in German, French, and Italian—her relatively brief career was a formidable one, to say the least. Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art is a magnificent, if not exemplary, exhibition that includes some 400 works intuitively conceived and produced in diverse media by a remarkable avant-garde practitioner.

I saw Helène Aylon’s (1931–2020) current exhibition, Reflections, at Kerry Schuss Gallery in Tribeca immediately before heading to the opening of Colette Lumiere’s show at Company Gallery’s new Elizabeth Street location. The latter, curated by Kenta Murakami, is vividly titled Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972–1983. I have known both artists for decades. Their works and installations, their methods and practices couldn’t be more different.

Thoughtfully co-curated by Gerry Beegan and Donna Gustafson, a selection of posters, print media, courtroom sketches, artwork, and photographs document the construction of Angela Davis’s public image by mainstream and alternative media. Interspersed with the archival material are works by contemporary artists who continue to build upon Davis’s philosophies of freedom.

A couple is lying in bed. A woman, with her arms raised and left knee bent, leans languorously on the man behind her, who buries his face in a pillow. Bright light from the open curtains falls over the peaks and valleys of their bodies. We feel awkward as we stumble into their private sphere. But are we voyeurs or invaders? The feeling prevails through Wild Horses, Sim Smith gallery’s exhibition of paintings and photographs in southeast London, which focuses upon the subject of couples in various guises.

The elliptical, parabolic nature of Frize’s approach to painting means that the strict chronology of production is not linear or predictable. Rather, previous methods or series of paintings return, thus requiring us to check their dates. We see quickly that a series of paintings may not be exhausted and abandoned simply because it is followed immediately by a very different series, and can in fact be the source of reactivated, ongoing exploration.

Yoakum’s landscapes have been well-known in the world of folk and outsider art for four decades, but their enfranchisement by the larger art world has taken longer, even though the work of this Chicago artist was recognized and collected by a group of trained artists in the same city almost as soon as it appeared in the 1960s.

Holly Coulis’s brilliant, punning title perfectly captures the intellectual conceit that drives her equally brilliant show. Her work, picking up on the eyes in the title, has always been a matter of focus. How, in her earlier paintings, to perceive a still life: should the size of objects in a painting be determined by reality or should size have nothing to do with representational verisimilitude?

In Lands End, artists have taken over all sections of the former restaurant, even those not normally seen by diners, such as the kitchen and trash areas. The exhibition is presented by the FOR-SITE Foundation and curated by its executive director, Cheryl Haines, who invited 27 international artists and collectives to address the perils of climate change.

By sheer coincidence, I visited No Tears: In Conversation with Horace Pippin, which situates Pippin’s John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) in the context of critical texts and Dean Moss’s video johnbrown (2014), on December 2, the 162nd anniversary of John Brown’s hanging. It was my second encounter with the abolitionist that week, having visited Kara Walker’s exhibition—where Brown made an appearance in the artist’s video Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021)—at Sikkema Jenkins just a few days earlier.

resented at The Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Witch Hunt organized by curators Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood showcases the work of 16 female-identified artists across varying mediums and from a global lens. Representing 13 different countries, the 15 projects in the two-pronged exhibition probe and expand what feminist art looks like and what questions it asks, while highlighting the significance of performance and video-based work in feminist art practice.

Jane Freilicher (1924–2014) and Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019), both important painters, were very different artists. She made figurative paintings of still life objects with countryside and urban scenes in the background, while he was an abstract painter whose subjects had elusive, “real” sources. They hardly knew each other, and they certainly didn’t influence each other. What, then, is to be gained displaying them together, in this exhibition of some 16 works, late paintings by both of them?

Last fall I imprudently ran up my company Amex to buy materials for a body of sculpture I wanted to make. So begins Darren Bader’s latest foray into the funny, sexy, sad lives of objects: a compendium of wall-mounted and floor-balanced assemblages—knickknacks, tchotchkes, doo-dads, detritus, debris, and crap—all of which exclaim a certain thingness, plus a sentimental value somewhere between an Etsy-trained AI and at least 10,000 Midwestern monkeys banging out Hamlet.

John Willenbecher’s work is an art of anticipation. His precise forms anticipate the seriousness of Minimalism, while his paradoxically playful objects beg to be handled, a quashed call to participation impossibly choreographed behind glass.

Brilliantly curated, this succinct show of 21 works created between 1972 and 2021 manages to present Carl Andre in three modes. Simultaneously monumental and intimate, these pieces provide a nuanced view of an artist all-too-easily consigned to Minimalism and left there in splendid but intellectually mute isolation.

Stand still and direct your gaze three stories up into the MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium and prepare to be arrested by the motif of black-and-white in Adam Pendleton’s Who is Queen? The work, monumental in scale, with its three soaring scaffold sculptures, taking up the height of the 60-foot atrium, is his most “autobiographical” to date and considers history not as fixed or static, but rather continuous, alive, and ever-evolving in real time.

Raymond Saunders’s current solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps presents a series of gripping assemblages, hung on the walls like excavated fragments. The individual configurations might be referred to as slabs, panels, boards, or slates. However, thinking of the works instead as decks of culture or rafts of visuality may lend us a better lens for interpreting the work.

The shimmer of bright sunlight on wine-dark water, endless swirled striations of minerals in a Catskill outcrop, blurred light beams through dust: Chris Martin presents one-to-one dialogues—examinations of the minutiae of ineffability. In this newest cycle of paintings, Martin toys with aesthetic details in nature that have their correlatives in his arsenal of surfaces, textures, and non-repeating but predictable patterns.

Across the barren landscapes of self-taught artist Marcus Jahmal’s recent paintings, barren trees dot empty horizons, bathed in the hot glow of ambers, burgundies, and reds. Stripped of any foliage, their limbs reach like outstretched arms towards the sky while hollows in the trunks form elongated mouths that look as if they are singing, moaning, or supplicating to the gods.

Georg Baselitz, now in his 80s, continues to produce remarkable expressionist art, usually of figures seen upside-down. Born in Eastern Germany and educated in several art schools there, he moved to West Germany, where he first encountered abstraction. In 1969, he showed, for the first time, a painting with an inverted figure. Since then, this motif has been a signature element of his style.

Shikō Munakata (1903–75), a Tokyo-based printmaker, became internationally famous in the 1950s. Starting in 1959, he often visited New York, which he thought of as his second home. Much inspired by Vincent van Gogh, (who himself was of course much influenced by prints from Japan), Munakata modernized the style of classic Japanese prints to present subjects from contemporary life. This exhibition includes nearly 100 of his woodblock prints, most in black-and-white, some in color.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s work has always attached particular significance to the unhurriedly contemplative awareness of the moment and the durations embedded therein. In the artist’s eclectic inaugural show for Moscow’s GES-2, he presents a curated group exhibition as a piece of autobiography.

Nordman joins Gaea and contemporary feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray in demanding a break from the phallogocentric and imagining a new creation myth. In her “Plato’s Hystera” (hystera is Greek for uterus) from Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray advocates that we consider the cave as a place of origins. This is in opposition to the heliocentric view of the outer world as the source of enlightenment.

Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

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