HIGHLIGHTS
The fall season opened strong with some very exciting painting shows in Chelsea and its outskirts. The not to be missed stand alone Monya Rowe Gallery is featuring work by two innovative female painters, while in the heart of Chelsea, Hollis Taggart is featuring Tim Kent’s captivating works in his second solo show with the gallery. Right across the street, Fergus McCaffrey Gallery is showcasing fresh work by a seasoned German painter Reinhard Pods.
Daily Nights at Monya Rowe Gallery @monya_rowe_gallery
On view through: October 12, 2024
Featuring: Lacey Black & Aubrey Levinthal
The haunting and melancholy figures by Aubrey Levinthal found an unlikely but complementary pairing to Lacey Black’s colorful, fantastical, and bizarre dream imagery in this two person show. Aubrey Levinthal, known for her muted colors and thinly painted figures which are carefully composed in space, pushes this body of work to new extremes by presenting juxtaposing shapes and playing with Vuillardesque optical illusion. The showstopper is a painting called Ascending Subway (Stairs) which shows a female figure in a chartreuse coat and a few others emerging from the subway with the cityscape in the top quarter of the painting. The seemingly geometric composition comes to one moment of peak drama where the top of the female figure’s head is aligned with the top stair.
Lacey Black, a new artist to the gallery, brings a fantastical flair to the show with Bosch-like dream imagery and bright but also thinly painted surfaces. Her various choices of surfaces, which range from paper to panel to canvas, all have a multi-layered transparent quality, adding to her paintings’ dreamlike feel. Black’s complex narrative and ample detail in each piece allow endless observation of her unraveling stories.
Edges Off a Model at Hollis Taggart Gallery @hollistaggart
On view through: October 12, 2024
Featuring: Tim Kent
Tim Kent’s paintings in this show have reached a new level of transcendence and altered reality through his mastery of effortless and action-full brushstrokes. The altered reality in his imagery, accentuated by color and form, takes the viewer on a journey to the strange and beautiful spaces that influence Kent’s compositions. This body of work is all moderately sized paintings but, in comparison to his previous work, is much more colorful and spatially complex.
Kent still toys with a perception of time allowing paint to both captivate the beauty and the strangeness of the subject. The partially realized or blurred figures that seem to have already left the space give a sense of a timelapse that’s happening in front of our eyes. The incredible depth of space and the dramatic sense of light in every piece only makes these paintings more intriguing. These works nod to the classical painting traditions and deep knowledge of art history while bringing a modern take on painting: the mastery of a true virtuoso.
Reinhard Pods: Happy Hour New Paintings 2023- 2024 at Fergus McCaffrey Gallery @fergusmccaffrey
On view through: October 26, 2024
Featuring: Reinhard Pods
Reinhard Pods brings the unapologetic German attitude to this season’s Chelsea exhibitions. His paintings are immediate and gritty with the same bad boy charm that he is so well known for. With the familiar echoes of graffiti, this particular body of work is much lighter and a lot more colorful than some of his previous heavier-painted canvases.
The work is refreshing and shows the versatility of this well-seasoned artist. In particular, paintings like Happy Hour IV, which feature both immediate, thick brush strokes in bright yellow and spray paint, which there are several of in the show, also have fairly large areas of white canvas showing. These works breathe and move with intriguing surfaces full of physicality and valor. The presence of the artist in these works is axiomatic.
About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, and ArtSpiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. @annashukeylo