Contemporary Art and Culture
In 2019, an art acquisition trip brought curator Lan Shi from Beijing to New York. When the pandemic extended her stay, she shifted her focus and began working as a full-time freelance curator and art agent. Since then, she has organized more than a dozen exhibitions of varying scale, including her current project with artist Jeffrey Morabito.
With only a few days left before it closes on October 4, Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4 offers a gathering of 21 artists responding to the turbulence of the present. Curated by Tom Fitzgibbon, the exhibition unfolds less as a single argument than as a shifting field of voices, unsettled, layered, and in dialogue.
From Manhattan to Brooklyn, there is funny business happening in the galleries this holiday season, quite literally. Portraits of humorous creatures in a solo exhibition titled Donut Dog by Nancy Elsamanoudi at Doghouse Gallery are an opening act to the performances at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective. Slightly absurd paintings of “Lost” posters by Jeffrey Morabito crack a joke in a two-person exhibition titled Flat Theater at Space 776 (CLOSING DECEMBER 18th), while a humorous undertone sets the mood in the Paintings and Chairs group exhibition at Zepster Gallery.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Born in Bronxville, half Hong Kong-ese and half Italian, Jeffrey Morabito spent his early years traveling between New York and Hong Kong. Much of Morabito’s work is playing with the legibility of objects in painting. Recognizable figures are put in unrecognizable picture planes, or sometimes the reverse. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2019, he had a retrospective of his work entitled Glossolalia curated by Karen Wilkin at 1 GAP gallery. Morabito’s work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Hyperallergic, White Hot Magazine, Art Spiel, Youngspace, Deliciousline and China Daily. A recipient of the Art Cake Studio Program, he currently works in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Jeffrey Morabito’s show “Birds and Flowers, Vases and Windows” is beautiful and lush and draws you in. There are vibrant colors and wandering lines, rich passages that feel like small works unto themselves–secret gardens waiting to be discovered within each larger piece. But if there are elements that delight the eye, there are ideas that tease the mind. For running through his art and practice is a sense of duality and contradiction where opposites collide and play, posing gentle questions as they merge into new concepts and forms.
Curated by Michael David and Martin Dull
January 11 – January 27, 2019
Opening Reception Friday Jan 11, 6-9PM
All images by Sharilyn Neidhardt
The work in “New Narrative Now,” curated by Michael David and Martin Dull at M David & Co. is united by a particularly muscular and aggressive kind of paint handling – unsurprising from a gallery well-known for cultivating abstract expressionist work. The paintings also share lyrical and mythical storytelling qualities. Recognizable figures flicker and bend across these canvases, wading through turgid waters, or wrestling with ropes of paint, or bathing in dreamy color. Animals and toys crowd some canvases, women stretch tortured forms across others. Personal mythologies illuminate and infuse each canvas, casting a mysterious spell for the viewer.