Exhibition Review – Page 7

March 5, 2025March 19, 2025

Insider Outsider

A painting of a person in a suit and tie

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Adhemar Ahmad- portray 1969. Oilt, thin wooden board, unprimed canvas, staples. 32.5 x 24.25 2002

This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.

February 27, 2025March 3, 2025

Rope and Revolver at Catharine Clark Gallery

Installation shot of WOUNDED, Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery.

February 25, 2025March 3, 2025

Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism at Drawing Rooms

A display of art on a white surface

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Anne Trabuen (left wall), Denise Treizman (right wall), Carol Salmanson (front)

At Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 presents works that engage with Jewish identity, mysticism, and inherited traditions. Curated by Anne Trauben, the exhibition, on view from February 13 to April 5, 2025, features artists Carol Salmanson, Denise Treizman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Pesya Altman, and Trauben herself. Their works—encompassing drawing, painting, fiber, mixed media, and light-based sculpture—explore memory, ritual, and transformation.

February 24, 2025March 3, 2025

Ming Wang’s solo show Through Lingering Window at Fou Gallery

Ming Wang: Through Lingering Windows installation view. Photograph by Ken Lee ©Ming Wang, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Ming Wang’s solo exhibition, Through Lingering Window, curated by Ashley Ouderkirk at Fou Gallery, creates a meditative and healing enclave amidst the bustling streets of Union Square in New York. Located on the seventh floor of a Fifth Avenue building, the gallery becomes an intimate retreat where Wang’s oil paintings evoke a sense of stillness within the restless cityscape.

February 20, 2025March 3, 2025

Robert Yarber- Regard and Abandon at Nicodim Gallery

Robert Yarber, *Error’s Conquest*, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 71 by 130 inches. Photo courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

Neon nights are brought to life within Robert Yarber’s paintings. The large-scale paintings in Nicodim Gallery’s survey of his works bring viewers along for a wild ride. Whether it’s pulling us into a dark hotel room, lit solely by the blue light of a droning, static television set, or throwing us outside, into the life of the party, and possibly, over the balcony and into the air- we are left in suspense of what comes next. It’s as if we were sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone’s life story unfold.

February 19, 2025March 3, 2025

Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Installation of “Intersection” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Image courtesy of the gallery.

The current exhibition by Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey, running from February 8 to March 8, explores a subject central to painting since its inception. Independently, their work engages with abstraction and figuration, using color, surface, and shape as primary vehicles. When viewed in person, the exhibition demonstrates how each artist approaches their medium to address their own interest between abstraction and the figure. However, when this exhibition is viewed together in the digital realm, another issue emerges—one that was pivotal in art criticism during the 1980s and 1990s that deals with an issue that pre-occupied Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco: the topic of simulation and simulacra or simulacra and hyperreality.

February 11, 2025February 11, 2025

Judy Pfaff Taught Them to Break the Rules—Now They’re Sharing the Stage

A room with art pieces on the wall

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Installation view

Judy Pfaff has never played by the rules—her art bends them, her teaching breaks them, and her career is proof she never needed them. A MacArthur “Genius” who reshaped installation art, she has spent five decades throwing order out the window in favor of energy, movement, and sheer creative force. That ethos is on full display at Art Cake in Brooklyn, where Pfaff and three former students have reunited—not in a classroom, but as equals in a space that refuses to sit still.

February 6, 2025February 5, 2025

Keisha Prioleau-Martin: Recenter at Olympia

Recenter is a delightful return to Impressionism in many ways. Prioleau-Martin chooses for her subject matter decidedly impressionistic themes—moments at home, moments of introspection, and unrehearsed tenderness, all the casual yet poignant subject matter that marked painting’s initial move from the historic and fantastical to the everyday and human in the 1870s. She also employs the paint with a focus to capture the spur of the moment and the unexpected. Her small-scale ceramics, composed on the templates of stock sculptural types—odalisques, Rodin-like romantic poses, and busts, are, by virtue of their Lilliputian size and wit, Impressionist re-interpretations of dry classic forms. They start out as one thing and shift mid-stream into another: this is particularly evident in Prioleau-Martin’s bust Self-portrait (2024) which masquerades as a planter with fabric and wire vegetal tendrils emanating from her cranium along with her braids.

February 3, 2025February 2, 2025

Jim Condron: Collected Things at the New York Studio School

Installation view, photo courtesy of Etty Yaniv

Jim Condron’s exhibition at the New York Studio School, curated by Karen Wilkin, continues his consistently thoughtful Collected Things series, inviting viewers to see everyday objects as vessels of personal and cultural memory. The sculptures, varying in size from around 20 to 96 inches, playfully transform seemingly ordinary items into layered narratives that bring unexpected elements together.

January 30, 2025January 31, 2025

The Art of Kimbap: A Reflection on Trust and Vulnerability

*My Right Hands and Your Left Hand, Cooking with Joshua Kun Kyung Sok. 2025.*

Kun Kyung Sok’s latest performance, “My Right Hand and Your Left Hand,” held at Space 776, invites audiences into an intimate and aromatic exploration of collaboration, creativity, and trust. The performance centers on Kun and her co-performer (a rolling cast of artists and non-artists) working together to prepare kimbap, a traditional Korean dish, using only her right hand and the other participant’s left hand. On opening night, while the salted streets of the Lower East Side froze, Kun’s audience huddled in close to witness a warm scene of clumsy vulnerability and palpable humor. “Armed” with a single knife, the two performers navigated the challenges of mutual control, toppling salt shakers and spilling rice, all the while the hypnotic scent of freshly prepared food permeated the space.