Exhibition Review – Art Spiel

November 21, 2025November 21, 2025

Shervone Neckles: Steeping Memory

We do rely on art for healing purposes, but art that directly heals often requires a performative component. That is not to say that it delivers results, but there needs to be an interactive element in which the art appears to “give back” to the viewer. I visited the shrine of St. Anthony in Padua, for me, it was mostly to see the Donatello altarpiece and the Antonio and Tullio Lombardo friezes, but it was impossible to ignore the numerous worshippers at the shrine, their foreheads resting against the saint’s sarcophagus, inserting small pieces of paper with requests for St. Anthony. For nine years, Shervone Neckles has wheeled her healing cart — the Creative Wellness Gathering Station throughout the five boroughs and dispensed potions to fascinated and grateful onlookers.

November 18, 2025November 18, 2025

Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space

Judy Pfaff, *Barcelona*, 1990, steel, plastic, glass, table and chairs, 168 x 168 x 168 inches

It began, as many enduring ideas do, over wine and conversation. Michael David, painter, curator, and gallerist of M. David & Co., was speaking at a dinner with Judy Pfaff about her close friend and early champion Al Held. The talk drifted to another dear friend, Elizabeth Murray, and then to her admiration for Frank Stella. From that exchange evolved the idea for Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space, curated by Michael David, and now on view at Art Cake in cooperation with The Brooklyn Rail.

November 17, 2025November 14, 2025

Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel

Fran Shalom’s paintings reduce form to its essentials while preserving the marks of revision and doubt. The surface becomes a record of both decision and hesitation, clarity and its undoing. Her compositions are direct yet ambivalent. Airy lines float within vivid color fields, their edges both firm and uncertain, altogether suggesting a state of being through color, motion, and gesture rather than representation. They obstinately remain abstract, teasing recognition without granting it.

November 10, 2025November 10, 2025

What The House Dreams Of – Two painters at Ruby Dakota Gallery

Athena Parella, Bedtime Story, Charcoal on paper, 17.5 x 22, 2025

“Childhood” has always been a fertile source for artists in all disciplines. We all had a childhood and, for better or worse, we all carry memories that often haunt us throughout our lifetimes. Ruby/Dakota, a scrappy young gallery in the East Village is presenting a two- person show entitled What The House Dreams Of that brings together two young artists with memories to share.

November 5, 2025October 31, 2025

Myth as Metamorphosis at Freight + Volume

Jorge K. Cruz & Elizabeth Insogna, Divine Myth– Faith and Flesh, installation view, photo courtesy of the gallery

In the quiet hum of Freight + Volume, myth breathes anew — through clay, through oil, through the occulted pulse of memory and transformation. Elizabeth Insogna’s luminous ceramics rise from ionic pedestals like ancient offerings, while Jorge K. Cruz’s visceral canvases create a kaleidoscopic backsplash, drawing viewers into a dialogue between the sacred and the subversive.

October 29, 2025October 30, 2025

Recording is Seeing at Tappeto Volante: Marta Lee 11:11

Installation photograph of *11:11,* at Tappeto Volante

A few weeks ago, Marta Lee visited my studio. A few days after that visit, she texted me:

“Hey, what is the deal with that long wood piece of molding that was kind of to the left of where u were sitting? It’s gorgeous”

Marta was referring to an 8-foot-long piece of molding I’ve used as a mahlstick (also spelled ‘maulstick’) since 2018. I probably found it in the trash in my first studio building on Grand Street in Bushwick, and I’ve never thought of it beyond its use as an object to balance my arm on while painting. But Marta was right – it is sort of gorgeous. It’s got a spiraling geometric pattern carved into it, and paint streaks where I swipe it while lifting brushes. This realization led to another – just how unique Marta’s way of seeing the world really is.

October 27, 2025October 7, 2025

Flora Yukhnovich: Four Seasons at the Frick Collection Cabinet Gallery

Installation view of Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons in The Frick Collection’s Cabinet Gallery, showing Autumn and Winter. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

What draws artists and audiences back to the Baroque now, in a century shaped by speed and fracture? Perhaps it is the recognition of kinship. The seventeenth century was also an age of cataclysm and wonder — continents mapped, the cosmos recalculated, science expanding perception. The Baroque arose amid fracture: religious schisms, shifting empires, faith and politics entangled. Art became theatrical, constructed to move the spirit through light, motion, and sensation.

October 21, 2025October 20, 2025

Johnny g mullen: Rehearsals in Movement

Installation View, (photo courtesy of Yanmei Jiang)

Walking into Peninsula gallery, an intimate space in the Two Bridges neighborhood, viewers are greeted with the energetic and punchy paintings in Johnny Mullen’s solo show- rehearsals in movement. Mullen has pinpointed his focus on layering paint, motion, and plays with both transparency and opacity in this new series. With the gallery itself being so intimate, you get a close and personal view of the works, a deeper look that proves very rewarding. Meandering from one painting to the next, each of a consistent size, you get to join mullen on his explorations within each piece. Expanding from his interest in color theory, Mullen has added an expanded investigation of layering and gesture within the pieces.

October 20, 2025October 9, 2025

Delusions of Grandeur -Grayson Perry at the Wallace Collection

Totally Unique Thing. AI generated image, glazed ceramic. Installed on bespoke wallpaper, designed by Perry and produced by Liberty of London

The Wallace Collection, a storied historic mansion in London that houses an extraordinary, far-ranging collection of art and objects, invited the artist Grayson Perry to embed and create an exhibition that responds to their collections. Collected during the18^th and 19^th Centuries, the museum is dripping in Rococo, houses breathtaking Old Master paintings, amour, ceramics, medieval relics and sculpture. It would be, for a lesser artist, a daunting assignment.

October 6, 2025October 9, 2025

Ashley Garrett: Psyche at September

*Welling,* 2025, oil on canvas, 65” x 115”

Psyche, Ashley Garrett’s exhibition of paintings at September Gallery in Kinderhook, has a mix of large and small oil paintings, and pastels. The small works have a restless energy emphasized by Garrett’s staccato mark-making. The large canvases give Garrett’s brush plenty of room to deliver longer, more fluid gestures. This freedom allows her paint strokes to slide over and under each other in a flow that can give her compositions a quiet intensity, like tall grass seething in a high wind. Garrett has lightened up her palette to include more pinks and a range of whites and pale grays.