Exhibition Review – Page 5

July 8, 2026July 8, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

Andreas Schulze’s exploration of color in the cool pastures of cake

In his show Cake (2026) at Sprüth Magers, New York, Andreas Schulze explores the visual effects of saturated color and geometric form, using cake as the setting for his investigation.

In his paintings, Schulze creates an inner three-dimensional universe, which serves as a bell jar. In his imaginary pastures, Schulze creates surreal interiorscapes, built of geometric shapes and flat backdrops of color-gradient skies, juxtaposed with rounded spheres and spirals painted in three-dimensional perspective, with depth and shadow. The pictorial space he builds gives a stage for him to explore various phenomena, in this case, cake, and he does so with a playful seriousness, experimenting with the basic forms and images that make up cakes: candles, frosting, fruit, sprinkles, and layers.

July 7, 2026July 13, 2026, by Chunbum Park

Hollis Heichemer: Transcension over Anthropocentrism and Breakaway into Landscapes

Hollis Heichemer’s solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart titled “moving in stillness” is a profound investigation of existence and the meaning of the world through the study of landscapes and Mother Nature. Is Humanism an anthropocentric perspective that is ultimately flawed and furnishes humanity with the arrogance to destroy the environment and disregard the principles of empathy? How can we overcome the diseased thought that humans have the right to master or exploit nature for profit? And how has the artist found great peace and liberation through her lifelong study of Mother Nature and her generous nourishment and wisdom? Does Heichemer apply the paint purely as a formal exercise of abstract colors and relationships, or does the paint become the flesh of Mother Nature, by the observation of which we can become and live through the painting as landscapes?

July 6, 2026July 6, 2026, by Amanda Church

Tommy May: Sammy’s at Half Gallery

Life’s a beach, or maybe it should be if it could only resemble Tommy May’s resplendent scenes of light reflecting on Sammy’s bay beach on the east end of Long Island. Are beach scenes banal? Despite a robust art-historical lineage of beach paintings ranging from Milton Avery to Alex Katz, not to mention myriad others, including Picasso, Monet, and Degas, there’s a tendency to relegate the genre to kitschy decoration, best suited for motel rooms or dentists’ offices. Despite a softness to May’s surfaces that could cross into that territory, the paintings deftly skirt it through their atmospheric intensity and sophisticated touch.

July 6, 2026July 6, 2026, by Shuhan Zhang

Growing After the Embers: A Review of Bùi Thanh Tâm’s Solo Exhibition Here on and after

For a long time, when I was young, I felt distant from the idea of “history.” In textbooks, history always appeared through years, wars, reforms, and changes of political power, as if it were made of events already organized and settled. Yet the history that truly remains in the body often appears in more hidden forms. It may be a silence within family narratives, a memory that one generation chooses to avoid, a recurring pattern in festive images, or a color that seems joyful while quietly carrying a wound. Very often, history continues to exist in another form, lingering in images, bodies, and everyday experience.

July 1, 2026June 28, 2026, by Sherly Fan

The Luckiest Show You Will See This Summer

What would you do if you wanted to bring more luck into your life? Drawing from her observations of how people across cultures use rituals and superstitions to summon luck, Gail M Boykewich’s show Into the Wolf’s Mouth feels almost like a field guide to how we pray, wish for good fortune, and stay hopeful enough to keep moving forward. Rather than treating luck as simple optimism, Gail presents it as a language of survival — a way people negotiate uncertainty, longing, heartbreak, and the desire for a better future. The title is inspired by the Italian idiom “in bocca al lupo”, a phrase used to wish someone luck as they enter danger. It beautifully implies a universal experience: the desire for more, for solutions, for security, or simply for a way to feel better, especially within our current turbulent and unstable political status quo.

June 29, 2026June 28, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

The Biennale That Broke Itself

The 61st International Art Exhibition arrives in grief, political fury, and institutional crisis. It is one of the more galvanizing editions in recent memory.

The lagoon light still flatters everything it touches, but this year, Venice has the feel of a city that stayed up too late arguing. May 7, 2026 — the one morning of the press preview period spared by both rain and protest — was the kind of day Venice is famous for: blue sky and large cinematic cumuli drifting above the Queen of the Adriatic. Police stood watch outside the Israeli and Russian pavilions. The queues at the Giardini were long; those at the Arsenale were longer. In years of attending press previews, I have rarely encountered such a congested or physically demanding environment — the crowd, indistinguishable from a general-public opening, consumed by the compulsive and indiscriminate act of photographing everything in sight.

June 26, 2026June 24, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

From A to Z and the Bodies In Between at Nunu

Borges once described a fictional Chinese encyclopedia that classified animals into categories so incompatible — beings that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that look like flies from a distance — that the whole idea of classification begins to feel like a kind of absurd fiction. Nancy Bowen’s first solo exhibition at Nunu Fine Art invokes exactly that suspicion: that the dictionary, the archive, the great pre-internet repositories of everything, are not neutral records but constructions, and that constructions can be dismantled, embellished, and made to mean something new.

June 25, 2026June 25, 2026, by Melissa Stern

Women Across America 1945-1979 at Eric Firestone

Eric Firestone Gallery, in its continuing support of underrepresented and female artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, has mounted an ambitious and interesting exhibition on now through July 11 at the gallery’s location on Great Jones Street in NYC. The exhibition is devoted to women who worked in abstraction from 1945 to 1979, thus giving the curators a very specific window within which to work.

June 24, 2026June 24, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Dynamic and tender moments in Angelo Vasta’s Luci Spente Exhibition at Tappeto Volante’s new gallery location

Angelo Vasta’s exhibition, Luci Spente, meaning Lights Off, at Tappeto Volante’s newest gallery in Tribeca, greets you with energetic works on paper in which bodies overlap, lean into one another, and drift across the surface. The figures carry a deeply personal connection as Vasta stresses the importance of closeness, exchange, and intimacy within domestic spaces. While not as brightly colored as his previous works, the colors here are deeper and softer, carrying a more somber tone. Vasta welcomes us into the spaces. He welcomes us as if we are a part of the group.

June 23, 2026June 20, 2026, by Noa Charuvi

Basis: Gabriela Vainsencher at Asya Geisberg

At Basis, Gabriela Vainsencher’s second solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery, the artist continues to explore themes of motherhood, domestic life, the female body, and her relationship with art history as an artist-mother, a figure traditionally marginalized. Vainsencher’s work resonates within a broader context of artists who have embraced domesticity and motherhood as central creative subjects, such as Louise Bourgeois, who explored maternal forms and the body. Vainsencher explains that she chose the title thinking about how early childhood forms the foundation for all experiences going forward, as having children does to the parent, and also since she finds herself physically becoming a basis or pedestal when her kids climb on her, a familiar experience to all parents of small children.