Contemporary Art and Culture
The two-person show of luminous abstract wall works at Atlantic Gallery offers viewers a dynamic sensory experience where light, shadow and unexpected materials form a conversation about how we see and engage with the world.
Dance the Distance: Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer at Atlantic Gallery.
Curated by Suzan Shutan. It runs through March 23, 2025
Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.
Continue reading “Barbara Friedman’s All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch&Co”
A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.
Continue reading “Up: Janet Goldner’s Zigzags at FiveMyles”
Currently on view at Nunu Fine Art’s New York Project Space is View from My Window, a solo exhibition by Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu. The exhibition features over 20 small oil paintings, predominantly 13” x 10” in size, and is housed in the gallery’s lower level—below ground—intensifying the sense of intimacy in both subject matter and conceptual approach. Lu’s subject matter, at first glance, appears as fleeting moments captured in time, but upon closer inspection, they reveal layers of surrealism, irony, and political undertones.
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Water moves. It reflects, absorbs, distorts. It never repeats itself. River-Rising, a four-channel video installation by Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller, is built on these elements. Filmed along three river estuaries—the Garonne in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River—the work isolates the shifting surfaces of water.
Continue reading “Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller: River-Rising at Hunterdon Art Museum”
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.
Continue reading “Insider Outsider”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Continue reading “Robert Yarber- Regard and Abandon at Nicodim Gallery”