Uncategorized – Art Spiel

June 25, 2025June 24, 2025

Natalia Zourabova: Nightlight at Kaliner Gallery

I am meeting Natalia at Kaliner gallery on a steamy day in June. The artist, who arrived here for this milestone exhibition, her first solo in New York, is uncertain when and how she will be able to return home to Israel. The war in Iran was launched just a week after the opening. Stranded away from her family, she remains determined and optimistic. This toughness in the face of chaos is also evident in her artwork. The paintings in Nightlight are vibrant, large, and striking.

June 10, 2025June 8, 2025

Adriane Colburn: Seeing by Mapping

Artist Adriane Colburn lived in San Francisco for over twenty years. That time was formative—personally and creatively. At the same time, she maintained a consistent presence on the East Coast. She’s from Vermont and has always spent summers there, with a lasting connection to that part of New England and its relationship to the land.

May 19, 2025May 22, 2025

Ghada Amer: New Directions and Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery

Upon entering this exhibition, I was taken to the wall pieces immediately, especially the use of vibrantly colored embroidery string mimicking paint strokes on the canvas. Art historical references and connections are very prevalent in the works of this exhibit. It was refreshing to see this conversation of the painting canon being brought up in a contemporary light by the use of this novel medium. Amer’s love and interest in the history of painting is apparent, and her works show art historical influences intertwined with intuition and a strong painterly hand that is present despite there being no paint in the show.

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025

Beauty is a Blast: a tribute to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Featured Exhibition

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, installation view, *Beauty is a Blast* at Art Cake

The exhibition Beauty is a Blast, on view at Art Cake in Brooklyn, brings together the work of more than 200 artists in a posthumous examination of the life and influence of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024). It documents a network of relationships, of pedagogy, of influence. Conceived by artist and curator Christian Haub in 2021 as a modest acknowledgment of Gilbert-Rolfe’s legacy, the project was paused, then resumed in late 2024 in collaboration with Gilbert-Rolfe’s family and the Art Cake team. As word spread, the exhibition grew, not by design, but by response. The scale—over 250 works—became a measure of the reach of an individual who spent decades thinking through the terms and implications of contemporary abstraction.

April 10, 2025April 10, 2025

Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild

Hot Air

*Black Feather Triangle 1* by Deborah Kruger

Curator Fran Beallor presents Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild in Chelsea, two exhibitions that focus on environmental damage—melting ice, polluted waters, deforestation, plastic waste, extreme weather, and species extinction. The goal is to make these vast and often abstract issues accessible to the wide public.

March 28, 2025March 26, 2025

New York Studio School Marathons

Transformative Two-Week Art Immersives

“You should do it,” said a friend, and on that speculative basis, I showed up on West 8th Street, sculpting apron in hand, butterflies in stomach. I’d made a small sitting man before, but this was my first try at a life-size figure. […]By lunch break, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park among chess players and musicians, I was already feeling like a secret sculptor. – Giles Goodhead, Summer 2024 NYSS Sculpture Marathon with Brandt Junceau

March 13, 2025March 12, 2025

Barbara Friedman’s All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch&Co

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Barbara Friedman

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.

March 11, 2025March 12, 2025

Guan-Hong Lu at Nunu Fine Art New York

*The Unbearable Lightness of Being*, 2024 oil on canvas 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. Image courtesy of Nunu Fine Art Gallery

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.

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

Simphiwe Mbunyuza: UMTHONYAMA

opinion

Simphiwe Mbunyuza’s ceramic sculptures are a powerful synthesis of ancestral traditions, personal history, and contemporary expression. His recent exhibition, UMTHONYAMA, at David Kordansky Gallery in New York (January 16 – February 22, 2025), presented a body of work that transforms the physical space of the gallery into one of spiritual reflection, cultural storytelling, and artistic innovation.

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.