Contemporary Art and Culture
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.
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.
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.
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.
In February 2025, at a gathering of artists and friends, William Norton learned that two gallery spaces—#104 and #108—at 37 North 15th Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn had become available. He had one week to assemble two exhibitions. He accepted the challenge.
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.
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.
Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.
Odeta Xheka, an artist, curator, and mother, has been an avid advocate for women in the fine arts. Her latest endeavor is an ambitious and exciting one, as she opened OXH Gallery in the heart of Tampa’s Ybor City Historic District just a few months ago. I’m sitting down with Odeta to discuss her new gallery, her mission, exciting collaborations, and the current two-person show Time Shards, which will be on view through March 20th, 2025.
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.