Art Spiel – Page 17 – Contemporary Art and Culture

Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Rachel MacFarlane’s Mystical Spaces: Afterlight at Hollis Taggart Downtown

Stepping into Rachel MacFarlane’s exhibition, Afterlight, you enter an atmosphere of radiant, sweltering landscapes and venture towards an unknown future. The unpredictable future of a natural world that is vibrant, strong, and resilient, continuing to grow despite the climate changes and ecological effects that have threatened it. MacFarlane expertly situates the viewer amid a vibrantly colored atmosphere, positioning them as an active participant in the environments the paintings create.

Exhibition Review by Rui Jiang

A Lure, A Lament at Gallery 456

A clamor of murmurs without end. Several ghostly strands twisted strangely yet remained formless, wispy, and clinging, yet never settling into anything definite. Moving, then halting; halting, then moving again. Soft as if boneless, without body heat, yet inducing a tremor from within: a sudden burn, gooseflesh blooming in patches, sticky, viscous—caught and entangled by a reckless surge of ghostly energy. One slips from the ordinary into a hollow. A Lure, A Lament offers, at first encounter, precisely such a sensation. And yet its murmuring voice continues to drift, recounting wave after wave of fragrant air.

Exhibition Review by Noa Charuvi

Tirtzah Bassel: I Put A Spell at A.I.R Gallery

In Tirtzah Bassel’s vibrant and challenging exhibition, I Put A Spell, the viewer is immediately confronted with the question: Can the power of witchcraft—rooted in both ancient wisdom and intuition—serve as a potent metaphor for reclaiming women’s agency in art and beyond?

Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam: Conversations and Inspirations

Walking into the group exhibition, Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam at Art Cake, curated by David Dixon, you are first greeted with a piece by Thomas Nozkowski. This piece is one of three included in the exhibition, each serving as a foundational anchor point in the show. Within the paintings, Nozkowski abstracts forms or fractions of events, allowing viewers to experience the essence and bring their own associations to the works.

Exhibition Review by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Rifka Milder Paints Downtown Without the Downtown Act

New York City loves a label the way it loves a line outside a new restaurant: there is the promise of significance and the reassurance that someone else has already decided what matters. The label flatters, then quietly ends the conversation. The oil painter Rifka Milder’s work refuses that bargain. Call her a “downtown painter,” and you’re not wrong, but her new solo show at Helm Contemporary, GREAT JONES, is what happens when someone who actually grew up downtown, in a household run on paint and argument, makes abstraction that declines to become neighborhood branding. Art in America once called her “an oil painter’s painter.”

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Anne Russinof – Gestural Symphony at Equity Gallery

Emily Berger met the late painter and artist, Anne Russinof, twenty years ago at The Painting Center in New York. Russinof’s intelligence and presence were immediate. A friendship formed around their work—studio visits, openings, exhibitions, and eventually, showing together. Both were committed to abstract painting and supported each other’s practice. Berger curated this exhibition of Russinof’s elegant, rigorous paintings at Equity Gallery to bring them wider recognition. What Russinof left behind is a powerful body of work. “I believe she would be pleased with the exhibition, the beautiful catalog designed by Patricia Fabricant, and the thoughtful, poetic writing from Paul D’Agostino and friends,” Berger says.

Krista Voto and collaborator, Brittany Coburn, Her Shadow Casts No Simple Form

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Meghan Roghanchi at RAM Gallery

In her mid-twenties, Meghan Roghanchi began collecting art with her husband, engaging directly with artists and developing an interest in the relationship between artistic production and collecting. After raising three children to school age, she returned to a professional focus shaped by her long-standing engagement with art, education, and collecting. Drawing on these experiences, Roghanchi founded RAM Gallery, positioning it at the intersection of creative practice and collecting, with an emphasis on direct exchange between artists and audiences and an accessible, welcoming gallery environment.

Exhibition Review by john ros

Making Room: Refusal and Collective Practice at The Living Space

On the second floor of a prewar building on a non-assuming block of Flushing, Queens, one might stumble upon a vibrant community of young artists making work and creating community. There is no signage announcing arrival, no threshold that signals entry into the capital “A” capital “W” Art World. Instead, there is a buzzer, a staircase, and a living room temporarily transformed. This is where Reflections of Home, the inaugural exhibition at The Living Space Gallery, takes place — as an encounter and as a statement of refusal.

Exhibition Review by Emma Ahmad

Bonny Leibowitz: Adventures in Plunderland

In 2023, multidisciplinary artist Bonny Leibowitz’s world shifted when she stumbled upon an active demolition site in a shopping center in Richardson, Texas. She described the landscape as “both horrific and beautiful” – a scene of destruction and chaos situated right in the middle of the inner city Dallas suburb. Braving the sweltering Texas heat, Leibowitz made multiple trips to the site, photographing it extensively and collecting pieces of debris from the wreckage that would later comprise her series Adventures in Plunderland.

Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Bonesetter: Dislocations, Connections and Synergies

Walking into the space at 86 Bowery, you are greeted by a calm, welcoming exhibition, the walls warmly lit and filled with a wide array of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, featuring works by 24 artists. The exhibition title is Bonesetter, based on the idea of a bonesetter, an individual in many cultures who resets broken bones and dislocations.