Art Spiel – Page 3 – Contemporary Art and Culture

Installation view, Blizzard, Dimin Gallery

Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Blizzard at Dimin Gallery- intertwined times- nostalgia, stillness, and ecological urgency

Walking into Dimin gallery on a humid summer day, Blizzard, the exhibition currently on view, envelops you with a welcoming dynamic, though like a winter storm, often all-encompassing, bitter, and fierce. Despite these negative associations coinciding with the theme of blizzard , there is a sense of peace and serenity while observing a storm safely. As long as you are observing from a safe distance, both the winter season and its storms can offer great solace and opportunities for contemplation. Similar to the work in this show, we are welcomed to dive into the environments of the works and take note of what themes are driving the artists. Given our growing concerns over climate change, global warming, and changes in the environment, this exhibition is very timely; especially ecologically, this show calls for attention. These artists certainly show how a snow day can slow time and force us to have more respect for the unyielding natural world.

Daniel Rothbart's Serpentine Sibyls, curated by Melissa West

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Serpentine Sibyls at Snug Harbor

A chance meeting in October 2024 set Serpentine Sibyls in motion. Wandering into the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Daniel Rothbart met its director and senior curator Melissa West, and a shared bond with the late critic and curator John Perreault — who ran the center in the 1980s — opened a collaboration that grew from the main pond to the two reflecting pools beside the Glass House. Rothbart’s floating forms in aluminum and glass, buoyed by salvaged Japanese fishing floats, drift and turn with wind, light, and water, so no two hours look alike. Named by West for the ancient prophetesses and for the serpentinite stone in Staten Island’s own hills, the work holds history and forecast at once, using the climate crisis as its undertow. Sited at a former sailors’ home along a tidal waterway, it runs through September 28 at Snug Harbor. The artist and curator discuss the project’s origins, its shifting forms, and the myth and history beneath the title.

Group exhibition: Transcendence installation view, 2026. Photography by Jiaqi, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Exhibitions by Ming Chen

Transcendence at FOU Gallery

Transcendence, a group exhibition of sculptures and paintings, is curated by Helena Jin and on view at FOU Gallery from July 11 – September 5, 2026. The artists Tianshu Zhang (张天舒), Gloria Fan Duan (樊段晓春), and Tao Xian (陶显) explore the show’s theme of transcendence in vastly different formal ways. Despite Helena Jin’s scholarly background in researching Buddhist art history, the type of transcendence posed by the show is distinctly secular; while some of the artists reference East Asian tradition and symbolism, the “beyond” or spiritual is achieved through individual artistic approaches to color and form.

Exhibitions by Chunbum Park

Bing Lu: The Queries that Remain After the Image

Bing Lu’s solo exhibition, “what remains after the image,” at Gallery 60 NYC is an endeavor of multifaceted inquiries concerning the nature of photography and image production, abstraction, and the artist’s own personal life. Featuring 13 photographic works that utilize digital collaging and color manipulation techniques, the exhibition is an exercise in experimental spirit for Lu to continually push the boundaries and investigate the abstract and experimental language of photography.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Cutaway at Brandeis University

For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.

Exhibition Review by Cristina Albu

Anne Katrine Senstad – Being (Un)schooled

Crossing the threshold of the “Veieja Escuelera” exhibition at Synesthesia Gallery, Brooklyn, visitors find themselves enveloped in an eerie haze of green light that is both sensuous and disquieting. This is not the only defamiliarizing element since the floor is carpeted with artificial grass and the light works encompass phrases in multiple languages. On Anne Katrine Senstad’s turf, nothing is what it seems at first sight. A Norwegian artist living between New York and Oslo, she uses light both environmentally and sculpturally to expose the interdependence between perceptual experience, cognition, and ideological beliefs. Her practice engages both with the phenomenological inquiries of minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin and with the tongue-in-cheek propositions of Conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman who have paired neon light with text to invite reflection on the function of art as sign.

Monumentalizing the Trace, installation view, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery

Exhibition Review by Felix Suazo

Treizman + Zurilla: Monumentalizing the Trace

Situation

The duo Treizman + Zurilla has created a paradoxical situation at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery in Pembroke Pines, Florida. There are no paintings hanging on the walls or sculptures on pedestals; only the remnants of an undefined and colossal event. It is perhaps the belated fulfillment of a premonition that adopts the exhibition space as a medium for art, transforming the White Cube into a site-specific installation.

Exhibition Review by Yasmeen Abdallah

The Art of Drag & NYC at Culture Lab LIC

A retrospective of drag was recently presented with great aplomb at Culture Lab LIC. Queens: The Art of Drag & NYC featured an array of artists deeply embedded in the glorious culture of drag. Honoring its rich history through performance, fashion, music, makeup, design, and more, the essence of this multifaceted experience was distilled through celebratory expressions of artistry, beauty, community, and resilience.

Exhibition Review by Michal Gavish

Le Alchemiste by Anselm Kiefer at the Palazzo Reale

I saw “Le Alchemiste” by Anselm Kiefer at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and although I have seen many exhibitions by this German artist, I have never seen anything like this. He creates large vertical portraits of about forty women who worked as alchemists and healers in various European communities in the period between antiquity and the nineteenth century.

Exhibition Review by Noa Charuvi

Do I Know You From Somewhere? at Transmitter: Alison Kudlow, Susan Meyer, Hanna Washburn, and Se Young Yim

Entering the bright gallery space, shared with Tiger Strikes Asteroid on the other side of the wall, you are welcomed by brightness and playfulness. Like walking into a kindergarten classroom, a playroom, or a yoga studio, the sculptural inhabitants are cordial yet also preoccupied with themselves. It is no coincidence that the curator and three of the artists are mothers who spend time with children.