Art Spiel – Page 31 – Contemporary Art and Culture

In Dialogue by Riad Miah

Lauriston Avery with Riad Miah

In Dialogue

I am happy to speak with Lauriston Avery following his successful recent exhibition at Dutton. Avery is an artist whose work challenges traditional notions of material and space. Through an intuitive and deeply personal process, he transforms unconventional materials—often those found in everyday life—into evocative, textured works that feel both raw and, at times, meditative. His practice blurs the lines between structure and spontaneity, embracing limitations as a source of discovery rather than restriction. In this conversation, we discuss Avery’s approach to materiality, the role of intuition and experimentation in his work, and how the idea of space has become a vital element in his practice. His work invites us to reconsider what we see and feel in our environments.

Exhibition Review by Etty Yaniv

A Longing at Kaliner: Fanny Allié

Fanny Allié’s exhibition A Longing at Kaliner presents a series of works made from the materials of daily life. Using worn clothing, domestic linens, and fabric remnants from her own surroundings, Allié constructs layered compositions that speak to human connection, memory, and what remains after use. Her figures, built from these fragments, feel both familiar and distant—suspended in stillness, shaped by lived experience.

Exhibition Review by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Foundations: Lior Modan at Dinner Gallery

Lior Modan’s work invites touch—but not quite. On the somber, richly textured surfaces of velvet, patterns emerge, outlining everyday objects and settings: a watch, Dinner Gallery’s glass door leading to the courtyard, a table under an archway, and various indecipherable but seemingly familiar architectural forms. They are punctuated with scraps of domesticity and quotidian life: lace strips, tree branches, and old-timey tablecloth designs. In the artist’s solo exhibition titled The Foundations, each monochromatic piece quietly outlines the theatricality of everyday life. Oscillating across the terrains of sculpture, frottage, performance, and assemblage, Modan’s work gently unpacks the categorical pretense behind techniques of making.

A museum with a display of art AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Exhibition Review by Melissa L. Mednicov

Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art

Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, ranging from works she produced in art school in the fifties to her last works. In doing so, the exhibition centers and decenters Marisol’s status within the Pop art sphere, where she never fully situated herself. Her works are too brutal and too strange (in the best sense of the word) for Pop. She was undoubtedly exhibiting with Pop artists and part of their networks, as her films with Andy Warhol included in the exhibition attest. However, she was somewhere else, too. Her works contain the brute force of politics, history, culture, and climate change, and, in her practice, she engages with how those forces take place primarily upon the bodies of women. The body morphs and sometimes breaks under these forces.

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

Interviews by Caitlin Reid

1000 Days of Drawing: A Conversation with Joshua Drayzen

In Dialogue

I met with Joshua Drayzen at Massey Klein shortly after the opening of his solo exhibition, Spirit Wave. A Brooklyn-based artist, Drayzen recently surpassed 1,000 consecutive days of drawing. I wanted to learn more about the enigmatic images and the devotional practice behind them. What I discovered, however, was that this was more than just a habit—it’s a ritual that shapes and invigorates his entire creative practice.

Exhibition Review by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Biophilia: Nature Hacked, Art Rewired

Imagine nature got hacked. If it could rewrite its own DNA—absorbing industrial waste, pixels, and plastic—what would it become? Welcome to Biophilia. This six-artist exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT, curated by Ellen Hawley, doesn’t just depict nature—it reimagines and reconstructs it. The organic and the artificial no longer exist as opposites. Featuring Carol Bouyoucos, Julie Evans, Loren Eiferman, Christina Massey, Heide Follin, and Sui Park, Biophilia brings together artists who push past nostalgia for an untouched Eden to present nature as something restless, resilient, and constantly evolving. The result is a visual feast—bold, kinetic, and utterly alive. This is no polite, whisper-in-the-gallery experience. It lunges, sprawls, and twists. It pulses with energy, daring you to chase its shifting forms.

Exhibition Review by Anna Shukeylo

Raymond Saá at Morgan Lehman

On the 4th floor of one of Chelsea’s heavily trafficked art buildings, Morgan Lehman gallery is presenting a jazzy solo exhibition, Pan Con Timba, by abstract, musically-influenced painter Raymond Saá. This exhibition brings together the artist’s love for music that he skillfully reflects in his rhythmic paintings and spice of his Cuban background; after all , Pan Con Timba is not only a jazz song that inspired Saá, but also a famous Cuban sandwich with guava preserves.

In Dialogue by Will Kaplan

Site: Seoyoung Kim’s project to uplift artists and broaden their communities

In Dialogue

For each iteration of curatorial project, Site, founder Seoyoung Kim has been blessed: swelling turnout, glowing reviews, a sunny day for their first outdoor show. When she opened Site 004. Winter Solstice on December 21st, New York saw its first snow of the season. Moments big and small in her pop-up shows keep confirming that she’s on the right track. The ambitious installations lean toward an organic, playful minimalism, with room for viewers to look slowly. In dialogue with sculptures and wall-work, Kim has begun to incorporate time-based programming—poetry readings, DJ sets, and artist performances– to fully embrace her curation’s one-night ephemerality. Still, these brief offerings provide space for artists of all stripes to congregate and share their work meaningfully, with a sense of both depth and urgency. A year into spearheading this project, Ms. Kim took some time to reflect on Site’s journey.

Exhibition Highlights by Andrew Fish

Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in March 2025

Highlights

We’ve passed the Ides of March and 2025 is in full swing. Teslas are burning, the stock market is crashing, and the Black Lives Matter plaza in Washington DC has been completely demolished at the cost of six hundred thousand dollars to taxpayers. In Boston, we await some kind of tipping point, like the good revolutionaries we are. There’s no better time to be making art that will undoubtedly reflect the time we’re living in, even if only subversively. Because dissent is now a truly radical act. It’s also Women’s History Month and there are no greater radicals than women artists, blazing trails and making visible what might otherwise be ignored. Here are some highlights to celebrate.