Contemporary Art and Culture
Located along the central artery of Little Italy, amid a glut of red sauce joints with checkered tablecloths, sits the new home of Fugue Gallery. Having recently relocated from Canal Street to Mulberry Street, the space, a 1,000-square-foot brick loft, eschews white box sterility for something more atypical.
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Emelie Stenhammar’s works echo the aims of Elizabeth Murray to reshape our relationship with painting. Cozy rectangular formats are denied. Twisted Perspective prevails. Both artists’ depictions of domestic spaces reflect a mutual fondness for cartoons and whimsy. Stenhammar paints compelling allegory about the human condition, with a compassionate gaze akin to that of Kathe Kollwitz.
Continue reading “How Unexpected: Encounters With the Divine, Emelie Stenhammar”
In his show Cake (2026) at Sprüth Magers, New York, Andreas Schulze explores the visual effects of saturated color and geometric form, using cake as the setting for his investigation.
In his paintings, Schulze creates an inner three-dimensional universe, which serves as a bell jar. In his imaginary pastures, Schulze creates surreal interiorscapes, built of geometric shapes and flat backdrops of color-gradient skies, juxtaposed with rounded spheres and spirals painted in three-dimensional perspective, with depth and shadow. The pictorial space he builds gives a stage for him to explore various phenomena, in this case, cake, and he does so with a playful seriousness, experimenting with the basic forms and images that make up cakes: candles, frosting, fruit, sprinkles, and layers.
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Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.
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Maria Gil Lucientes paints in the slim margin where a system starts to come undone. She begins with a constraint, a single color, a periodic screen, a piece of medical gauze, then lets the materials misbehave. In Pareidolia, gauze shifted by air becomes the suggestion of a face. A Spanish-born painter who studied mathematics, physics, and computer science before a decade in tech, Lucientes brings a system-builder’s discipline to a practice that hinges on chance. Here, she reflects on the path from science to painting, the dialogue between control and surprise in her process, and the new Moiré series taking shape in her studio.
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Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities.
McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.
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Walking into this show on a cold, blustery night, you are greeted by large windows illuminated out by gallery light. Inside, you are met with a collection of color, light, and energy. Each piece in the exhibition Spectral Evidence uses mainly acrylic to illuminate new spaces by dissolving edges, blending colors, and allowing gradients to calmly and smoothly envelope the space within the works. While each artist in the show has their own take on creating their own spaces, they use many conventions of painting and abstraction to create new forms and environments to experience, and each piece seems to flow well into the next. The gallery layout lends itself to a meandering space.
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Tom McGlynn continues to grow a decade-long train of thought with a new selection of paintings in This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art. Consistent with his oeuvre, he arrays a selection of color rectangles suspended within various fields of color. An acquaintanceship with the origin of this direction, accompanied by a fresh pair of eyes, will enable a viewer to put aside the parallels with Mondrian, Albers, or even Hans Hoffmann, and see these works anew.
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The artwork in Beamsplitter, a six-person show at Field of Play, functions as a series of portals. Named for a scientific device that both transmits and reflects light, Beamsplitter opens up spectrums of material, concept, and time. Using a mix of large and small works from artists across generations, curator David Shaw expands the Gowanus gallery’s 9 x 15-foot footprint into a dynamic array of gateways. The recurrence of circular forms and apertures presents a menu of windows to the artist’s interiority or world-view. Field of Play’s signature astroturf floor provides an idiosyncratic arena to home these loci.
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