#artexhibition – Art Spiel

February 7, 2024February 7, 2024

Small Myriad: Sharon Horvath at Bookstein Projects

Installation view, detail, photo courtesy of Etty Yaniv

Sharon Horvath’s paintings in Small Myriad, her current exhibition at Bookstein Projects, create a sense of an alluring universe where dazzling colors, interflowing shapes, and tactile surfaces merge, meander, and as a group form an enigmatic universe unified by a mysterious code. Horvath’s spiraling lines and patterned forms create ebbing and flowing movements echoing Theodor Schwenk’s anthroposophical approach to the unifying principle of all movement and form. In his book Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Schwenk posits that water movements reveal fundamental, archetypal patterns in natural and human-made environments. This deeper order finds resonance in Horvath’s paintings, but simultaneously, her imagery and use of collage also lean toward the enigmatic, paradoxical, and absurd.

January 27, 2023January 26, 2023

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing room, gallery, scene

Description automatically generated — Jac Lahav, Immersive blue vine installation on the hardship and beauty of being a foster parent

Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief at Sugarlift is an immersive installation about the artist’s experience as a foster parent. At the center, a large sculpture titled 29, references 29 points of contact that the artist has had with different foster children. The lines of saffron and gold leaf across abstracted canvases, and a site-specific wall drawing allure visitors to enter Lahav’s world.

November 11, 2020November 12, 2020

In My Room – Susan Carr at LABspace

A Photo story

Upon entering In My Room, Susan Carr’s solo show at LABspace in Hillsdale, NY, my senses are overloaded in the best way by the colorful and tactile work. The gallery is teeming with an impressive amount of work that fills the walls, floor, and pedestals. As I walk around, I am greeted with the fond familiar smell of fresh oil paint— thick, bold, and often mixed on the surface. This application is important to the overall sensation of Carr’s work. It makes me grasp the immediacy and the confidence that are necessary to make the work. Squeezing paint directly from the tube onto the canvas requires a commitment from the artist and Carr dives in headfirst to create paintings of zombies, clowns, self-portraits, and eyeballs.

January 24, 2019February 5, 2019

Rutland: Real and Imagined

Ric Kasini Kadour, The Modern Is The Way, photo courtesy of the artist

Photography is inherently effective at telling a story of place. Not only of documenting its history, but also possibly of predicting its future – projecting how a place is or is in the process of becoming. For the group show, “Rutland: Real and Imagined,” which opens in January 31, 2019 at The Alley Gallery in Rutland, Vermont, artist and curator Stephen Schaub brings together eight internationally recognized artists who interpret through their use of photography what constructs a sense of place. Altogether, the resulting photographic imagery in this exhibition creates an engaging story about Rutland – not as a single place but rather many places that come together in the minds and lives of the people who live there.

January 14, 2019January 14, 2019

Valerie Hegarty – Memory of a Place

In Valerie Hegarty’s work, autobiography, history, and art history merge seamlessly into engaging installations with a distinct sense of place – visceral and subtle, layered and focused. An inquisitive rigor runs through her work, stirring in the viewer an appetite for more. Valerie Hegarty shared with Art Spiel some thoughts on art making, her own art journey, and some of her upcoming projects.

Portrait of artist while working on “Alternative Histories” for the Brooklyn Museum Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

December 28, 2018December 28, 2018

Plush Paint: please do not pet, caress, fondle

Step off of the gray pavement, step out of the chilly dullness of an impending New York City Winter, traverse the threshold of Next to Nothing Gallery, and indulge in the celebration of painting currently on view at 181 Orchard Street.

Installed works by Jason Stopa and Susan Carr, photo courtesy of the gallery

“Plush Paint: please do not pet, caress, fondle” features the work of Jason Stopa, Osamu Kobayashi, and Susan Carr in a bounty of paintings and sculptural hybrids that boast tenacious gestures, mysterious shapes, and amped up colors. As the eyes adjust to the stark whiteness of the minimalist space, at first glance the work appears as a collection of unearthly gemstones unified by candied commercial hues and vibrating combinations of paint. Robert Erani, Gallery Director and Curator employed the cohesion of color to serve as an “accessible commonality that any viewer can appreciate.” For Erani the visual pleasure of these works seduces the viewer to take a deeper look and discover less obvious nuances that distinguish the individual work of each artist.

November 1, 2018June 4, 2020

Austin Thomas – Lots of little things at LABspace

All images: Austin Thomas collages, photographed by the author

Austin Thomas’s drawings, Lots of little things, currently on view at LABspace, a small gallery in a tiny town, are diminutive in size but vast in scope. Arranged in three irregular rows on one wall, these forty-odd drawings offer the viewer enough to look at for several hours. I have been to the show three times and was sorry to leave each time. They seem to display almost everything drawing can be.
Continue reading “Austin Thomas – Lots of little things at LABspace”

May 1, 2018November 15, 2020

Perfected Scene at John Doe

Jeff Liao, *Coney Island from Steeplechase Pier*, pigmented print, 2011, image courtesy of LYK Art Projects

Curated by LYK Art Projects,”Perfected Scene” the upcoming show at John Doe Gallery features work by Jeff Liao, Jaye Rhee and Jason River, whose photographic works share a sense of manipulated stage-like worlds. Jeff Liao creates cityscapes with Utopian undercurrents, Jaye Rhee questions authenticity in making art, and Jason River creates enigmatic spaces with bare bodies and everyday objects. Continue reading “Perfected Scene at John Doe”

April 24, 2018November 15, 2020

Helen O’ Leary: No Place for Certainty

Helen O’Leary, installation view of Home is a foreign country, 2018, photo courtesy of Lesley Heller by Eva O’Leary

Helen O’Leary‘s sculptural paintings are delicate and rough, subtle and raw, literal and metaphoric – they embrace and prick the viewer at the same time. Her current exhibition “Home is a foreign country“ at Leslie Heller indicates not only clear incisiveness and impressive mastery of form, but also a deep generosity- sharing with the viewer her rigorous process of grappling with material: visible jointing, disjointing, bending, folding, knitting. She says that somewhere through the struggle some magic happens. And magic does happen in her artwork. Continue reading ” Helen O’ Leary: No Place for Certainty”