contemporary art – Page 9

April 27, 2026April 26, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

How Malta Biennale 2026 Reimagines Site-Specificity

One is never prepared for the Maltese archipelago and its vertiginous dichotomy of antiquity and modernity; an exhilarating compound of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Though one might consider it diminutive, during the three-day press preview, I traversed the main island, Malta, and its quieter, more pastoral and bucolic sister island, Gozo, in a flurry of taxis, ferries, and buses. (Comino, a nature lover’s sanctuary, remains largely uninhabited.) Malta occupies a distinctly liminal position within the Mediterranean world: a central island shaped across centuries by exchanges among Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Situated a mere 60 miles south of Sicily and roughly an hour’s flight from Tunis, it has long functioned as a site of passage, encounter, and cultural layering—a geographic palimpsest upon which successive civilizations have inscribed themselves again and again.

April 23, 2026April 22, 2026, by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan

Departing From The Flat World: Jong Oh’s Sixth Solo Exhibition At Marc Straus Gallery

“The world is flat” is perhaps humans’ most primitive sense of physical surroundings. It was also a cosmological conclusion drawn from honest bodily perception, because the land beneath our feet is indeed still and level, and the universe unfolds as an infinitely extending plane. This perceptual honesty is where Jong Oh begins.

April 22, 2026April 21, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cynthia Pareja Dubin at the Oyster Point Hotel

The Artist in Residence program at The Oyster Point Hotel was launched in 2020 and curated by Ellen Martin, with the support of Kevin Barry, the hotel’s President. Its premise is straightforward: contemporary art belongs not only in galleries but in the spaces where people actually live, rest, and move through their days. Each year, a selected artist’s work inhabits the hotel’s guest rooms, common areas, and the fabric of the place itself, encountered by thousands of visitors during their stay.

April 20, 2026April 19, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Floating in Three Acts- Keren Anavy at SUNY

Floating names a state of suspension, between sinking and surviving, between grief and the body’s refusal to stop. In Keren Anavy’s landmark solo exhibition, Floating in Three Acts, this condition is both subject and structure. The exhibition is built the way floating feels: without firm ground, without clear direction, with the question of outcome left open.

April 13, 2026April 11, 2026, by Shuhan Zhang

Andrius Alvarez-Backus: I Want to Know, I Need to Know

In Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s solo exhibition, I Want to Know, I Need to Know, at Eli Klein Gallery, the work Are You Still Strong Enough? (2025) emerges as the visual center of the show’s underlying tension. A My Little Pony toy hangs vertically, the surface covered in bronze patina, while the incision along its abdomen is carefully stitched closed. What was once a lighthearted and slightly absurd object becomes, through this treatment, both fragile and solemn. Its form evokes a body after surgery, yet also resembles a preserved specimen. However, the meticulous stitching does not suggest that the wound has truly healed. Instead, the seam runs along the body, leaving the incision exposed and gradually becoming part of the sculpture’s structure. The suturing does not erase the rupture; it keeps the rupture visible. The wound is no longer simply a trace of intervention, but the structural element through which the work sustains its tension.

April 9, 2026April 12, 2026, by Anna Shukeylo

Elisa Jensen at Astor Weeks, A Quiet Pause in Chaotic Times

Nestled on the 3rd floor of 209 Canal Street, off a particularly bustling block in Chinatown, is a show of Elisa Jensen’s paintings titled Invitation politely, at Astor Weeks Gallery. These works echo Bonnard’s complex compositions with windows and the depth of space in Vuillard’s work. The paintings are various memories of places close to the artist’s heart: her home in Brooklyn, the house of her late parents that no longer stands, and her aunt and uncle’s home in Denmark. Jensen knows how to whisper through paint and tell a quiet poem in scumbles, with a profound feeling of color. Her playful use of iridescent paint leaves the paintings to be experienced as they change drastically with subtle shifts in lighting. It is as if each painting carries many versions of itself throughout the course of the day, as the light changes.

April 8, 2026April 7, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Eric Wolf’s Two Waters: Nature, Observation, and Exploration at Abri Mars

Eric Wolf’s works at Abri Mars take us through misty, expansive landscapes. Their ethereality and tranquility pull viewers into new places to explore and settle into. Within Two Waters, Wolf recreates the landscapes he observes directly, using a limited ink palette to bring the pieces to life. Through a combination of controlled and reactive strokes, Wolf uses hard and soft edges to render his figures of nature. While the figures are more abstract- mountains, bodies of water, trees, etc, these works are expanding on the process of plein air, bringing the environment into the works directly. With the gallery’s natural light from the front windows, the darkness of the ink becomes velvety, drawing you in, while the light of the paper glows beneath, pushing outward. This push and pull makes the work feel dynamic and lively.

April 7, 2026April 6, 2026, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Magical Thinking of Systems and Beliefs, at Tufts University Art Galleries

Installation view of Magical Thinking of Systems and Beliefs

Would you have believed the sun revolved around the Earth? Possibly, since that was the ironclad determination of the bureaucracies in the 16th century. Slavery legally existed in the United States for centuries before there was even the slightest abolitionist movement. Which brings to mind, why do we adhere to beliefs today simply because they are propagated by governments and institutions?

April 1, 2026April 1, 2026, by Will Kaplan

Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles

In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation.

March 31, 2026April 2, 2026, by Hantian Zhang

The 15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the Flower Hear the Bees?

Botany, I read in Zoë Schlanger’s bestseller The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, is full of groundbreaking discoveries these days (Schlanger 2024). We now know that plants have cellular conduits that allow propagation of electrical charges, that some plants release chemicals in the air to alert neighbors of insects, and that evening primrose increases its nectar’s sweetness when it senses the frequency of the hum of bee wings. While such plant-feeling, plant-talking, and plant-listening are not sustained by the same biological apparatus as ours, the functional parallel is apparent. Perhaps it is time to broaden our understanding of intelligence.