materiality – Page 3

April 1, 2025March 31, 2025, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Foundations: Lior Modan at Dinner Gallery

Lior Modan, *Rain* (2025). Velvet, foam, cardboard, sand, and epoxy putty in artist’s frame. 23 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Dinner Gallery. Photo: JSP Art Photographer.

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.

February 19, 2025February 21, 2025, by Doug Navarra

Myron Stout: Materiality, Meaning, and the Geometry of Abstraction

opinion

Myron Stout (1908–1987), Untitled, at Peter Freeman, Inc. — *Untitled,* no date, charcoal on Strathmore paper, 25 1/8 x 19 inches, (63.8 x 48.3 cm), PF8230

An exciting exhibition of Myron Stout’s early charcoal drawings is currently on view at Peter Freeman Inc. in the SoHo district of NYC, running from January 16th to March 1st, 2025. This collection of approximately 35 works from the late 1940s and early 1950s offers a glimpse into the evolution of Stout’s personal style as he shifted toward reductive geometric abstraction. Positioned within the broader context of mid-20th-century abstraction, these drawings mark a bold departure from the era’s dominant trends, which often incorporated symbolic, gestural and representational elements.

November 12, 2024November 12, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Running Line: Noga Yudkovik Etzioni at FORMah Gallery

A group of wooden objects on a white floor

Description automatically generated — Noga Yudkovik-Etzioni, Running Line, detail

In Running Line, on view at FORMah gallery, objects stripped of function take on new roles: charged, amorphous, and poetic. Israeli artist Noga Yudkovik-Etzioni creates a space where memory, material, and form converge through elongated installations on the floor and a series of small wall-mounted paper-based reliefs

June 9, 2024June 9, 2024, by Chunbum Park

The Philosophy of Physical Existence at Tutu Gallery

A room with a fireplace and a rug

Description automatically generated

Installation view of Gentle Mist group exhibition at the Tutu Gallery, Photo Credit: Yulin Gu and Yuhan Shen

The exhibition titled Gentle Mist at the Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn could be mistaken for primarily being idea-driven, in which case the ideas precede artwork production, along the lines of artists working with clarity of vision, such as the Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt and the Minimalist artists Tony Smith and Robert Morris. However, upon closer examination of the works by this group of New York and Baltimore artists, we realize that the makers of the art objects are more intuitively engaged with their art. There is a great deal of trial and error and improvisation in the creative process, and the ideation and production processes integrate up into a complex maneuver or dance.

April 25, 2024May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Accommodating the Object: Elizabeth Yamin and Bosiljka Raditsa at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Opinion

A room with art on the wall

Description automatically generated — Installation view. Photo courtesy of The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

The exhibition Accommodating the Object of paintings by Elizabeth Yamin and Bosiljka Raditsa is presented by The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in New York and was curated by William Corwin, who describes this exhibition as an intimate survey that offers the viewer an opportunity to compare the works of these two artists, who were active during the latter part of the twentieth century without attaining prominent careers.

March 23, 2024March 23, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Kosuke Kawahara – Exotic Star at RAINRAIN

photo story

A room with paintings on the wall

Description automatically generated — Right: Kosuke Kawahara, Forever Waiting, 2018-2023, Oil color, encaustic, spray paint, ink, pencil, gesso on wood panel, 773⁄4 x 621⁄2 x 3⁄4 inches / 197.49 x 158.75 x 1.9 cm. Left: Kosuke Kawahara, New Poison, 2023-2024, Oil color, acrylic, encaustic, spray paint, ink, gesso on synthetic fabric, 311⁄4 x 261⁄4 x 11⁄4 inches / 79.38 x 66.68 x 3.18 cm

Kosuke Kawahara’s solo show at RAINRAIN represents a multi-faceted approach to materials, exploring what are conventional ways of organizing knowledge? Or, perhaps, how cosmic, biological, and cultural systems intersect? Throughout the paintings, I recognize forms resembling distorted body parts and hinted symbols from astronomy, depicted with oil paint, acrylic, chalk, spray paint, fabric, and wood. When Kawahara’s surfaces manifest their materiality—a patch of exposed woodgrain or a peel of paint revealing found fabric—they suggest the existence of other dimensions and bring me to question the characteristics of processes like reproduction and decay.

September 2, 2022November 2, 2022, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Lesley Bodzy’s Sculptural ‘Paint Skins’

Lesley Bodzy. *I knew better*, acrylic, 66” x 34” x 15”, 2022. All photographs are courtesy of the artist.

Wall sculptures by Lesley Bodzy will be on view during Armory Week 2022 at SPRING/BREAK in Leftover and Over curated by Giovanni Aloi and Erica Criss. Anna Mikaela Ekstrand interviewed the California-born Houston and New York City-based artist about her evolving practice.

April 1, 2021April 12, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Mira Dayal: In that Empire at Spencer Brownstone Gallery

In Dialogue with Mira Dayal

*Mira Dayal, installation view (wall text), “…In That Empire…” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2021, photo courtesy of the artist.*

In her inaugural solo exhibition with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal has rubbed by hand the entire gallery floor in graphite, resulting in a map of the space’s topography – all lines and no borders. Drawing on Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, the show explores notions of scale, control, ethics, materiality, and simulation. The show runs through April 4th, 2021.

March 2, 2021March 2, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Babs Reingold: Palette of Materials

Macintosh HD:Users:babsreingold:Documents:• Babs_Art:Art_Resume:Art_Profile:Art_Babs_photosOfBabs:Babs_images_jpegs:Babs_HairNest_1_15_16_0385sm.jpg — From left to right: Babs Reingold in the studio with Hair Nest ’01, Hair Nest ’16, Hair Nest ’15, photo courtesy of the artist

In her multi layered installations Babs Reingold‘s brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Babs Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Amy Butowicz: Boudoir Theatre at Peninsula Art Space

In Dialogue with Eric Fallen, Founder and Executive Director

A room full of furniture

Description automatically generated — Duet, 2020 76.5”h x 84”w x 53”d Canvas, acrylic paint, wood, furniture parts, wheels, and hinges

Amy Butowicz solo show Boudoir Theatre at Peninsula Art Space features a collection of domestically scaled sculptures staged as a group of characters which are readily associated with notions of sensuality, ornamentation, and haute couture. Bulging cushion-like forms, meticulously hand-stitched over wooden structures, display intricate patterns and rich material suggestive of bedding, vanities, corsets and human anatomy. Bold and tender simultaneously, these anthropomorphic forms defy the disdain and fear that are frequently imposed upon feminine artforms, spaces, and bodies. Eric Fallen, founder and executive director of the Red Hook based Peninsula Art Space elaborates on Amy Butowicz’s exhibition and on his art venue.