Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space

Judy Pfaff, Barcelona, 1990, steel, plastic, glass, table and chairs, 168 x 168 x 168 inches

It began, as many enduring ideas do, over wine and conversation. Michael David, painter, curator, and gallerist of M. David & Co., was speaking at a dinner with Judy Pfaff about her close friend and early champion Al Held. The talk drifted to another dear friend, Elizabeth Murray, and then to her admiration for Frank Stella. From that exchange evolved the idea for Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space, curated by Michael David, and now on view at Art Cake in cooperation with The Brooklyn Rail.

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Susan Mastrangelo: The Beat Goes On at Kathryn Markel

In Dialogue
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Installation view, Susan Mastrangelo: The Beat Goes On at Kathryn Markel

Susan Mastrangelo’s solo show, The Beat Goes On, at The Pocket Gallery of Katherine Markel Fine Arts features work completed from 2022 to 2025, with the majority of the pieces completed in 2025. Mastrangelo creates bold reliefs that transform a variety of materials into bold abstract and biomorphic forms.

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Wherever I Lay My Head at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning 

In Dialogue
Group picture(Members in picture from left to right): Euijin V. Ra (artist), Julia D. Shaw (artist), Courteny Symone Staton (artist), Laura OsCam (artist), Sherwin Banfield (Program Manager), TEDF (artist), Marleen Moise (artist).

Wherever I Lay My Head, now on view at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning , began with an invitation to Indira A. Abiskaroon to curate the culminating ARTWorks exhibition. The offer came from Program Manager Sherwin Banfield and was formalized in conversation with Director of Program Operations Wendy Arimah Berot. Abiskaroon’s first priority was to spend time with the ARTWorks Fellows—to learn how their practices had developed over the course of the program and to hear what ideas had been resonating in their weekly sessions.

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Running Line: Noga Yudkovik Etzioni at FORMah Gallery

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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

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Gabriela Vainsencher: Epic, Heroic, Ordinary at Asya Geisberg

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Gabriela Vainsencher with “Epic, Heroic, Ordinary” at Asya Geisberg gallery, March 2023

In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8th, 2023.

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Franziska Warzog: The Joy of Tactility

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Franziska Warzog, Creature covered by tongues, textile sculpture, 2008, 134 x 27 x 12 cm, (52.8 x 10.6 x 4.7 in), photo taken by the artist’s husband

The Hanover based artist Franziska Warzog makes textile sculptures characterized by bold shapes and vivid colors reminiscent of patterns in nature. As a daughter of two visual artists, she was introduced to design principles since early on.

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Susan Mastrangelo at 490 ATLANTIC

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The artist with her work, photo courtesy of Barabara Friedman

Susan Mastrangelo’s five paintings featured in her solo show at 490 ATLANTIC vibrate with vivid and visceral energy, a culmination of the emotional journey she has experienced this past year and a half. The artist says that as she is standing in front of this painting series, she remembers how the fear during COVID prompted her urge to “seize the moment and focus on being present every minute in the creation of each work.”

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Meridian at Haggerty Gallery: Sara Cardona and Elisa Lendvay

Thomas Motley in conversation with Elisa Lendvay and Sara Cardona


Installation view, Meridian, Haggerty Gallery, photo courtesy John Watson

The unique design and location of the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery at The University of Dallas proved a most fitting space for the exuberant content of Sara Cardona and Elisa Lendvay’s exhibit, titled Meridian. Picture a giant treehouse, spanning the edge of a steep ravine, extended over a leafy canopy of thick post oak trees. From the gallery’s atrium entry, visitors enjoy a dramatic bird’s-eye view of a sylvan campus below. Under gallery director John Watson’s sculptor’s eye, Cardona’s and Lendvay’s lively celebration of nature, a Gaia shout-out, projected joyous meridian energy-lines from gallery to surrounding woods. Meridian expressed the artists’ shared interests in earth’s natural shapes and cycles, regeneration of discarded or out-of-fashion cultural designs and hardware, and celebration of movement, of dance.

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Kyle Staver – New Work at Zürcher

In Dialogue with Kyle Staver


Kyle Stave, Venus and the Octopus, 2020, Oil on canvas, 70 x 58 in / 177,8 cm x 147,3 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Zürcher Gallery, NY/Paris

Kyle Staver’s second solo show at Zürcher Gallery in New York features new paintings, relief sculptures, drawings, and aquatint etchings through July 24th. In this interview Kyle Staver shares some ideas on her work process, touches upon the narrative and mythological elements in her work, and gives us an insight on her notion of art history.

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Artists on Coping: Daniel Wiener

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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In the studio with my dog, Ollie. May 11, 2020

Daniel Wiener, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, grew up near Los Angeles but has lived in NYC for thirty-nine years. A professional artist since 1977, Daniel’s first show was at the Stephen Wirtz gallery in San Francisco, held shortly after his graduation from UC at Berkeley. In 1982 Daniel was awarded a fellowship for an unusually long stay at Yaddo, which inspired his exodus to the East Coast. Daniel was affiliated with Lesley Heller Gallery, until it closed due to the Covid 19 pandemic, where he had a one-person exhibition titled Wide-eyed & Open-mouthed in September, 2019. In response to this show, Bomb Magazine published an interview with Daniel and Fawn Krieger called The Space of Intimacy: Daniel Wiener. He is currently working on a series of painting-like bas-reliefs made from self-hardening clay based on a technique he developed at Dieu Donne. Daniel lives and works in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

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