Upper East Side – Art Spiel

October 1, 2025September 29, 2025, by William Corwin

Getting to the End of the Line: Sol LeWitt and Phong Bui at Craig Starr

Installation View. Phong H. Bui and Sol LeWitt. Craig Starr Gallery (1)

For both Phong Bui and Sol LeWitt, the line is a democratizing gesture. The line as a line: a mark; steering focus towards the method of an image’s creation rather than convincing the viewer of the realism of its ultimate subject. And, at least for both of these artists, this means we begin to deal with units. With LeWitt, the unit is the geometric shape — a square, cube, or even a diagram-a nugget of information, often placed within another diagram, offering multiple levels in the narrative of the work’s process and arrangement.

May 18, 2023May 16, 2023, by Art Spiel

Bob Seng: Cutting Corners at John Molloy Gallery

Featured Artist

Macintosh HD:Users:robertseng:Desktop:Art Spiel:Molloy overview3.jpg — John Molloy Gallery: installation view “Cutting Corners”

Bob Seng’s collages at John Molloy remake and reimagine the iconic EXIT sign. The artist says that he has chosen these ubiquitous signs for their attitude, a “go out” directive to an alternate space and time, and for their combative red and black elements. Initially he approached these signs as if they were archaeological excavations, selectively removing layers of the red and black paint to reveal what he imagined as “lost” civilizations buried underneath, “possibly a harbinger of our own in future time.”

March 11, 2023May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Beyond the Digital at Venus Over Manhattan (uptown)

Opinion

Installation view of "Beyond Digital", Venus Over Manhattan, 2022 — Installation view of “Beyond Digital”, Venus Over Manhattan, 2022. Photo courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan

Artists have been working with technology since the beginning of the 20^th Century. This represents an important moment in artmaking’s evolution, which until recently collectors and institutions haven’t wanted much to do with—the result is a lack of historical presence for such works. Without recourse to a history, every few decades promoters herald the emergence of an exciting new realm of expression or experimentation related to a new media, which appears to the uninformed to be without precedence—most recently it was the crypto-driven NFT market. It is this lack of a sense of history that makes it possible for the organizers of Beyond Digital to claim that this exhibition brings together pioneering artists whose works explore the possibilities of bridging the digital and physical realms. Problematically, this project is more than 50 years old and is built upon one that dates back to the start of the 20th century, when artists working in the modernist tradition started to adapt technology to art to produce light organs, slideshows and kinetic art.

January 26, 2022January 25, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Doomscrolling at Petzel

In Conversation with Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston, “May 27” (2021), multi-color woodblock print on paper. 57.5 x 42.25 inches (courtesy the artists and Petzel, New York)

The woodblock prints by the artists Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston at Petzel refer to recent harsh events that occurred in the United States and the way we perceive them through iconic media imagery. The prints specifically address 18 moments that took place between May 24^th, 2020 to January 6^th, 2021—marked by the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the ensuing protests, and the insurrection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is on view at the gallery Upper East Side location through February 12, 2022.