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Gallery shows

Hudson Valley (and vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: May 2024

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Spring is in full bloom and it’s one of the most beautiful times of year upstate. I’m looking forward to Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory, curated by David A. Ross at Kino Saito in Verplanck, NY, opening May 11. Farther north there are two notable shows opening on May 18 in Kinderhook: Other Realities (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms) at Bill Arning Exhibitions and Annie Bielski, Raw Footage at SEPTEMBER. Also opening May 18 is the Wassaic Project’s summer exhibition Tall Shadows in Short Order. I recommend visiting Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson to see Lothar Osterburg’s extensive solo exhibition, A Celebration of the Small, featuring a collection of models, installations, and photogravures from the past twenty-five years. There are too many great exhibitions to mention here, so take a look at the list below and get ready for a road trip.

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Gallery shows

NYC Selected Gallery Guide: May 2024

Welcome to the early edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to May art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Notable, must-see shows in Brooklyn include Emily Janowick at International Waters, Emily Roz at Auxilliary Projects, and Charlotte Zinsser at Haul. In Manhattan, Julia Bland has a new series of monumental woven and painted pieces at Derek Eller and Joanne Greenbaum is having her first solo at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Check out Two Coats contributors Anna Gregor at D.D.D.D. Projects and Natasha Sweeten at Satchel Projects. We also recommend Jennifer Coates at both HIgh Noon and Chart, Lesley Vance at Bortolami, Rachel Eulena Williams at Canada, and Amy Sillman at Gladstone. And then, don’t forget, we will have a slew of art fairs in our midst. We’ll be heading to the Future, NADA, and Independent fairs. See you out there.

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Solo Shows

Lucy Puls: Meaning in obsolescence

Contributed by Talia Shiroma / Pink teddy bears, plastic ponies, and the blank face of a Mac 512 computer peer out from blocks of amber murk. They are among the discarded goods on display at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery as part of Berkeley-based artist Lucy Puls’s solo show, spanning works created between 1989 and 2003. For the series In Resin, which she began in the early nineties, Puls amassed secondhand items from thrift shops and encased them in translucent resin prisms. Ranging from a BB gun to records, these once-coveted objects now register as curiously impotent, floating in their chambers like specimens in jars. Although they are up for sale once more, the encased objects feel unobtainable, as if quarantined from both time and human desire.

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Joe Bradley: Merging night and day

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / On a warm, sunny day that teased people outdoors, I stepped into Zwirner to catch Joe Bradley’s current exhibition, “Vom Abend.” Nine large paintings gleamed within the pristine gallery. I’d in fact been on my way to see another show, but at Zwirner I lingered and I looked, unexpectedly beguiled. Pretty soon I relaxed and accepted I’d be here a while.

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Group Shows

Xingze Li and Sarah Pater: Extraordinarily quotidian

Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back. 

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Solo Shows

Ian Myers: A painter’s faith

Contributed by Anna Gregor / Ian Myers’ paintings blur the lines between art, nature, and miracle, asking what painting’s vocation is at a moment when anything can be art, nature is under threat, and miracles are unfathomable. His five paintings, on view in his solo show “immortal flub” at New Collectors Gallery, are obviously art. Rectangles do not occur in nature, nor do the white gallery walls on which his rectangular paintings hang. But these rectangles don’t act like windows that allow us to enter an illusionistic space, as we expect from mimetic paintings. Nor do they reveal the human hand or thought processes that we assume to be involved in making abstract work. They eschew the exhibitionist gesture of Abstract Expressionism, the clarity of hard-edge abstraction, and the planned step-by-step process of much contemporary abstraction. 

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Solo Shows

Farrell Brickhouse: The beat goes on

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.

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Solo Shows

Mary Carlson: Timelessly medieval

Contributed by Adam Simon / I happened to visit Mary Carlson’s exhibition “Garden” at Kerry Schuss Gallery the day I finished reading Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, written in the 1950s. I’m not usually drawn to fantasy fiction – this book was a gift – but Peake’s dreamlike rendering of a forbidding castle with clinging ivy and bizarre inhabitants had me in thrall, primed to receive Carlson’s medieval world and its symbiotic relationships between plants and people. One of the characters in Titus Groan uses the ivy to scale the castle walls, while two others take tea on a tree that grows horizontally out one of the windows. While not exactly ivy, vines fashioned from copper piping figure prominently in “Garden,”often dwarfing the mostly female glazed porcelain saints that sit on modest carved wooden shelves. The untamed power of the natural world, and humanity’s marginal presence in it, is an underlying theme in “Garden” and very like the world described by Peake.

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Museum Exhibitions

What makes a good painting?

Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.

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Solo Shows

Lee Maxey: Teasing out the uneasy

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Many years ago, I saw a strange and seductive specter on a cold winter night in Troy, New York, that has haunted me to this day. Through the glass windows of a gloomily defunct department store, a neon shock of orange letters hovered in the air spelling out the word EXIST. This enigma was the work of the artist Sharon Bates, part of an installation in which she cleverly riffed on the authority of an EXIT sign, transforming an everyday sight into a glowing spiritual command. I was reminded of Bates’s sculpture while taking in Lee Maxey’s new exhibition of paintings, titled “Wait Here,” at Olympia.

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