September 5, 2022
Susan Rothenberg, Beggar, 1982. Oil on canvas. 39 1⁄2 × 50 1⁄2 in. © Susan Rothenberg. Courtesy of Maggie Trakas and Karma
Summer’s nearing its drought-filled end, and there’s nothing like seeing some “good” art to quench the thirst. The art critic Clement Greenberg used to tell me, when we’d go to galleries together: “There’s only two kinds of art, ‘good’ or ‘bad’—that’s all there is.”
For a big gulp of both kinds, the Armory Show at the Javits Center is the place to start (September 9 through 11). Independent 20th Century, the new off-shoot of Matthew Higgs and Elizabeth Dee’s widely acclaimed Independent (known as a place to discover rising artistic talent), focuses on what it means to be “contemporary” now—it’s at the newly restored Battery Maritime Building (September 8 through 11). Here are some shows that I think distinguish the “good” art from the other kind:
Ivy Shapiro’s group exhibition of 30 women artists redefines what the act of painting actually means. It’s called “Painting in New York: 1971-83,” a period of political and aesthetic upheaval. Ivy, the daughter of artist Joel Shapiro, grew up observing these strong and inspiring women artists (Jennifer Bartlett, Lois Lane, Elizabeth Murray, Ellen Phelan, Pat Steir, Susan Rothenberg, and others) and hopes seeing these paintings will instigate more interest in the lives of the people who made them—their “legacies matter now more than ever.” (Karma, opens September 21.)
Julie Curtiss’s “Somnambules,” a very personal body of work that lays bare her battle with insomnia and all that it implies. (Anton Kern, 16 East 55th St, September 8 through October 22.)
Peter Schlesinger’s “Rocks Waves Clouds” at David Lewis in East Hampton, through October 9. Bold ceramic sculptures with ash glaze (the most ancient form of glazing) in wiggly shapes become alive with markings that suggest the show’s title, accompanied by paintings of Swedish seascapes—landscapes unlike any I know.
Melissa McGill’s “Currents” at Totah, 183 Stanton Street (September 8 through October 15).
Christine Quarles’s “In 24 Days tha Sun’ll Set at 7pm,” her first major solo New York exhibition, at Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street (September 8 through October 29).
Arthur Jafa’s “The White Album,” the penetrating follow-up to his 2017 groundbreaking “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death.” (Screenings at Gladstone, 508 West 125th Street, Wednesday-Sunday, 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.)
Hank Willis Thomas’s “Everything We See Hides Another Thing” will occupy both of Jack Shainman’s Chelsea spaces (September 8 through October 29).
Basil Kincaid’s “River, Frog and Crescent Moon” (Venus Over Manhattan, 120 East 65th Street, September 7 through October 8).
Dawn Williams Boyd’s “The Tip of the Iceberg” debuts at Fort Gansevoort with a dozen vividly colored cloth paintings—fabric is her paint. Powerful images stitched together use history as well as contemporary political references and personal recollections to tell provoking narratives. There’s nothing shy about them: In Death of Democracy, Trump, Putin, and Kim Jong-un carry a casket as a metaphor for the fall of democracy. (5 Ninth Avenue, September 21 through November 19.)
New Delhi and London-based Bharti Kher’s “Ancestor,” commissioned by the Public Art Fund, stands tall at 18 feet to welcome one and all into Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza. She’s a fantastical bronze mother figure of hybrid identity, in a sari with hair in a multi-lobed bun. (September 8 through August 27, 2023.)
Christina Iglesias’s “Landscape and Memory,” five bronze sculptural pools with flowing water in Madison Square Park, through December 4. It’s an ode to Cedar Creek, which once ran through the park where the oval lawn is today. (Madison Square Park Conservancy, between East 23rd and East 26th Streets, from Broadway and Madison Avenue.)
Julia Phillips delves into surveillance in public space with “Observer, Observed”—curated by Cecilia Alemani, it’s Phillips’s first public artwork and the High Line’s latest commission. Cast bronze binoculars on a stand invite visitors to spy on neighboring buildings and streets while a camera inside the binoculars beams the viewers’ eyes onto an adjacent LED screen. With echoes of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the work digs into the voyeurism of social media. (Installed on the Flyover on the High Line near 26th Street through August 2023.) New sculptures by Phillips can also be seen at street level in her show at Matthew Marks (526 West 22nd Street, September 10 through October 29).
Paris-based artist Xinyi Cheng is having her first show in the United States. It opens in November at Matthew Marks. Gay men are often a theme in her vividly colorful and provocative canvases—she revises gendered thinking.
“Gilded Darkness,” Nari Ward’s latest project, is curated by Massimiliano Gioni (husband of Cecilia Alemani and creative director of the New Museum) for the Trussardi Foundation at Centro Balneare Romano in Milan (September 12 through October 16). His next big show at the New Museum is Theaster Gates’s “Young Lords and Their Traces” (November 10 through February 5, 2023).
You can see the last photographs ever taken of Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson, a rare portrait of Alexander McQueen—in a ball gown—and much more in David LaChapelle’s “Make Believe” at Fotografiska New York. (September 9 through January 9.)
“Guston/Morandi/Scully” at Mnuchin Gallery, curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam (45 East 78th Street, September 8 through October 15).
Mary Heilmann’s “Daydream” at 303 Gallery—her Red Break, one of her standout paintings, shares the space here with ceramics and an installment of her brightly colored furniture. (555 West 21st Street, September 17 through October 29.)
“Sheree Hovsepian: Leaning In” at Rachel Uffner (170 Suffolk Street, September 16 through November 5).
Issy Wood’s “Time Sensitive,” her new paintings of hijacked images, are imagined and real at the same time. (Michael Werner, 4 East 77th Street, September 9 through November 12.)
“Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition” at the Yale University Art Gallery (September 9 through January 8, 2023).
A selection of portraits by Njedeka Akunyili Crosby from her ongoing series of Nigerian children called The Beautyful Ones; it’s curated by Hilton Als at the Yale Center for British Art (September 22 through January 22, 2023).
At Diana New York, the new cooperative gallery debuting this month in one room with lots of art-gallery history at 127 Henry Street, three international galleries team up and open with a group of artists from their stables—Amba Sayal-Bennett, Philip Mueller, Matthew Kirk, Jimmy Wright, Rachel Martin, and Tyler Bright Hilton. (September 7 through October 16.)
And don’t miss MoMA’s Wolgang Tillman show, “To look without fear” (September 12 through January 1, 2023). It seems like Tillmans has explored every imaginable genre known to photography, and through his eye we feel what it’s like to be alive at this time.
At MoMA PS1, Umar Rashid gives us the final chapters (4, 5, and 6) of his epic story “Ancien Regime Change.” Thirty new works, fiendishly researched, look back to the 18th century, zeroing in on New York’s history and weaving fact and fantasy, laying bare how political and cultural power comes and maybe goes. In his imagining, nothing is fixed—everything is being reinvented. He’s a 21st-century history painter. (September 22 through March 13, 2023.)
Go up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” alongside contemporary artists working in clay. (September 9 through February 5, 2023.) Go a little further uptown to see Americas Society’s thought-provoking “Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime,” which promises “natural and fiscal paradise” in the Caribbean region, where finance and tourism abound, with help from artists like Allora & Calzadilla, Gwladys Gambie, and Yiyo Tirado. (September 7 through December 17.)
By all means go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for “Matisse in the 1930s,” a time when, if you can believe it, Henri was having a creative block. It was his visit to Philadelphia at the invitation of Albert Barnes to do a mural that brought him back to planet Matisse. And a train to Washington will take you to “Sargent and Spain” at the National Gallery. More than 140 works, including never-published photographs by the artist himself, reveal his fascination with that country’s landscapes, people, and daily life (October 2 through January 2, 2023). And then there’s “Wonder Women,” a powerful group of them, curated by Kathy Huang at Jeffrey Deitch, 925 North Orange Drive in L.A. (through October 22).
Around the world: The far-flung and not-so-far-flung…
Over the weekend, art worlders congregated in Seoul, drinking in emerging talent and art throughout time at more than 110 galleries in Frieze’s first art fair in Asia.
Shara Hughes gives us imagined and remembered landscapes with unexpected colorful combinations in “Time Lapsed” at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (September 17 through November 20).
“Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 15 through February 19, 2023).
“Monet–Mitchell” serves up 60 works by both artists at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (October 5 through February 27, 2023).
In Hadi Fallahpisheh’s “As Free As Birds” at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London (through September 18), his playfulness is never far, but his cast of characters (a human, a mouse, a cat, and a dog) form a kind of family and conjure domestic nostalgia, which can turn violent, raising questions about anxiety and belonging.
Outsider Art Fair Paris (September 15 through 18) will offer Ukrainian folk art as well as underground comics in a show called “The Underground is Always Outside”; it’s curated by Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Dan Nadel.
Nature Morte’s Nidhi Agarwal and Aditya Pande shows at Delhi Contemporary Art Week (September 1 through 7, Centre of Contemporary Art Building, New Delhi).
Doug Aitken’s “Flags and Debris” at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a collaboration with LA Dance Project, a kind of “Choreography in the Desolate City.” All the works have emerged since COVID, and bear its imprint. (Through December 31.)
“Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-1954” gives beautiful epistolary and visual insight into the artist as a young man. It’s a kind of early, ephemeral retrospective (out from Thames & Hudson on November 22, 2022). The book coincides with a major Freud exhibition at London’s National Gallery.
And don’t leave London before looking long and hard at three paintings by John Currin at Sadie Coles. It’s a masterclass in “good” art: Currin, who turns 60 on September 16, is clearly communicating with Jan van Eyck and his other art gods. (Opens October 11.)
