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Where's the frame
November 21, 2022 5:39 PM
GMT
Although it might seem that the whole art world is prepping for Miami art week, there are some excellent shows to see in New York City. From Al Freeman’s soft sculptural paintings in the Lower East Side to Ariana Papademetropoulos's feminine surreal depictions in Chelsea, here is a list of exhibitions you can visit around NYC right now.
TREMBLING - Tao Siqi at Fortnight Institute
Deliciously tinted and soft-edged depictions, Tao Siqi’s cropped compositions make you wonder what you’re looking at. Fragments of paws, breasts, toes and champagne, the ambiguity makes you questions what’s what. The artist keeps the meaning and subtext to herself, so the works are open-ended for the viewer to interpret. The small and mid-sized paintings are hung across the wall with lots of space to breathe, making the cropped-up images look even smaller and partial.
ON VIEW UNTIL DEC 17 2022
FLOORS - Al Freeman at 56 Henry
For this exhibition, Al Freeman has created four new large-scale, loosely-stuffed vinyl reproductions of everyday objects. Each of the four sculptures that hang on the walls of the space is an inflated depiction of everyday objects that you can find on the floor. One is a larger-than-life scratched-out lotto ticket, another a pavement full of pennies and receipts, all of them instantly recognisable signs of everyday life. Seemingly unremarkable sights if not for its stuffed, soft, large inflation. As Dan Nadel has written: ‘On the wall, Freeman’s sculptures are gently sagging and knowing monuments, so alive that they seem to be making mordant comments to each other. If there’s a critique of consumption, of carelessness, then it’s directed equally at the artist herself, but with a wise shrug.’ Don’t forget to see the book where you can find her comparisons. For these, she pairs two images that resemble each other; sometimes, images of artworks - like Ed Ruscha - are mirrored with hilarious images found on the internet, photos of drunk friends, and pictures of pranks.
ON VIEW UNTIL DEC 4 2022
MENISCUS - Daniel Ingroff at Situations
In Daniel Ingroff’s solo exhibition at Situations, you can see his exploration of bodily relations between the subject and the outside world. In a beautiful soft green, he has depicted two humanised peas french kissing, a surreal combination of a large head under bather exhaling while unbothered ducks are swimming above him, all poetically encroaching upon each other’s territories. As written by the gallery: ‘The subjects are in a state of “becoming” as they hybridize into other forms. A variety of responses to this violation are depicted: there is a challenge, there is resignation, and there is communion.’
ON VIEW UNTIL NOV 27 2022
Chloe Wise at The Journal Gallery
For this show, Chloe Wise has created very realistic paintings depicting faces or bust portraits. Ultra awkward emotions, complete unfiltered happiness, or something in-between - there is humour, there is joy - just go and see it.
ON VIEW UNTIL DEC 3 2022
LA ISLA DE BARRO - Amy Bravo & Albert Peguero at Swivel Gallery
At this two-person exhibition with Amy Bravo and Albert Peguero curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre and Bony Ramirez, the space if filled with sculptures and works on canvas that follow the rounded shapes of the gallery walls. As written by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, ‘La Isla De Barro offers as a premise the creation of a fantasized world where two artists’ personal obsessions and narratives, anchored in their distinctive history and relationship to a home drawn from memories, recollections or tales, blend into an immersive scene of wonder. Recontextualizing their distinctive cultural specificities, Amy Bravo and Albert Peguero each explore their unique bond to their homeland in subjective ways. While Amy Bravo uses symbolism, memorabilia, recounted familial histories and ownership of self as a means to reinvent a fantastic, intimate vision of Cuba, Albert Peguero adopts the traditional building aesthetic from his native Dominican Republic to create playful and surreal functional structures which interrogate the shared experience of working-class immigrants. For the exhibition, both practices are put in contextual dialogue as to create a dynamic space the viewer can immerse themself in.’
ON VIEW UNTIL JAN 7 2023
THE FORGETTING - Shary Boyle at Sargent's Daughters
At this exhibition, you can see Shary Boyle’s wide range of media, sculpture, drawing, installation and performance. In this new body of work, the artist combines a range of materials as well as specific social and political histories. In doing so, she explores the formation of personal identity right now, during our cultural crisis. Weaving in common art historical scenes, such as a beautiful depiction of flowers in a vase, is juxtaposed with an almost offputting marble-like chopped of hands that seem the be smoking a blunt. Or another common art historical scene, an empty beach, is contrasted with a human-skeleton hybrid lying serenely on the sand. It’s shocking but still comforting - asking questions about our state of being.
ON VIEW UNTIL DEC 17 2022
EXTERNAL ENTRAILS - group show at Silverlens Gallery
At the gallery’s second show in their new New York gallery, you can see an intergenerational group exhibition featuring all new works by Southeast Asian artists Nicole Coson, Corinne de San Jose, Bernardo Pacquing, and Arin Sunaryo. As put forward by the gallery, the exhibition is ‘ a response to the unremitting socio-political aggressors—national and foreign governments, colonialism, erasure, and dissimulation—and environmental disasters— volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, extreme floods, and monsoons—that Southeast Asia faces as one of the world’s most natural disaster-prone regions.’
ON VIEW UNTIL JAN 7 2023
BABY ALONE IN BABYLONE - Ariana Papademetropoulos at Vito Schnabel Gallery
At the gallery’s 19th Street location, you will find new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Ariana Papademetropoulo. In this new body of work, she draws upon the 15th-century lore of the mythical unicorn. In her exploration of this theme, she considers iconography from two celebrated tapestry series of the late Middle Ages: The Lady and the Unicorn, an allegorical fable of the five senses, and The Hunt of the Unicorn, a story unfolding of the swift, wild horned creature who could only be tamed by a virgin maiden. Constructing her own eccentric tale in the present day, Papademetropoulos invites viewers to journey between collapsing realities and converging realms through a couple of hyperreal, dream-like episodes that unite in a story of awakening and transformation.
ON VIEW UNTIL JAN 7 2023
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Image: close up Ariana Papademetropoulos, Phases of Venus, 2022