New York In The Eighties: A Blueprint For The Present

 
An image of Keith Haring on the New York Subway in the 1980s

Tseng Kwong Chi
Keith Haring in New York City Subway Car, 1981/2019
Gelatin silver print
20 × 30 inches

 

text by Lola Titilayo

Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties reveals a decade shaped by cultural pressure points – economic insecurity, constitutional backlash, a public health catastrophe, and the debate over who gets to be seen, feeling uncannily familiar in today’s world. The show frames the decade as a blueprint for understanding the problems artists face today, battling with institutions, identity, and the power of image in everyday life.

After the financial crisis of the 1970s, New York entered a decade marked by raw, unpredictable talent, with artists who were defiantly bent on redefining what art could be. Rising artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, and Christopher Wool began reshaping contemporary art, challenging expectations, and expanding the bounds of artistic expression. The ’80s ushered in a new era, in which experimentation and radical expression were the gravitational center of the scene.

Entire neighborhoods downtown were still gritty, industrial, and half-abandoned, which allowed artists to claim lofts and storefronts as studios, galleries, and performance spaces. The lack of structure made the city fertile ground for artists to experiment, and community was paramount in bringing ideas together. From the economic crisis recovery to the rise of AIDS, art became a way to claim space, identity, and voice often in ways that were provocative and deeply personal to the artist.

An image of the 'What Me Worry' piece by Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (What me worry?), 1987
Photographic silkscreen on vinyl
107 7⁄8 × 127 15⁄16 inches

One of the defining threads was a turn toward confrontational, socially charged art. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (What Me Worry?) exemplifies this impulse. Using her signature combination of bold, declarative text layered over ironic phrases and imagery, Kruger exposes the gap between the carefree façade promoted by mass culture and the complicated reality underneath.

The phrase “What me worry?” places the viewer inside that first-person statement, while challenging them to question the role that  privilege plays in determining the content and degree of our worries. In doing so, the work pushes the viewer to step outside the passive acceptance of cultural norms and to recognize how language and imagery shape our emotional responses.

A Guerrilla Girls piece on women one person exhibitions in New York

Guerrilla Girls
How Many Women Had One-Person Exhibitions at NYC Museums Last Year?, 1985
Off-set print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches

On the recurring theme of confrontational art, Guerrilla Girls calls out discrimination in the art world. These bold posters were designed to draw viewers’ attention to the main issue for women in the art industry: the lack of representation in major institutions and solo exhibitions within a global art capital. True to their approach, the Guerrilla Girls maintain anonymity using gorilla masks as a way to shift the attention from the individual to the collective message.

Works such as untitled(fred) by Kenny Scharf, embody the decade’s chaotic energy with the use of clashing patterns, complementary colors, and cartoonish, improvised expressions.

'the advantaged of being a woman artist' piece by Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls
The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
Print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches

In Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Gravestone, the three-door installation represents the architecture of a monument to life, death, and what lies beyond. Created just a year before his death, the rigid doors form passages to Basquiat’s life and memories. His untitled (Mary Boone) features a rough painting of a crown, with “mary boone” written underneath. A fitting inclusion for the curator, as she marks her triumphant return to the New York art world.  

A piece by Jean Michael Basquiat, three doors

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Gravestone, 1987
Acrylic and oil on wooden panels
5415⁄16 × 687⁄8 × 221⁄16 inches

Keith Haring, along with artists such as González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, and Niki de Saint Phalle confronted society with its role in the AIDS epidemic. On a formal level, Haring experimented with diverse surfaces such as ceramic vases and chalkboards, adapting his signature dancing figures to new textures while preserving the joyful energy of his line work. Jeff Koons, by contrast, embraced materials like stainless steel, transforming everyday objects into highly-polished, hyper-reflective icons of consumer culture. Together, these artists pushed material boundaries using unexpected textures to reimagine the relationship between art, objects, and cultural norms.

A vase by Keith Haring

Keith Haring
Untitled (Gold Vase), 1981
Felt-tip pen and enamel on fiberglass vase
40 × 25 × 25 inches

Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties is on view through December 13 at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York

Gabriel Orozco Recontextualizes Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?" Through the Lens of Contemporary Art & Politics @ Kurimanzutto New York

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

text by Poppy Baring

Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay, “Why Socialism?” is as relevant now as it was almost seventy-five years ago. Featuring numerous artists’ responses to the essay, artist and curator Gabriel Orozco opens the show with a refined version of the text, presented as a collage of modest photocopies. Themes that are still eerily close to those that swell in today’s discourse are included, such as “private capital tends to be concentrated in few hands,” “legislative bodies are selected by political parties largely financed by private capitalists,” “production is carried on for profit not for use,” and “an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student who is trained to worship acquisitive success.”

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman

These brief summaries of Albert Einstein’s contestations of capitalism are still echoed in media today. In a recent interview with comedian Marc Maron, Barack Obama spoke about how our culture is geared toward consumption, material goods, and fame. The author Scott Galloways, when speaking with Piers Morgan, notes that innovation has somehow excused depravity, citing Elon Musk as a clear example. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize, warned audiences of the danger of digital beings created by companies motivated by short-term profits. The answer to these issues suggested by Einstein in “Why Socialism?” is a socialist economy and an educational system orientated towards social goals.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

While visitors are left with political thoughts ruminating, they enter the almost all black-and-white main room of the exhibition and approach large grayscale flags of United Nations members, made by Wilfredo Prieto in a piece called “Apolitico.” Their loss of color strips away any signs of allegiance or patriotism and presents these flags as interchangeable. Other works, such as Ariel Schlesinger’s “Burnt Newspapers,” show the fragility of historical records, which is brought up again in the final and most shocking part of the exhibition, “The Pegasus Stories” by Forensic Architecture. 

This video on digital violence reveals the terrifying real-life experiences of international human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and activists whose devices were infected and monitored by corporations using Pegasus, a destructive software developed by the Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group. Initially developed as just one part of Israel’s mass surveillance of Palestinians, Pegasus is now being used to target individuals across forty-five countries. In the passage for visitors to read before watching the film, they explain the American government’s public rejections of the software, as contrasted with its private acquisition of some of its tools from the NSO group’s U.S affiliate, epitomizing American hypocrisy and depravity at its finest.

This exhibition exposes visitors to an array of artists’ responses to Einstein’s essay. The stories reported in the final film are enough to leave you speechless, and overall, this display provides a dark and scary reflection of our current reality, which indeed supplies an answer to the question being posed.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

Featured artists include Ariel Schlesinger, Forensic Architecture, Minerva Cuevas, Petrit Halilaj, Robert Longo, Roman Ondak, Wilfredo Prieto, Zoe Leonard, and special guests.

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein is on view through October 18 at Kurimanzutto 516 W 20th St, New York

Hank Willis Thomas' I AM MANY Implicates Us All in the Making of History

Hank Willis Thomas
Roots (After Bearden), 2023
screenprint and UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond
97.625 × 122 × 3 inches (framed)

text by Hank Manning

Truth is black and white–or is it? In I AM MANY at Jack Shainman Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas invites us to consider how perspective changes our understanding of art, nationhood, oppression, solidarity, and the relationship between the past and present.

In direct reference to the 1,300 identical “I AM A MAN” signs carried during the Black sanitation workers strike of 1968, I AM MANY proposes itself as an antipode to the famed rallying cry. It was this demonstration where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

As guests enter, the words “LOVE OVER RULES” blink in neon blue. To the left, one black and one white arm stretch towards the heavens, their hands grasped. This marble sculpture is titled Loving Day, in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly surnamed couple whose legal battles enshrined the right to interracial marriage in America. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Community, 2024
Polished stainless steel
33.25 × 33.5 × 11.8125 inches

Upstairs, hands continue to feature prominently in the exhibition’s bronze and stainless steel statues. Hands impart the toll of one’s work, reach out for help, link together, call for action, but also violently apprehend. Hands direct actions from the aesthetic–grooming hair–to the existential–resisting or abetting violence.

Hank Willis Thomas
America (gray), 2025
mixed media including decommissioned US prison uniforms
68 x 159 x 1.25 inches

Each piece of Thomas’s visual art demands a second viewing: from a closer distance or a different angle, with more light or more context. Upon first glance, a wall work made partially from decommissioned prison uniforms spells out “AMERICA,” but as we approach, the letters become a dizzying maze. “EVERYTHING” on a lenticular print actually consists of innumerable small “NOTHING”s. Op art prints shift as we walk from left to right, challenging our understanding of the black-white dichotomy. In each of these works, our first impressions are betrayed by unexpected paradoxical interpretations. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Until Ex parte Endo, 2024
UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond, decommissioned US flag
78.5 x 57.5 x 9 inches (framed and assembled)

With written instructions, the exhibition invites us to use a camera flash to uncover the palimpsestic nature of the work, revealing images that are often lost to history. Under an American flag and an old portrait of the US Capitol building, light reveals children of varied races pledging allegiance. Numerous faces of protestors, those who came together to fight and build our current world, appear etched into UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. In the final room upstairs, prints of the pamphlet “Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot” hang. When illuminated, they unveil photographs of protesters, armed police, and smashed windows. One multiple mixed-media quilt is described as “reminiscent of a QR code,” emblematic of the way that the incarcerated are treated like “faceless numbers on a spreadsheet.” 

The late King’s presence and guidance are felt throughout the exhibition. But it is not his face hidden within the works. Rather, we see the thousands of people who listened to him declare, “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thomas forces us to reconsider not just how we understand our world today, but how we read history, from the slave trade to the Civil Rights movement to our present day. It is the story of not just a man, or any person, but many. The exhibition’s continuous and multifaceted interactivity nudges us: we too are part of the story and must move, shed light, think critically, and use our voices. 


Hank Willis Thomas: I AM MANY is on view until November 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York

Theo Bardsley’s Renderings of Sunday: Between Irony and Affection

 
 

text by Emma Grimes

At Court Tree Collective, a family-run gallery devoted to emerging artists, the London-based painter Theo Bardsley is on view with Two Sides of Sunday, a series of new works in azure blues, forest greens, and autumnal browns. His paintings capture the many ways people spend a Sunday—binge-watching Netflix, bathing, fighting a hangover—with a gaze that floats between affection and irony.

In Hair Of The Dog, a dapper, lonely man nurses his hangover in a stylish pub. Two pints of Guinness rest on the table, one full, one empty and nudged to the side. The outline of the drained glass looks as if it could have been drawn in chalk, the paint appearing coarse and granular.

In another work, The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, Bardsley employs the same technique on an ashtray. Behind a sleeping woman tangled in a blanket, a man smokes. On the table beside him sits an ashtray, rendered only in outline. His work stops just shy of completion, as if these tableaus are a faint memory from a dream. 

Theo Bardsley
The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective

Both these scenes and his other works carry a distinct melancholy. Even when the figures aren’t physically alone on the canvas—and many are—there is distance and isolation even in shared moments. Everyone in Bardsley’s world appears preoccupied and never fully present, like the incomplete renderings of the pint and ashtray.

Like his Naive art predecessors, Bardsley flattens space and eschews practical details. The smoker’s hand, for instance, is an oblong blob that’s legible as a hand only by its placement. The smoke drifts out of the man’s mouth in cloudy, gray-white flecks. Each is a small, deliberate stroke. There’s a tension between these static, almost tangible bits of smoke and the movement they imply. Bardsley makes such a fleeting moment feel graspable. 

In A Face Mask and Leftovers for Breakfast, a figure in a red robe and green face mask sits lost in thought. On the table before them sits a takeout box, a moka pot, and an orange Penguin Classics edition of Pride and Prejudice. Behind the figure, an open window frames leafy trees, and beside it hangs a solemn portrait. Bardsley seems to wink at artistic conventions—the idealized landscape, the serious portrait—while guiding our gaze instead toward a figure in a face mask eating from a box of leftovers. His humor lies in this elevation of the mundane and his self-aware pleasure in painting it.

His works are titled with a blunt literalness, as if to dissuade anyone from searching for deeper meaning. In one work, the title itself is a joke. A brunette woman is draped across a velvety red bed, her head resting in the crook of her elbow with a remote control at her side. The painting is called Are You Still Watching, referencing Netflix’s familiar notification to viewers who’ve been watching a show for hours.

Theo Bardlsey
Are You Still Watching, 2025
Oil on canvas
32 × 44 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective

Rather than painting picturesque landscapes or serious portraiture, of which he references within his own paintings, Bardsley paints the quotidianness of domestic, modern life with both a solemn melancholy and a deadpan seriousness that’s impossible not to find humorous. And he’s laughing too.

Two Sides of Sunday is on view through October 11 at Court Tree Collective, 51 35th Street, New York.

Sasha Gordon: A Gaze Cutting Inward

 

Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

 

text by Emma Grimes

On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.

Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. 

Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.

Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.

Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on. 

On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?

In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.

In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn. 

 

Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

 

Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface. 

In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.

Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.

Inside Five Must-See New York Gallery Shows This Spring

Find everything from queer intimacy to infinity rooms to domestic Americana on paper this season in New York’s galleries.

 

Jim Shaw
Study for “The Bride Stripped Bare” (2016)
Pencil on paper

 

text by Kim Shveka

Jim Shaw, Drawings
Gagosian
On view through June 14

For over thirty years, American artist Jim Shaw has mined the depths of Americana, popular culture, personal memory, and dream logic to create a body of work as chaotic as it is compelling. Now on view at Gagosian, Drawings is an exhibition of works on paper made between 2012 and 2024, showing Shaw’s intellectual inspirations in his artistic journey. Known for his ability to weave together the threads of America’s subconscious through surreal and symbolic visual language, Shaw here turns to the intimacy of graphite and ink, using sketch-like drawings to offer a direct window into his thinking; raw and unfiltered. These drawings are freely associated with references drawn from the artist’s mind and memory, as he imagines and recalls scenes from his own life and the collective American memory, translating the images in his mind’s eye onto paper. Jim Shaw’s “Drawings” is a deeply personal and evocative exploration of identity, nostalgia, and American culture.

 

Sam Moyer
Boca (2025)
Marble, acrylic on plaster-coated canvas

 

Sam Moyer, Subject to Change
Sean Kelly
On view through June 14

Multidisciplinary artist Sam Moyer is known for her distinctive approach to merging abstraction and materiality, often redefining conventional sculptural forms through her innovative use of natural elements. Her work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, creating wall-mounted pieces that highlight variations in surface and light.
Now showing at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sam Moyer’s fourth solo exhibition features a dynamic body of new work. The exhibition showcases Moyer's fondness for inconsistency and contradictions across a variety of artworks. Featuring Moyer’s latest stone paintings from 2024, which combine reclaimed stone and painted canvas, alongside oil on panel paintings and handmade paper. In these new works, Moyer meditates on life's inherent dualities; decay and growth, loss and perspective, endings and emergent beginnings; capturing a moment of balance during trying times. The palette draws inspiration from Claude Monet’s late paintings, interpreting his shift towards purity of color and light as an investigation of essential visual language, ultimately reflecting Moyer's continued exploration of color and light as the core building blocks of abstraction.

 

Salman Toor
Cross Street (2025)
Oil on panel
© Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farwad Owrang

 

Salman Toor, Wish Maker
Luhring Augustine
On view through June 21

Salman Toor is renowned for his evocative figurative works that explore vulnerability within contemporary public and private life, particularly in the context of queer, diasporic identity. His paintings delve into the opportunities, anxieties, and humor inherent in the search for selfhood and the immigrant experience. Now showing at Luhring Augustine, Wish Maker, Toor’s first major New York presentation since his pivotal 2020 Whitney Museum show, spans both gallery locations, featuring paintings at Luhring Augustine Chelsea and a dedicated presentation of works on paper at Luhring Augustine Tribeca. Toor's new paintings, drawings, and etchings place imaginary yet relatable figures in diverse settings, examining the complexities of our paradoxical times. His work vibrates between heartening and harrowing, often employing a distinctive viridescent palette that illuminates both beauty and violence, liberation and entrapment, reflecting how perception shifts with perspective. Toor skillfully fuses art historical references with contemporary concerns, creating a rich compilation of traditions, popular culture, and lived experience.

Installation view, Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 8 - June 14, 2025.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert.

Atsuko Tanaka and Yayoi Kusama
Paula Cooper Gallery
On view through June 14

Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, is an exhibition that brings together the groundbreaking works of two of Japan’s most innovative and influential artists. The exhibition presents a diverse selection of Tanaka’s works on canvas and paper, alongside early pieces by Kusama in various media, highlighting the parallel yet distinct artistic concerns of these pioneering figures.

Both Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) matured in post-World War II Japan, a period of profound societal transformation that spurred radical shifts in the arts. Tanaka, a key female member of the Gutai movement, is known for vibrant works like her iconic “Electric Dress” (1956), where circles and lines dynamically interact. Kusama, active in 1960s New York, explored hypnotic repetition, creating immersive works evoking hallucination and boundlessness. Both shared a broadened approach to artmaking, incorporating textiles, sensory environments, and performance, developing personal abstract languages with repeated motifs in large, enveloping scales. The exhibition includes Tanaka's early drawings and paintings, Kusama’s pioneering “Infinity Nets,” rare collages, photographs, and historical films.


Dozie Kanu. Chair [ iii ] (Dark), 2022
Poured concrete, steel, rims
35.9 x 16.5 x 20.5 in. 91.4 x 41.9 x 52.1 cm.
Courtesy of anonymous gallery, New York, NY

the chair by the window is an old friend featuring work from Jane Dickson, Kamil Dossar, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dozie Kanu, Mike Kelley, Carolyn Lazard, Klara Liden, Elliot Reed, Josef Strau
Anonymous Gallery
On view through June 14

The chair by the window is an old friend explores the emotional layers of domestic space. It focuses on how our homes can feel safe and familiar, but also confining or heavy with memory. The objects we live with become more than decoration, they carry personal meaning, reflecting who we are, who we were, and who we might want to be. Some artworks, such as Nan Goldin’s My Bed, Hotel La Louisiane, seem to capture the trace of a moment that has just passed, preserving an atmosphere of intimacy and lingering presence. Others, like Elliot Reed’s leaning umbrellas, convey a sense of stillness and resistance to functionality, evoking suspension rather than resolution. Across the exhibition, everyday materials such as wires, fabric, and furniture are reimagined as vessels of emotion and meaning. Through these transformations, the works articulate themes of care, closeness, imbalance, and quiet shifts, drawing attention to the subtle psychological states embedded within domestic objects and spaces. In this way, the exhibition invites us to think about what ‘home’ really means. Is it a space where we can rest, or does it sometimes hold us back? As life outside moves faster and becomes more overwhelming, our interiors can become places where comfort and loneliness exist at the same time. They are both a retreat and a mirror of our inner world.

A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation

Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu


text by Karly Quadros


Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film. 

Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.

Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days. 

This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.

One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.

The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu

Mathilde Denize's Sound of Figures Reverberates Through Perrotin in New York

The melodic sensibility of Mathilde Denize’s visual style is at the center of Sound of Figures at Perrotin in New York. Reused from film sets, her materials are born-again into an environment that is altogether new. Denize’s combination of painting, sculpture, and figure feels almost archaeological—we are transported to a retrospective that is not actually of the past. 

Her use of color and form might match stereotypical notions of femininity, but her finished products are anything but. Denize’s paintings are akin to faces printed with makeup—picture a cheek coated in blush. There’s a corporeality to her two-dimensional work that makes it feel as though it’d be warm to the touch.

The entrancing and other-worldly nature of her work speaks to a certain feminine mystique contemporarily neglected in favor of a testosterone-centric mainstream. Using an impressive amalgamation of material and medium, Denize plays the song of a nuanced female experience without having to produce any noise.

Sound of Figures is on view through February 19 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002

Fall into a crevice of the human mind @ Perrotin in New York

text by Mia Milosevic

Jesper Just’s surrealist film, Interfears, is an eerie dreamscape documenting the neurological manifestation of emotion. The film, alongside an accompanying series of MRI prints, is currently on view at Perrotin in New York until December 21. 

On the second floor of 130 Orchard Street, positioned in a dark enclave to the left of the hallway, is Jesper Just’s neuroscientific pursuit into the emotional mind. Starring Academy Award nominee Matt Dillon, the film on display documents his character in a state of relative turmoil. He recites a monologue from the discomfort of an fMRI, which highlights the entrapment of the mind in its own neural net. As Dillon endeavors to portray an invented character, Interfears logs his authentic response, dismantling the separation generally accredited to the actor and his assigned role.

Breaking from conventional narrative structure, the film leverages MRI technology to aesthetically analyze emotional processing. The utilization of the clinical, private space strategically enunciates the natural paranoia our own minds force upon us in moments of solitude. Broadcasted on the ceiling of the otherwise sterile environment is a blue sky and a collection of palm trees. This illumination, amidst the otherwise corporate ceiling, starkly contrasts the internal neural processing of the character lying beneath it. Our own ironic sense of confinement, in contrast to the abyss which remains consistently above us, becomes jarringly apparent.

Facing the film, alongside the viewers, are three MRI prints which display brain activity via coloration of varying human emotions–terror, joy, and sadness. To witness movement on the MRI when someone is organizing their memories and thoughts is separative in a way that is abstractly terrifying. It doesn’t feel like we should be able to see the sensations which we might already doubt the legitimacy of. Further, the assignment of a region on the brain to one emotion or another actually does the opposite to demystifying the concept of our own emotional sourcing. Just’s propensity to provoke further inquiry is writ large. 

The cinematic musical composition is dreamlike for the entirety of the film, its resonance reminiscent of the distance we generally feel between action and volition when in the thick of a bad dream. Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Adagietto both activates and follows Dillon’s affective voyage throughout the piece, exploiting the role of sound in emotional exploration.

At one point in the film, Dillon recounts what appears to be a distant and potentially aversive memory.

“I’m outside the concert hall on the stairs.

My face, numb and freezing.

I hear laughter.

Golden light.

Red velvet seats.”

The image is vivid, and the description relatable. The dimly lit hue of Dillon’s memory is grounded by the environment it’s recounted in.

Installation view of Jesper Just’s Interfears at Perrotin New York, 2024. ©Jesper Just 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Interfears is on view through December 21 @ Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street New York, NY 10002

Absorb the Color of Late Capitalism in Baby Blue Benzo @ 52 Walker

David Zwirner at 52 Walker in New York City announces its thirteenth exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, which features work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist Sara Cwynar. This presentation focuses on a new film—for which the show is titled—shot on both digital video and 16mm and projected at monumental scale. To complement Baby Blue Benzo, a series of related photographs will be installed throughout the gallery space.

Engaging with vernacular photography and the moving image, as well as their attendant technologies, Cwynar’s practice—which also includes collage, installation, and performance—explores how pictorial constructs and their related systems of power feed back into real life. Such projects as Rose Gold (2017) and Baby Blue Benzo consider color—namely, how its use and value are constantly renegotiated by the shifting conditions of consumerism, technology, and desire. Drawing from her background in graphic design and a lineage of postwar conceptual photography, Cwynar tampers with visual signifiers to deconstruct notions of power and recontextualize image culture in late capitalism.

In her new film, Cwynar combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for Baby Blue Benzo were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot—featuring two sets of circular camera tracks—with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction.

Baby Blue Benzo is on view through December 21 @ 52 Walker Street, New York City

The Gelatinous Abjection of Mire Lee's Black Sun @ New Museum in New York Invariably Turns Us On

“Mire Lee: Black Sun,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum.
Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hannah Sage Kay


Entering Mire Lee’s installation at the New Museum—passing through plastic strip curtains into a moist, greenhouse-like environment—seems, I can only imagine, like a trip up a vaginal canal. It recalls one time that, in warm, sud-less water, I looked down to see a brownish-red gelatinous mass emerge between my legs. With an ovular center and porous, mane-like tentacles, it moved, not in a bloody mess, but as a neatly self-contained collection of blood clots and uterine lining. The wet porous fabric that lines the plastic walls of Lee’s installation recalls this same murky, brown fluid that accompanies the expulsion of an egg and, not at all coincidentally, overlarge egg sacks dangle from the ceiling, entwined with rope, metal chains, and what looks like a prematurely formed exoskeleton.

Strange whirring, rotating devices—simultaneously technological and organic—churn in mud-filled recesses of the grated metal floor below. One such contraption wound with sodden, fleshy cables rotates over a pool of dense brown liquid: a loose member makes a distinctly phallic flop; an art handler man-handles the entrails; a viewer becomes a casualty of the splash impact—its localization on the front of his pants unveiling the very male shame at the heart of all female subjugation. A cum shot to the patriarchy? A territorial spraying? A cyborgian golden shower? However you spin it, I like to think the installation staked its claim, via a forced confrontation with those bodily functions and oft-taboo fluids that make up the stuff of all life and sex, feces and death.

This pseudo-maturation chamber, in all its arousing repulsiveness, posits the female body as the original site of body-horror as a genre and sexual stimulant—not because any real violence has occurred, but rather because violence is inextricably associated with the female experience: vaginas tear in childbirth, babies emerge as purple as eggplants, walking down the street is a physical liability. And yet, the genius of Lee’s installation is its unabashed admission that depravity is sexy. It recalls those paraphiliac misadventures recounted in Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, where omorashi fetishism and corporeal mutilation are the result of adolescent musings; it simultaneously transports you inside an episode from Star Trek: Enterprise, wherein Captain Archer develops an obsessive interest in the unhatched Xindi-Insectoid eggs hanging from the ceiling of an abandoned ship after one sprays him with a neurotoxin. What is, there, a simple illustration of the chemically-induced power of maternal instincts and the resulting shame when those same instincts are displayed by a man, here manifests as a voracious unease: the uncanny pleasure and discomfort of an unfulfilled orgasm.

Titled after Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, Lee’s installation extends Kristeva’s characterization of melancholia to the asshole and all its attendant forms as another forbidden, shameful, non-speakable void in which language and symbology no longer function, but that same characterization can, it seems, engulf our prescribed and highly shielded perspectives of the female body. So, while many may simply be disgusted by Lee’s exhibition and what it stands for, I instead see a feminist refusal to quiet those life-giving functions that in the secret recesses of the mind invariably turn us on.

 
 

"Resounding, Variegated, Leaves" Foregrounds the Primacy of a Multisensorial Encounter @ Mrs. Gallery in New York

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves, an exhibition featuring works by Fabienne Lasserre, Annie Pendergrast, and Lily Ramírez, brings together three artists who work along distinctly different wavelengths, yet come together as they embrace the natural phenomena of listening, touching, breathing, and looking as it occurs through an exchange between artist and art object. A primordial hum, the aural topography of a cave, a protrusion juts out from the painted surface, an atmospheric aura emanates from a flower.

The multiple postures of Lasserre’s hanging, standing, and leaning ear-like forms project an ongoing moment of repose, surreptitiously confronting the architecture or spectator as they quietly teeter along the tightly wound wire between invitation and revolt. A subtle dissonance pervades from the interaction between the knobby, hand-wrought linen membranes covered in thick paint and the industrial sheen of the vinyl lens at the center of each object.

Annie Pendergrast’s paintings channel the deep-rooted, unrelenting frequencies of natural organisms thriving in the face of air pollutants, radioactive soil, and bioengineering. A palpable heat emanates from the electric hues of flashe, as the paint bubbles up slightly to the surface. Striated bands of color insistently reverberate across each arrangement, buzzing with energy and the possibility for plant systems to reclaim control of the earth through their healing properties and the potential for bioremediation.

A dense cacophony of accumulated marks maps the terrain of Lily Ramírez’s heavily impastoed paintings—acting simultaneously as a direct trace of the artist’s presence and also an aggregate record of her lived experience and memory. On a cellular level, Ramírez’s gestures evoke chromosomal strands vying to shape the proverbial DNA of each painting; while on a macro level, they convey pathways of movement woven across the artist's native city of Los Angeles or other expansive swaths of land.

To privilege tactility and aurality is to thwart the relentless stream of images flooding visual culture. In this way, the works in this exhibition foreground the primacy of a multisensorial encounter that demands the physical presence of a spectator. While the artworks themselves don’t explicitly make sound or ask to be touched, the artists have imbued their work with a methodology that filters the act of seeing through a form of deep listening and touching, as much as looking, at the natural world.

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves is on view through August 11th at Mrs. 60 - 40 56th Drive Maspeth, NY

Martyna Szczęsna Addresses the Challenge of Creating Art in An Ever-Gentrifying Urban Landscape @ Open Source Gallery in New York

In Martyna Szczęsna’s Spectre at Open Source Gallery, the artist has manipulated over 500 feet of nylon construction netting into an oversized ruched curtain, winding it through the KoKo NYC lot space. A playful embodiment of drama, opera and the challenges of securing hospitable space for art and creative expression in the ever-gentrifying urban landscape of this city. The blazing orange work will be on view all summer.

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed her MFA studies at UCLA. Szczesna lives and works in Brooklyn. Select exhibitions include: ARRAY at Penumbra Foundation, If Rittenhouse– at Callicoon Fine Arts, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Szczesna’s work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations, and The Watermill Center.

Spectre is on view through August 31st at Open Source KoKo NYC Lot at 440 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215.

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of collecting and arranging found objects. In selecting items that range from the obscure to the ordinary, the private to the ethnographic, Steinbach emphasizes notions of circulation and human connection.

The exhibition highlights a concentrated three-year period in the artist’s career and draws upon memory, offering a recontextualization of his own historic practice and an occasion for reflection. Comprising a seminal large-scale “display” and objects from the same time period, the exhibition is populated by individuals who are both named and unnamed, touching upon family gatherings and traditions, intimacy, and the personifying power objects can hold.

Haim Steinbach: 1991-1993 is on view through February 27 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 W 21st St, New York

Universal Fatigue: A Solo Exhibition By Mircea Suciu @ Blain | Southern in New York

Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding color-coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts.’

Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed on an acetate sheet, onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections, which Suciu then 'restores' by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colors until he creates a surface that is barely recognizable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and the eventual dissolution of all things.

Universal Fatigue is on view throughout February 22 at Blain | Southern 547 W 25th St, New York, NY. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern.  Photo by Cooper Dodd:

SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] @ Wilhardt & Naud

Sisson exhibits their sixth body of work, COTTON, divided into two parts, Phase 1 is the first in this series.

Beginning in 2018 with a bag of gossypium (cotton) seeds delivered by mail from their uncle, these seeds sparked a dialogue between the artist and their partner. Those conversations were the catalyst to COTTON.

The body of work in this installment includes paintings, a tapestry, and quilts that the artist learned to make in Mississippi under the mentorship of the Gees Bend masters.

The artist explores the changing shape of slavery’s influence through a plant, tended to by enslaved millions who built America’s superpower economy and shaped its cultural, systemic, and social landscapes.

The plant provided an entry point, through which the artist could develop and explore a personal and direct relationship. Over a year and a half, they grew more than 600 cotton plants on the roof of their home and studio. The remainder of the recently devastated crop are now presented as living sculptures.

SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] is on view throughout February 16, 2020 at Wilhardt & Naud 1667 North Main Street. Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Lani Trock

Melanie Baker's The Optimates @ Cristin Tierney in New York

The Optimates presents three distinct scenes: a person stands at a podium; a man, seen from behind, speaks to someone unknown; and a group of men huddle in conversation at a window. The works are large in scale; some exceed life-size. All are made with charcoal, graphite and pigment on paper. Two are mounted on panels, and the other is presented loose, pinned to the wall.

Baker crops her images to draw attention to specific details. It isn’t immediately apparent in every work who the subject is, but signifiers indicate the immense power the subject wields. They wear dark suits and crisp white shirts, and several are pictured in richly adorned rooms. These are the people, we are meant to intuit, who possess wealth, class, and authority. They are also, clearly, all middle-aged or older white men, and Baker provides just enough context clues to suggest that they are either the focus of attention, or the ones cutting the back room deal. The exhibition title is a further nod to their status; the Optimates in ancient Rome were conservatives who favored rule by oligarchy and opposed immigration and assistance for the urban poor.

The Optimates will be on view throughout February 22 at Cristin Tierney 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Arcadia Missa Presents Hamishi Farah, And Lomex (New York) Presents Danica Barboza & Justin Caguiat @ Condo London 2020

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living in Australia while retired from Australian art. Drawing upon afropessimist theory their painting practice skims through possibilities for non-human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido.

Caguiat produces large oil based paintings often on unstretched canvas that shift stylistically between abstraction and figuration. Done in almost a pointillist style, the works appear as landscapes or murals out of a different era; anachronistic images with a register always in flux. Drawing stylistically from sources as varied as symbolist and post-impressionist painting, Viennese history painting, and certain stylistic movements in Japanese painting, they present otherworldy vistas perhaps at home in science fiction or in the realm of fantasy.

Danica Barboza produces suites of sculptures that populate a mythological universe entirely of her own devising; suites of works throughout which the same figures recur in various states of physical development that experiment with notions of celebrity and icon. Her works elaborate a mythic autobiography rooted in a romance between her and a mare figure named in her work as “Draco Adollphus B”; a figure often presented in various states of construction and de-construction, iomages of whom she has produced since as early as 2000 as part of a long term robotics project that informs much of her larger sculptural practice. She has produced a concurrent gothic novel ‘spondere’ which is available in various stages of construction on the occasion of her solo exhibitions.

The works of Hamishi Farah, Danica Barboza, and Justin Caguiat will be on view through February 8, 2020 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor, Soho, London. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series @ Muddguts in New York

 
 

Judith Supine’s latest solo show at Muddguts called, Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series features all new works by the artist. Throughout the Cowboy series, Supine uses iconic Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures of the unknown, valor, and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the cowboy figure, and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity, the Cowboy series is a continuation of the artists pursuit of placing art between the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series is on view through August 25 at Muddguts 247 Graham Avenue Brooklyn, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Muddguts

Margot Bergman: Family Album @ Anton Kern Gallery in New York

For the artist’s second solo exhibition with Anton Kern Gallery, Margot Bergman presents Family Album, which includes her most recent paintings and photographs. Bergman has sustained an active painting practice in Chicago since the 1950s and honed a peerless style of figuration. For the last 15 years her subject matter has focused on individual faces of imagined people, predominantly women. Her style is characterized by active expressionistic brush work, unconcerned with symmetry, realistic proportions, and traditional notions of femininity. The artist can adeptly shift styles within a single composition, juxtaposing photorealistic eyes and lips, with a scribbly green hair-do, and a thin wash of color for the complexion. Accompanying Bergman’s paintings are theatrical and lively photographs that bear an uncanny resemblance to her painted works. Together Bergman’s paintings and photographs create a manufactured family album that memorializes the environment in which they were created and their palpable relationship with the artist.

Family Album is on view through August 16 at Anton Kern Gallery 16 East 55th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery