The Circular Inquiries of Allison Katz @ Hauser & Wirth

 

Allison Katz
First Impression, 2026
Oil and acrylic on linen, 160 x 145 x 3.6cm / 63 x 571 / 8 x 13/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

text by Emma Grimes

At Hauser & Wirth, Allison Katz’s show Outta The Bag, her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location, is on view. In this latest series of works, Katz makes her usual references: there’s a still-life of a cabbage, a couple roosters, a coral-pink caricature of a mouth, many windows, and plenty of nods to art history. Katz still has a predilection for words too: what they can do to, with, and alongside the canvas.

The exhibition opens with an image of a young, blonde-haired man hanging a framed painting onto what appears to be a windowsill. We’re thus primed with an acknowledgment of art’s capacity to function like a window, to transform an empty white wall into something else entirely. Interestingly, though, the title of this painting, Reflection, reverses the analogy, shifting attention away from how these mediums open up the world and instead underscores their mirror-like quality; that is, how what one sees out there—whether in a painting or the world at large—is a reflection of one’s inner world. Katz seems interested in painting not as a way of looking through, but of looking back.

 

Allison Katz
Reflection, 2026
Oil, acrylic and sand on canvas, 160 x 145 x 3.6 cm / 63 x 57 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

The details in Reflection, as in all of Katz’s work, are impressive. The figure is entirely composed of sand that’s densely glued onto the canvas, then painted over. The three-dimensional sand makes the vivid strokes of paint feel as though they’re protruding out into the room. 

Across the room hangs First Impression, which is an illustration of the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition in 1929, surrounded by a set of white teeth and pink gums. In fine detail, paintings from Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh are recreated inside the wide-open mouth. Life and art are taken in, for Katz, at the gut level: not the eyes, ears, or nose—which are all too cursory—but the mouth, where one chews, tastes, digests. Both Reflection and First Impression, in speaking to the mechanics of looking and engaging with art, are shrewd introductions to the rest of the show.

One of the most striking paintings is Burden. It shows Katz submerged in a rippling pool, her hands raised on either side, as though she is finding her balance. Standing on her head is a massive orange and green rooster, outlined in painted-red pieces of rice. At this point in her career, Katz’s frequently cited image of a cock presents itself as quoting her previous work. It’s no longer a sincere attempt at pointing towards an original symbol. Is Katz balancing under the weight (or burden) of being an artist? Is she poking fun at herself and the inherent ego necessary to create? These questions are no longer at the forefront; the cock can’t help but allude to all of its past versions of itself. Katz seems to be experimenting with how long one can apply the same symbols before their edges dull, when a quotation itself becomes the reference point, and the original meaning grows distant. In this way, and in a very broad sense, Burden can be read as a meditation on the instability of meaning.

 

Allison Katz
Burden, 2026
Oil and rice on linen, 220 x 130 x 3.6 cm / 86 5/8 x 51 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

These ideas reach their apex in the following room. Allusion Cuts, a near-homonym of Allison Katz, layers different scenes into a single composition. The central image is a self-portrait from an advertisement Katz did for Miu Miu, overlaid with a hen and a bird, a badminton shuttlecock, and oranges sprawled across the ground. Katz presents another self-portrait, one that’s based on an image made for circulation. Placed alongside more cock references, Katz reaches the peak of her self-referential investigation. She turns her own image into a quotation, something that can be confused for the real person it represents. Mirroring the obfuscation between Allusion Cuts and Allison Katz, the woman in the Miu Miu ad might look like Katz herself, but it feels more like The Treachery of Images.

Outta The Bag is on view through July 24 at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster St, New York.

At 93, Joan Semmel Is As Honest As Ever

Joan Semmel
Sunlight, 1978
Oil on canvas, 60 x 96 in. (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York

text by Emma Grimes

Uptown at the Jewish Museum, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh provides a survey of 16 works, spanning from 1971 to 2023, that tell the rich and compelling story of Semmel’s artistic evolution. And further downtown at Alexander Gray Associates, Continuities presents recent works, painted within the last two years, from the same pioneering artist. Together, these concurrent shows spark timely questions about womanhood, self-image, and transformation.

The Jewish Museum’s show begins with works from Semmel’s Erotic Series—from the early 1970s—that depict heterosexual couples having sex. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), the first painting shows a woman, rendered in a yellow-orange hue, straddling a reclined man. The second image, as the title suggests, flips their positions. Nearby, Erotic Yellow (1973) shows a couple laying down, intertwined. The woman’s body is painted in cherry pink; the man in dark, olive green. The bodies appear as if inserted onto the canvas from somewhere else, and the colorful backdrops can almost feel sterile. The scenes are recognizable and undoubtedly of real life, but they’re also luminously artificial and constructed, as if these figures are on a sound stage, posing. 

 

Joan Semmel
Erotic Yellow, 1973
Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

 

Semmel positions the woman as an equal partner. It is obvious, and might be taken for granted by young viewers today, that she has desire, is acting on that desire. What might resonate more for contemporary observers has less to do with Semmel’s representation of a reciprocal heterosexual dynamic, but more with how Semmel is shown to inhabit her own body. Given the recent resurgence and glorification of skinniness on social media, the proliferation of GLP-1s, and the normalization of plastic surgery, Semmel’s offering—that one can be at ease with one’s body, no modification needed—is perhaps more radical today than before.

Following these are Semmel’s self-portraits, also from the ‘70s. Each one is painted from the perspective of looking down. Due to the natural closeness between one’s own eye and body, the limbs and curves appear striking on the large canvasses. Works like Intimacy-Autonomy (1974) recall the spectacular, natural beauty of a Georgia O’Keefe landscape. 

The positioning also forces you into her own subjectivity. It reminds me, perhaps bizarrely, of Joan Didion’s description of writing as a hostile act. When an interviewer asked her to expand on this, Didion said: “It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture.” 

Semmel’s self-portraits, in a similar vein, are coercing the viewer to see things from her angle. And while every work of art must come from an individual point of view, rarely does the coercion itself become visible. In her self-portraits though, she makes you see from her own gaze while also making that very effort evident.

 

Joan Semmel’s Portrait: Joan Semmel, 2019.
Photo: Erica Lansner

 

In the middle of this show is a collection of other works from various artists and time periods that Semmel curated to be considered alongside her work. There are two pieces from Joyce Kozloff and Judith Bernstein respectively. There’s a sculpture from Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel’s portrait of Meyer Schapiro, Arnold Newman photographs of Louise Nevelson and Martha Graham, just to name a few. Then there are three curious variations of works referencing Adam and Eve: God’s Curse by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1896-1902), Eve Eating the Forbidden Fruit and Handing it to Adam by Philip Galle (16th century), and Adam and Eve by Max Weber (1911-1916). There are too many to consider each in-depth, but they provide a fresh lens to consider Semmel’s work.

 

Max Weber
Adam and Eve, 1911–16
Oil on canvas, 22 x 17 in. (55.9 x 43.2 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York, gift of Leonard and Phyllis Greenberg, 2014-26

 

The exhibit concludes with five nude self-portraits from this century, which is the subject of the entire show at Alexander Gray Associates. That exhibit, named Continuities, consists of around a dozen of these paintings, all made within the last two years. 

Before entering the main exhibition room, one encounters a confrontational gaze from Semmel herself. In this self-portrait, she rests leisurely in a chair with her head tilted upwards faintly, as if she is asking something from you. The painting is titled Here I Am (2025). On second thought, it’s as though she is demanding something of you, specifically that you meet her gaze, that you look her in the eye before turning towards her body.

Among these paintings, one will quickly notice that Semmel seems to have moved on from that ambitious, subjective perspective found in her earlier works. There is a single painting, titled Shadow Heart (2024), that’s from her head looking down, except the one significant difference is that Semmel’s hand covers her lower stomach and groin. If what made her earlier nudes remarkable was their unabashed representations of the self and body—so forceful that they were transformed into imperatives to look (from her eyes) and acknowledge—then these works are tragic indications that one cannot hold onto such self-assurance forever. 

Joan Semmel
Shadowed Heart, 2024
Oil on canvas 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Joan Semmel
Skin in the Game, 2019
Oil on canvas, 4 panels: each 96 x 72 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

The language in some reviews of Semmel’s latest work is striking—well, striking, but not surprising. I mean the reviews that laud Semmel’s “courage” for revealing her 93-year-old body. “Shame is nowhere to be found,” one extolled. These reviews, needless to say, maintain the bottom-line idea that she should be—we’re expecting her to be—ashamed of her body. If nothing else, this is a curious assumption to make given her previous work. 

That being said, there is something undeniably self-conscious about Semmel’s recent works. One can see this shift in a few ways. First, the gaze is made external. We are usually looking at her in these paintings, not with. Secondly, her body is not nearly as relaxed as before. She stands in front of a mirror, looking at herself. She is posing. She even covers up parts of her body in a few.

Joan Semmel
Blue Space, 2025
Oil on canvas 601/ 8x 721/8 in (152.7 x 183.2cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Compare any of these recent self-portraits at Alexander Gray with her earlier work. Take Sunlight (1978) as an example. In this work, she looks down on her soft pale body. A hand rests over her thigh, the other caresses the back of her foot. A finger on this hand presses down onto one of her toes, a subtle but meaningful detail that turns a body into a person with feelings, preferences, impulses. Her brown hair twirls over her left breast. The sunlit body sits on a white blanket. In the corner of the canvas’s left side are small splotches of grass, offering a narrative clue: she is outside—perhaps in a garden—appearing to enjoy the day’s warm sunlight. Wherever this person is, one also wants to be.

The painting, from a technical standpoint, is sublime (one does not want to look away), but what has always persisted for me, after one must look away, is this woman’s embodied presence. It is an attunement both with life outside and the life within. She is more than just unashamed of her body; she actually seems innocent of the knowledge that she ever had to be—like Eve, of course. And this mode of being cannot coexist with self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is precisely what worms its way into Semmel’s more recent self-portraits. Iris Marion-Young would describe this phenomenon as a woman seeing herself as another thing in the world, and therefore, she “remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities.” It is this distance that becomes present in these recent works where Semmel’s hands cover her face or where she watches herself mediated through the mirror reflection. What nevertheless remains astonishing is how Semmel—ever, yet alone for so long—created work unveiling her own body that simultaneously denied anyone the ability to turn her into an object. Where that sounds like a contradiction, it somehow never was. 

This shift might provide an answer as to why Semmel chose multiple works depicting the story of Adam and Eve to be viewed alongside her exhibit. Tragically, one can’t stay in the garden forever.

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh is on view through May 31 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York. Continuities is on view through May 30 at Alexander Gray Associates, 384 Broadway, 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.

Judith Godwins’ First European Solo Exhibition Expressions of Life @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents American painter Judith Godwin's first European solo exhibition, Expressions of Life. The exhibition comprises an overview of the artist's work from the early 1950s - the period in which she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement - to the end of the century. The opening exhibition truly illustrates the artist’s lasting influence over the landscape of American art, despite the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.

Long underappreciated, Godwin’s contribution to the New York avant-garde has undergone recent revision following her inclusion in landmark exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Whitechapel Gallery and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, that offered a reappraisal of women abstractionists of the 20thcentury. Her thesis was – and remained – one of liberation from the conventions of a movement anchored in a language of masculinity and heteronormativity. Starkly aware of the limitations imposed on her by the milieu in which she practiced, Godwin sought to redefine such ‘masculine’ values by way of gestural abstractions that brought a loose geometry into dialogue with nature, dance and Zen philosophy. Her innovative reorientation of the language of modernism remains a radical statement today.

 

Godwin’s interactions with the New York art world began early in her career. As a student at the Mary Baldwin College in her native Virginia, she sought the acquaintance of the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Godwin’s invitation to Graham to perform at her college laid the foundations for a lifelong friendship between the two, and Graham’s trailblazing path in a world dominated by men became a touchstone for Godwin. The diaphanous washes of colour, colliding forms and sensuous arcs which characterise Godwin’s works from the early 1950s are indebted to Graham, whose performances she frequented on arrival in New York, often watching from the wings.

 

By 1953 Godwin had settled in New York and was continuing her artistic education under Hans Hofmann, whose influence can be seen in her dynamic approach to composition and colour. Provincetown Summer, 1953, exemplifies Godwin’s facility for translating depth and volume into two dimensions. Introduced to Zen Buddhism by Abstract Expressionist painter Kenzo Okada, such philosophies began to play a larger role in her painting, encapsulated by calligraphic brushwork, redolent too of Franz Kline, another close friend of Godwin’s. As the 1950s continued, the artist’s work took on larger proportions and a darker palette, all the while maintaining an organicism and proclivity for light and space in her evocation of the spiritual in nature. Her vigorous abstractions caught the attention of influential art dealer Betty Parsons, who included Godwin as the youngest artist in the inaugural exhibition at Section Eleven Gallery in 1958 alongside artists including Agnes Martin, and went on to present solo exhibitions of her work in 1959 and 1960.

 

During the 1960s, as Pop Art and Minimalism began their ascent, Godwin distanced herself from the New York art world, retreating instead to Connecticut where she worked restoring 18th-century homes and trained in masonry, carpentry and landscape design. Her return to New York in 1974 saw a change in her paintings, which demonstrated a robust communion with the outdoors and a physicality that invoked the power of nature. With its assertive cardamom red palette and esoteric iconography, Elegy to a Slain Deer, 1975, captures Godwin’s investigation of the relationship between the physical and metaphysical. As in her paintings of the 1950s, her keen appreciation of the corporeal form is palpable in the material presence of her body on the canvas, in body-length arcs of the brush that express her movements with agency. The liberation of the body and its inherent sensuality continued to play a central role in Godwin’s works of the 1980s and 1990s, as articulated by the flesh-inflected palette of The Nest, 1994. Godwin died in 2021 at the age of 91, just as her work began to reach new audiences worldwide. Her lasting legacy is in the transformative nature of her practice, which successfully recalibrated the masculine language of gestural abstraction, shifting representations of womanhood and sexual identity on the canvas.

Expressions of Life is on view through March 9 @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery 6 Heddon St, London W1B 4BT, UK

Katherina Olschbaur: Dirty Elements @ The University Art Galleries In Irvine

Olschbaur provides a female perspective to a history of canonized male painters, whose work simultaneously inspires her. Although traces of matriarchal order in Western thought typically appear as a mythological apparition, Olschbaur paints a narrative that subverts our expectations under the normative language of patriarchy. For Olschbaur, art historical tropes are appropriated and used like garments, worn then cast aside in a process that is ever changing and moving within each work. In this way, Dirty Elements investigates the power dynamics of patriarchal order and its violent denial of female sexuality. Referencing a wide spectrum of thought, Olschbaur’s practice takes root in mythology, religious and historical paintings, the subcultures of S/M, and film. Embracing Georges Bataille’s concept of the formless, the paintings explore the dirty elements of our carnal nature. In so doing, they feature provocative and erotically charged scenes that are at times humorous and disturbing. Dirty Elements is on view through March 14 at Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, Irvine, California. photographs courtesy of University Art Galleries, UC Irvine © 2020 by Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

Opening of Archipelago: A Solo Exhibition by Arielle Pytka At Just One Eye in Los Angeles

Archipelago tells a story of an imaginary new world, perhaps here on Earth or in the stars. As a child, Pytka always dreamt of being an adventurer and cartographer in the early days of exploration. At fifteen, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, crewing on a vintage sailboat and in 2015, she completed another transatlantic crossing, sailing in the Panerai Transat Classique, in which her team came in first place. All of this time at sea fueled her creative inspiration and interest in the discovery of distant new lands and people. The paintings in Archipelago are a reflection of her desires to map unknown places. She subconsciously began painting maps to destinations that do not exist on our globe. Some of these paintings are reminiscent of island chains in South East Asia, where she lived part-time for the last 5 years.

Archipelago is on view at Just One Eye 915 North Sycamore Ave. LA. photographs courtesy of Nina Prommer

Liz Larner Presents "As Below, So Above" @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Liz Larner’s As Below, So Above is a selection of new works that demonstrate her ongoing examination into sculpture, painting, drawing, and ceramics. The environment – the personal and the entrenched – are set together in these artworks that reach for an understanding of vulnerability through what is and has been considered low and directed, made capital of, and endangered. As Below, So Above will be on view through June 22 at Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

HELEN FRANKENTHALER: SELECTED PAINTINGS @ Yares Art In New York

Helen Frankenthaler, New York City, 1974. Photograph by Alexander Liberman

Source: International Center for Photography

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) is one of the most important and influential postwar painters, whose abstract compositions, featuring brilliant expanses of color and light, have inspired generations of artists and changed the course of art history. She led the way from Abstract Expressionism to a new and vital form of painterly lyricism that heralded the Color Field movement. On view in this exhibition are some twenty major large-scale paintings that celebrate the New York-born artist’s formidable, six-decade career. A classic Frankenthaler work, Swan Lake II (1961), filled with ethereal pools of electric blue, grays, and deep red, against a neutral ground, is a quintessential example of her unparalleled achievement. Helen: Frankenthaler: Selected Paintings will be on view through May 18 at Yares Art 745 5th Ave.

Nadine Faraj Presents Get Used To Us @ Anna Zorina Gallery In New York

“Get Used To Us” echoes a historic LGBTQ rights slogan "We're here! We're queer! Get used to us!” Nadine Faraj’s fluid wet-on-wet technique abstracts erotic scenes to reflect an essence of sexual freedom that celebrates the mutability of gender and identity. The artist’s expressive application of pigment creates a blurring of boundaries between her subjects in a way that mirrors the suspension of self when provoked by passion. Get Used To Us will be on view through April 6 at Anna Zorina Gallery 532 West 24 Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Anna Zorina Gallery, New York City.

Zhou Yilun "Ornament and Crime" @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Ornament and crime are not synonymous to Zhou Yilun, however. His influences begin with the Western, Judeo-Christian canons he studied and was trained to emulate in school, but skew more heavily to the laborers he saw building, tearing-down, painting, and repainting the structures in the city surrounding him, and the American basketball players, hip-hop stars, and black celebrities he grew up mythologizing and imitating.  Zhou lifts and distorts techniques inherited from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic eras, revisiting, perverting, and parodying their ideas for the new globalist regime. Each of his artworks is formed from the same bricolage of identity—the sum of stretcher, wood, and canvases painted, deconstructed, and constructed again. Zhou’s practice is alive with Chinese bones and Western sinew and flesh, torn down and built back up with the same materials again and again, so that the elements that once existed as ornament are now integral to the identity and essence of each artwork itself.  "Ornament and Crime" will be on view @ Nicodim Gallery  571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 until February 17. photographs by Oliver Kupper