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

Punch, Curated By Nina Chanel Abney @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Punch, curated by artist Nina Chanel Abney, features thirty-three artists who examine contemporary culture and society through the lens of figuration. The exhibition focuses on artists primarily from Los Angeles in Abney’s circle who explore connections and disconnections between culture and subculture, figuration and abstraction, and the physical and the digital. The pieces featured in the exhibition contain references to art historical precedents such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, as well as street art, while integrating elements of design, graffiti, cartoons, and satire. Using painting, sculpture, and performance as acts of defiance, these artists explore how they can create figurative and abstract representations with visual punch while portraying a society immersed in new media and pop culture.

Punch, Curated by Nina Chanel Abney is on view through August 17 at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles 925 North Orange Drive, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch

Fred Escher Presents Killer Diorama @ Catbox Contemporary In New York

"I can't talk about art or ideas or the creative act. I dream, day and night. Most of the time I dream about something that didn't happen to me and is not going to happen to me. It is called thinking, and that is a riddle wrapped inside a mystery and inside, is a mystery of me. My thinking is like watching TV. Nothing happens. I want to be lobotomized by boredom. I dream as if it were happening, both past and present, day and night. People talk about ideas and inspiration. I don't think I have that kind of body or mind. I don’t know where dreams come from and I don’t know where you go to find ideas; you either have a helium connection to feelings or you don’t. I can't talk about dreams or what things mean. I have silence in my brain and it sits on my tongue. Hiding in my head is the dream and I pick up a brush or a pencil and let it out. I can't put it into words, I can only paint or draw it. If you find a dream, work with it, if you don’t have dreams get a job (I worked at CVI making stretchers for 25 years). If you read a book or a newspaper or travel to another country, that is good for your life, but don’t take that stuff into your studio. I don’t know what influences me, or who; but I am guilty of looking at art. I do not feel like I missed anything by not painting or drawing for 26 years. If you stop breathing you die, if you stop making art, nothing happens, you just find something else to do. Now, I feel like painting and here I am: a painter.” - Fred Escher

Killer Diorama is on view through December 9 @ Catbox Contemporary in Ridgewood, NY. photographs courtesy of Catbox Contemporary

Drake Carr Presents "Gulp" @ The Hole In New York

Drake Carr presents Gulp, a new series of figurative sculptures composed in two parts. Like the composition of an album, Carr’s sculptural ensemble segues between genres, time signatures, and themes to populate a scene built of multiple tracks. Irregularities in scale and texture animate and describe the boundaries between each of the figures, casting kaleidoscopic patterning as the crux of the soiree’s representational and interpersonal logic. Stuffed and dressed, bodysuits and armatures shuffle and skip (like a scratched CD) in a warp of orientations. Gulp is on view through August 12th at The Hole 312 Bowery New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Jean-Michel Basquiat "Words Are All We Have" @ Nahmad Contemporary In New York

Nahmad Contemporary presents its first exhibition dedicated solely to Jean-Michel Basquiat, organized by guest curator and preeminent Basquiat scholar Dr. Dieter Buchhart. Centering on the critical function of language in the work of Basquiat, this comprehensive exhibition will illuminate the artist’s pioneering incorporation of literary and musical elements into his work. Most often identified with both the formal and stylistic aspects of Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat’s linguistically complex paintings place him within the trajectory of the Beat Generation writers and the evolution of jazz and hip-hop. Jean-Michel Basquiat "Words Are All We Have" will be on view until June 11, 2016 at Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue

[MUST SEE] June Culp @ Freddy Gallery in Baltimore

Freddy Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Baltimore-based artist, June Culp. There is a compelling psycho-sexual violence embedded in Culp's paintings that is reinforced by the large scale and reductive imagery. The paintings are limited to mostly black-and-white depictions of what the artist describes as everyday preoccupations. These everyday preoccupations include fist-fights and strip clubs. On view until May 2 at Freddy Gallery, 510 West Franklin Street, Baltimore, Maryland