Rebecca Morgan: "Town and Country" shows the extent of Morgan's achievement in painting, with forays into printmaking and brass sculpture, new endeavors for the artist. With archly symbolic portraits and complex scenes, Morgan weaves a grand narrative of gendered subversion buttressed by broader societal scale. Morgan's characters straddle both the timelessness of morality tales, and the specific moment that we find ourselves in - redefining gender relations and reviewing historical representations in works from John Hughes movies, to stylized exemplars like Rubens and Fragonard, to Norman Rockwell's foundational Americana lore. While always emanating from a contemporary socio-political yet diaristic lens, Morgan's works now chart a wider continuum of referents. Archetypal characters strain against their roles, undermine fabricated notions of romance, and confront the hollowness and fear behind current masculinity, with both levity and tension. Town and Country is on view though November 2 at Asya Geisberg Gallery 537b West 23rd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery
The Museum Of Modern Art & MoMA PS1 Present First Major Retrospective Of Bruce Nauman In 25 Years
Co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts draws upon the rich holdings of both institutions and nearly 70 lenders. Encompassing Nauman’s full career and featuring a total of 165 works, the exhibition occupies the Museum’s entire sixth floor and the whole of MoMA PS1. This joint presentation provides an opportunity to experience Nauman’s command of a wide range of mediums, from drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture to neon, performance, film and video, and architecturally scaled environments.
Disappearing Acts traces strategies of withdrawal in Nauman’s art—both literal and figurative incidents of removal, deflection, and concealment. Close relatives of disappearance also appear in many forms. They are seen, for example, in holes the size of a body part, in the space under a chair, in the self vanishing around a corner, and in the mental blocks that empty creative possibility. “For Nauman,” said Halbreich, “disappearance is both a real phenomenon and a magnificently ample metaphor for grappling with the anxieties of both the creative process and of navigating the everyday world.”
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is on view through February 18 @ The Museum of Modern Art, and through February 25 @ MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, New York. photographs courtesy of MoMA
Frank Stella Presents Recent Work @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles
Few artists are as synonymous with the history of 20th and 21st-century American art as Frank Stella. His work across media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking, has continuously broken ground at each stage of his decades-long career, remaining influential and relevant to subsequent generations of contemporary artists. The selection of recent works presented at Sprüth Magers highlight the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series. This is the first solo exhibition of Frank Stella’s painting and sculpture in Los Angeles since 1995. The exhibition is on view through October 26 at Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
Walead Beshty Presents Equivalents @ Regen Projects
Photographs, sculptures, and collages populate the expansive space at Regen Projects, incorporating the traces of bodies, circulation, and labor within the surface of the artwork. In this highly charged, pithy and multi-dimensional body of work created roughly over the course of a year, Beshty drills through computers, a television, and an oversized, outdated printer. He slices flat screen televisions in half lengthwise and displays these brutalized devices with their power still connected to the electrical grid, leaving them in a desperate anthropomorphized state of survival - endlessly powering on and off again, their inner machinations on full display. Copper plates made from the artist's own pharmaceutical receipts and x-rays of the artist's own knee document the expected outcomes of his prescribed medications and are left to oxidize slowly over time. Positive and negative transparency film is left exposed in Beshty's checked baggage, the resulting works made during idol modes in transit. The dualities are endless; layered ad infinitum. Equivalents opens tonight and will be on view through April 7 at Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard.