Nikita Gale's Thank God You're Here @ 56 Henry In New York

“Thank God you’re here” is an exclamation of relief at the presence of another person. This presence offers a sense of safety or comfort—delivery from whatever was occurring before they arrived. The phrase is also a simple instruction: thank God—a body that is both present and absent, a body whose presence is contingent on social agreements that are substantiated through ritual and repetition—that you are here.

The differences in meaning are less important than the situation that is implied: an experience of the presence of others. Each of the works presented in this exhibition is a meditation on the indeterminate boundary between presence and absence, and, in particular, how presence is read in the absence of bodies.

Like lungs, caves are hollow spaces within solid forms. They delineate—and facilitate exchanges—between inside and outside, whether by providing people with shelters or forums for sharing information. Caves are the ancestral homes of homo sapiens. In caves, we began to tell stories to one another with sounds and images—around fires, surrounded by walls inscribed with records of our experiences. (In a cave in Indonesia, archaeologists recently discovered a life-size painting of a wild pig that was made 45,500 years ago, making it the oldest known cave drawing.) Just as caves were spaces in which domestic, social, and theatrical life coalesced, COLLAPSE I–IV, a series of collages, compresses images of caves onto those of coliseums, arenas, and other types of performance venues. The formal gesture of collapsing these images into a single plane allows the prehistoric to haunt the present. The erasure of the distinctions between the contemporary categories of domestic, social, and theatrical throws into relief the discursive relationship between them.

Thank God You’re Here is on view through March 22 at 56 Henry Street New York

Headlines: Recent Drawings By Derek Boshier @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Derek Boshier’s practice has taken many forms over the years: he has produced films, paintings, sculptures, album covers as well as theatrical sets, but drawing has remained central the entire time. Magazines and newspaper clippings are the primary source for his “Headline” drawings and the immediacy of the medium has allowed him to react to current events in real time. While the drawings exhibited here are all recent, they are the culmination of decades of dedication to drawing and conviction to understanding the world at large through lines on paper.

Headlines is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Christine Wang & Luke Murphy Present Screen Time @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Screen Time is an exhibition of new work by Luke Murphy and Christine Wang. Both artists address the screen as a digital intermediary for experience. Though its trajectory began long ago, the screen's total encroachment upon daily life reached new heights in 2020, becoming the primary tool of community engagement, creative exploration, and consumer activity in response to long-term shelter-in-place restrictions. Murphy and Wang consider the omnipresence of the screen without dogma, addressing its cultural and perceptual implications with a sense of humor and an appreciation of unexpected beauty.

In equal parts euphoric, critical, escapist, hilarious, and mournful, their work presents a kaleidoscopic approach to a moment of cultural inundation and mass uncertainty, finding value in the sheer play of perception and the long standing role of art to illuminate through confusion.

Screen Time is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Jeffrey Gibson's It Can Be Said of Them @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them, features new work exploring themes of identity–as it relates to diversity and inclusivity–to uplift the unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility. It Can Be Said of Them takes its title from a print produced by Sister Corita Kent in 1969. Kent’s print was part of her “Heroes and Sheroes” series, undertaken after she formally left the church as a serving nun, and depicts images of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The men are surrounded by a quote by author E.B. White that reads, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not turn his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”[1] A strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Kent viewed these four figures, among many others, as modern day martyrs, especially during a time of aggressive political and social unrest.

It is in these works and others on view, that Gibson expands on how gender, as identity, is a liminal space; one that occupies and explores the in-between, the threshold, the reconfigured and the temporal. As a transitory space or state, it is characterized by ambiguity, hybridity and fluidity, with the great potential for subversion and radical transformation. Writing about anti-structure, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argues that this liminal state is “a conceptual space where the ordinary world falls away, and the hierarchies of everyday life are no longer applicable.”[2] It is in this sublimation of surrender where joy can be found; where one re-articulates a new identity beyond the restricted spheres tied to tradition, geography, or social construct, and lives openly after abandoning the constraints of the everyday. Gibson’s most recent work is a reaffirmation of this profound and total freedom.

It Can Be Said of Them is on view through February 27 @ Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City. photographs courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

Something Vexes Thee? New Paintings By Jessie Makinson @ François Ghebaly Gallery In Los Angeles

 
 

The title of the exhibition, Something Vexes Thee? is a rhetorical question, at once sarcastic and decorous. It’s what’s up with you? wrapped ironically in genteel robes. It is also what the witch asks of The Sheriff of Nottingham after his plans have been foiled once again by the trickster Robin Hood in the 1991 film adaptation of the English legend. Jessie Makinson’s painting of the same name is a decentered diptych crawling with potentially vexing vignettes. A couple of fighting dogs have upset a basket of peaches, a parlour game in a backroom equivocially suggests sensuous and sinister play, various limbs jut in and out of frames and doorways, suggesting narrow escapes. Along the right foreground, where painters traditionally place a repoussoir to gently guide the viewer’s eye back into the composition, the eyes of a steely, nymph-ish character gaze back at you over a crooked arm, annoyed, perhaps, at the intrusion. Makinson reimagines the hierarchical grid of the painting into a complex and generous container for many stories at once.

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Ursula Le Guin explains how the vessel, as opposed to the weapon, is the earliest and most significant “cultural device.” What has been gained, she asks, by characterizing history as a spear, an arrow, a sword piercing lines of victims and losers that span the centuries? What if we see the human story as a container, a sack, a vessel allowing for the jumbled freeplay of many narratives at once? Jessie Makinson takes this as an invitation to muss up the fixities that haunt historical painting. Instead of villains, heroes, or even genres, she offers story—not as an escape from reality, but as a tool for imagining a new one.

Something Vexes Thee? is on view through February 27 @ François Ghebaly Gallery 2245 E Washington Blvd.,
Los Angeles

magic passed life Features Work By Mike Linskie & Lucia Love @ darkZone In New Jersey

This place changes a little each time I come back to it. Even through a mask, the dust can find a way to settle into the back of your nostrils. The light has shifted, and the air has a frenetic energy in it. There’s a leak in the crawlspace in the far back corner, which has collected in a pool and traveled down the gentle slope of the retaining wall all the way to the opposite corner. The space seems to be salivating, maybe in expectation of my arrival, or maybe in the anticipation of being one step closer to an impending finality. Or is it bleeding? What will it’s scabs look like? This peculiar codependence has done damage to us both. Visit by visit, wounds are inflicted, moved passed, and brushed over. How will we heal together?

magic passed life was on view February 1 @ darkZone in New Jersey

Bojan Sarcevic: L'Extime @ Galerie Frank Elbaz In Paris

Bojan Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.

Each marble block is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer inserted into or placed atop of it. Like alien sarcophagi, the marble blocks in a deeply veined blue, green, or rose tone seem to engulf the machines. Three slightly larger-than-life muscular figures surround and engage with the marble sculptures. Their distinct postures and carved stone heads create an eerie unison. Contrasting with their seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figures are draped in delicate silk blouses cut in characteristically 1980’s silhouettes, while shibari rope bondage dresses their hips and feet.

The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotes how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us.

L’Extime is on view through February 27 @ galerie frank elbaz, Paris 66 Rue de Turenne

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

KW Institute For Contemporary Art Celebrates It's 30th Anniversary With Year-long Program Of Exhibitions

Founded on July 1, 1991 by Klaus Biesenbach, Alexandra Binswanger, Philipp von Doering, Clemens Homburger, and Alfonso Rutigliano, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. put down roots in a derelict former margarine factory located on Auguststraße 69 in the Berlin-Mitte district. After organizing the pivotal innovative exhibition project 37 Räume in 1992, artistic director Klaus Biesenbach continued to present ground-breaking exhibitions that won the institution critical acclaim, both nationally and internationally, and in 1996 he initiated the now widely renowned Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

In its thirty years, KW has considerably shaped the development of contemporary art by critically examining current tendencies and discourses within society. To mark its 30th anniversary, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. is is hosting a year-long program of exhibitions featuring artists Renée Green, Leonilson, Michael Stevenson, and Amelie von Wulffen; group exhibitions co-curated by artists Iman Issa and Ghislaine Leung; and a new performance piece by Michele Rizzo.

This series of new commissions, featuring Susan Philipsz’s acoustic work in KW’s courtyard in homage of political activist Rosa Luxemburg on the anniversary of her execution, was created during Philipsz’s residency at KW in 2002; the re-installation of Katharina Sieverding’s monumental print Deutschland wird deutscher (1993) is to be displayed in the entranceway of KW as well as on billboards across Berlin in April-May; and artist Sissel Tolaas will create a limited edition of soap carefully composed from particles she collected at the KW building, a former margarine factory.

Complementing this program, a major two-part art auction, organized in collaboration with renowned Berlin-based fine art auction house Grisebach, will take place in June and December 2021, featuring works by over 60 artists who have significantly contributed to KW’s legacy. The annual program’s key event will be a weekend-long celebration on July 2 – 4, 2021, featuring an extensive program of events, performances, and the launch of the first publication retracing KW’s history.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s full 30-year anniversary program can be found here.

Watch Part 2 of The Broad Museum's Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat Featuring James Spooner

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time” Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988). The Broad announces Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a three-part video series dedicated to the famed New York City artist. The video series includes three segments, Jazz and Bebop, Punk and No Wave, and 2 Bebop to Hip-Hop via Basquiat, where musicians, creatives and scholars discuss the impact of each music genre on Basquiat’s now iconic style. All three segments were filmed at The Broad, in newly installed Basquiat galleries displaying the museum’s uniquely deep representation of the artist’s work. The "Punk and No Wave" segment, hosted by James Spooner, co-founder of Afro-Punk and who ran an underground club on Canal Street in the early ‘90’s, features tunes by James Chance and The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Basquiat’s band Gray, Liquid Liquid, DNA, and Mars. Click here to read a conversation between Spooner and The Broad’s director of audience engagement, Ed Patuto.

Time and Intent: A Solo Exhibition By Alex Heilbron @ Meliksetian Briggs In Los Angeles

The five paintings featured in Alex Heilbron’s Time and Intent are part of a larger body of work she began prior to, and completed after, the onset of the pandemic. The various patterning techniques that guide this work facilitate distillation of concepts like adolescence, decay and movement into notions of temporality. Not unlike the specular aspect of a graph, these paintings find a balance in transition between dualisms: order and chaos, active and passive, before and after.

Time and Intent is on view through March 27 @ Meliksetian | Briggs 313 N Fairfax Avenue

Danny Fox's The Sweet and Burning Hills @ Alexander Berggruen In New York

Danny Fox’s new paintings at Alexander Berggruen capture the conflicting spirit of the Hollywood Hills through boldly-rendered expressive portraiture, mystical elements, and allusions to smoke and fire. Fox blends domestic imagery with influences from his natural surroundings to create eerily striking articulations of the human psyche. In the show’s namesake 2019 painting The Sweet and Burning Hills, a figure lets a mask hang below her chin to reveal her face, seemingly indifferent to the fire-teeming background. The ghost-like transparent outline of her body suggests her transience within the burning environment, or perhaps she exists as a distant memory. As the figure is impermanent and atemporal, so too is the landscape immortalized in painting while burning to ash. photographs by Dario Lasagni

The Sweet and Burning Hills is on view by appointment through February 26 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3

Steven Harwick's SKiNFLiCK Solo Show @ URSA NYC

i’M DiRTY LiKE iCE CREAM MELTED iN BEDSHEETS AND FRESH MUD SQUiSHED OUT OF CROCS HOLES. YOU ARE HiGH OCTANE TUBE SOCKS iN PiSS STAiNED BRiEFS. GiVE ME YOUR GOLD TEETH, i’LL KEEP THEM iN EVERY POCKET. i’M CUM RiCH LiKE A MATCHSTiCK ANARCHY SYMBOL ABOUT TO GET LiT.

SKiNFLiCK is on view virtually and for in-person appointments @ URSA NYC

7 Never-Before-Seen Works By Rosie Lee Tompkins @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts In San Francisco

American artist, Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is considered one of the greatest quiltmakers of all time and one of the century’s greatest artists. The seven artworks on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts date from 1974 to 2006, the year of the artist’s death. This significant exhibition coincides with a major retrospective of her work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and includes a newly commissioned essay by Lawrence Rinder, the longtime champion of Tompkins and former Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Rosie Lee Tompkins is the pseudonym of quilter Effie Mae Howard, who carefully guarded her privacy after her rise to national prominence in the late 1990s. Born on September 6, 1936 to a sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas, she learned quilting from her mother as a child but did not begin to practice the craft seriously until the 1980s, when she was living in the Bay Area city of Richmond. Tompkins was a devout member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and credited God with her uncanny sense of color. Many of her quilts were made with family members or friends in mind, and can be seen as prayers on their behalf, including her sons.

Few of Tompkins’ quilts conform to the traditional scale of a bed covering, a byproduct of the conceptual logic inherent in each piece. Her quilts are characterized by the variation in scale of the triangles and squares used in her patterns, creating “asymmetrical forms that pull, crumble, and bend,” says Rinder. Tompkins “transformed everything she touched with her improvisatory piecing and unerring sense of color, composition and scale,” notes critic Roberta Smith. “In the still-unfolding field of African-American quilt-making, she has no equal.”

Rosie Lee Tompkins is on view through February 19 @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts 1969 California Street, San Francisco

I Contain Multitudes Group Show @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery In New York

I Contain Multitudes is a group show featuring the works of Jules Gimbrone, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, and Jennifer Sirey. The microbiome — all the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that cohabitate our genetic biomass, actually outweigh us by volume, some estimate that there are over 10 times as many microbial cells than human cells in and on each one of us. The microbiome is invisible to the eye but visible to our sense of smell, taste and touch, and visible in human culture as well. From the foods that we eat and the ways we digest, to the ways we process and interpret information and construct identity, and to whom we are attracted, the microbiome is influencing us and participating in our relations to the world. This show seeks to explore ways that several artists have pointed to, cooperated, or worked in tandem with microbial life in the making and context of works of art and culture. The title originally comes from “Song of Myself, 51” by Walt Whitman, and more recently used by science writer Ed Yong to title his book about the microbiome.

This exhibition will include a special series of KLAUSGALLERY.cloud editions focusing on the various practices of each artist. New editions of the online component will launch throughout the month.

I Contain Multitudes is on view through February 20 @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery 54 Ludlow Street, New York

Michael Stamm Presents "so super sorry sir!" @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

The paintings in Michael Stamm’s “so super sorry sir!” revel in their idiosyncratic, contradictory attitude toward morality, sexuality, mental health, and contemporary cultural politics. They feature an unlikely cast of characters—ranging from the Devil to an anthropomorphic hand—whose disparate senses of virtue and spirituality often clash with societal convention. At once clinging to life and hurtling toward annihilation, the artist questions what self-actualization looks like in the face of an overly righteous and emotionally precarious world.

The Devil appears as a surrogate for various archetypes—a conspiratorial friend, a scorned enemy, or at times, the artist himself. He is at once a foe to be vanquished and a sly, picaresque hero, providing an infinite set of entry points for the viewer to project their own definitions of “right” and “wrong”. In the titular painting of the show, “so super sorry sir!”, the Devil takes the role of a hysterical martyr, at once offering his patriarchal tormentor a flower, while stabbing himself with a sword. The painting reimagines a memory of a forced apology extracted from the artist by a homophobic teacher. Instead of flatly submitting, the Devil flamboyantly and sibilantly disobeys. Deploying icons of the Virgin Mary interspersed with images of historical gay villains, the work indulges both the aggression of sarcastic defiance and the kinky masochism of self-flagellation. Throughout the exhibition, the Devil, ever at odds with his environment and always nude, exuberantly plays out the iconoclasm of being a queer person. This dissonant, ever changing position associated with queerness may deny an easily resolved identity or moral stance but, ironically, is exactly what allows for the possible reconciliation of conflicting desires.

so super sorry sir! is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Cammie Staros's What Will Have Being @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

Over the past decade, Cammie Staros has investigated the ways in which classical antiquities have come to represent an origin story of Western art history. While continuing to address the historical narrative surrounding these objects, the body of work in What Will Have Being focuses more on the prescience of ancient artifacts – how their treatment might foretell a possible future of today’s objects. Relics and ruins, which outlast the societies that made them, emphasize both the achievements and the hubris of humanity. But by shifting our contextual understanding of these objects, by considering how meaning is made, we can begin to understand an alternative narrative. The works in What Will Have Being not only question our understanding of contemporary political and environmental instabilities, they also poignantly consider how our current moment will be remembered, and what kind of world it will produce for tomorrow.

What Will Have Being is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Sue Williams Paintings And Collages @ 303 Gallery In New York

In 2020, the brutal reality of living in the waning days of American Empire has allowed Williams to consider how we might have arrived at this point. Her new paintings are suffused with images of colonial times: disembodied Pilgrim clogs, Tudor cabins, horses outfitted with blinders, the literal nuts & bolts that prefigured the industrial revolution, Betsy Ross as a dinosaur. The suggestion that America is founded on violence and manipulation, that the post-truth, post-Trump, post-COVID world is not an anomaly but a continuation of a status quo built over the past 400 years, doesn't seem far-fetched. A painting titled "Land Of Profit and Coincidence" would resonate equally in 1620 or 2020.

There is a wry and impertinent classicism in Williams' compositions - at first glance, they suggest the kind of maps early land surveyors might use. They also may intimate the strewn wreckage of a natural disaster, here the relentless and sadistic subversion of democracy, the American dream, and E Pluribus Unum. Couched in the archetypal imagery of our noble forefathers, of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, American idyll itself becomes Machiavellian. Williams herself sums it up with two quotes: "The American people are the most brainwashed in the world" (Adam Curtis), and a hopeful note courtesy of Woody Guthrie: "You fascists never gonna win."

Sue Williams’ solo exhibition is on view through January 30 @ 303 Gallery 555 W 21st Street

David Hicks Presents Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Seed, David Hick’s exhibition of ceramics and drawings represents the artist’s first solo show with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. This body of work is closely connected to the landscape surrounding Hicks’ studio and home in Central San Joaquin Valley, a largely agricultural area in California. The artist writes,

While not tethered to a focused realism of nature’s shapes and natural development, my approach is more a loose conversation with natural form; one that addresses my interpretations of growth, irregularity and the movements of nature.

David Hicks’ multifaceted terracotta works ‘grow’ up and around the space in which they are installed. Dionysian ‘Offerings’ take the artist’s maximalist approach to an extreme, depicting heaping plates of vegetal forms—some rising four feet high off the floor—doused in thick glazes, often captured in mid-drip. Plant-like forms also appear as small talismanic objects the artist calls ‘Clippings’. In places, the forms appear more bodily, like heads or organs, offering a reminder that we, too, are a part of the landscape.

Seed is on view by appointment through February 13 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue

Hannah Epstein's Kill Your Captors @ Steve Turner In Los Angeles

Kill Your Captors, Hannah Epstein’s latest solo exhibition at Steve Turner, features new hooked rugs, most of which she created after moving into an 1886 church in Mahone Bay, a small town one hour from Halifax. The hysteria of 2020 and meme culture that ensued are depicted in some works, while others depict monsters looking on. The meme works relate to Cancel Culture, Elon Musk and Grimes, Xi Jinpeng’s China, sacred cows and hyperstimulation. Battles are brewing and monsters are watching.  

Kill Your Captors is on view through February 6 at Steve Turner, 6830 Santa Monica Blvd