We’re deep into the fall art season and there’s much to see — and plenty of variety for everyone. Our current favorites traverse a multitude of styles, genres, and media. Make your way this month around an artistic labyrinth that encompasses Aboriginal bark paintings, Modernist masters and mentors Charles Cajori and John Graham, BioArt maker Luis Fernando Benedit, along with artists who ought to be iconic, like Tina Girouard, the iconic kitsch of Francis Picabia, and much more. Make a weekend of it, and enjoy! —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
Samuel Hindolo: Eurostar
Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through November 9
In Samuel Hindolo’s “Saïda (Parvis)” (2024), a muted oil palette of pale pink, cream, and mossy gray-green lends a mysterious aura to an image of two animals cavorting in what looks like a storefront window. The washed-out scene, where color seems to hold back lest it feel too insistent, recalls the work of Luc Tuymans and others skilled at depicting absence in presence. Yet Hindolo’s animals hint at narrative, and even whimsy. In fact, the entire show is loosely cohered by a narrative based on a 1913 silent comedy short, “Saïda A Enlevé Manneken-Pis.” In the film, an escaped leopard runs amok in Brussels and knocks down the iconic titular statue. Several works in the show feature the leopard, but only “Saïda (Two Scenes, One Predicament)” (2024) portrays an active scene, as police stalk the animal. In others, we see her as an incomplete sketch or emerging, ghostlike, from a field of soft color.
The artist’s occasional experiments with style — inserting collaged elements like products and pop culture imagery and dipping into graphic abstraction — at times undermines his strengths. Yet at their best, the works conjure a sense of warmth and wonder in an otherwise alienated world. —NH
Charles Cajori: Turbulent Space, Shifting Colors
Hollis Taggart Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, First Floor, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through November 16
An important teacher to many artists of the New York School, including Jack Whitten, David Reed, and Douglas Florian, Charles Cajori is one of those figures who never quite gets his due. He started the renowned Tanager Gallery with fellow artists Lois Dodd, Angelo Ippolito, William King, and Fred Mitchell, and would go on to found the New York Studio School, an important area art school, with Mercedes Matter, Esteban Vincente, and others. And when he relocated to California, he briefly taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where he interacted with Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and other artists in the Bay Area scene.
In this exhibition, his two-figure paintings, seemingly influenced by the New York Studio School’s propensity for two-figure life drawing classes, reveal the history of his life and experiences during an influential period of American art. His early abstractions, like “Untitled” (1957), give us a sense of his roots in Abstract Expressionism — he did live on East Tenth Street for years, the epicenter of the movement — but the figure never quite goes away, and paintings from the 1970s reveal a closer affinity with Bay Area abstractions and other New York School renegades who never turned their backs on figuration, including Lois Dodd. Curated by John Seed, this is a welcome exploration of an artist whose legacy is embedded in his love of community and art. —Hrag Vartanian
Francis Picabia: Femmes
Michael Werner Gallery, 4 East 77th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through November 23
Postmodernism may have ushered in the era of combining high art and kitsch, but decades earlier the Surrealists were exploring this idea. And no Surrealist was more successful than Francis Picabia. He was so successful that his later “kitschy” art is still sometimes held in contempt by arbiters of taste. But why? Maybe because he didn’t combine high and low in a single work but rather morphed into a painter of slightly surreal pin-up girls? Or because he was really a proto-postmodernist? I first encountered these paintings in the context of a Mike Kelley exhibition and it’s artists like Kelley, his Destroy All Monsters bandmate Jim Shaw, and other great art weirdos who bring out the campy glory of Picabia’s later paintings. Femmes is a fascinating look at the artist’s transition from his Surrealist creations of the 1920s (still a little bit campy) to his Hollywood-dramatic portraits of nude women to later works like 1949’s kitschy-and-witchy “Masque.” For anyone who can’t get into Picabia’s later works, I encourage you to see this show and look at the art through a different lens, one in which Surrealism, pulp novels, and Vargas Girls are cut from the same cloth. —NH
John Graham: A Mentor of Modernism
Rosenberg & Co., Lenox Hill, 19 East 66th Street, Manhattan
Through December 3
There are few weirdos in 20th-century American art as strange as the Ukrainian-born John Graham. Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky, his mentorship of artists far more talented than him has sealed his reputation as a major figure in the 20th-century New York art scene. In this two-level exhibition, Graham’s distinctively doll-like figures are on display along with an early 1923 self-portrait, a wonky 1925 still-life, and a Picasso-Rose-period-like acrobat in a de Chirico-esque landscape from 1927, along with other paintings that demonstrate his scattershot approach to painting, which feels more like flipping through a history of Modern Art than examining a more digested world view.
In fact, one of the most interesting works is a drawing that was intended for an unspecified History of Modern Art book, complete with a marquetry frame created by the artist himself. The drawings are mostly forgettable, though “Studies: Birds and Self-Portrait” (1941) is a window into how his eclectically organized imagery can continue to ignite wonder and magic.
Among the added delights here are the higher-quality paintings by those around him who went on to far more lucrative careers and reputations, like Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Dorothy Dehner, and Stuart Davis. The fact that he gets upstaged at his own exhibition seems almost fitting for Graham. And I’m not even sure he would’ve minded because you can sense his influence, even if not direct, all around their work. —HV
Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN
Center for Art, Research and Alliances, 225 West 13th Street, West Village, Manhattan
Through January 12, 2025
At the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), Tina Girouard’s work droops softly from the ceilings, assembles into neat grids, loops in video documentation, and sparkles in sequined textile works. Over a nearly half-century career, she founded the iconic artist-run restaurant FOOD with Gordon Matta-Clark and performed regularly at 112 Greene Street, better known today as White Columns. She lived with the painter Mary Heilmann and schmoozed with artists like Lynda Benglis and Richard Serra.
You could ask how such an artist could have largely slipped out of the art historical canon. Because she’s a woman, of course. Because she alternated between New York and Louisiana, maybe. Because her work was so wide-ranging that it’s hard to pin her to a particular movement — Pattern & Decoration? Video art? I’m not so sure she would care. She seems, to me, driven by an internal rhythm, someone whose mind moves through material, whether film, performance, drawing, textile, installation, or collaboration. One thing she’s never been called, as far as I can tell, is a poet. But I think that nebulous form finds its analog in her amorphous interests and aesthetic. At CARA, a set of notes for an enigmatic language she was developing feels like it embodies her philosophy of art-making as, in her words, “life-making.” On a sheet of stationery are three roughly drawn cryptograms, one of an apartment building, another of what looks to be a Rosie-the-Riveter-esque crooked arm, the last of two abstract symbiotic shapes. She translates in text written in pencil below: “The House is running through me.” I think I would call her a poet, too. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala
Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through January 5, 2025
As soon as I stepped into the Asia Society’s monumental display of Aboriginal bark paintings, I realized that the 90 minutes I scheduled for myself was not nearly enough time to take in their majesty. Maḏayin brings together eight decades of mesmerizing work from the Yolŋu people, who reside in the Yirrkala region of northeast Australia. Wall texts tell relate how in the 1930s, after years of violent tension with White Australia, they began painting large strips of eucalyptus bark with designs that had been passed down through millennia as critical expressions of artistic diplomacy and political statements of sovereignty over their land, some of which were key to obtaining land and water rights for their people. And the works themselves are nothing short of sublime. Entrancing patterns painted with natural pigment tell stories that have remained part of Yolŋu culture for tens of thousands of years. I spent another two hours in the galleries this past week — and I’ll be back again for one last mind-expanding visit before the show closes.
If you want to make a day of basking in the beauty of contemporary Aboriginal art, you can also check out Gapu-Buḏap – Crossing the Water (through November 8) at D’Lan Contemporary, New York’s only gallery dedicated solely to Aboriginal artwork; artist Gunybi Ganambarr takes patterns that are usually painted on wood and deftly transfers them to metal. Meanwhile, Salon 94 is showing Dhambit Mununggurr’s Dhambit – Rock of Ages through November 2. The Aboriginal bark artist has been granted permission by her tribe to paint in acrylic — in a major departure from the traditional form, her thick swabs of paint sing in electric blue. —Isabella Segalovich
The Body Inherent: Emilia Azcárate & José Gabriel Fernández
Henrique Faria Gallery, 35 East 67th Street, Fourth Floor, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through January 25, 2025
Put your phone away before you step into this exhibition. Emilia Azcárate’s hushed yet magnetic paintings and José Gabriel Fernández’s sensuous sculptures should be admired unmediated, and you won’t be able to capture their sleights of shape and light, anyway. The two artists, both from Caracas, Venezuela, channel abstraction in an exploration of the body — Azcárate through darkness and color theory, Fernández by harnessing form in service of the erotic. With a close eye (and perhaps some guidance from a gallery staff member), you may be able to discern Azcárate’s geometric alphabet and one word in particular that recurs across her canvases. —Valentina Di Liscia
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths
Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 142 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through January 25, 2025
The late Argentine polymath Luis Fernando Benedit remains undersung in the United States, despite his prescient contributions to cybernetics and BioArt. The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art’s wide-ranging look at his formative, late-1960s and early-1970s years, Invisible Labyrinths, provides an excellent introduction to his artwork.
The title installation from 1971 — a wall-less maze of mirrors, in which imperceptible bands of light trigger an alarm when crossed — places visitors in a position similar to lab rats. The art habitats Benedit created for actual plants and animals, represented through photographic and schematic documentation, as well as the original tanks’ translucent husks, also possess a scientific feel. But even the artist’s less celebrated paintings, both his Art Brut juvenilia and his Pop human-animal hybrids, inject a welcome dose of color alongside all the techy experimentation. —Louis Bury
Edges of Ailey
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan
Through February 9, 2025
The bus running down Ninth Avenue sweltered as I flipped through South to America, Imani Perry’s masterful account of a misunderstood region with deep roots. The book’s epigraph is a fitting testament to an embodied art form: “The dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.” Half an hour later, I stepped into a transportive show dedicated to the groundbreaking Black American choreographer and artist to whom the quote is attributed, Alvin Ailey. A wholly transformed space in the oft-sterile Whitney, Edges of Ailey offers a comprehensive yet digestible constellation of Black diasporic artistry anchored by a hypnotic montage of performances, interviews, and archival footage running across the top of the room, a reference point to return to throughout the show. Despite spanning time periods, geographies, and media, this exhibition manages to connect the dots between seemingly disparate art forms without essentializing or flattening work of the Black diaspora, all while paying homage to the Black Southern community in which Ailey grew up. Late muralist John Biggers’s indelible 1945 painting “Sharecropper” finds kinship with abstracted figuration by Romare Bearden in the opposite corner; autodidact Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter’s 1950s canvas speaks to a Jacob Lawrence painting from a decade earlier. Give yourself time to explore this exhibition, which will keep you in its thrall long after you step outside the museum. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
Jesse Krimes: Corrections
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through July 13, 2025
In this timely single-gallery exhibition, Jesse Krimes dismantles notions of who constitutes an “offender” in our deeply flawed criminal justice system. The artist, who spent six years in federal prison for non-violent drug charges, created many of the works on view — including his 40-foot mural “Apokaluptein:16389067” — during his incarceration, using ingenious methods such as transferring images onto bed sheets with hair gel and plastic spoons. These are joined by 19th-century photographs by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon thought to be the historical precursors of modern-day mugshots. Together with newspaper clippings and other images culled by Krimes to examine how people accused of crimes are represented on an increasingly public stage, they prompt a much-needed analysis of the individual experience of imprisonment. — VD
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