Brooklyn's Bumpin': Platform, Smack Mellon, Main Window DUMBO, Minus Space

Laura Battle's ledger drawings at Platform Space, 20 Jay St. No. 319 Fridays-Saturdays 1 - 6.
Curated by Elena Sisto. Gallery Link

Loved this show. Fine pen strokes augmenting historical ledgers found in Battle's Hudson, NY neighborhood. Also excited by the diaphanous qualities of pen on thin, old paper sheets.

Details - pathways and marks through ruler space.

The color obtains a dye feeling--perpetuated in part by the yellow sheets of paper.

Laura Battle with Elizabeth Hazan work in progress, the studio abutting the gallery. 

 

Thank you all for a lovely, unusual and reinvigorating experience. 

Cecile Chong outdoes herself in_other Nature at Smack Mellon. Gallery Link

The install is rambunctious, glorious, abundant. Black light spills over paint applied to large plant forms mounted on chain link fencing. Swaddled 'guagua' forms emblematize innocent consciousness before nature is divided by claim. 

Back side; projected on the back wall lapping waves of water in black and white.

In the front space, Julia Oldham and Chad Stayrook take over a post-acopocolyptic landscape voiced over by Oldham's AI avatar. Gallery Link

Espied through the laboratory of working parts, the presentation that guides us through the space.

Beyond a life-size cardboard tractor, the avatar materializes.

Takes shape as a talking head and begins spinning the vision so well elucidated in form.

Main Windows in Dumbo presents Etty Yaniv with an ambitious installation. Gallery Link

A trompe l'oeil mis-en-scene writ large and glorious.

Close to: every texture has image, a life cycle both trash and landscape.

Gabrielle Evertz at Minus Space in Exaltation.Gallery Link

The painter, a renowned color expert who taught at Hunter College for 28 years, is a new discovery to me but clearly not others. Her meticulously painted canvases feature unusual palettes that hum with resonance to landscape.

Within these linear shapes worlds exist, both urban and wintry and spring-like gardens.

LES, LES

Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater: Gallery Link

February Light, tapestries by Josep Grau-Garriga at Salon 94. Gallery Link

Shirley Jaffe at Tibor de Nagy

"The exhibition gathers a select group of works, from private collections and the artist’s estate, in order to concisely showcase a presentation of the artist working at the height of her powers. It brings together classic examples from four different decades including The Chinese Mountain (pictured above) from 2004-2005 and two paintings Splitting Yellow and Swinging (2) completed the year of her death in 2016, as well as a drawing from 1996."

Next door at Cunningham: Jake! the oddly named Jake Berthot  exhibition showing late paintings after moving studio to Accord, NY. Gallery Link

Close view of his drawings, carefully gridded and plotted. Jake is 1/2 American Cezanne, 1/2 Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose nocturnes he adored.

In the 1990s when he began to make this work, it felt incomprehensible to those who'd championed his highly successful, abstracted "lozenge" paintings throughout the 1980s. But it's a natural homecoming, and literally as he returned to the landscape (he grew up in Tallahassee, FL, and was no stranger to landscape).

Jake told a funny story about his search for housing in Manhattan. After days of intensive looking, queried a friend, "who is Mr. Shaftway? He owns all the real estate in town."

The paintings are glazed and gnarled; also darker and richer than lighting allows.

Berthot's homage to Ryder so clear in this moonlit passage in the woods.

After a lifetime of wresting shape from surface, how surprising to find the surface there.

After Susan Rothenberg, seeing Lester Johnson at Stephen Harvey Fine Art Projects was a welcome surprise.

And after reading Nancy Princenthal's brilliant book about rape and art, Unspeakable Acts, this Bob Thompson  painting brought extra meaning.

Studies for the Thompson in the back room

A beautiful June Leaf in Post, the exhibition. Gallery Link

There's a lot more to see in Jennifer Coates' debut exhibition with High Noon, Toxic Halo, then I will show here, so go visit. Here is the link: Gallery Link

These are the strangest paintings in Toxic Halo, in which various processes (pouring, outlining,  marking) coalesce into a vision dreamlike yet psychologically true. 

Jiha Moon's debut, Enigmatics, at Derek Eller Project Room. Gallery Link

Detail - washes create a plane shift that pattern moves over.

The vessels gorgeous--both painted and compressed.

At CANADA: Done with Xanax, by Katherine Bernhardt. ET Phone home! Gallery Link

Xanax code word for New York? which the artist left for her native St. Louis, to recover books of stickers and other illuminating childhood memorabilia.

The paint loose and wild; pouring gives just one go, and the image must be built  on the spot to remain free.

Close by, Femme Brut at Chart (the downtown portion of Jackie Saccoccio's double gallery show). Gallery Link  

Surprises: the works on paper bearing overt markings hearkening back to the pathways in her installations after a Giverny residency in the 1990s, also drawing on the paintings, establishing a structure in the pours.

From a series of watercolors flanking the entrance

Homage to Courbet, a work that in top and bottom write shows a lot of intervention by the artist, and it's exciting, collapsing the cinematic panels of 2013-2015 into single canvases filled with incident.

Last stop: CollectCouples at NY Figure Academy. Gallery Link
Such fond '90s memories of Ellen Phalen's ink doll works, this owned by Eric Fischl and April Gornik, as are the paintings below by various artists.

KAWS and Julia Chiange exhibit this large Joyce Pensato drawing,

and three Susan Te Kahurangi works on paper.

Ebony Patterson, Leopard Lily Forest from 2013, Collection Mickalene Thomas and  Raquel Chevremont.

Two from John Currin and Rachel Feinstein.