Peter Shear
Until May 13th. Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-242-7727, cheimread.com.
Peter Shear’s small paintings resemble brief, challenging poems. The picture and the title touch the heart and the eye. Decide if these bounces interest you.
Only the small size is constant here. Otherwise, color, suggestions, internal scales, and stylistic variations take precedence. The show’s first painting, “Same Day” (2021), separates a short strip of two narrow horizontal shapes with a slight wobbly white line halfway to the right edge of a dark brown field. You can picture the abandoned outdoor furniture (which used to be the center of active human interaction) on the beach as it gets dark. There is.
Next door, Door to Door (2022), Shear generously uses white, blue, brown, and green brushes across the surface. Although an end in itself, this work evokes the genre of painting studies and its enjoyment. And soon after, the show’s eponymous “Following Sea” is again white-on-brown, but solidly painted.
The paintings in the small first gallery of the show are especially powerful. Direction may be indicated by a more tightly structured “Match”, such as a jewel. Roberta Smith
Michael McGrath
Until May 19th. Crossing Art, 559 West 23rd Street, Manhattan, 212-359-4333, crossart.com.
the artist Michael McGrathBased in Rhinebeck in the Hudson Valley, , paints what they call pictographic landscapes. Surprised insects and trees. His show “Moon Riot” at Crossing Art Full of laid-back spiritualist energy.
McGrath’s research took a fundamental turn a few years ago. (I discovered him on Instagram.) He painted pleasantly serene landscapes and dark figures in the vein of Edvard Munch, but suddenly his work exploded with dayglo colors and singing plants. and was not moored to the composition. His works are not serious and apocalyptic, but warm and funny, like folk art or children’s drawings, and include “Introduction to the Hunting Gods,” “Witch Spring Training,” and “Redesigning the Ghost System.” ”, “Weekend Meeting of the Month” and other titles. and little vampires.
The show contains some missteps. I can live without a fake fur yeti figure that is overhanging and feels more like a theme park mascot than a sculpture. Because it embodies the wonder of walking in the woods and a deeper sense that the world is fine minus humans. Everything plays out like in Thomas Cole’s 19th century Hudson River His School Masterpieces series.course of the empire(1833-1836) may be the first American painting to warn of the Anthropocene. McGrath channeled something: maybe spirits, maybe gods, but mostly so-called outsiders plugged into different frequencies. Martha Schwendener
Enrique Chagoya
Until May 13th. George Adams Gallery, 38 Walker Street, Manhattan. 212-564-8480, georgeadamsgallery.com.
In Enrique Chagoya’s painting Detention at the Border of Languages (2023), three Native American figures in a canoe labeled “Border Patrol” kidnap a woman with the head of Donald Duck. It looks like As if with a squeegee, Chagoya drags the greenery adjacent to the scene, creating a Gerhard Richteres visual glitch. The work is characterized by mashing up pop and abstract elements with historical sources. In this case, Charles he is remaking Ferdinand Wimar’s his 1853 painting The Abduction of Daniel Boone’s Daughter by Indians. This, and 13 other of his paintings, prints, and book works included in “Borderless,” were created by a Mexican-born Californian artist to create a collage out of debris in a process Chagoya calls “reverse anthropology.” It provides a powerful introduction to how to explode history.
Chagoya’s father had a side job as an artist while working for the Central Bank of Mexico, whose main business was identifying counterfeit currency. Following this example, Chagoya studied economics before turning to art and printmaking. The background to this is “The Enlightened Savage Guide to Economic Theory” (2009-2010), in which his two golem-like figures fight. One is Saddam made on an oil rig with his Hussein head provided from a portrait from an Iraqi dinar banknote, the other one of him fights. Made from fighter jet parts, George Washington’s head is sourced from US dollars. Chagoya’s best work remains in these “codex” forms, where the pre-Columbian Maya and Aztec book traditions were nearly obliterated by the Spanish Catholic colonists, mixed with comics, and art-historical allusions. is permeated. Chagoya’s caring attitude is as fresh as ever. John Winkler
king cobra
Until May 13th. JTT, 390 Broadway, Manhattan. 212-574-8152, jttnyc.com.
The schlock-shocking demeanor of the artist known as King Cobra (aka Doreen Lynette Garner) announces itself in the gruesome “Salome’s Revenge” (2023). It’s his cast of pink silicone of a human head shoved into a deli slicer. So you can tell what it’s made of by looking at the tondo, which is layered with rubbery meaty bits. Cobra’s previous sculptures have used similar grindhouse techniques to explore the brutal history of medical experimentation on black bodies. Here, “flesh” includes “dirt from the grave of J. Marion Sims,” blaming the men who pioneered obstetrics and gynecology of enslaved black women, often without anesthesia.
The exhibition “White Meat” imagines the racial concept of the white man as a kind of mortadella, an abstract piece of meat speckled with nuts and fat. Cobra’s metaphorical carnage questions whether abstraction itself is a racial concept. Did a white man invent abstract art? Can you extract the artwork (or medical “achievements”) from the monsters that made it?
The show’s masterpiece is a life-size model of a necrotic shark, strung together with colored silicone, beads, hair weave, steel mesh, and razor blades (for teeth), suspended in an open steel frame. This is clearly a parody of Damian. Hurst’s formaldehyde blockbuster. The second gallery piece includes a rope of blonde dreadlocks and a huge necklace of white dreadlock scalps. Maybe it takes this kind of bloody exaggeration to show the cruelty of whiteness itself. And even if there is purity in abstract art, Cobra’s rough working method belies it. Travis Deal
Man Ray portrayed the Parisian artists and writers of the 1920s and ’30s as hauntingly as Nadar did his 19th-century predecessors. Indeed, Marcel Proust’s deathbed photo of Man Ray is the perfect bookend for Victor Hugo’s photo of Nadar. But when Nadal mourned the French literary giant in his 1885, Nadar himself, a venerable Parisian institution, rushed to Proust’s apartment in 1922 at the behest of Jean Cocteau Mann. An American who spoke terrible French and lived in Paris. A little over a year.
The wonder of Man Ray’s Parisian Portraits, 1921-1939 lies in his accessibility and artistry. Before relocating, Man Ray befriended two of his avant-garde artists, Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara. They smoothed his entry into Paris and are one of his subjects in this exhibition of 72 vintage his prints. Most of these were pulled from his Baum collection by Timothy, a private his art dealer who knew Mann in his later years and collaborated on this show.
Man Ray admired his subject. To soften wrinkles and other imperfections, he usually shot from a distance with a long lens, slightly overexposing the film. But his portraits were deep and blatant: the know-it-all eyes of the poet Anna de Noailles, the glassy stare of the long-soaked Sinclair Lewis, the burly strength of the young Alexander Calder. And then there’s a self-portrait of him taken in his mid-thirties — purposely tied diagonally, piercing his eyes, set to a line of unstoppable determination. Arthur Lebow
