TIO NYC: Chelsea (mostly on 21st and 22nd Street)!

23 Oct TIO NYC: Chelsea (mostly on 21st and 22nd Street)!

Two shows at the Miles McEnery Gallery, “The Disappointment Engine” and ‘Heliopedi” were among our favs, but sadly they just closed. That said you should look up the work of Jacob Hashimoto and Pia Fries.

Another, titled “The Other Side,” featured the equally impactful, monumental landscape paintings of April Gornik. (Go here for more on her work in The Church in Sag Harbor with husband/artist Eric Fischl.)

Viruses, stained-glass windows, Atari circuit-board patterns, and leaf structures all collide in the 11 sculptural works in Jacob Hashimoto’s exhibition, “The Disappointment Engine,” along with an immersive, site-specific hanging installation stretching from wall to wall.

Image, courtesy Artsy.

While remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions, notably, landscape-based abstraction, Modernism, and handcraft, Hashimoto’s practice is distinctly multidisciplinary, asserting a decidedly contemporary penchant for experimentation and exploration. The artist uses sculpture, painting, and installation to create beautiful, complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even astroturf-covered blocks. His layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology.

Pia Fries studied at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts, Switzerland, and at the Academy of the Arts, Düsseldorf, Germany, where she studied under Gerhard Richter. From 2014 to 2023, Fries has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Image, courtesy McEnery.

“There is an exuberance and generosity to Fries’s work that, in its physicality and its athleticism, feels much closer to our everyday affairs than the conventionally positioned cerebral concerns of abstraction…Hers is a practice that sits in between times; in between genders; in between abstraction and representation, critical theory and popular interest; and, ultimately, in between her hand, and her body, and our eye,” wrote Christopher Bedford about “Heliopedi.”

“Over the course of her nearly four-decade career, Gornik has been unwavering in her devotion to the sky, the earth, the horizon, and her experience of their intersection as jumping off point for her painting practice. Working from memory, dreams, and photographs, Gornik splices the real and the imagined, ultimately translating them into oils on linen.

“With uncanny manipulation of the natural laws of gravity and perspective, Gornik thrusts the viewer into her dramatic panoramas, forcing us to reckon with the sublimity of creation, the power of our changing climate, and the inevitability of our own mortality,” explained the gallery.

Now onward to shows still up and running.

Go here for more about TIO in NYC.

Mickalene Thomas at Yancey Richardson, “je t’adore, through November 11, 2023:

Courtesy Yancey Richardson.

A multidisciplinary artist, Thomas’ mixed-media portraits critically deconstruct accepted definitions of beauty, race, and gender, specifically in relation to black women. Known for her monumental, rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and female subjects, the artist identifies photography as playing a central role in her work. She first began to photograph herself and her mother during her time as an MFA student at Yale and has since moved to photographing friends and lovers…

Rhinestones serve as an added layer of meaning and a metaphor for artifice.

An eye-dazzling collection. Literally.

Ugo Rondinone at Gladstone gallery, through November 9:

Rondinone’s new, large-scale sculptures along with an interconnected body of work, act as building blocks of a perfect storm.

At the center of the exhibition are three massive “lightning strikes” that forcefully punctuate the space. Painted in bright, Dayglo yellow, the bronze light sculptures depict the crooked and rhythmic lines that form the lightning, creating a tangible albeit static representations of those awe-inspiring phenomena. A hung cloud relief created with sand, gravel, and concrete accompanies the light sculptures in the artist’s conjuring environmental wonders.

In a world where such wonders may soon cease.

Carol K. Brown’s “Someplace Else,” Nohra Haime Gallery, through November 4, 2023:

Image courtesy Nohra Haime.

Brown’s “Someplace Else” explores memory and perception through intricate watercolors. The environment of her paintings invites the viewer to step into a dreamlike world that follow the path of a disappearing man traveling in a rich and beautiful, but dubious space.

It appears the artist is dealing with the fullness of life – just as the ground is becoming shakier.

Valerie Jaudon’s “Parameters” at DC Moore, through November 11:

Image, courtesy DC Moore.

In 2006, Jaudon’s practice underwent a fundamental shift. The artist eschewed color and optical elements for compositions of white paint on bare linen canvas. Her most recent paintings maintain the simplified palette of white and black paint on raw canvas, while introducing freely curving lines, creating irregular forms within the complex architecture of the composition and palpable dynamic tension.