This week in Newly Reviewed, Andrew Russeth covers a group show of self-portraits, Gina Beavers’s collaged sculptures and Hannah Villiger’s beguiling photographs.
UPPER EAST SIDE
‘Yours Truly’
Jam-packed group shows with quirky conceits are an enduring (and endearing) tradition of the New York summer, though they felt thin on the ground this year. Fortunately the art adviser Eleanor Cayre stepped up to curate “Yours Truly,” a rollicking exhibition of recent self-portraits by more than 50 artists, at Nahmad Contemporary.
Chino Amobi, a musician and artist, gazes out of a vivid oil painting the size of a sheet of paper, while a young Jordan Wolfson is being embraced by his father in a tender snapshot affixed to an egg-shaped hunk of brass. Emily Sundblad sits nude and visibly pregnant in a spare canvas, still a rare subject a century after Paula Modersohn-Becker painted herself that way, perhaps the first such depiction in Western art.
Since most of these pieces were created in the last few years, the show amounts to a behind-the-scenes group portrait. Carolyn Lazard is in bed, on her laptop, in a pen drawing; Danielle Mckinney is in bed, sleeping, in an oil painting.
Other portraits are less candid but not necessarily less revealing. A charismatic pig stars in an immense image by the roguish photographer Heji Shin, and Joel Mesler has a slapdash painting of a dejected clown. The show’s cumulative effect is moving, as so many people decide how to present themselves while we look on.
Henry Taylor steals the show, as he so often does. Here he is floating in a pool in a radiant painting that was turned into a mural on the High Line in 2017. He is wearing sunglasses, leaning back on fluorescent-green pool noodles, and it looks like summer is never going to end.
CHELSEA
Gina Beavers
Gina Beavers, an artist in New Jersey, also organized a winning group show this summer: a menagerie of art informed by quotidian items (a Claes Oldenburg sundae, a Samara Golden breakfast table) at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Now she is back with “Divine Consumer,” a curveball of a solo show. Known for relief paintings of social-media snapshots, such as outlandish manicures and luscious cheeseburgers, she has taken a subdued turn here.
Beavers dropped images of home décor from online ads (the kind that follow you around the internet after you view a product on Amazon) into Photoshop, transforming them into collages that she sculpted with foam, putty and paper pulp, before finishing them with paint.
Fourteen of these pieces, some quite large and all beguiling, are at Boesky. A scarlet blanket has become a craggy abstraction (or a mess of intestines), while pink and red towels, sliced and stacked, suggest fantastical architecture. Digital junk yields new life. In the six-foot-tall “Yellow gingham ascension (cushions, drapes, pillows),” 2024, a series of cushions float heavenward.
If Beavers previously laid bare the grotesque but intoxicating nature of what goes viral, here she is plumbing the slippery, sticky nature of today’s images, which morph as they vie for clicks and cash online.
Her earnest treatment of deadpan ideas has a comic effect, and a certain poignancy, but spend enough time with her “comfortcore paintings” (as she calls them) and a sense of unease may overtake you. At once banal and strange, these meaty objects are not quite what they purport to be — a very of-the-moment condition.
UPPER EAST SIDE
Hannah Villiger
Hannah Villiger was a master at making a lot out of very little, and of working adamantly on her own terms. For about 15 years, until her death in 1997 at 45, this Swiss artist focused on photographing her body with a Polaroid camera, enlarging and transferring the results to square-shaped aluminum plates.
She had a solo show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris earlier this year; this exhibition is her first New York solo outing in three decades. (Local museums, step up!) The show has a grand total of two works, but that is enough to confirm her power.
In “Work” (1980), which is just over three feet on each side, two hands grip each other, awkwardly but firmly, against a black backdrop. The other work, “Block” (1997), comprises four photos arrayed in a grid roughly eight feet square. Only fragments are visible: a leg, two knees (maybe), an arm holding a shin and a bit of flesh I cannot identify.
Villiger viewed her art as sculpture (the exhibition’s title is “Skulptural”), exploring the body’s formal possibilities while never quite rejecting its allusive potential. Here, thoughts about vulnerability, resilience and privacy come to mind.
As a new art season dawns in New York, measure what you encounter against this show.
Last Chance
Brooklyn
Ian L.C. Swordy
Although he obtained an M.F.A. with a focus on sculpting from Yale in 2009, Ian L.C. Swordy began his career as a bassist for a band. Then for 15 years he was a performance artist, traveling across the United States with props, until he hit a creative wall. Then he returned to sculpture. Now, at Entrance (a 10,000-square-foot sculpture garden under construction in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn), his marble works — called “Direct Carving NYC” — are on view as the site’s inaugural exhibition.
Swordy’s performance art kept his body in constant motion. (He once traveled to France and challenged every man he met on the street to a boxing match.) When he turned to sculpture, with stone sourced from Vermont, making cats with birds on their heads and eventually human figures, he began to wonder about energizing such a static material to the point where it could be made to “move.” Works like “The Return” and “The Pearl” probably demonstrate this best, with folds that form gently around the hips, buttocks and chests of the figures.
His immaculately polished, large and curvy sculpture recall the work of the African American sculptor William Edmondson, only that Swordy’s work does not seem to be made by hand, but looks so natural, so smooth, like the result of years of water washing over a pebble.
There are also smaller works on pedestals, providing a nice contrast in scale, but the real contrast is with little rough sculptures that the artist makes from found objects, hanging on the walls of a shipping container in the garden.
It remains to be seen what the artist will do next after his first real series as a professional sculptor. Swordy took a while to return to his first love, but his exploration seems to be paying off: He is making stone move. YINKA ELUJOBA
Tribeca
Juan Eduardo Gómez
With five large-scale paintings in his new solo exhibition, “Dusky Rainy Sunny,” the Colombia- born artist Juan Eduardo Gómez examines the relationship between the human form and landscapes.
Set on canvases the color of beach sand are fleshy, even voluptuous, figures posing as rock formations. A subtle sensuality hovers around what might, at first, seem to be bodies made of stone. This dance is most palpable in “Vertical Figure,” a tightly composed picture where rocks seem to be arranging themselves into the shape of a kneeling man.
Gómez spent much of his time during the pandemic making large charcoal drawings of human figures, a process he incorporated into the production of works in “Dusky Rainy Sunny.” Fusing his many influences, like the graffiti work of friends (Lee Quiñones, Futura and CRASH), cave paintings, and Mexican muralism, he set out to paint gardens and landscapes, but the human form continued to emerge, filling up the canvas.
Born in 1970, Gómez first started painting figures from life during his time at the Art Students League before receiving a B.F.A. degree from the School of Visual Arts in 1998. A few years later, in the early 2000s, he became studio assistant to the painter Alex Katz, a job he still holds. With this show, Gómez is beginning to rise above these disparate experiences, blending them into a fine mix, allowing himself to produce work born out of the rigor of academic scholarship and the playful freedom of a practical artist studio. YINKA ELUJOBA
More to See
Brooklyn
Adama Delphine Fawundu
A charming antique farmhouse sits on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, laden with a not-so-charming history. In the 18th- and 19th centuries, enslaved Africans worked the land and performed domestic labor. We know some of their names and even their birth dates — the 1800 census included 12 enslaved Africans at this location — but Adama Delphine Fawundu, a Brooklynite and the first artist in residence at the Lefferts Historic House Museum, goes much deeper. “Ancestral Whispers,” her carefully researched installation, both inside and outside the house, serves as a memorial and celebration of the enslaved people who lived here.
Inside, placards offer specific information about them. Nero became a free man and died in the Civil War. Isaac escaped and perhaps set up a new life in Manhattan. Flora was a cook and a herbalist, but also “supposedly enjoyed a good joke, loved cats, and was deeply spiritual.”
Mantels lined with plants and candles create an ad hoc shrine to these individuals. Outside the house, nylon banners printed with textile patterns and photographs are hung along the porch facing Flatbush Avenue. This is, for me, the most beautiful part of the show, but a giant cape displayed inside the house — a quilt-like object titled “In the Face of History Freedom Cape” (2020) and dedicated to Black suffragists and political pioneers like Shirley Chisholm — argues for a more pragmatic way of shaping the present and future: Vote! MARTHA SCHWENDENER
East Harlem
‘Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega’
In celebration of its centennial year, the Museum of the City of New York invited Manny Vega to be its first artist in residence. Fabulous choice. Vega is a native New Yorker and a treasure, with a nearly four-decade track record of visual scintillation behind him. The essence of that career is distilled in a 24-karat nugget of a survey, “Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega,” assembled by Monxo López, the museum’s curator of community histories.
Puerto Rican by descent, Vega was born in 1956 in the Bronx, raised there and in Manhattan, and an immersion in art came early. One of his first jobs after graduating from the High School of Art and Design was as a guard at the Cloisters, the Met’s branch in Upper Manhattan devoted to European medieval art. In 1979 he joined El Taller Boricua (Puerto Rican Workshop), the street-active artist collective and graphics workshop in the East Harlem neighborhood known as El Barrio.
In the early 1980s, he began traveling to Brazil, where he was initiated into Candomblé, an Afro-Atlantic religion that fuses West African Yoruba and Roman Catholic beliefs and has a vivid tradition of ceremonial art, including beaded banners and ritual utensils, both of which Vega has produced. Given these entwined influences, conventional distinctions between “high art,” “popular art” and “spiritual art” have never made sense to him, which explains the title of his show, “Byzantine” suggesting intricate formal polish; and “Bembé” evoking drum-driven religious worship that is also a party.
The mix is there in four small paintings he made in 1997 as studies for a set of mosaics commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the subway station at East 110th Street and Lexington Avenue. Brightly colored and packed with figures, the images depict El Barrio street life — neighbors jostling, vendors selling, bands playing — and give it a charge of devotional fervor, aural exultation. (A tour of other Vega commissions in East Harlem, all within walking distance of the museum, is well worth making, a highlight being his tender homage to the poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) on a building at East 106th Street and Lexington Avenue.)
Sound and movement are major components in Vega’s visual universe. Icon-like images of Ochun, the Yoruba goddess of dance, and St. Cecilia, the Roman Catholic patron saint of music, appear in the show as tutelary spirits. And there are others. One is the Barrio-born jazz musician Tito Puente, whose album covers Vega has reproduced as glass mosaics. And in a large ink drawing, as crisp as a woodcut, we find the assembled performers of Los Pleneros de la 21, a local dance and music troupe promoting traditional bomba and plena.
Politics runs, like a bass note, throughout Vega’s art. In his case, though, it’s far less a politics of overt protest than of positive assertion.
In the work of this profoundly devotional artist, the presiding deity is Changó, the Afro-Atlantic spirit of justice and balance, and also of dancing and drumming. A watercolor painting of him closes the show, and it’s a classic Vega creation: formally precise, imaginatively stimulating, instantly accessible. And it has found just the right home. It’s on loan to the show from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who, a wall text tells us, displays it in her chambers in Washington. HOLLAND COTTER
See the August gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in September appeared first on New York Times.
