This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Meredith James’s anti-architecture monument, Franz Gertsch’s take on Patti Smith, Ragnar Kjartansson’s postcard ode, Analivia Cordeiro’s merging bodies and Guanyu Xu’s hovering photos.
Lower East Side
Meredith James
Through Dec. 13. Marinaro, 1 Rivington Street; 212-989-7700, marinaro.biz.
Meredith James’s show at Marinaro, “The Exit,” showcases a monument of contemporary architecture — or anti-architecture, really: the contemporary office, lined with cubicles and made famous in comic television shows like “The Office.”
Working spaces reflect contemporary life, like the empty offices during the pandemic that inspired James’s photographs and sculptures, but they also are descended from modernist aesthetics. The white cube gallery for displaying groundbreaking modern art became the white cubicle, the place where your laboring spirit goes to die.
Rather than heap scorn on the white-cubicle office, however, James took a larger mirror with her to shoot inside an empty office in New York. The mirror created fun-house reflections — literally, new angles to the office. From these crisp, kaleidoscopic photographs, James then created wall-relief dioramas filled with exquisite handmade details, including water-stained drop ceilings and exit signs.
As remote work threatens to turn many cubicle workplaces into empty offices, James’s project feels like a document memorializing the phenomenon: Last exit, the office.
Soho
Franz Gertsch
Through Jan. 31. Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street; 212-542-5662, hauserwirth.com.
A 2018 survey at the Swiss Institute introduced many to Franz Gertsch, a Swiss photorealist painter who created large, spectacular canvases. The current exhibit at Hauser & Wirth focuses on a series by Gertsch featuring the singer, poet and artist Patti Smith.
Included here are “Patti Smith III” (1979) and “Patti Smith IV” (1979), made from photographs Gertsch took at a Smith performance in Cologne, Germany. It may be hard, however, to pull yourself away from the video in which the charismatic Smith visits Gertsch’s studio and drops a few ideas on being an artist, as well as a muse.
The scale of Gertsch’s paintings along with their edgy contemporary subject are what make this show. Three giant woodcuts — one portrait and two landscapes — reveal Gertsch’s classic virtuosity as an artist. And Gertsch’s impulse to spend two years painting Smith was dead-on accurate: Icons in our media-saturated era tend to be rock stars, not rocks and plants.
Tribeca
Ragnar Kjartansson
Through Dec. 20. Luhring Augustine Tribeca, 17 White Street; 646-960-7540, luhringaugustine.com.
The power of postcards may be waning in the age of the internet, but their historical significance is indisputable. The photographer Walker Evans collected 9,000 postcards and often rephotographed their locations.
In “Sunday Without Love” at Luhring Augustine, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has recreated in video, complete with a tune adapted from a German comedic song, a postcard attached to his refrigerator featuring a kitschy pastoral scene.
Absurd but absorbing, “Sunday Without Love” reprises an approach Kjartansson used in an earlier video of the band the National playing their song “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours. Here, the video lasts 19 minutes, but it gives you ample time to contemplate the wry futility of life and perhaps the decline of Europe — or admire the commitment of the artist and the young actors who remain perfectly frozen in their poses for the duration of the video.
Lower East Side
Analivia Cordeiro
Through Jan. 6. Bitforms Gallery, 131 Allen Street; 212-366-6939, bitforms.com.
At this mini survey by the pioneering Brazilian computer dance artist Analivia Cordeiro, you can see her stunning “0=45 version VIII” (1974/2025). In it, the performers’ movements were determined by using algorithms coded in Fortran, a computer programming language developed for scientific applications. The results are like watching an abstract composition come to life, with human bodies and abstract art merging.
Another video in the show features Cordeiro describing how her father, Waldemar Cordeiro, the renowned Concrete painter (and later digital artist), hung an Alexander Calder mobile above her crib when she was an infant. Because of this, she argues, modern art, and particularly Concrete geometric art, were “inside my neuro-system.”
Now that everything from paid labor to biological functions are linked to digital devices, Cordeiro’s vision, with modern dance and human movement connected to algorithms, is particularly prescient.
Chelsea
Guanyu Xu
Through Dec. 20. Yancey Richardson, 525 West 22nd Street; 646-230-9610, yanceyrichardson.com.
To make the photographs in “Resident Aliens,” his current show at Yancey Richardson, the Beijing-born Guanyu Xu went to people’s houses and, using photographs from their own albums, set up a staged narrative of their lives. The visual trick is that it looks like Photoshop, with images seemingly hovering in space.
The people collaborating with Xu for these photographs are all migrants with varying immigration statuses. Xu doesn’t name the individuals whose homes or stories we’re witnessing. Instead, the titles consist of long bureaucratic-sounding numbers and the cities in which the works were made: New York, Chicago, Shanghai.
Caught in the maelstrom of immigration, these are the real people, histories and places behind the political battle. The images that Xu and his subjects create are more complex, and possibly even more accurate, than what a single image could convey.
See the November gallery shows here.
The post Art Gallery Shows to See in December appeared first on New York Times.
