This week in Newly Reviewed, Max Lakin covers Nancy Dwyer’s big words and a summer group show with some thrilling collisions.
Tribeca
Nancy Dwyer
Through Aug. 1. Ortuzar, 5 White Street; 212-257-0033, ortuzar.com.
Most people don’t think too long about what they say or the words they use to say it. Nancy Dwyer, by contrast, thinks about words until they inflate to the size of furniture.
Take, for example, the base of an imperious mahogany desk of the C-suite variety, which spells out “ENVY,” as if shouting the quiet part out loud. It’s from 1988, the go-go ’80s of Reaganomic excess, deregulation and other assorted sins for which we continue to pay. By contrast, “RELAX” (2025) dissects that word into cushions squeezed into a steel cage, a piece of hostile architecture that takes comfort hostage. It looks the way being told to relax feels: useless, infuriating.
Those pieces, along with a selection of paintings and sculptures, form this four-decade survey of Dwyer’s deadpan conceptual art, which yanks language from the cognitive realm into the physical one. Dwyer is part of the cohort, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, who met as students at Buffalo State University and emerged in the late 1970s as the Pictures Generation, artists who found something sour in the deluge of mass media and hijacked its vocabulary to prove it.
Dwyer’s art, which seizes upon advertising’s playbook specifically, displays both a healthy skepticism of and deep affection for linguistic elasticity. Unlike most of her peers, Dwyer worked unusually closely to the media she critiques, with a brief stint as a commercial sign painter, and she has the mistrust of a whistle-blower.
These are serious jokes. By transmuting words into droll one-liners, she engages with the structure of meaning itself. She gives words literal weight, lets you walk around them, and proves they’re no more stable for it.
Among a selection of painted panel works sprouting from the kind of articulating arms used to mount television sets, a profanely titled work from 2024 is the most elegantly rhetorical. Its query is at once incredulous and expansive, a response commensurate to the multivalent horrors coming at us in high definition. It’s a channel that never changes.
Small Format Painting
Through Aug. 1. 56 Henry, 105 Henry Street; 646-858-0800, 56henry.nyc.
In the New York art world, the summer group show is a low-lift proposition — a gallery’s chance to kick the tires on its roster, a show perhaps tethered to a loose, inoffensive theme (flowers, swimming), if it bothers with one at all. It’s an easy pleasure, the equivalent of the movie flipped on during the last week of school: an acknowledgment that everyone’s attention has checked out until September.
This show isn’t much more taxing. Curated by the artist Josh Smith and Leo Fitzpatrick, whose too-short-lived gallery Public Access last occupied a storefront down the block, it features 35 paintings by a rich mélange of art stars, skaters, graffitists and other assorted members of the slippery downtown scene, who were supplied with an 8-inch-by-10-inch canvas. No prompt, no conceptual thesis, just the freedom of not being told what to do, which, really, is the whole point of summer.
Most of the work is slight — dashed-off sketches or a familiar motif from an artist’s bag that can feel like a study for a larger painting that may never exist. There’s a smeary, downbeat comic strip populated by Nicole Eisenman’s angsty stick figures. Joe Bradley shows a fuzzy amoeba, while Alberto Casais renders an elegant fender bender. The skater Mark Gonzales conjures impressive pathos with a few wobbly lines depicting a failed trick. KT Hickman’s simple yet enticing piece suggests a little revenge.
The real thrill comes from collision — blue-chip artists of international renown rubbing with those whose celebrity tops out at the neighborhood level, all given equal space. It’s likely, for instance, that this is the one chance to see Jeanette Mundt, whose work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, share real estate with the tagger Neckface, whose gurning cartoon demons haunt the metal pull-down gates that protect stores throughout New York. It’s a small miracle of temporary democracy, which lately can feel hard to come by.
See the June gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in July appeared first on New York Times.
