This week in Newly Reviewed, Jillian Steinhauer covers Agnieszka Kurant’s unnerving technology, a group show that nods to history, and Marian Spore Bush’s otherworldly paintings.
Tribeca
Agnieszka Kurant
Through Aug. 22. Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway; 212-977-7160, mariangoodman.com.
It took me at least a minute of standing in front of Agnieszka Kurant’s “Conversions 5” (2023/2025), part of her exhibition “Collective Intelligence,” to realize that it was moving. The painting appears, at first, to be a fixed image of blue dots surrounded by blobs of glowing green amid a field of rusty red.
But as I stared, I realized that the dots and blobs were fading and shifting in almost imperceptible ways. My vision had to adjust before it could begin to register what I was seeing. And then, once it did, I let out an audible “whoa.”
At its best, Kurant’s art inspires this type of reaction. The Polish-born conceptual artist, who lives in New York, creates works that feel like propositions. For example, “Semiotic Life” (2022/2025), another piece in this exhibition, features a living bonsai tree intertwined with a bright blue, 3-D-printed resin rendering of what the news release calls “its algorithmically predicted, optimized future form.” Kurant is asking how the technology we’re all increasingly subject to quite literally shapes us.
In the case of “Conversions 5,” the painting is made from liquid crystals that shift in response to heat signals generated by an algorithm, which tracks the emotions in social media posts by participants in global protest movements.
The piece, then, is a kind of live diagram — although it’s not clear how to interpret it. How much does that matter? This is a sticking point of Kurant’s fascinating artworks: The premises are sometimes so complicated that trying to understand them can dampen their impact.
Chelsea
‘Galleon Trade’
Through Aug. 23. Silverlens, 505 West 24th Street; 646-449-9400, silverlensgalleries.com.
Many galleries mount group shows in the summer, often with insubstantial results. So it’s always notable when one appears that’s been carefully thought through, rather than thrown together.
Such is the case with “Galleon Trade,” whose starting point is the Manila Galleon, a fleet of Spanish ships that sailed between the country’s colonies in the Philippines and Mexico from 1565 to 1815. The ships brought precious trading cargo from Asia like ivory, porcelain and spices to exchange for Mexican silver.
This isn’t a historical exhibition, though. Instead, the galleon serves as a conceptual framework for pieces by eight contemporary artists from the Philippines, Mexico and California (a frequent port of call). They sometimes refer to the trade explicitly, as in well-paired works by Carmen Argote and Bernardo Pacquing that physically evoke the specter of ships. But mostly the source material is a metaphor for cross-cultural exchange.
Patrick Martinez’s “Birds of a Feather” (2025) encapsulates this well: The 10-foot-long multimedia piece features a neon rendering of a Mesoamerican bird alongside Filipino Machuca tiles and paintings of plants from Los Angeles. It looks like a section of a wall from a neighborhood that’s undergone several cycles of life, brought in after years outside.
Elsewhere, connections emerge between works, including the serpentine form of Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s hemp sculpture “Fountain 002” (2024) that echoes the waves in a tapestry by the artist Jorge Rosano Gamboa with José Mendoza, a Zapotec weaver. In this way, the show becomes an exchange network of its own.
East Village
Marian Spore Bush
Through Sept. 6. Karma, 188 East Second Street; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.
For almost two decades, Marian Spore Bush (1878-1946) was a dentist in Bay City, Mich. Then, in 1919, her mother died, and Spore Bush began using a Ouija board to contact her. Through the board, a group of spirits of dead artists reached out to Spore Bush, she said, and told her to start painting.
She did, despite never having made art before. In 1920, she moved to Greenwich Village and stayed in New York for the rest of her life. She continued to make and show work informed by the spirits and became something of a media curiosity.
The exhibition “Life Afterlife, Works c. 1919-1945” brings Spore Bush’s paintings back into view after a period of obscurity. They are — as you might expect — otherworldly, featuring swooping, symbolic birds and simple yet surreal settings. When she was starting out, Spore Bush made small, flat oils of flowers and scenes of a prophet-like man communing with animals. But as her abilities and pictures grew, she began to build up paint in impasto waves; her imagery also became eerier.
As World War II approached, Spore Bush turned to grayscale for a series that the curator Bob Nickas rightly foregrounds here. In “Factories” (1930), ghostly buildings dot a craggy landscape filled with what seem to be masses of people, or dark souls. In “Seascape” (1943) a large white bird hovers over a man on a raft who may be under attack by vultures. With remarkable elegance and economy, these paintings convey a deep sense of foreboding.
See the July gallery shows here.
Jillian Steinhauer is a critic and reporter who covers the politics of art and comics. She won a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant and was previously a senior editor at Hyperallergic.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in July appeared first on New York Times.
