Group Shows

Group Shows

You Don’t Know Me: Trompe L’Oeil and artistic illusion

Contributed by Mark Wethli / On a small shelf in a quiet corner of Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, sits a dog-eared paperback copy of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. With a growing sense of delight, we soon realize that the book is itself a trick, a trompe l’oeil sculpture by Justin Richel, convincing in every detail from its vintage 1990s graphics to its well-worn cover….It is a fitting overture to “You Don’t Know Me,” the four-person show currently on view. The artists – Carly Glovinski, Rachel Grobstein, Duncan Hewitt, and Richel – present kindred explorations of parallel realities, producing conundrums and contradictions that give rise to visual enchantment and philosophical contemplation.

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Group Shows

Resolute painters at Equity

Contributed by Zach Seeger / One day, the polyglot, not-quite-formed figurative painter Alfred Jensen was sitting at his desk in his studio mulling over what to do next. A world traveler, he had a bounty of books, cutouts, and sketches of glyphs, logograms, symbols and signifiers nesting in his studio. But he was stuck. Then Mark Rothko knocked on the door for a studio visit. After a few long drags from his cigarette, Rothko gestured to the byzantine bric-a-brac on Jensen’s wall and said, “You know, Alfred, that’s your work. Paint that.” From that point forward, Jensen changed how and what he painted. Via sticker-book color and flourish, “Gritty Rituals,” a thoughtfully energizing group show at Equity Gallery, recalls the schematic proto-pop that Jensen teamed with imagist distortion and tantric and somatic references. 

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Group Shows

Chromatic propulsion at Frosch & Co.

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Out of the Blue” at Frosch & Co boasts a tight concept and adds real snap to the conversation presumed suspended until after Labor Day. The idea is to explore how the color blue ramifies through the lenses of different painters. That might seem like a merely modular survey, since other colors too have distinct connotations. But blue’s, as the gallery’s press statement notes, seem to swing more dramatically – between cool and warm, masculine and feminine, obscene and pure, barbaric and royal, stormy and serene. This quality makes for an unusually rich array.

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Group Shows

3 painters at Zepster Gallery

Contributed by Riad Miah / After graduating from Pratt and spending a few years staging and curating pop-up shows and one-night events, Devon Gordon opened the ambitious new Zepster Gallery in Bushwick last May. The title of its second exhibition, now up, is “Oh, To Leave a Trace,” after a chapter of Mary Gabriel’s acclaimed book Ninth Street Women. The show features three female artists whose work continues in the contemplatively feminist vein that the book frames. 

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Group Shows

Tight corners at D.D.D.D.

Contributed by Mackenzie Kirkpatrick / In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelardcharacterized the corner as “a symbol of solitude for the imagination.” Jan Dickey, curator of “The Corner Show”at D.D.D.D. Gallery, has keenly embraced this notion through dynamic, imaginative artists who apprehend the corner as a kind of refuge.

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Group Shows

Ceramic alchemy at Peter Freeman, Inc

Contributed by Jeffrey Grunthaner / Properly curated, summer group exhibitions can open novel avenues between disparate artists and particular creative practices. “Made in Cologne,” currently up at Peter Freeman, Inc., decidedly accomplishes this. The conceit of the show is simple: the 15 featured artists have all made ceramic works at the atelier of Niels Dietrich in Cologne, Germany. Founded in 1984, Dietrich’s studio specializes in ceramics and showcases how plastic this medium can be. The expressive character of the exhibition derives in part from the variety of styles and attitudes on display. But all embrace the unique nature of ceramics in one way or the other. 

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Group Shows

The enduring elasticity of painting

Contributed by Sharon Butler / After a lengthy stretch during which emerging painters have leaned into commercial preferences for the traditional, many seem to be breaking free from the market’s emphasis on imagery and narrative. Painters with a penchant for experimental, near three-dimensional approaches have bounced back into the conversation they commanded in the early 2010s. Three current exhibitions, all curated by artists, reflect various aspects of this phenomenon.

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Group Shows

The family Abelow at Swanson Kuball

Contributed by Liz Scheer / “Shoot for the Stars,” on view at Swanson Kuball in Long Island City, surveys intergenerational works by members of the Abelow-Kirilloff family, which includes New York artists Joshua Abelow and Tisch Abelow. By presenting the work of siblings, spouses, grandparents, and children, gallery directors Laura Swanson and Greg Kuball raise fascinating questions about the relationship between family and art. Do the formal parameters of a family foster or impede an individual’s creativity? Is a family itself a means of artistic production? 

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Group Shows

Xingze Li and Sarah Pater: Extraordinarily quotidian

Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back. 

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Group Shows

An instructive ouroboros at Miguel Abreu

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Images are everywhere. This simple (perhaps obvious) fact is driven home in various ways all the time. Most often in NPR bullet points indicating how many images the average person consumes daily. The number is often greeted with dull terror. Yet images are so prevalent that they disappear, coating the world in an invisible film. This dual quality of ubiquity and invisibility is what makes images such an attractive and important subject for artists to tackle. The current show at Miguel Abreu is kind of a who’s who of artists who study images and their rhythm. 

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Group Shows

A gathering at Tappeto Volante

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Last week, “La Banda 2024” opened at Tapetto Volante, a gallery tucked into a group of Gowanus studio spaces, currently inhabited by artists Inna Babaeva and Lenora Loeb. The show features work by many of the stalwart artist-organizers in Brooklyn’s art community, who keep the outer-borough art conversation percolating despite the relative inattention of mainstream media that focus more on Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Tribeca.

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Group Shows

An Italian American colloquy with Joanne Mattera and John Avelluto

On the occasion of “A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists,” a sprawling group show on view at the Calandra Institute through January 12, 2024,  Two Coats of Paint invited John Avelluto, one of the artists in the show, and Joanne Mattera, the mastermind behind the whole project, which began as an online exhibition called “Italianità,” to talk about growing up in Italian families, and how the experience shaped their lives and their work. John currently has a solo exhibition on view at Stand 4 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, too.

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Group Shows

The uppercrust on display in “Wave Pattern”

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / The lofts of downtown New York occupy a special place in American art history. They functioned most importantly as incubators for Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, eventually giving way to the galleries of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the spaces once occupied by Barbara Gladstone, Pat Hearn, and Willem de Kooning have been replaced with Uniqlo, Nike, and expansive apartments for the super wealthy. In “Wave Pattern,” a downtown apartment show on the sixth floor of an unassuming Broadway building, art world scions Dylan Brant and Max Werner provide some relief from this cluttered, big-box nightmare. 

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Group Shows

The sea: Vulnerable and mysterious at Field of Play

Contributed by Jenny Zoe Casey / The title of the group exhibition “1,000 Year Current,” on view at Field of Play Gallery in Gowanus, refers to the time it takes for a particle of water to circumnavigate the earth. Curated by gallery director Matt Dogsdon, the show encompasses a generous range of linked subjects, from the sea’s primal mysteries to its vulnerability to climate change.

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Group Shows

Confrontational color at Analog Diary

Contributed by Clare Gemima / Analog Diary’s group exhibition “Chromazones” – curated by Derek Eller, Abby Messitte, Katharine Overgaard and Franklin Parrasch – features a wide, intergenerational array of artists. Many works, including Clare Grill’s Plant, Pam Glick’s Cat, Dog, Car, Sky, and Yukine Yanagi’s Chrysalis, are traditional oil paintings. Others utilize unconventional materials, such as glitter, which is found in Chris Martin’s Fireflies, or gemstones, which appear in Alteronce Gumby’s I can’t stop thinking about love. And there are ceramic sculptures, like Peter Shire’s Scozzese and Ken Price’s Iggy. The show confronts viewers with abundant color. While that may be a narrow parameter, here it provides insight into each artist’s approach to material and method of application.

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