artcritical.com has long boasted the most comprehensive listings of exhibitions in New York of any art magazine, online or off. To greet the new season, our editors and a dozen writers offer the following tips. Henceforth “Tips” are going to be a regular feature in our newsletters and on social media as they always have been in our different listings categories.
OPENING SEPTEMBER 9
Kyle Staver: Tall Tales at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects
Figures, animals, and creatures cavort through Kyle Staver’s large pictures, free of the hindrances of bones, re-enacting old stories anew while communing with the long history of painting. Staver may be the first painter since Lester Johnson to get any mileage out of Greek mythology, and her new paintings of Pandora, Icarus, and Ganymede promise both to impress with their ambition and delight with their charm. FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
208 Forsyth Street, thru’ October 11
Writing Bodies at EFA Project Space
Writing Bodies, a group exhibition curated by Litia Perta, brings together nine artists working across different disciplines. Investigatory and interstitial in nature, the show will be the site for a series of scheduled “art actions” – performances, open studio practices, talks. Wonderfully dislocated, Writing Bodies promises to provide space for exchange, action, transparency, and serious play. EMMALEA RUSSO
323 West 39th Street, thru’ October 10
Stephen Maine at Hionas Gallery
For centuries, printmakers have striven – sometimes through elaborate means – to emulate the fluency and immediacy of painting, whether in lithography or soft ground etching, for instance. There is something deliciously perverse, therefore, in painter Stephen Maine turning the tables to make intriguingly textured large abstract paintings using “plates” of non-fine art materials like insulation paneling or extruded foam to build his layers of color. DAVID COHEN
124 Forsyth Street, thru’ October 4
Nadia Haji Omar/Bayne Peterson at Kristen Lorello
Since opening her gallery in April 2014 after serving as a director at Eleven Rivington, Kristen Lorello has proven herself to be an adroit curator with an eye toward the unexpected – such as a revival of the Southern California art scene fixture Malcolm “Mac” McClain and a NADA booth featuring cerastone-coated sculptures by Rachel Higgins. Her two-person show of Nadia Haji Omar and Bayne Peterson represents an intriguing juxtaposition of media that centers on delightfully intricate colors and patterns. WILLIAM J. SIMMONS
195 Chrystie Street 6th Floor , thru’ November 1
Carl Andre: In his time at Mnuchin Gallery
Some early and significant sculptures by Carl Andre are here contextualized with major works from the same period by Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd and John Chamberlain, amongst others, offering an encapsulated view of a moment in the history of New York’s vital art scene before its place had been defined art historically. What we get to see are the shared ideas, later to be tagged Minimalism, as well as bold and inventive works from each artist that still look fresh today. DAVID RHODES
45 East 78 Street, thru’ December 5
Julia Bland at On Stellar Rays
The symmetrical geometric forms of Julia Bland’s dark and absorbing painted tapestries, boxing in and out of a radial center, are broken and interpolated with hand-worked detail and unexpected openings. A shadow might actually be a hole revealing a velvet-faced panel. A pattern, painted over, dissolves to criss-crossed knotted threads. Bland’s math-based intricate webs are often drawn from her reading and retelling of mystical texts. MEGAN LIU KINCHELOE
133 Orchard Street, thru’ October 25
OPENING SEPTEMBER 10
Bill Beckley, 1968-78. The Accidental Poet (The Avoidance of Everything) at Albertz Benda
To those familiar with Bill Beckley’s large beautiful photographs of flowers his very different early art will be a revelation. The show includes materials drawn from the artist’s personal archives as well as never before seen performance documentation, watercolors, and studies for works that have not been on view in decades. DAVID CARRIER
515 West 26th Street, thru’ October 3
Sergej Jensen at Galerie Buchholz
Long known and celebrated for his finely wrought, stitched together paintings made from found textiles, Sergej Jensen, for his first solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz presents an altogether different body of work. Figures that appear to be sourced from Renaissance, Romantic or early Modernist paintings are rendered in complex, transparent layers that are just as visually astute as his earlier abstract paintings and which mark a bold departure from his established oeuvre. DAVID RHODES
17 East 82nd Street, thru’ October 31
Where Sculpture and Dance Meet: Minimalism from 1961 to 1979 at Loretta Howard Gallery
Performance art is linked to theatre, dance and activism, but also shares aesthetic histories with art objects—a fact facing ever-increasing resistance. This exhibition offers a well-researched look at this irksome intersection including such classic works as Andy Warhol’s helium filled pillows, “Silver Clouds,” used as a stage set for Merce Cummingham’s dance, Rainforest (1968.) ANNE SHERWOOD PUNDYK
525-531 West 26th Street, thru’ October 31
Dana Schutz: Fight in an Elevator at Petzel Gallery
In the three years since her last show at Petzel, Schutz has experienced motherhood, and her new show, Fight in an Elevator depicting figures in “compressed interiors where they are forced to struggle against the boundaries of their painted environments” sounds like she has been channeling a whole new set of feelings to get to the heart of her interior experience. DENNIS KARDON
456 West 18th Street, thru’ October 24
Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
In her first commercial gallery exhibition of new work in more than five years, Sze continues to create surprisingly intricate large-scale installations. Her use of everyday materials such as paper clips, industrial shelves, lamps, Styrofoam cups, or ballpoint pens re-contextualize the objects in our environment, morphing and shifting our perspective on our relationship to them. Her latest creations will encompass both floors of the gallery, sure to provide a constellation of visual delights. LEE ANN NORMAN
521 West 21st Street, thru’ October 17
Robert Janitz: Kerckhoffs’ Principle at Team Gallery
Robert Janitz, known for gooey paintings with broad strokes of wax-infused oil paint, presents a show of smaller pieces that are a bit ancillary to his usual work. Janitz’s portraits are bust-like images that depict only the back of his subject’s head, using layered swirls of pasty paint. The abbreviated forms are still emotionally resonant, recalling the work of Christina Ramberg or even, say, Alex Brown. NOAH DILLON
83 Grand Street, thru’ October 25
Susan Jane Walp: Paintings on Paper at Tibor de Nagy
Walp’s fifth exhibition at Tibor de Nagy will be her first to focus exclusively on works on paper, bringing a renewed freshness of paint handling and imagery to her long-standing interest in still life. The carefully arranged varieties of objects familiar from her previous work have yielded in recent years to more Spartan subjects with surprising potency, as in a series of frontal views of a single Etruscan vase. ELEANOR RAY
724 Fifth Avenue, thru’ October 17
OPENING SEPTEMBER 11
Laurel Sparks: Rubedo at Kate Werble Gallery
“Rubedo,” an alchemical term, hits the nail on the head for Laurel Sparks’ new exhibition where something is always turning into something else in endlessly playful, quizzical, and amusing paintings that often collect other materials including small objects, dirt, marble dust, glitter, and papier-mâché. With their intersections always highlighted, hand-painted patterns bind and merge into other patterned sections, and accrue into schematic and symbolic quilt-like organizations. MEGAN LIU KINCHELOE
83 Vandam Street, thru’ October 24
Ron Nagle: Five O’Clock Shadow at Matthew Marks
Ceramics is kind of a niche form in the art world, but those who do it well (such as Nagle, Arlene Shechet, Ken Price, and Nicole Cherubini) really show you how exciting the medium is. The staging of this show promises to be really interesting, with the pieces inset into the walls. When my natural urge is to see such objects in the round, I’m curious to see whether that works. NOAH DILLON
522 West 22nd Street, thru’ October 24
Elana Herzog at Studio 10
Cheap décor is savagely implicated in Herzog’s favorite methods, including stapling chenille into a wall and ripping it away, vivisecting dissonant carpets into pictorial arguments, and Home Depot-ing planes of bargain-basement renovation—or is demolition? Herzog’s ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions — unruly brushstrokes, in effect — that coalesce into powerful storms of texture. DAVID BRODY
56 Bogart Street, thru’ October 11
OPENING SEPTEMBER 12
Gabriele Evertz: The Gray Question at Minus Space
Minus Space, still in DUMBO, recently relocated to the cobblestoned corner of Main and Water Streets. The innovative architecture, which defies scale with its internal-external exhibition spaces, should be a gorgeous venue for Gabriele Evertz as she continues her maverick yet historically grounded investigations of color and cognition, optical bounce and intuition. Gray is the theme this time—with no lack of other chromatic tones that slice and sequence to special effect. DEBORAH GARWOOD
16 Main Street, Suite A, DUMBO, thru’ October 31
OPENING SEPTEMBER 15
Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism at Sotheby’s.
Female surrealists have long been relegated to the category of muse to male surrealists. Now the market is discovering that – surprise, surprise! – women surrealists could be artists, too. This private selling exhibition will display more than fifty iconically bizarre works by better-known names like Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning, and lesser-known ones, from Czech-born Toyen (1902-1980) and Spanish-Mexican Remedios Varo (1908-1963) to the British Eileen Agar (1899-1991). PIRI HALASZ
1334 York Avenue, thru’ October 17.
OPENING SEPTEMBER 18
Samuel Laurence Cunnane at Theodore: Art
Stephanie Theodore is kicking off the Fall season with the work of 26-year-old Irish photographer Samuel Laurence Cunnane, whose dedication to analogue techniques gives his work a handmade patina reminiscent of Sally Mann’s landscapes. Cunnane’s combination of banal interiors, portraits, and darkly staged scenes bespeaks an emotive range not typical of artists at this stage in their career. WILLIAM J. SIMMONS
56 Bogart Street, thru’ October 25
Swedish Wooden Toys at Bard Graduate Center Gallery
From toys made for frozen lakes to handmade puzzles and more sophisticated, mass-produced forms, this colorful, scholarly exhibition not only traces the production of Sweden’s toy industries from the 17th thru’ 21st Centuries but also explores the educational value of wooden play things and the practice of handicraft (slöjd), a topic that will resonate emphatically with the resurgence of interest in beautiful, well-made objects for work and pleasure. REBECCA ALLAN
18 West 86th Street, thru’ January 17
OPENING SEPTEMBER 24
Painting is not doomed to repeat itself: An Exhibition Curated by John Yau at Hollis Taggart Galleries
This safe and solid Upper East Side stalwart (founded 1979) seems intent on dusting down its reputation since moving to Chelsea this summer. Poet and critic John Yau has assembled five painters, Squeak Carnwath (who shows with them) and guests Catherine Murphy, Philip Taaffe, Brenda Goodman and Merlin James, in what looks set to be a manifesto show for painting’s renewal as well, perhaps, as this gallery’s. DAVID COHEN
521 West 26th Street, thru’ October 31
