Defiance, celebration, warning, rallying: There are so many good reasons to unfurl a flag. Some of those hoisted above his home by artist James Esber on Williamsburg’s Grand Street entreated citizens to vote recently, although others over the years have defied the raison d’être of flags with witty subversions intellectually worthy of the bohemian ‘hood. But Brenda Zlamany’s double-sided masked portrait flags actually conform to a plague-fighting remit. Real, living human visages peep out from the functional, life-saving fabrics which themselves often deploy the signifiers and tropes of heraldry: symbols, fields, words. A portrait of fellow artist Justin Sterling peers out from a lined cloth whose tapering black strokes on a white ground recall a kaffiyeh in just the right balance of protection and resistance.

Above Store For Rent Gallery at 179 Grand Street, Brooklyn, New York. Best viewed from the north-west corner of Bedford and Grand
There are two flags alternating week by week through April 9, with changing flags at 4pm Fridays
Mask Flag 1 features Justin Sterling (pictured) and Joel Lahey, Mask Flag 2 features Helen Oji and Adé.

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From Alberti’s paradigm through Duchamp’s Large Glass through Rudy Burckhardt’s Brooklyn Window of 1954, the literal and metaphorical potency of windows has reverberated through art history. Taking his cue from the Zero Tolerance “broken windows” policy of racialized policing, Justin Sterling has adopted the fractured sash as a Rothko-like format for visual adventures within and beyond the actual glass. Rothko resonates in the “chapel” environment Sterling has created at Cathouse Proper’s Brooklyn project space. In Sterling’s chapel, prayers for the defeat of Donald Trump were evidently answered on the eve of the extended show’s closing celebrations.

A socially distanced closing is scheduled for Sunday, November 8, 12-6PM. 524 Court Street, 2nd floor (enter Huntington Street) Brooklyn, NY 11231

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On this last afternoon of the 2019 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, artcritical’s David Cohen moderates a discussion with five of this year’s prizewinners: Judith Bernstein, Charlotte de Larminat, Inka Essenhigh, Alain Kirili, and Doron Langberg.

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Don Perlis: Trumpworld at National Academy Museum – 1083 5th Avenue @ 89, New York, NY (212) 369-4880 – April 20 to June 14

The all-too thin silver lining of the billowing dark political clouds is the burgeoning artistic take on this weird moment. Although the true Goya or Daumier of 45 has yet to assert him or herself, there are contenders: artcritical/The Review Panel has acknowledged Judith Bernstein, Peter Saul, Mira Schor and others. Don Perlis, who has a gem of a show at the National Academy Museum through June 14, is an intriguing addition to this roster. His “Trumpworld” is disconcertingly benign, a long way from the Dream and Lie of Franco territory of ubiquitous politicized iconography. In place of overt satirical bite there’s something more akin to saccharine slobber in these almost commedia dell’arte visions of Times Square bacchanals. In a touch that recalls Reginald Marsh and George Bellows, Perlis renders dystopia with nostalgic serenity. But it’s arguably more sinister to see Trump’s visage sinking into the corporate and all-too-human continuum of diversions and foibles than to indulge in foaming at the mouth bestiaries. While the show includes tour de force painting machines, some of the finer works here are amplifications, in vignette, of isolated incidents in  the grander scenes, like this skirmish between competing wonder women with the president looking on. Perlis taps humor and humanity as a way to survive the nightmare while sticking to a larger message: Stay angry.

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In the last hour of this show the paintings are going to be swept off the walls with song. Some weeks ago, a remarkable woman entered the gallery and told the proprietors that the whales in Juliette Dumas’s canvases were singing to her and appealing for her reply. With the gallery’s permission, Ami Yamasaki proceeded to produce music from unexpected depths and cavities that no “natural” singer makes use of, at least not a human one: birdsong and the resonances of the ocean, however, as well as what might be thought of as  extraterrestrial sounds proceeded to emit from this slight Japanese woman. Yamasaki is a sound and installation artist based in Tokyo.  Today also marks the conclusion of a project room exhibition by Stephen Maine.

109 Ingraham Street, between Knickerbocker and Porter avenues, Bushwick, silasvonmorisse.com

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In 1980, not long after he moved into his basement apartment below ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, the painter Robert Goldman — who then was known as Bobby G — began a series of monumental figure portraits of the young people who lived in the neighborhood. This artistic vision culminated, in 1984, in a 50-foot-long, 10-foot-tall mural painted guerrilla-style on the cinder-block facade of a burned-out tenement at the corner of Delancey and Suffolk streets (now the site of a monstrous mega-development). The paintings have remained more or less unseen until this month, when a selection went on view at Hionas Gallery in Crown Heights. After more than 35 years they remain fresh and energetic, “portraying the youth of the Lower East Side,” as Goldman says in his artist statement, “with their most powerful inner essence projected out into the world beyond.”

February 17 to March 31, 2018, 1426 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. Open Saturdays only, 12-6 pm

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The work pictured here, Weight Room, 2018, is currently on view at Zürcher Gallery in NoHo in a group exhibition with Kazuko Miyamoto, Huang Rui, Cordy Ryman and Merrill Wagner (through April 27)

New York Studio School, 8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery

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Mira Schor at Lyles & King
First published: Thursday, November 23rd, 2017

A modest room of small pictures, Mira Schor’s project space exhibition, The Red Tie Paintings, pulsates with lyrical fury. These Goyaesque allegories exude shamanic urgency, as if painted for purposes of exorcism. The artist does indeed describe a cathartic functionality for these works: “A day in the studio begins with the instantaneity of response to that day’s repellent news, which I can articulate very freely in ink and gouache on paper.” Red and black are at once symbolically charged and formally potent chromatic choices. The dramatis personae in this fiery suite include limp dicks, a melting swastika, eyes that are also vaginas and bleed, the Owl of Minerva (she who rises only at dusk) and the eponymous, synechdochal necktie that comes to menacing, serpentine life, a device that recalls anthropomorphized props in a William Kentridge animation. Artistic sisters channeled include Charlotte Salomon, Nancy Spero and Sue Coe. At once deeply personal and fiercely political, this is poetry meets therapy meets agit prop meets magic.

Jacob El Hanani Linescape: Four Decades at Acquavella Galleries
Monday, October 2nd, 2017

Scriptural injunctions against graven images and puritanical disdain for decoration or ornament for their own sake engendered an ingenious work around from medieval artists: micrography. Miniscule but nonetheless legible script is arranged into otherwise prohibited or discouraged forms, sometimes whimsical, sometimes expressive of the text itself. Fast forward to minimal art and its inherent iconoclasm and Casablanca-born, Israel-raised, Paris-educated, New York-based Jacob El Hanani pulls from his “portable ark of the covenant” (in R. B. Kitaj’s phrase, from First Diasporist Manifesto) the mind bogglingly ethereal feat that is his application of this ancestral technique to a contemporary abstract idiom. These days, however, there is a relative loosening-up of his approach, as the artist acknowledges in titles that evoke landscapes by Turner and cityscapes by Mondrian. As El Hanani explains, “For many decades, I was working under a self-imposed austerity, but many artists, as they get older, release themselves and tend to embrace a freer, more lyrical style.

Janet Fish: Pinwheels and Poppies, Paintings 1980-2008 at DC Moore Gallery
First Published: Saturday, September 30th, 2017

Last chance today to catch this three-decade survey of paintings by Janet Fish. Known primarily for her densely detailed, richly colored, complexly composed still lifes often lit with an intensity that matches their informational overload, Fish revels in the delightful inherent contradictions of her elective craft. By this I mean that she gravitates towards tricky arrangements of gaudy forms and challenging perceptual distortions but then proceeds to deliver what she sees with disarming frankness. She forces herself to look through layers of baroquely contorted 1970s glassware, for instance, or heavy-gauge plastic shopping bags with all the varying secondary reflections and refractions they engender and obligates herself to render contrastive surfaces of liquids and fruits and flora often trapped within a matrix of shadows and the irregular gridding of mesh receptacles. And yet these mind-boggling observational conundra are dispatched with no-nonsense, unflashy, almost homespun methodical paint application that bespeaks fidelity, honesty and presentness of mind.

Doron Langberg at 1969
First Published: Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017

The breakout paintings of Doron Langberg from around five years ago collided intimism and raunch to potent effect. Their slow-read romantic symbolism hovered between coyness and luxuriance as if the brush could’t quite believe the homoerotic explicitness it was being enlisted to depict. The latest paintings from this still-young Israeli-born, UPenn and Yale graduate, on view through the end of this week at 1969 (Quang Bao’s new gallery on the Lower East Side), tone down the sex but if anything ramp up the psychology, trading one kind of penetration for another. The sitters in these portraits are close friends, fellow artists and family members. The range of handling is quite dazzling, whether in materials, composition, degrees of verisimilitude and resolution, or emotions—sitters’ or artist’s. Julia and Snake, (pictured here) which shows Julia Bland at work, uses the fiber artist’s materials to orchestrate complex dissonances between readymade and discovered abstraction, stylized and actual flatness, volume and shadow. Mark on the Beach, the most hedonistic image in this group, is an essay in shifting foci in which the artist’s subjective responses– indifference, devotion, affection, lust – to different aspects or zones within the scene are somehow as palpable and convincing as the neutral, democratic alloverness of an objective approach would be. It is as if he were a camera with feelings.

Fran O’Neill at David & Schweitzer
First Published: Tuesday, January 31st, 2017

Maybe it helps to know that Fran O’Neill has a deep past in figurative painting rooted in perception and drawing from life: that would make sense of the compositional acuity, vivacious economy and voluptuous sense of bodily connection in her beefy, boisterous forms. It might also explain why they sometimes recall Howard Hodgkin though they are far less polite in dispatch. Or why the brushstrokes remind us of Juan Uslé but with more generational purpose. But the highest compliment one can pay to these audacious paintings is that the artist’s formal groundings aren’t beaten into them. They are abstract, hard and fast.

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Radically reworking Eugène Delacroix’s Orientalist The Fanatics of Tangier (1837-38), Shoja Azari shows enraged Muslims – the stereotypical fighters who haunt our political discourse today. And on the wall behind the painting are numerous tiny web-derived images of contemporary political strife. Encapsulating the theme of Occupy Mana, the massive exhibition at Mana Contemporary curated by Phong Bui and Rail Curatorial Projects, this painting asks, what is to be done? How can artists respond to our crises?

Occupy Mana: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society has the Capacity to Destroy ran from October 21 to December 16, 2017

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