This week, our picks of New York City gallery shows to know feature a wide variety of solo shows: from contemporary artists exhibiting for the first time in the U.S. to retrospectives looking back at important works by influential artists. Shows in Chelsea, Downtown and Uptown will present sculpture and paintings that delve into the human experience. Keep reading for our selection of highlights of the NYC gallery scene through February 11, 2018.
CHELSEA
DC Moore Gallery: “Carrie Moyer: Pagan’s Rapture”
February 8 through March 22, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 8, from 6 to 8 p.m.
In her second solo exhibition with DC Moore Gallery, Carrie Moyer will present “Pagan’s Rapture.”
In this exhibition, described by the gallery as a “reaffirmation of Moyer’s Pleasure Principle,” the artist is working with both the sensual and rational materiality of color and paint to counter contemporary culture’s persistently gloomy outlook and sense of foreboding about End Times. Moyer’s work in “Pagan’s Rapture” features playful, logo-like silhouettes of flora, fauna, body-parts, vessels and planets as both flattened archetypes and cheeky references that serve as a compositional framework for “cascades of paint, glitter and light.”
DC Moore Gallery is located at 535 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011. www.dcmooregallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Sassafras and Magma" by Carrie Moyer, 2017. Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 60 x 54 inches. © Carrie Moyer. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.
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Hollis Taggart Galleries: “Primordial Language: Small Works by William Scharf”
February 8 through March 10, 2018
Hollis Taggart Galleries will present “Primordial Language: Small Works by William Scharf,” a retrospective of works by the late artist from 1964 through 2012.
William Scharf (1952-2018), an artist during post-war New York, created surrealist and biomorphic work employing a distinct visual language steeped in myth and mystery. Featuring potent symbols like the egg, the eve and the cross throughout his work, Scharf’s work combines visual transcendence and beauty through careful paint handling, rich color and heady symbolic language. His small canvases from mid-1960s show the beginnings of free-flowing brushwork developing into discrete vignettes of glowing form, with forms that coalesce into compositions that function like contained ecosystems and glimpses into a larger world.
Hollis Taggart Galleries is located at 521 West 26th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001. www.hollistaggart.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Night Move" by William Scharf (1927-2018), 1964. Oil on paper mounted to board, 12 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches. Courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries.
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Bruce Silverstein: “Marjan Teeuwen: Destroyed House”
February 8 through April 14, 2018
Opening Reception with the Artist: Thursday, February 8, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Artist Talk & Book Signing: Saturday, February 10, at 1 p.m.
Bruce Silverstein will present “Marjan Teeuwen: Destroyed House,” the artist’s first exhibition outside of Europe.
Dutch contemporary artist Marjan Teeuwen’s “Destroyed House” body of work reclaims wreckage of abandoned buildings. The artist assembles fragments in painstakingly detailed installations set within the original structures as temporary living artworks for viewers from the surrounding community to experience. Teeuwen uses a large format camera to capture the necessarily short lived installations, which offer limited viewing opportunities, for a larger audience. The photographs illuminate what the gallery calls “the precarious balance of the power of destruction with the constructive implications of order and function.”
Bruce Silverstein is located at 529 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011. www.brucesilverstein.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Destroyed House Krasnoyarsk 1" by Marjan Teeuwen (b. 1953), 2010. © Marjan Teeuwen, Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.
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DOWNTOWN
Peter Blum Gallery: “Luisa Rabbia: Death&Birth”
February 9 through April 7, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, February 9, from 6 to 8 p.m.
In her third solo show with Peter Blum Gallery, Luisa Rabbia will present “Death&Birth,” featuring new works.
The “Death&Birth” exhibition is the culmination of a trilogy, with “Love” currently on view in Italy. Rabbia’s works at Peter Blum explore birth and death as a process of transformation rather than as an experience with a distinct beginning and end. The exhibition includes three smaller paintings of the artist’s “LingamYoni” series, referring to the lingam and yoni shapes in Hindu culture.
Rabbia’s work is intricately layered to a create a glowing palette of yellow, red and violet hues on a deep field of blue acrylic, with countless fingerprints covering the surface of each painting alluding to the individuality of human nature and the marks left by humans on history. Rooted in the dialectic between inner and outer space, her work operates on a micro and macro level, making reference to the touch and form of the human body.
Peter Blum Gallery is located at 176 Grand St, New York, NY 10013. www.peterblumgallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Death" by Luisa Rabbia, 2017. Colored pencil, acrylic and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
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Nicelle Beauchene Gallery: “Fountainhead: Andrea Joyce Heimer”
February 8 through March 11, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 8, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery will present “Fountainhead: Andrea Joyce Heimer,” a first full-scale solo exhibition of work by the artist.
In this new body of work, Andrea Joyce Heimer explores hypothetical narratives about finding her birth parents, following the passage in 2015 of a Montana bill allowing adoptees access to their original birth certificates. In each work, Heimer depicts different scenarios should she choose to discover the identity of her parents. Densely populated compositions show a wide spectrum of emotions such rejection, anger, acceptance, isolation guilt, relief, recognition and embarrassment. Inhabited by figures inspired by ancient Greek black-and-red figure vases and medieval bestiaries, the paintings illustrate the artist’s expectations and anxieties through layered formal complexities. Heimer transformed and displaced her titles by translating them into a series of other languages and then back to English to show the ways in which narratives change as they are passed from person to person.
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is located at 327 Broome St, New York, NY 10002. www.nicellebeauchene.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
UPTOWN
Marlborough Gallery: “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Embodied Forms”
February 7 through March 10, 2018
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Marlborough Gallery will present “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Embodied Forms,” a retrospective of the late artist’s work.
The gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) will feature work from her “Abakans,” “Crowds,” “War Games” and “Coexistence” series made from 1971 through 2009. Abakanowicz—who dealt through her artwork with the trauma of living as a child in an occupied Poland during World War II—created installations and sculptures that dealt with existential concerns through a unique sculptural vocabulary. The exhibition will showcase the artist’s woven sisal works from her “Abakans” series, as well as burlap figures from her “Coexistence” series.
“Crowd IV,” a series of 24 figures created in 1989 and 1990, will also be on view at Marlborough Contemporary at 545 W. 25th Street. While defying classification, Abakanowicz’s work is beautiful and unsettling, reminding viewers of the fragile nature of the human condition.
Marlborough Gallery is located at 40 West 57th St, New York, NY 10019. www.marlboroughgallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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NYC Gallery Scene - Highlights publishes weekly with exhibitions selected by Hamptons Art Hub staff. This edition was written by Genevieve Kotz. Click here to visit our Gallery Guide to find more exhibitions on view.
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