This week, our favorite gallery shows opening in New York highlight contemporary artists working in painting and sculpture. Chelsea and Downtown galleries will feature fragmented landscapes, wire sculpture, found imagery and Latin American iconography. Continue reading for our picks of NYC gallery scene shows to see through May 20.
CHELSEA
Ryan Lee: Tim Braden: Long, Long, To Everywhere”
May 17 through June 29, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 17, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Ryan Lee will present “Tim Braden: Long, Long, To Everywhere,” an exhibition of new paintings by the British artist.
Revisiting themes of wanderlust, exploration and adventure, Tim Braden brings new perspectives to familiar subjects with his paintings of French beaches, Spanish gardens, Brazilian explorers, and sailboat races. Evoking memories of travel rather than specific locations, Braden has created fragmented landscapes that draw on his own travels, his collection of vintage travelogues and snapshots of his friends’ vacations.
With patches of light and color, Braden’s paintings recall both the specificity of personal experience and inventive nostalgia for time and place. Working as meditations on the act of looking, his work plays with the fictionalization of memory and how images point to the surrounding visual culture that shapes personal histories and futures.
Ryan Lee is located at 515 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001. www.ryanleegallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Regatta" by Tim Braden, 2018. Oil on canvas, 62 7/8 x 47 7/8 inches. (c) Tim Braden; Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
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Jack Shainman Gallery: “Nick Cave: Weather or Not”
May 17 through June 23, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 17, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Jack Shainman Gallery will present new work by Nick Cave in “Weather or Not.”
The exhibition will debut a series of Nick Cave’s wire “Tondos” presented in a focused, sparse installation that evokes immediacy, according to the gallery. Swirling cacophonies of colors are created from the layered mapping of cataclysmic weather patterns superimposed onto brain scans of black youth suffering from PTSD related to gun violence. With the images removed from their figurative context, the works feel disembodied, underscoring the anxiety of severe trauma. Rooted in the current societal moment, Cave’s work joins gravity and imminent danger with hope through enchanting and shimmering aesthetics.
Jack Shainman Gallery is located at 513 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011. www.jackshainman.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Tondo" by Nick Cave, 2018. Mixed media including metal, wire, bugle beads, sequined fabric and wood, approximately six feet diameter. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.
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Lehmann Maupin: “Cecilia Vicuña: La India Contaminada”
May 19 through July 6, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 19, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Lehmann Maupin will present “Cecilia Vicuña: La India Contaminada,” the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of work by the Chilean artist.
The first comprehensive survey of Vicuña’s work in New York, the exhibition will feature the artist’s mixed media sculptures, raw wool installations, paintings and videos spanning from 1969-2017. Cecilia Vicuña’s raw wool installations and sculptures are titled “Quipu,” after the Quechua word “knot,” referring to the historical Andean systems used to record statistics and narratives through the knotting of colored thread. Constructed as poems in space with dyed, raw and unprocessed wool, the “Quipu” works are tactile representations of the interconnections between cosmological and human realms. Poetic and philosophic, these works create a visual meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, humans and nature, and the past and the present.
Vicuña’s mixed media sculptures, which she calls “Lo Precario” (“The Precarious”), give complexity to the materials used, from found scraps of cloth and shards of plastic to a feather or a leaf. Originally composed along the ocean’s shore, the works were intended to disintegrate and wash away with the high tide after creation. Vicuña continues to make these works in waterways around the world, as well as re-creating them in indoor galleries. The artist’s work—whether fragile sculptures or paintings featuring revolutionary iconography—references Latin American history, positioning itself as an indigenous, decolonized woman’s perspective for viewers to contemplate while challenging their own ways of thinking.
Lehmann Maupin is located at 536 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011. www.lehmannmaupin.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Quipus Visceral" by Cecilia Vicuña, 2017. Site-specific installation of dyed, unspun wool, dimensions variable. Installation view, "Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen,"Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 16–June 18, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Alex Marks.
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DOWNTOWN
Owen James Gallery: “Mark Mann: O Uncolored People”
May 17 through June 30, 2018
Opening Reception: May 17, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Owen James Gallery will present “Mark Mann: O Uncolored People,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures.
Touching on nostalgia, Americana, history, culture, memory and identity, Mark Mann’s paintings and sculptures ruminate on the American legacy through physical manipulation and the contextual isolation of found imagery. In his paintings, Mann depicts white, middle class vacationers in closely cropped, blurry images. Culled from vintage promotional postcards depicting the heyday of American holiday resorts and tourist attractions from the mid-1950s to 1970s, the paintings represent a fantasy past and false narrative of a uniform American culture and economic class.
Mann’s exhibition also includes a series of white plaster cactus sculptures, which, along with the exhibition’s title, alludes to Ed Ruscha’s “Colored People,” a humorous strike against the country’s prejudices that featured photographs of cacti against white backgrounds. Potted in tin cans originally used to import food products, Mann’s fragile sculptures are a subtle reminder that America is built on the strength of its immigrants. Mann also created a series of sculptures based on military field stretchers, in which the original fabric has been replaced with the interlaced nylon straps originally used in beach chairs and pool loungers. Like the sunbathers and cacti, the sculptures play with imagery central to the American psyche.
Owen James Gallery is located at 59 Wooster St, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10012. www.owenjamesgallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Irish Twins" by Mark Mann, 2016. Acrylic on 2 wood panels, 10 x 20 inches overall. Courtesy of Owen James Gallery.
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Aicon Gallery New York: “Rajan Krishnan | A Retrospective”
May 17 through June 23, 2018
Press Preview & VIP Reception: Thursday, May 27, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Aicon Gallery will present “Rajan Krishnan,” a retrospective of the late artist’s work.
Rajan Krishnan, who passed away suddenly in 2016, was a longtime collaborator with the gallery. Throughout his career, his art has centered on the natural environments in which he found himself, approaching his subject matter almost in the vein of a naturalist. In idyllic landscapes rendered from his childhood memories before rampant urbanization in his native India and in images of more current environmental degradation and urban decay, Krishnan simultaneously catalogued the variety of plant and animal life in his native Kerala and documented its destruction due to industrialization and human neglect.
Staged against a foreboding grey backdrop, his work feels dreamlike while at the same time alluding to wet concrete or industrial fog. His canvases, which range from intimate to monumental, feature lush and detailed scenes of plants and wildlife, depicting the balance between humans and their habitats.
Aicon Gallery is located at 35 Great Jones St, New York, NY 10012. www.aicongallery.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 selected by Kathryn Heine and written by Genevieve Kotz. Click here to visit our Gallery Guide to find more exhibitions on view.
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