David Byrne, How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic (Installation View), via Pace

Artist and musician David Byrne rarely stays in the same conceptual space for long, moving from recorded music to sculpture, painting and drawing to film. The longtime frontman of the Talking Heads, and a vital force in the history of downtown New York’s art scene from the 1970’s to today, it’s hard to find a mode of work he hasn’t tried at least once. This vision finds a fitting home at Pace Gallery this month for How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic a show of work from the artist’s dingbats series of drawings made during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of his tree drawings from the early 2000s, and a selection of his drawings of chairs from 2004–07.

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Robert Nava, Mechanical Voyage (2021), via Night Gallery

Night Gallery has opened a new show of works on paper by artist Robert Nava, Bloodsport, a body of works that continue Nava’s visceral renderings of dream states and surreal, tension-filled compositions that walk a line between brusque compositions and a surreal sense of horror.  Read More »

Rodney Graham, Untitled (2022), via 303 Gallery

On view this month, 303 Gallery presents a new body of work by Rodney Graham, a body of paintings that expand on the artist’s already expansive and exploratory body of work. Working since the early 1980s across the disciplines of video, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and music, Graham’s work stages layered narratives suffused with cultural and historical signifiers. Here, he turns that same notion towards the painted canvas, using his understanding and utilization of varied materials and modes to create densely layered compositions that blend together a studied sense of the art historical with the artist’s own techniques.  Read More »

Jonas Wood, Dinosaur Landscape (2019), via David Kordansky

This month at David Kordansky Gallery, a new body of work by Jonas Wood, Plants and Animals, unites a set of recent paintings and works on paper by the artist that spans the full gallery space. Exploring recurring images in his work, and focusing in here on the aforementioned subjects, Wood turns to a variety of formats and mediums to render images not only of flora and fauna, but also of detailed worlds of related forms, spaces, and moods. Read More »

Wilson Bentley, Snowflake 6 (1900), all images via Georgia Suter for Art Observed

Currently on view at The Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY is a group exhibition entitled Snow Day, organized in association with Eric Brown Art Group. The show brings together ten artists, contemporary and deceased, who have engaged with landscapes and the natural world: Wilson Bentley, Jennifer Bartlett, Charles Burchfield, Jack Bush, Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Hector Leonardi, Aubrey Levinthal, Fairfield Porter and Kathryn Lynch. The exhibition juxtaposes photographs, paintings and works on paper. Captured by each artist in the selected body of works is the unique serenity induced by a landscape blanketed in snow. Read More »

Tomás Saraceno, Silent Autumn (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

On view this month at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, artist Tomás Saraceno presents a body of new works that invite participants to attune to the intricacies of our entanglement with human, nonhuman and elemental forces. Across a spectrum of perceived realities and through works that connect differently with other beings and phenomena, Saraceno highlights how a considered co-existence encourages new ways of living together, while giving space to existing equitable collaborations with the atmosphere and wider environment. Read More »

Sayre Gomez, Halloween City (2022), via François Ghebaly

Currently on view at François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Sayre Gomez continues his recent exploration of a unique approach to the cognitive mapping of late America, seen through the cultural and topographic specificity of Southern California’s urban sprawl. Continuing the exploration and depiction of ads, abandoned buildings, and other landscapes and scenes, Gomez’s work here, in Halloween City, takes on a particularly dark and dreary turn.  Read More »

H. R. Giger, HRGNYC (Installation View), via Lomex

Among the more hotly anticipated shows of the winter calendar in New York, Lomex is currently hosting a survey of works by  the renowned Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, opening in the gallery on January 29, 2022. The largest exhibition of Giger’s work in New York in nearly three decades, HRGNYC draws from the breadth of his entire career and displays his manifold talents in a vast array of media. Read More »

Eddie R. Aparicio, Holbein En Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd., LA, CA) (2018), all images via Aidan Chisholm for Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth presents “The New Bend,” a group exhibition exploring the intergenerational legacy of quilting as a gendered, raced and classed mode of social practice. Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, the exhibition brings together twelve contemporary artists engaging with the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilting tradition: Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa.

Tomashi Jackson, Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021)

The New Bend renders apparent the enduring influence of the Gee’s Bend quilters, underscoring the weighty historical role of Black American women including Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988) and Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935). Rooted in the hamlet of Gee’s Bend along the Alabama River in Wilcox County, this textile tradition extends from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present era, with contemporary artists mining the visual rhetoric and technical framework of quilting, while paying homage to the collective ethos of the communal practice. “The New Bend” highlights contemporary engagement with the Gee’s Bend legacy to posit the centrality of this tradition within Modernist art historical narratives of abstraction.

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the pivotal exhibition “The Quilts at Gee’s Bend” at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002-2003), “The New Bend” attests to the continued relevance of this textile practice in the context of twenty-first-century digitization. Russell evokes the rhetoric of digitization and computation to understand the cooperative networks enacted through quilt-making today, in this era of the Web 2.0 marked by the proliferation of participatory platforms within the decentralized internet domain. “The New Bend” does not position textile art as a reversion to the handmade in our digital era, but rather harnesses the rhetoric of computation and coding to appreciate the layered dynamics of quilting as simultaneously personal and communal, conjuring collective memories while perhaps envisioning alternate futures. In Qualeasha Wood’s work, the artist reflects upon the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021), views the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.

Qualeasha Wood, Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021)

The gallery statement underscores the legacy of Gee’s Bend extending beyond art historical discourse: “What the quilters of Gee’s Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition.”

Anthony Akinbola, Jubilee (2021)

Basil Kincaid, Four Eyes One Vision (2021)

Entering the intimate, second-floor space of the Chelsea gallery, viewers encounter Dawn Williams Boyd’s The Right to (My) Life (2017), a mixed media tapestry capturing an anti-abortion rally. This vibrant figurative work situates textile art as a mode of political intervention, conjuring the legacy of quilting as a mode of political conscious-raising amidst the Civil Rights Movement, particularly following the emergence of The Freedom Quilting Bee in Rehoboth, Alabama in 1966. Anthony Akinbola builds upon the sampling tactics of Gee’s Bend quilters through his use of the Du Rag, a vernacular emblem of Black American culture, in his Jubilee (2021). From the architectural paneling of Eric N. Mack’s boy on the edge of the shoreline in DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX (2018) to the incorporation of soil from a former potato field in Tomashi Jackson’s Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021), the vibrant works in “The New Bend” are enmeshed within a creative network encapsulating rich cultural heritage.

Dawn Williams Boyd, The Right to (My) Life (2017)

Diedrick Brackens, survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life (2021)

– A. Chisholm

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Hauser & Wirth]
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers [Souls Grown Deep Foundation]

Ashley Bickerton, 0°36’06.2″N, 131°09’41.8″E 1 (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This month, Lehmann Maupin presents Seascapes at the End of History, artist Ashley Bickerton’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing the artist’s bold and expressive use of sculpture and natural iconographies to create striking, illusory effects. Posed as a reappraisal of the seascape genre, the exhibition features work first conceived of while living in New York City prior to the artist’s relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993. An avid surfer, Bickerton’s work here draws on resin, fiberglass, corten steel and other materials to blend industrial material with natural iconographies.  Read More »