Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel

Marking his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, artist Matias Faldbakken brings together a series of installations that unify drawings from 2017 to 2021 alongside a series of various groups of lacquered bricks, some locally sourced, others originating from Norway. The artist, who has often explored notions of antagonism and conflict, charging his works with a sort of disruptive, confrontational energy, here turns that notion towards the act of drawing itself. Read More »

On view this month at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, artist Chris Martin presents a body of new works that continue the artist’s luminous, colorful approach towards the painted canvas, and the continued relationships of scale that flow through so many of the artist’s works. On view on the first floor of the gallery space, a series of large-scale canvases and a smaller painting made in tribute to the late Lance De Los Reyes, present night skies, washes of color and surreal moments of explosive energy in a set of explorations of energy and space.

Images and depictions of the cosmos are a uniting thread among all of the paintings: inky night skies, planets, constellations, stars, and moons, continung a relationship between deep space and the landscapes in the near field. The artist, who has long drawn inspiration from time spent in the Catskills, where he would follow patterns and movements in the land and its wildlife, here takes those same iconographies and applies them towards unique expressions of space.

The influence is clear in all of these new works, a number of which were painted in his Catskills studio. The five paintings in the gallery’s back atrium are all atmospheric skyscapes—some seeming to directly depict the constellations and night sky of the open woods and fields. It is not only nature found in these works, but the influence of Brooklyn, music, and pop culture are also evident—in Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space, for example, Martin’s painted galaxy is populated by collaged images of Greta Garbo as the Sphinx, sailors, mushrooms, frogs, birds, musicians, and pot leaves—among others—creating humor and play in the cosmic heavens.

Martin’s work has long negotiated this peculiar space between the spiritual, the natural, and the pop cultural ether that seems to hold and envelope so much of his approach towards the image. Rather than place these notions in opposition, his pieces here present a fusion of all inputs, a harmony of inspiration that seems to place the distant vistas of outer space, the internal reveries of solitude, and everything between, on equal footing.

The show closes February 26th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Chris Martin at Anton Kern [Exhibition Site]

Yves Laloy, Untitled (1956), via Perrotin

On view this month at two of Galerie Perrotin’s Paris exhibition spaces, artist Yves Laloy’s work gets an expansive and exploratory review, marking the first major exhibition since a 2004 retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Unifying a series of private loans for the show, the exhibition marks an unprecendented look at the architect-turned-painter and his kinetic, colorful painterly constructions. Read More »

Robert Gober, Waterfall (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks

This month in New York, Robert Gober makes his return to Matthew Marks Gallery, bringing forth new drawings and sculptures made from a wide variety of materials including wood, resin, acrylic paint, cotton fabric and running water, all the works in the exhibition were made in Gober’s New York studio over the past five years. A continuation of Gober’s expressive and illusory body of work exploring politics of the body, memory and time, his most recent show presents a series of new constructions running along similar conceptual avenues.

Robert Gober, Waterfall (detail) (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks Read More »

On view this month at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s New York outpost artists Yves Scherer and Louisa Gagliardi present separate bodies of work unified by the gallery space, creating a subtle and enigmatic discourse on reality, perception and culture. Across a set of sculptures and paintings, the show is a striking meditation on the two artist’s work, and the unexpected but compelling linkages between them.

In 2021, a mob of protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol, creating a wealth of now enduring images of a country in the midst of political and cultural strife. The images, something of a modern media collage, were at times surreal and unsettling, at others comical and bizarre, underscoring the United States’s modern crossroads of political and social identification. These images became the inspiration for artist Paul Chan, whose work A drawing as a recording of an insurrection, a massive double-sided illustration interpreting the day’s events, is on view now at Greene Naftali.