Opening Thursday, 23 February 2023
Jeneen Frei Njootli – Fierman, 19 Pike St
Fierman presents How Imminent Is This : Love N Prayers, a solo exhibition by Jeneen Frei Njootli. It is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, following NDN Burn in 2018. Frei Njootli is a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation living on sovereign land in the northern Yukon Territory of Canada. The exhibition features new sculptures, primarily wall-based, comprised of synthetic tarps, animal hides, cardboard and other packing supplies, and ricrac and beaded cultural signifiers such as earrings.
Winfred Rembert – Hauser & Wirth, 32 E 69th St
Hauser & Wirth presents All of Me, its first exhibition of works by late American artist Winfred Rembert (1945-2021), in collaboration with Fort Gansevoort. Occupying three floors, this immersive tribute to Rembert’s incredible life and artistry will include more than 40 works made in his signature medium of carved, tooled and painted leather, including several never before seen. Produced during the last three decades of his life, the objects on view offer a striking visual memoir and will take visitors on a journey through key chapters of the artist’s personal history. Rembert’s paintings recognize the people and places––from pool halls, juke joints, and civil rights protests, to cotton fields and chain gangs––that shaped his worldview, uniquely rendered through technical mastery of his chosen medium into something arresting and astonishing.
Tony Oursler – Lehmann Maupin, 501 W 24th St
Lehmann Maupin presents Machine E.L.F., an exhibition of new work by Tony Oursler. Based in New York City, Oursler has been a pioneering figure in new media since the 1970s. Over the last four decades, Oursler has explored popular culture through a diverse combination of multimedia projects, immersive environments, expansive outdoor installations, and dynamic dolls, ghosts, and bots that liberate video from its traditional two-dimensional format and bring it into the realm of sculpture. Often taking the human form, especially the face, as his subject, Oursler examines psychological states, the interaction between technological progress and society, and the history of science, pseudoscience, spiritualism, and religion.
Nancy Spero – Lelong & Co, 528 W 26th St
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Nancy Spero dedicated to works created between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, the final two decades of the artist’s life. Throughout a career spanning over five decades, the New York-based artist Nancy Spero (b. 1926 – d. 2009) foregrounded women’s experiences, challenging systems of authority and subverting aesthetic conventions in the process. Frustrated with the pervasive silencing of women’s voices in society, Spero was an activist who devoted herself to the advancement of women in the arts through hosting and participating in discussion groups, many held in her SoHo loft. Beginning in 1976, Spero made women the sole subject of her work to elevate their status from “other” to protagonist. In celebration of Spero’s unapologetic advocacy for the presence of women in the arts, the exhibition will coincide with Women’s History Month.
Leidy Churchman – Matthew Marks, 526 W 22nd St
A monotype is a unique print made by painting on a hard surface, laying a sheet of paper on top, and running the plate and the paper through a press to transfer the image. Printed from a single application of ink, monotypes have a richness and an immediacy more commonly associated with painting than with printmaking. This immediacy makes monotypes an especially rich field of experimentation for Churchman, who has been making them since 2013.
Opening Friday, 24 February 2023
Lewis Hammond – 47 Canal, 291 Grand St
47 Canal presents Bludgeoned Sky, Lewis Hammond’s first solo presentation in New York, comprising a new series of paintings that probe the experience of physical, political, and emotional dislocation.
Oliver Lee Jackson – Andrew Kreps, 394 Broadway
Since the 1970s, drawing has been an integral part of Jackson’s practice as he freely incorporates watercolor, collage, charcoal, and printmaking techniques to create layered compositions. Drawing on a wide range of references, from music, dance, renaissance paintings to Jackson’s own studies of African cultures, the resulting works blend figurative forms with improvisational marks. Moving between legibility and abstraction, Jackson creates various points of entry within each work, seeking to open his work to a multitude of readings.
Lisha Bai – Deanna Evans Projects, 373 Broadway
Bai is presenting a new body of work in After Hours, one that features textiles, specifically piecework fabric curtains. Bai has long been interested in the interplay between illusionism and materiality in the history of modernism—in objects that simultaneously invite viewers to perceive a continuing, believable world and self-consciously point to the physical stuff of their making. For After Hours, Bai pieces together influences and images from many brightly-colored textiles, cutting and sewing them together to resemble light streaming through a window at the close of day, the time when her three kids are in bed and her studio practice typically begins. These works are intended to be functional curtains—doing the job of filtering light, concealing and revealing what lies beyond them while allowing the viewer to peer into a pictorial space.
Hayes-Wallace – Hesse Flatow, 508 W 26th St
Winter is a word, feeling, thought, season— a blank space which contains the multitudes and the nothingness of timelines remembered and those yet to be written.
In Winter, sculptures, drawings, embroidery, collage, language, and installation reflect on the literal and interpersonal interpretations of the season: as construct, objective truth, method, and frame of mind. Eventually most things conclude in preparation for spring.
Molly Rose Lieberman – Theta, 184 Franklin St
Molly Rose Lieberman spends her days surrounded by the ancillary ephemera of creative production. As an archivist, she works in the stacks with documents, images, and material relics of modern art history. In the evenings she comes home to the apartment she sublets, where any walls not covered in old books on art, philosophy and global interests are painted pumpkin, sky blue, or papered in a pale chartreuse Edwardian print, tacked with her own mementos and bric-a-brac. In the early mornings before work she walks eight blocks to her studio, a second floor former massage parlor that also serves as a storage space for mid-century modern odds and ends her subletters are deaccessioning online, with big windows eye-level to the bouncing paper lanterns strung across Pell Street. The floors here are split between soft sage paint and an oatmeal carpet – a melange that casts a bubbly tranquility one might assume was left by the massage parlor, but wasn’t. It is in each of these spaces that the work for Alive Girl has been conceived. Now, the artist adopts the gallery as her own in a sort of reenactment, resembling the comforts of her environmental palimpsest in place of the white cube’s conventional neutrality.
Opening Saturday, 25 February 2023
Bill Viola – James Cohan, 48 Walker St
James Cohan is pleased to present an exhibition of important early works by the pioneering video artist Bill Viola. This is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition at James Cohan.
Since the early 1970s, Bill Viola has used video to explore sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. He has been central to the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to expand its scope for subsequent generations of artists.
Jennifer Macdonald – Underdonk, 1329 Willoughby Ave
Underdonk is pleased to present Hoverpool, a group of unique cast bronzes by Jennifer Macdonald, curated by Priscilla Fusco. Inspired by mineral spas, lap pools, lakes, and other bodies of water that draw us into reflective contemplation, Macdonald’s bronzes are a community of houseboats, bathers, and divers as well as structures of pool houses, rafts, aqueducts and reservoirs. The result is a fleet of distinctive objects and characters, thrust into engagement with one another.
