Art We Saw This Winter

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From our critics, reviews of closed gallery shows around New York City.

By The New York Times

Chelsea

Through Feb. 18. Marianne Boesky, 507 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9889, marianneboeskygallery.com.

From the 1970s until her death in 2022, Jennifer Bartlett melded the expressive tics of painting with the rigid grids of Conceptual Art. Whether slotting daubs of paint between the lines or sweeping color across them, the grid both confines and energizes simple subjects like mountains or trees, and intensifies elemental studies of form and color. Bartlett's encyclopedic and wandering "Rhapsody," from 1976, covers hundreds of square enameled panels printed with quarter-inch grids.

This show presents 77 of the artist's early, obscure serial drawings on graph paper made from 1970 to 1973. They bare the systemic underpinnings of her more polished work. In one grouping, she experiments with iterative ways of filling the squares, or shading a given area with stripes and stipples. Another prismatic series arrays little swatches of colored pencil on fields of metallic silver paint. You can sense Bartlett's restlessness in the way she colors outside the lines and allows mistakes to edge in.

A third series on view explores her favorite motif, the iconic house: a box with a triangle on top, inset with window and door. The sky is blue and the lawn is green. The progression of house drawings starts simply, plugging the component shapes dutifully into the grid. Then, several drawings in, Bartlett begins labeling the parts longhand, sometimes in ways that contradict the program — the word "sky" on a green triangle. The tangle of language at the top of one page trails off into a sparse gradient. In the rhythm of the plan's unwinding comes pleasure in constraint. TRAVIS DIEHL

TriBeCa

Through Feb. 11. Theta. 184 Franklin Street, Manhattan; 917-262-0037, theta.nyc.

The enigmatic acrylic rods, pucks and cards on view here are not art, strictly speaking. Promoted as "healing instruments" by the Gentle Wind Project, which espouses a vague New Age spirituality and is maybe a cult, these spooky gizmos lift liberally from Chinese medicine and chromotherapy. Ecstatically vibrant with a mesmeric graphic style, they take color theory to its implausible extreme, like a Josef Albers exercise on psilocybin.

Their promises, prescribed in their names — "Trauma Card 2 + Combat Fatigue Ver 17.0" (2006); "Soft Sleep Ver 8.2" (2008) — join them to the raft of homeopathic cures aimed at psychic ailments. These are outré versions — better judgment suggests that communing with a laminated Day-Glo Fibonacci spiral will not realign your body's electromagnetic field — but not so different from the stuff marketed under the $450 billion "wellness" industry. The organization's current incarnation, after a fraud investigation, as I Ching Systems and Artworks, invites contemplation as an aesthetic practice, even as its intent is less art world aspiration than eliding F.D.A. scrutiny.

We’re awash in bad actors, opportunists who would exploit our suffering for profit. A grifter blows into town and another buys the film rights. But the exhibition, organized by Nick Irvin, resists indulging in sordidness or levying a value judgment, a pose that can feel admirably openhearted or frustratingly oblique. It becomes its own study in obsession (books by Gentle Wind true believers l are available to reference, complete with Irvin's extensive marginalia), an attempt to make sense of faith, which of course can't be explained, or perhaps restore it. MAX LAKIN

NoHo

Through Jan. 21. dieFirma, 32A Cooper Square, Manhattan; 347-699-1440; diefirmanyc.com.

Once upon a time, linoleum floors conjured the gleaming promise of the modern century: vibrant and new, a marvel of science and convenience. By midcentury, it was de rigueur in American kitchens, synonymous with the country's postwar perception of itself: hard wearing, resilient, never to fade. The sheen, like much of the rest of the American dream proved to be held together by asbestos, has since worn off; Americans pulled up their linoleum floors and tossed them into the dustbin of decorative history.

The artist Bill Miller resuscitates that past, and its attendant ghosts, splicing found linoleum sheets into dense, nearly hallucinatory collages depicting the landscapes and modest domestic interiors of the postindustrial towns he's known. Miller doesn't manipulate the finishes, relying on the factory-made colors and often assaultive patterns for his palette, a self-imposed constriction that becomes expansive freedom. It proves to be a remarkably versatile medium, and an affecting one. Miller salvages much of his material from abandoned homes in and around Pittsburgh, where he lives, and whose collapsed steel industry both allows for and tints the work here.

The conceptual interest could quickly become stale, but Miller's choices avoid gimmickry. His dedication to his material reads as devotional and empathetic, portraying the lives of his blue-collar subjects through the very stuff with which they were furnished. His pictures have a haunted quality; marks of wear remain visible, traces of the linoleum's previous life still present, faded but not forgotten. MAX LAKIN

Flatiron

Through Jan. 21. The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, Manhattan; 646-839-5908, the8thfloor.org.

Performance art may not be as radical as it was in the 1970s, but the exhibition "El Corazón Aúlla" ("The Heart Howls") reaffirms what a potent vehicle it is for subversive expression. Curated by Alexis Heller and Tatiana Muñoz-Brenes, the show features 14 Latin American female and nonbinary artists calling attention to a crisis of gender-based violence: According to the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, at least 12 women per day were victims of femicide in the region in 2021. The artists take different approaches — performing in public and private, alone or with others — but are united by their unflinching vulnerability. They put their bodies on the line.

This includes Denise E. Reyes Amaya lying covered in garbage bags in the gutter of a San Salvador street in the video "Colored Bags for Trash" (2014); it's equally harrowing to watch passers-by ignore her and police officers poke her. In the video "Las Nobodies" (2011), the Mexican artist Nayla Altamirano walks meditatively along the border, collecting and donning bras left in the desert by the coyotes who sexually assaulted the women they were smuggling to the United States.

Some artists extend their vulnerability outward, like Elina Chauvet, who, in "My Hair for Your Name" (2014), cut off her locks and tied them with ribbons bearing the names of murdered women. Here, alongside those hanging locks and performance photos, the Mexican artist has set up a station where visitors are invited to do the same, pushing us to consider what we might be willing to risk or give up in sacrifice. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Lower East Side

Through Jan. 21. Shoot the Lobster, 138 Eldridge Street, Manhattan; 212-560-0670, shootthelobster.com.

The title of this group show — which includes work by 22 artists depicting, more or less abstractly, women — nods to "New Images of Man," the 1959 MoMA blockbuster curated by Peter Selz. That exhibition collected the twisted forms of modernist portraiture by the likes of Giacometti and Francis Bacon under the banner of the nuclear age. Much of that brutality lingers in this revision curated by the artist Candy Cane.

These "new images of women" are tense, taut, laced with intimations of sex and violence. The largest portrait, a photograph from Pieter Hugo's "Nollywood" series, portrays a Black woman holding the rough handle of a bolo machete that looks run through her naked sternum. She stares down the lens while stage blood soaks the blanket at her waist. A royal blue three-foot-tall "Raggedy Ann" riff by Jason Yates sits like it's gawking at the gore. Other photos show bondage, rope play, the tropes of sexploitation and indie sleaze. This isn't raunch for raunch's sake, though — these raw images confront the idea that the word "man" could name the whole happy human family. That happiness is fraught, too. In a 2021 headshot by Bill Taylor, a woman with a graying buzz cut and facial tattoos rests in a hospital bed, possibly asleep; for "In My Garden" (1987), Cindy Sherman dresses like a sludge-splattered oil worker, holds a dead snake like a symbol. Our social traumas have evolved, our boundaries of normalcy blurred, but Selz's show, or at least its title, remains an art-historical earworm. TRAVIS DIEHL

TriBeCa

Through Jan. 14. Broadway, 375 Broadway, Manhattan. (212) 226-4001; broadwaygallery.nyc.

For her first show at Broadway in 2020, Meg Lipke made a series of soft canvas sculptures à la Claes Oldenburg. Stuffed like pillows but shaped, for the most part, in empty squares or loose grids, and decorated with bright, zany patterns, they were essentially sculptures of paintings.

Her new show, "Ingredients You Can See and Pronounce," comprises nine actual paintings on stretched linen, their only idiosyncrasy a single rounded corner on each one. But their busy arrangements of bulges, loops and dots look so much like collages that you may find yourself looking twice to see whether their surfaces are entirely flat.

The show's publicity release mentions cave art, and it's true that there's something sandy and ancient about Lipke's color palette, its peach, orange, yellow and fuchsia notwithstanding; there's even a line of little brown quadrupeds in a piece called "Lascaux." But what really sent me tripping back in time was the stripes, more or less parallel lines and dashes that brought to mind some prehistoric artist dragging her fingertips through red ocher on a cave wall. These stripes reach their peak in "Old Sarum," a nearly black-and-white painting in which zebra patterns, pencil lines, apostrophes and squiggles that allude to Paul Klee drawings combine in a surface that's at once complex and simple. WILL HEINRICH

Chinatown

Through Jan. 8. Lubov, 5 East Broadway, fourth floor, Manhattan; 347-496-5833, lubov.nyc.

The New York-based artists Covey Gong and Eli Ping stage a comradely dialogue in a show focusing primarily on sculpture. Across the exhibition's seven works — all from 2022, with two by Ping and five by Gong — both artists manage a just-so balance as they play delicacy off heaviness and use simplicity without fussiness. Sculptural detail enlivens even the works that at first glance look like paintings, as in Gong's untitled diptych, where finely woven polyester organza stands in for painter's canvas, revealing the aluminum stretcher bars beneath. Plate-size polka dots mark this material — which recalls sheer pantyhose — airbrushed with black or dark gray acrylic in a loosely regular pattern, with smoky wisps of spray escaping the circles’ confines. The effect: minimalism with élan and soul.

Gong's diptych faces Ping's "Moult," a cast iron rendering of a simple form that looks like a towel — or even a painter's repurposed unstretched canvas — twisted and frozen in a rising, looping shape suggesting a torch or candle's flame. My favorite works here are two boxlike constructions by Gong using the same sprayed organza on a thin wire frame of bronze and tin. Hung on the wall, they are about the size of a hard-backed book and incorporate hook-and-eye enclosures of the kind you might find on a corset or blouse, one detailed in white fabric, the other in black. Cotton thread clusters within at the top and bottom, recalling Richard Tuttle's subtle sculptural drawings made with wire and shadow. JOHN VINCLER

TriBeCa

Through Jan. 7 at 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; (212) 727-1961, 52walker.com.

We, as a species, are impressed by big things: large animals, supertall buildings, supersize food. In art, however, bigger is not always better. Take Tau Lewis's current batch of sculptures in her solo debut, "Vox Populi, Vox Dei, " at 52 Walker.

The Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based artist blasted onto the North American art scene half a decade ago, a hugely talented 20-something who cobbled together gritty, almost haunted sculptures and tapestries with scavenged materials. Then she was discovered: tapped by important curators and recruited by large galleries, culminating in her participation in the current Venice Biennale.

"Vox Populi, Vox Dei" follows on the heels of that heady experience and finds Lewis running a little low on ideas. Six giant heads with bombastic titles like "Mater Dei" (all works are from 2022) and "Trident" conjure masks and ferocious monsters, deities and power figures from a panoply of cultures. Materials here include repurposed leather, fur, silk, rawhide, shells and snakeskin. The works are impressive — i.e., big — but rather basic. (I always think, in these instances of "giantism," of what Roberta Smith once wrote about Zhang Huan's giant sculptures: "The main subject here is scale itself; height, volume and quantity as well as hours of human labor.")

Much ink has been spilled on the art world devouring its young. On the one hand, it's fortunate that Lewis has found success. On the other, it's bittersweet: The wild ideas and compositions Lewis created when she was relatively unknown, crafting curious objects in her studio, were better. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Through Jan. 7. Lehmann Maupin, 501 W 24th Street, Manhattan, 212-255-2923 lehmannmaupin.com.

In the 1990s, the English writer, painter and musician Billy Childish and his band, Thee Headcoats, performed on the West Coast. These trips changed his life: He met and married his wife in the area, and now in his new show, "Spirit Guides and Other Guardians Joining Heaven and Earth," at Lehmann Maupin, he has returned to the Pacific Northwest.

These are 11 paintings with muted but expressive colors, in the manner of Edvard Munch, who was a big influence on Childish. His brushstrokes wobble like a quiet scream in a newly discovered forest. Working on linen, sketching first with charcoal before coloring with oils, he conjures an intense relationship with nature that is palpable. Even when human figures appear — usually alone — the weight of their environment seems to be squeezing them in.

Mountains, forests, lone trees, rivers and their tributaries become sites of what are perhaps forays into his own subconscious, of periods of his life that he would like to relive. Two paintings — "The Mountain That Is God" and "Moonrise Mount Tahoma" — feature the same scene: A man standing in a boat, his hat in one hand and his paddle in the other, with the mountain in the background, the river beneath him running with green cracks like a rock itself. If Childish is sharing what he remembers from his time with the landscape of the West Coast, the resulting images are majestic and peaceful, a testament to the richness of his memories, and to human memory itself. YINKA ELUJOBA

Chelsea

Through Jan. 7. Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, Manhattan. 212-242-7727; cheimread.com.

The art dealer Jay Gorney has built a small invigorating group show around the work of the perennially overlooked American painter Kimber Smith (1922-1981), combining four of his works with those of seven living artists. Maybe it will finally secure permanent visibility for his art.

Smith worked with an air of buoyant, irreverent improvisation, by mixing styles and techniques, as in the bright, slightly demonic "K's Mandolin" (1970), which combines hard and soft edges with intimations of graffiti, or by pushing painting to sketchy extremes like "June 13 (Gabrielle)" of 1979, which evokes children's drawing. Smith is linked to second-generation Abstract Expressionism or Color Field painting. But he seems more a disrupter of both styles, part of an ongoing process of the contamination of abstract painting by real life that has been underway at least since early modernists like Miro.

All the artists here pursue contamination. Joanne Greenbaum builds up dense networks of colorful lines that should break out in cartoons but never do. Joe Fyfe collages his spare painting with a second piece of canvas and what seems to be a scrap of a vinyl sign. Eric N. Mack reduces painting to thin veils of color stretched into real space. Marina Adams stays on canvas but also stretches her forms, distorting them like textiles. Matt Connors actually makes a patterned textile the half-hidden subject of his especially Kimber-like effort. The contemporary paintings — including those by the eminent Peter Shear and Monique Mouton — make Smith seem very much of our time, and so, ahead of his. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

Through Jan 7. A Hug From the Art World, 515 West 19th Street, Manhattan. ahugfromtheartworld.com.

Beryl Cook is fantastically popular in her native Britain, where her buoyant figures and warmly overstuffed scenes splash across postage stamps and tea towels, but is mostly unknown here. This determined exhibition aims to rectify the oversight, assembling 40 paintings, drawings and ephemera from Cook's five-decade output, from her first effort, around 1960, to her last in 2008, the year she died.

A wartime showgirl who at 40 took up painting with no formal training, Cook rendered workaday Britons in flat, voluminous splendor — cascading roly-poly retirees and fleshy call girls — a Boterismo for the Blackpool set. Her rowdy tableaus of greasy fish and chip shops and seaside holidays distilled a particular strain of British class sensibility, equal parts deprecating and bawdy, the un-self-conscious loosening of the stiff upper lip, or what she called "ordinary people enjoying themselves."

Rude but just shy of lascivious (Jackie Collins was a fan), Cook's vinegary wit translates naturally to New York. Several paintings refer to her travels here, where she observed the crowds like a ribald de Tocqueville in America: "Bar & Barbara" (1982), zaftig matrons in swelling furs stomping by the Algonquin Hotel, is as compactly appealing as any James Thurber.

In its depiction of teeming nightlife, Cook's work channeled a cheerier version of Edward Burra's social weirdness or George Grosz's caricatures of Berliners. Her themes were adult but absent anxiety and pain, which critics dismissed as unserious, a pan which misses the point. Cook was interested in pleasure, painting it to the point of defiance. MAX LAKIN

TriBeCa

Through Dec. 17. Arsenal Contemporary, 21 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 917-262-0233, arsenalcontemporary.com/ny.

One painting shows a demure blonde in a girlish blue frock, hands clasped modestly before her. In another, a brunette in a frothy white dress, white wrap and straw hat takes a seat among daffodils. A third gives us two young women out by themselves in nature — highlands in Maine, maybe, or a hillscape on Cape Cod. Barefoot, they wear sleeveless shifts in tasteful salmon-pink and blue-gray; pink girl stares off into the distance while her companion in gray braids her hair. These paintings and nine others in the same vein by Corri-Lynn Tetz, who is based in Montreal, present the most decorous, tasteful image of girlhood you could imagine.

I find them terrifying.

In Tetz's paintings, our society's clichés of the feminine have become a bear trap waiting to grab and disable any young woman who happens upon them, as almost every young woman is bound to do.

Several of the paintings are based on figures pulled from the pages of a Laura Ashley catalog. Others look like they could be ads for the latest "prairie" styles that have recently entered (I’d say, infected) mainstream women's fashions. Their scenes are rendered in the free brushwork of the best of postwar fashion illustration, such as one rarely encounters today.

By enlarging this classic advertising style to the scale of old master statements about war and God and classical myth, Tetz turns the selling of femininity into the subject for a new kind of history painting. "The Rape of the Sabines" is hardly more chilling. BLAKE GOPNIK

Tribeca

Through Dec. 15. Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; jacquelinesullivangallery.com.

Galleries dedicated to truly artful design are rare as MAGA hats in New York City. They don't always stay open for long. So I was excited to climb to this fourth-floor gallery in TriBeCa, up past the well-known David Zwirner and James Cohan spaces, and discover the inspiring group show that inaugurates Jacqueline Sullivan's new gallery.

I found a wonderful mix of very new, old, and very old furniture and objects. Bold oak chairs, crafted in Yorkshire around 1700, are in happy conversation with a minimal wardrobe designed in 1974 by the Dutchman Juliaan Lampens, who made crude plywood read as refined. There's a fine dialogue between a flowery Arts and Crafts carpet, woven in England around 1895, and geometric blankets produced this year by Grace Atkinson, based in Paris.

But a more thoroughgoing marriage of old and new comes in a new project from Kristin Dickson-Okuda, one of several creators commissioned just for this show. Dickson-Okuda has taken an Arts and Crafts "Sussex" chair, produced by William Morris in the 1870s, and, magpie-like, added black ribbons to its sides and clear vinyl squares to its arms and even hand-knit white cozies around its legs. Her additions feel completely contemporary, but also completely respectful of the vintage objects they adorn and update.

In design, a mix of old and new often feels like a showy accumulation of treasures, ignoring what each piece once meant. Sullivan, with degrees in both poetry and design history, turns anachronism into a creative force. BLAKE GOPNIK

Through Dec 11. Amanita, 313 Bowery, Manhattan; spazioamanita.com.

Brutality and tenderness commingle in the Hungarian artist Eva Beresin's new paintings in her show "Aktenkundig (On Record)," which depict versions of herself and her family in scenes that clamor with both visual and emotional intensity. Rendered in a childlike hand and juicy palette that belies their gravity, Beresin's pictures can feel fantastical, less surreal than the way anxieties tend to fall over one another in dreams, letting the mind sort them out, or not. Beresin often depicts herself naked, tumbling through space, à la Chagall. Soldiers are as likely to intrude as garden gnomes, ghosts are given equal status with art-historical allusions. Gloopy 3D-printed sculptures of melted dogs and turtles, as though escaped from the picture plane, amplify the allegorical mood.

Beresin's current mode of figurative painting follows from discovering the diary her mother wrote after her liberation from Auschwitz. Despite that subject matter, or perhaps because of it, Beresin's canvases brim with caustic humor ("Familiarity," in which a woman surveys her aging body as cosmonauts leer from the corner), indebted to but not weighed down by the freight of memory.

Beresin works fast, applying paint to canvas on the floor without any intermediary sketching. (Tread marks from her shoes are often visible, like a faint map, revealing the traces of her movements.) Her fleshy, muddy figures are often barely legible, sometimes heaped into clots of roughly defined bodies, which suggest mass graves and other attendant horrors of the camps, an inherited trauma that reverberates. Her furious strokes read as impatience, but also freedom. MAX LAKIN

Holland Cotter, Jason Farago and Roberta Smith are staff critics.

Dawn Chan, Aruna D’Souza, Travis Diehl, Yinka Elujoba, Blake Gopnik, Will Heinrich, Max Lakin, Arthur Lubow, Siddhartha Mitter, Seph Rodney, Martha Schwendener, Jillian Steinhauer and John Vincler are contributing critics.

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