Don’t Miss These Top New York Exhibitions
If you find yourself in New York City for The Armory Show and other fairs happening this week, be sure to spare time in your schedule for visiting exhibitions at these top galleries and institutions throughout the city.
“Mire Lee: Black Sun,” 2023, exhibition view at New Museum, New York, photo by Dario Lasagni, courtesy of New Museum.
Top New York Exhibitions at The New Museum
Mire Lee and Pepón Osorio
June 29—September 17
Concurrently on view at the New Museum, visitors will find the most comprehensive showcase to date of work by Pepón Osorio and the first American solo exhibition of the South Korean artist Mire Lee. Osario’s survey “My Beating Heart / Mi Corazón latiente” shines a spotlight on 30 years of the artist’s elaborate multimedia installations exploring race, gender, social justice, and identity. The detailed installations, often eerily reminiscent of everyday scenarios like classrooms or domestic dwellings, include those like the 1993 Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) and reForm (2014-2017), as well as the artist’s six-foot-tall anatomical crepe paper heart, which is complete with a recording of his own heartbeat.
Meanwhile, Lee’s “Black Sun,” named for Julia Kristeva’s 1987 study of depression and melancholia, imbues a sort of dystopian discomfort while considering qualities involved in interactions between the technological and corporeal, like tenderness, desire, revulsion, and anxiety. Taking place in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery, the show introduces a site-specific landscape filled with architectural forms and animatronic sculptures, made from mechanical systems and materials like grease-filled PVC hoses, silicone, clay slip, and oil.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Rain Splashed Painted Life,” 2022, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London.
David Zwirner New York Presents Exhibition of Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans: “Fold Me”
September 7—October 14
In “Fold Me,” Wolfgang Tillmans debuts an all-new body of work captured directly from eye to paper in a process of analog-digital photography that forgoes editing and manipulation, thus allowing an aspect of chance to come into play. Considering a fold to be an encounter of inside and out that leaves a physical impression, the concept is one long investigated by Tillmans. On view at David Zwirner’s 525 and 533 West 19th Street galleries is a strong focus on inanimate objects and poetic still lifes that center commonplace items—like a collection of disposable plastic pieces titled Watering—juxtaposed by a suite of new portraits that include figures like two Iranian artists and a Crimean Tatar refugee captured in Toronto.
Kaari Upson, “Mother’s Legs,” 2019, Installation view, Upheaval, Kunsthalle Mannheim, July 17–October 18, 2020, © The Art Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust.
What to See at Sprüth Magers
Kaari Upson: “Body as Landscape”
September 9—October 21
In “Body as Landscape,” Kaari Upson’s concern with the human form and its appendages, interactions, and the psyche that controls it is of utmost importance in the conceptual narrative of the presentation. Working at a unique crossroads of abstraction, drawing, figuration, and installation, viewers will find two works first commanding their attention in the galleries at Sprüth Magers: the 2020 room-sized eleven, which is the first U.S. presentation from the artist’s “Mothers Leg” series (a sequence of suspended tree limbs made from combinations of casts of real trees and the artist’s knees), and the artist’s largest drawing to date, Untitled, which presents as a kind of hand-drawn collage of layers, comprised of intense layers of textual phrases, gestural markings, and bodily presences. Also included is a selection of smaller drawings featuring Upson’s favored characters, like the semi-fictional Larry, his idol Hugh Hefner, and Angelina Jolie, among others.
Zoe Buckman, “dark morning of a day,” courtesy of the artist and Lyles & King.
Don’t Miss This Exhibition at Lyles & King
Zoë Buckman: “TENDED”
September 5—October 14
Zoë Buckman‘s debut solo exhibition at Lyles & King, “TENDED,” engages viewers through powerful juxtapositions of softness, beauty, outrage, and pain. At the forefront of the show are themes like terminal illness, grief, reproductive rights, and gendered violence, pulling from the artist’s own experiences and those of her community. Buckman poignantly conveys this in her signature merging of textiles, text, and other mediums like painting, sculpting, and appliqués. Her narrative of strength amid or in spite of life’s hardest moments begets a certain tenderness, taking the form of textile vignettes of effeminate figures, which the artist has sourced from her own collection of images taken during periods of isolation in the pandemic.
Buckman’s intensely expressive figures are often embroidered with strands of thread left hanging or surrounded by flowers and verbiage the artist has collected in a practice of journaling thoughts and interactions—including fragmented thoughts and phrases like, “I considered the fact I might not make it” and “It was a blueprint or a red flag or some other metaphor involving a color.”
Kostas Lambridis, “Mix Them Together,” courtesy of the artist and Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
Best Exhibitions In New York: Carpenters Workshop Gallery
Kostas Lambridis: “Reverse Fireworks in Slow Motion“
September 8—November 23
Carpenters Workshop Gallery introduces the U.S. solo debut of Kostas Lambridis in his New York exhibition “Reverse Fireworks in Slow Motion.” Described by the artist as a departure from familiarity, Lambridis’s newest works have elected to return to basics by focusing on one material at a time, a tactic that allowed for a new kind of complexity. On view are nine new pieces existing at a crossroads between object and furniture, their highly-detailed surfaces and intricate nooks and crannies made from various textures and variations of wood, metal, mineral, and plastic—like a coffee table of various rocks, stones, and mineral slabs, or a stool featuring patched-together wood finishes and textures ranging from wicker backing and ornamental carving to smooth squares of maple and raw sections of tree trunk. The show’s title comes from the artist’s slow-moving, intuitive, methodical approach, which he has likened to the experience of “capturing the spectacle of fireworks in reverse slow motion.”
