Back in New York after Labor Day and we are ready for the fall season of exhibitions by artists like Zoe Buckman, Wendell Castle, and Josiah McElheny.
Josiah McElheny: Observations at Night
James Cohan
September 6—October 19
Inaugurating James Cohan’s new Tribeca flagship is an environment of painting sculpture, and architectural installation by Josiah McElheny, entitled “Observations at Night.” Exploring the poetic nature and political hope of nighttime, the exhibition is centered around Moon Mirror, a large-scale sculpture that is responsive to sound and light, composed of custom-made prismatic glass. The show also features works like the artist’s new abstract painting series “Observations” and Three Twilight Labyrinths—an architectural installation built to display a triptych of paintings, suggesting the ways reality shifts as night falls.
Josiah McElheny
Moon Mirror
2019
Pressed colored prismatic glass, stainless steel, hardware
103 x 191 1/2 x 71 in
© Josiah McElheny 2019
Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Roy DeCarava
David Zwirner
Now—October 29
David Zwirner is showing two coinciding exhibitions of the late artist Roy DeCarava at its New York locations on East 69th Street and West 19th Street. At the Chelsea gallery, “Light Break” covers a variety of material emphasizing the artist’s mastery of tonal and spatial elements, like pieces focusing on the figural implications of smoke and debris. And uptown on East 69th Street is a presentation entitled “the sound i saw,” which features DeCarava’s decades-long exploration between the aural and the visual, based on the artist’s self-made book from 1960, which has never before been shown in its original form. The exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by art historian, Sherry Turner DeCarava.
Zoë Buckman: Heavy Rag
Fort Gansevoort
September 6—October 12
In Zoë Buckman’s exhibition “Heavy Rag,” the artist calls on deeply personal experiences to manifest her relationship to the physical spaces of the home, the boxing gym, and her mother’s kitchen table. Driven by her mother’s terminal diagnosis, the artist began working with a variety of domestic objects, as well as techniques and materials traditionally employed by women—like embroidered tea towels, quilting, and pottery—in order to reveal a complicated dichotomy of trauma and pleasure, while paying homage to the collective memory of shared experience. Filling three floors Fort Gansevoort’s gallery spaces, Buckman’s exhibition includes the artist’s iconic clusters of boxing gloves, this time covered in vintage floral fabrics, and embroidered works bearing hints of almost-removed stains and phrases like “For this you need thick bleach and euphemisms.”
Roy DeCarava
Couple walking, Park Avenue
1960
©2019 Estate of Roy DeCarava. All rights reserved.
Courtesy of David Zwirner.
Pierre Soulages: A Century
Lévy Gorvy
Now—October 26
Celebrating Pierre Soulages’ 100th birthday, the exhibition at Lévy Gorvy presents a survey of the French artist’s work spanning from the 1950s to the present day, which fills the entirety of the gallery’s three floors on Madison avenue. Focusing on Soulages’ role in creating a dialogue between American and European painting, the survey encourages viewers to consider the influence of the artist’s practice, which infused a profound sense of poetry into his radically abstract works, created using one central material: black paint. Featuring works like seminal paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, and his Outrenoir (beyond black) series, the exhibition at Lévy Gorvy also predates the upcoming “Homage to Soulages,” due to open at the Musée du Louvre in December.
Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary
Friedman Benda
Now—October 12
Paying tribute to one of America’s most iconic names in design, Wendell Castle, Friedman Benda’s exhibition “A New Vocabulary” highlights Castle’s extensive design career and innovative practice, in which the designer developed an entirely new sculptural vocabulary and way of looking at furniture making. In the presentation, a selection of Castle’s early, rare, and formative works are on display, along with key creations from the last decade, highlighting Castle’s unparalleled practice in creations like Environment for Contemplation (which is one of the most important examples of the designer’s famous stack lamination technique) and other wooden furniture pieces like Harmonious Opportunities and Wide Awake.
Pierre Soulages
Peinture 125 x 202cm, 30 octobre 1958
1958
Oil on canvas
49 3/16 x 79 1/2 inches
Distinguished Private Collection
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photo by
Tim Nighswander for IMAGING4ART.
