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art reviews from around new york

You have seen it all by now, which is what makes it abstraction. Allow me a tour of some of its most creative and sometimes infuriating productions, with abstract art in Tribeca.

The up side is that it can push the artist to rethink the very nature of the image. Coming to Iva Gueorguieva, at Derek Eller through July 11, you could have no clue what you are seeing. These are more or less medium-sized paintings, but with a lot going on. Is this formalism? Not exactly, but the more the artist works the surface the more it returns to the painting’s center in the human image.

Gueorguieva layers on the canvas, with nearly white, wide-open fields that unify the whole. They serve, though, as a packed receptacle for brushwork as drawing. It dares you to decide whether the detail lands above or below. At first glance, the broader fields flatten the canvas and bring it closer to abstraction. Over time, though, they give a sense of a human or inhuman body. As paint it looks well grounded, but as image it can fly.

The gallery speculates that the figure is the archangel Gabriel, and once representation takes visible shape it is hard to make it disappear. Is there a story here? Maybe one about the art scene now that Postmodernism has given way to something less skeptical. Artists all over are turning to modernist tropes for their energy even if they seem more than a little old. Sarah Blaustein returns to the concentric swirls and spring colors of Post-Impressionism and early Modernism itself, recently at Hesse Flatow through June 7. You might be a trifle embarrassed to feel it in motion.

Robert Janitz relishes his place in the art world, even if you had hardly noticed him. Born in Germany, based in Mexico, and on view in Tribeca, he is proud of it. His latest work, “1001 Nights [ + 1 ],” claims the power of a mythmaker with its very title—and, with the bracketed subtitle, the power to one-up Islamic myth, at Canada through July 11. He sees himself as competing with the “swirling atmosphere” of New York. Never mind that most artists I know have resigned themselves to be pretty much out of the competition and faithful to their art. Janitz would call that surrender.

His gallery did as much as any to nurture artists between abstraction and portraiture like Katherine Bernhardt, Katherine Bradford, and Lily Ludlow, and Janitz hopes he has the formula. He lays down simplified bust-length portraits against a vaguely blank, vaguely patterned field as studies in brushwork itself. Then he packs what should be the face with broad, busy brushstrokes. They can roughly take the course of facial features or, in other paintings, take off on their own. Both sets of work serve simultaneously as marks of erasure and of three-dimensional space. An admixture of flour, oil, and wax keeps the colors mute and the faces in your face.

They leave me seriously unconvinced, but they only affirm how much painting still matters. Stick to abstraction or imagery and find yourself stuck with both. Or stop with abstraction as a metaphor—or a metaphor as abstraction. A map is an old metaphor for art indeed, and Lena Henke maps Manhattan as “The City Transformed,” at Bortolami annex through June 21. It looks ever so handmade, like a relic, as a nostalgic tribute to the city. So what if you cannot pin down just what about New York Henke is mapping, least of all its art?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

For a time now, artists have been turning to weaving for the craft of the ancients and the latest thing in painting. An unknown quantity has become all but a formula, a cruel observer might complain, and a tribute to “women’s work” and a diversity of cultures has become just one style among many. You might as well delegate it to AI, the voice of authority continues, along with everything else.

Really? I am not convinced, but Jovencio de la Paz already has, and the results could have you rethinking old and new. It might also have you wondering just who these days is delegating what to whom.

Computer models can now turn out a text or an image in the style of anyone you like. Indeed, it has no choice, since a program cannot act without instructions, and there is no telling a machine just to make something great. Who gets to define great? And if the instructions call for something original, can it still claim originality? I argued for a similar “postmodern paradox” in starting this Web site, and it helped me rediscover Modernism and art history. Now AI could be the ultimate postmodern.

de la Paz makes a point of recovering the past, but as a collaboration with an uncertain future, at P.P.O.W. through June 21. This comes to Tribeca from not just any textile maker, but a Jacquard loom—or rather a digital Jacquard loom, if you can imagine that. But then a loom required instructions long ago, and automation had a cost in lives and livelihoods from the first. Yet it could adapt to shifting instructions, too, like those of an artist. It also produced practicality and beauty. It is, says the artist, “El Lugar de los Milagros” (or “The Place of Miracles”).

The show’s title is not just a lie. Up close, threads pop right out of the background. Step back, and the shimmer belongs to something like Op Art, as black verticals come closer to or farther from each other. The artist works in series, including grids and flattened circles, bringing the work that much closer to late Modernism. More often than not, the coarse weave leaves plenty of fabric unused. introduces the equivalent of unpainted canvas. It also breaks the symmetry.

Who, then, broke the symmetry? The artist has a shifting identity even apart from AI. Born in Singapore, de la Paz lives and works in Oregon. If the name sounds Mexican(and peaceable), the show’s title quotes a site in Oaxaca. Oh, and he or she prefers they. I cannot swear that this is LGBT+ art, but it has many loves and many collaborators.

The show overlaps Marina Rheingantz at Bortolami, a Brazilian who produces art of the Americas and a shifting, shimmering weave of paint alone. She works large, laying a fluid background of soft colors before overlays of scattered paint. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and color-field painting loom over everything. Once again, what was past is new. AI and a loom can compete with this, but who gets to say so? AI may yet take a miracle.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The Queens Museum does not “do” nostalgia, at least not willingly or well. It is too busy making up for its past, with artists from the Dominican community in Corona and the greater diversity of Queens. Besides, it hardly has to. Those of a certain age will remember the building as the New York City pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair all the same—with the Unisphere, still the symbol of “Peace Through Understanding,” out front.

Ready for more of a decade long on nostalgia and, simultaneously, hopes for the future? I look next time at “Pirouette,” a show of modern design at MoMA, as part of a longer review and my latest upload, but for today the course of the World’s Fair. The elevated platforms of the former New York State pavilion still rise close by. So what if now, after sixty years, an exhibition honors the World’s Fair as “A Billion Dollar Dream,” through July 13? The fair was a titanic undertaking, marred by corruptions, with a cost to the city of at least $60 million. It was the dream of a lifetime for many, but just whom?

The museum is overdue to build an audience, and this could have been the occasion. For opening day, it served Belgian waffles, an attraction of the fair, to all comers. Yet it is still the same low-budget operation struggling for relevance, and it cannot shake off its ambivalence. It serves up neither a celebration nor a critique. It bows to both as best it can, but with a long way to go. For now, too little is left after the waffles have gone.

Those too young to remember the fair can enjoy a model city as if it were made just for them—a literal model city, the fair’s scale model of New York. As you search for your block in a half-darkened room, you can feel yourself a part of a more optimistic era. Everyone belongs, it says, but not everyone gets the message. Charisse Pearlina Weston used her 2023 exhibit at the museum to decry the fair as an indulgence, taking over the park from its neighbors. One can feel their isolation, crossing to the museum over an eight-lane highway. One can feel it, too, in an art museum that never has caught on or in the park in winter, all but deserted apart from a brave jogger or two.

Can it recreate the wonder that a child like me once felt? It has maps of almost the entire park, in two and three dimensions, but then there is nowhere to go. Photos show the entrance to an elevated rail snaking through the fair’s density of pavilions to the tune of “It’s a Small World After All.” Here there is only silence. If pavilions for emerging nations stressed local cultures or their entrance to the world stage, one would never know it. The sole local costumes are uniforms for the fair’s admissions counter.

It asks to place the fair in its time, but only so far. It was automobile friendly, like Robert Moses, the ruthless urban planner who also organized the fair (a curious omission for the museum), and each of the leading auto makers had a pavilion. So did the ugly temptations of consumer culture and “The American Interior”? Will the show have room for at least a sample of Formica, if not an entire kitchen? Do not get your hopes up. A photo pictures laborers at work, including women, but surely someone had to build all this, and the Fair Pay Act of 1963 did not single out New York.

One can sympathize with the show’s ambivalence. The times had all the optimism of a new international order, but all the fears of the Cold War that no amount of show business could dispel. The fair brought with it the hopes of the civil-rights movement, but also protests from the Congress of Racial Equality. The 1939 World’s Fair was about the arrival of modernity. That brutal eight-lane highway connecting the city’s roads and bridges fell into place just in time. The 1964 World’s Fair was about what happens when modernity becomes the norm.

The passage from industrial waste to a park had foundered before. Flushing Meadow was still what F. Scott Fitzgerald called a valley of Ashes” and Robert Caro, in his biography of Moses, “foothills of filth,” but change was on its way. Not everyone could afford a car, but the fair fostered them—and automobile culture still rules in the city’s white outer-borough neighborhoods. The fair itself attracted far more than wealth as well, like my father and me. A year later, a ticket to the Beatles at nearby Shea Stadium cost just was $5.50. I only wish I could have gone.

The fair even had a place for art. Michelangelo’s Pietá came all the way from Rome to the Vatican pavilion, although the museum does not deign to mention it . Art is itself about felt experience, not amateur sociology. Maybe a little more such experience could at last put inequality on America’s agenda and the museum on a New Yorker’s map. The two world’s fairs were twenty-five years apart, and none has come since. There is a whole world left to bring alive.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.