303 Gallery, New York, New York
January 16, 2025

At 303 Gallery (Jan 16, 2025), Esteban Jefferson turns everyday barricades into allegories. Hyper-detailed nodes (a rusted lock, a stickered sign) anchor the eye while the rest dissolves into washes and graphite, a push–pull between documentary clarity and withheld context.

Jefferson’s project sits at the crossroads of portraiture and institutional critique: he “portraits” objects that enforce space. By isolating these controls and muting their surroundings, he makes their power audible. The works read urban and specific—New York scaffolds, museum stanchions, bureaucratic typography—but they land as larger questions about property, memory, and the aesthetics of authority.

Background: Jefferson is a New York–based painter known for a selective realism.His breakout bodies of work examined how cultural institutions frame objects and people; since then, he’s extended that lens to the city itself. The result here is crisp and quietly accusatory: pictures that look like fences and behave like mirrors.

Harper’s Chelsea, New York, NY

January 9 to March 1 2025

Marc Dennis’s first solo with the gallery recasts Dutch Golden Age vanitas for the contemporary era: hyperreal still lifes where bees and iridescent bubbles orbit lush bouquets and glossed fruit. The works explore nature and tech (those glassy orbs read like man-made “ingenuity”), while round canvases such as A Simple Relationship turn the genre into little planets, studded with frogs, carnivorous plants, and celestial symbols. The paint handling is indulgent, as the palette goes full technicolor. But the mood is memento mori: beauty, briefly at its peak, already slipping. You don’t just see the shine, you feel the countdown

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York
October 24 to December 14, 2024

At Paula Cooper’s 534 W 21st Street space, Cecily Brown staged a lush, headlong conversation with art history under the banner The 5 Senses. The show gathered new canvases and works on paper that riff on the 17th-century allegorical suite by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Brown’s figures and fragments flickering in and out of legibility as if a sense organ failing, then flaring back to life. You read the paintings like a crowded room: perfume, music, flesh, fruit, and fur all press forward at once.

Brown didn’t treat “the five” as a checklist so much as a mood: sensation as excess, desire as a kind of weather. On paper, the motifs loosen, bouquets and bodies dissolving into reds and smoky grays, while the larger oils stack glances, touches, and tastes into a single field. The result is decadent but unsentimental, a reminder that pleasure and ruin are neighbors in her vocabulary.