Month: January 2025

Jane Rosen: New Studies

January 30, 2025

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, January 30 to March 8 2025

At Sears-Peyton Gallery (Jan 30–Mar 8, 2025), New Studies distilled Jane Rosen’s lifelong attention to animal presence into spare, lucid objects and drawings. The show paired hand-blown, pigmented-glass “birds” poised on limestone or travertine plinths with sheets of Korean watercolor and gouache. Works that read like field notes pared to essentials. The figures sit in dialogue with their stone bases; on the walls, feathered marks and negative space do the same work at paper scale. The installation made her method plain: subtract until the living line remains.

Born in New York City in 1950, Jane Rosen worked across sculpture and drawing, often marrying blown glass to found or carved stone to consider animal intelligence and our ties to the natural world. After early decades in the New York scene, she relocated to the California coast, teaching widely (including SVA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) while developing the avian forms that became her signature. Rosen died on April 18, 2025, in Northern California.

Contemporary Art, Painting

Livien Yin: Thirsty

January 17, 2025

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.

https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/

Uncategorized

Estaban Jefferson

January 16, 2025

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.

Uncategorized

Marc Dennis: I’m Happy You’re Here

January 9, 2025

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

Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Carl Andre

January 9, 2025

January 9 to February 8, 2025 Paula Cooper Gallery NY, NY

Paula Cooper’s winter presentation of Carl Andre stretched across the gallery’s three West 21st Street spaces, quietly marking a year since the artist’s death and reminding New York how much of our sculptural eyesight he trained. The installation moved with Andre’s usual economy: materials set down, not fussed over; form arising from count and contact.

At 534, three monumental works established the terms. Breda (1986) laid out Belgian blue limestone blocks with the finality of civic paving, while Rise (2011) bent steel plates out from the wall to create a shallow enclosure, half alcove, half barricade. Ferox (1982) pushed hot-rolled steel from a corner in a triangular advance, a reminder that “floor piece” in Andre’s hands can feel like a verb.

The show widened the frame beyond metal and stone. Early collages and Negative Sculpture (1958) in acrylic foregrounded a pre-industrial hand, while typed poems (including gifts to filmmaker Hollis Frampton) made the parallel argument: words, too, can be stacked, aligned, and allowed to simply sit. Across all three sites, the curatorial through-line was generous: matter is enough, if you let it speak

Andre’s art doesn’t explain; it arranges. You carry out the rest, the angle of approach, the pace, the weight. After a circuit through stone, steel, brick, wood, and type, the take-away was almost architectural: planes and modules compose an experience.