Contemporary Art, Sculpture, textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

Marianne Boesky, New York, May 1 to June 14, 2025

Ghada Amer’s exhibition Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, presented in spring 2025, offered a lucid and forceful summation of her long-standing project: to unsettle the hierarchies that separate abstraction from figuration, craft from high modernism, and private desire from public form. Installed across the gallery’s West 24th Street space, the show combined large-scale embroidered paintings with a suite of compact sculptures.

The paintings announce Amer’s method through contradiction. From a distance, several canvases read as exercises in modernist discipline, such as grids, nested squares, vertical bands. These recall canonical figures such as Mondrian or Albers. Up close, however, these structures are disrupted by cascades of hand-embroidered thread that slip, knot, and pool across the surface. The thread, often attached with gel medium, refuses the crisp authority of paint. It sags and tangles, asserting gravity and the unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Amer’s signature strategy, overlaying abstract order with unruly materiality, here feels less oppositional than accumulative.

Two monumental square works, each roughly eight feet across and collectively titled My Homage to the Square, operate as the exhibition’s conceptual anchors. Their concentric geometries nod explicitly to Josef Albers, yet Amer’s surfaces don’t try for optical stability. Threads in saturated reds, blues, greens, and blacks drift across the squares, partially veiling the underlying structure and collapsing figure and ground.

Elsewhere, large vertical and horizontal canvases, such as The Grid of 2025 and The Ladies of Giverny, extend this logic. Here, the grid becomes a field of tension rather than control, its lines softened and destabilized by embroidered flows that recall both textile traditions and the ornamental excess — normally excluded from modernist taste. In the expansive Les Grands Nymphéas, Amer pushes this sensibility toward near-total: dense skeins of color accumulate into a surface with elements of painting, drawing, and textile relief.

The exhibition’s sculptural component, grouped under the title Thoughts, provides a crucial counterpoint. Small, biomorphic forms, modeled, in some cases, with Amer’s non-dominant hand, sit on plinths or shelves, their rough textures and compact scale encouraging intimate viewing. Cast in bronze or steel and occasionally paired with vividly colored bases, these objects read as three-dimensional equivalents of the paintings’ tangled lines. They are anti-monumental: portable, provisional, and suggestive. In the context of the gallery, they slow the viewer down, offering moments of concentration amid the visual abundance of the wall works.

What distinguishes Disobedient Thoughts from earlier presentations of Amer’s work is its tonal confidence.  In Chelsea, a context still closely associated with market-driven spectacle and stylistic branding, Amer’s show stood out for its refusal of easy legibility. Disobedient Thoughts asked viewers to linger with surfaces that are seductive and unruly. It was an exhibition that reaffirmed Amer’s position not only as a critical voice within feminist art discourse, but as a sustained and serious interlocutor of abstraction itself.

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Ceramics, Sculpture

A Hidden Oasis in the Bronx

Tucked away on the ground floor of the Walsh Family Library at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art is one of New York City’s best-kept secrets. For anyone in the Bronx, it offers a startlingly intimate encounter with the ancient world, particularly the enigmatic Etruscan civilization that predated and influenced the rise of Rome.

Roman bust carved in marble
Fordham's Museum of Etruscan Art
etruscan vase at Fordham
An Etruscan Mosaic

The museum’s location (literally inside a library) creates a quiet atmosphere. Unlike the sprawling halls of the Met, where you might feel like one of many thousands, here you are often the only person in the room with artifacts that are 2,500 years old. Windows look out onto the campus, grounding the ancient objects in a modern academic setting.

Etruscan Highlights

While the collection spans the Mediterranean, its Etruscan holdings are particularly evocative of a culture that blended elegance with a deep focus on the afterlife and ritual.

  • Bucchero Ware: The collection’s standout is its array of Bucchero pottery. This is the signature “black-on-black” ceramic of the Etruscans, designed to mimic more expensive hammered metal. The deep, lustrous black finish and sharp, angular shapes provide a striking contrast to the more common red-and-black figure Greek vases nearby.
  • Votive Offerings: You’ll find a fascinating collection of terracotta votive heads and feet. These were left at temples as “thank you” notes or prayers for healing. They are surprisingly human and individualistic, offering a direct emotional link to the people from the Italian peninsula long before the Caesars.
  • The Burial Amphora: A centerpiece of the renovated gallery is a large Etruscan Amphora (ca. 650 B.C.E.). It serves as a focal point for understanding Etruscan burial ceremonies, surrounded by smaller implements like bronze spearheads and cosmetic applicators.
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Contemporary Art, Painting

Georg Baselitz: “The Painter in his Bed”

Gagosian, New York, November 9–December 22, 2023

Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a bed with stockings from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, stags from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Gagosian Gallery opening for Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern, 1938) is a German painter and sculptor, commonly known for painting his subjects upside down. He took this approach as a pivot in his career in 1969, with a show of inverted portraits that soon became his signature gesture.

This exhibit is series of neo-expressionist paintings, paired subjects of figures in a bed and inverted deer stags.

The compelling works featured in The Painter in His Bed focus on two motifs: figures in bed and the stag. Defining human and animal anatomy with raw expression, Baselitz negotiates apperception of these subjects through his distinctive painterly approach. Vigorously applying layers of paint, he affixes stretched nylon stockings and sheets of gauze across the upper parts of the paintings or makes monoprinted impressions of their shapes. With these additions, Baselitz extends the innovation of Springtime, his 2021 exhibition in the same space in New York. Dedicated to the spirited provocations of Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dadaists, the works in Springtime draw upon these artists’ irreverent introduction of everyday materials into the realm of art. Whereas many of the Springtime paintings are exuberantly colored, the new works are dominated by elemental contrasts of black and white.

Gagosian Gallery
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