Category: Contemporary Art

Ceramics, Contemporary Art, Uncategorized

Tammie Rubin: Points of Origin

C24 Gallery, New York, New York, January 11 – 8 March 2024

From C24’s Exhibition Description:

Rubin’s conical sculptures reference hoods, headdresses, and helmets, and manifest power, awe, anonymity, horror, and magical thinking. The sculptures have a wide range of references from Catholic capirote hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods, and West African & Aboriginal headdresses, to dunce caps and medieval helmets. Suspended somewhere between familiarity and uncertainty, these sculptures capture the duality that is at the heart of Black life in the United States.

-C24 Gallery
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Contemporary Art, Painting

Gary Hume

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023

These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.


The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.

The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.

Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

John Hoyland: “Thresholds, Paintings 1965-1970”

Hales Gallery, New York, 1 December 2023 – 20 January 2024

A post-war abstract painter, Hoyland explored from London a parallel course to his contemporary New York painters in the abstract expressionist movement. This show at Hales Gallery highlights his investigation in acrylics, with layering, staining and other inventive mark-making.

From the Hales exhibition:
Hoyland (b.1934 Sheffield, UK – d.2011 London, UK) was one of the most inventive and dynamic abstract painters of the post-war period. Over the span of more than a half-century his art and attitudes constantly evolved. A distinctive artistic personality emerged, concerned with color, painterly drama, with both excess and control, with grandeur and above all, with the vehement communication of feeling.  

-Hales exhibition catalogue
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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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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things

Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023

A sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid

Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:

“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”

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