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Picasso Sculpture
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 14, 2015–Feb 7, 2016
Manet/Degas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Mark di Suvero “Nova Albion”
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 1-July 31 2010
The exhibition presents Nova Albion, 1964-1965, a monumental 24-feet high sculpture made of steel and redwood logs. Nova Albion is named after the white cliffs of northern California that were seen by Captain Francis Drake on June 17, 1579. The California beaches Drake explored are the same ones where di Suvero built this piece using found drift wood logs. In the title, Nova refers to a star that suddenly becomes a thousand times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity, and Albion refers to the earliest known name for England.
-Paula Cooper Gallery
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.
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