\n<\/p>\n
This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Jutta Koether\u2019s moody expressionist paintings, Ina Archer\u2019s \u201cBlack Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show\u201d and Susan Weil \u2018s pastel \u201cSpray Drawings.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Upper East Side<\/p>\n Through July 27. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan; 212-328-7885<\/a>, galeriebuchholz.de<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat do you want,\u201d Jutta Koether wrote in 1984 about the band the Cramps<\/a> on the occasion of its raucous, triumphant debut in Paris, \u201csex, fun, hysteria, a racket from battered amplifiers and abused guitars, sweaty bodies, dirt, sleazy chords and the feeling that a garage is still the best place for music?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Koether\u2019s writings, which appeared in the German pop-culture magazine SPEX in the 1980s, are famous for her smart, tough takes on art and music. If you were not fortunate enough to get your hands on a copy of the original print editions, in German, you\u2019ll have the chance in \u201cJutta Koether: 1982, 1983, 1984<\/a>\u201d at Galerie Buchholz. The exhibition includes a binder of her writings, translated into English, as well as her earliest, dark expressionist paintings.<\/p>\n The paintings and writings are of a piece. \u201cAnnouncing the marriage of existentialist black shades with the spiked leather collar of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll,\u201d she wrote in 1984. \u201cTo celebrate, Sonic Youth has released a new EP.\u201d The canvases have a similar spiked, existentialist swagger. The palettes are moody and the surfaces are stubbly. Some works here are abstract, others feature gaunt, alien faces, surrealistic shapes or a pair of limbs wrapped for battle, which turns out to be a female boxer.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s also a sense of nostalgia. The bands written about are gone, and many of the performers, like Nico and Lou Reed, are no longer with us. Similarly, Koether\u2019s paintings feel very much from another time, which could be the 1910s or the 1920s \u2014 the original era of disaffected German expressionism \u2014 or the gritty 1980s. Nonetheless, battered amplifiers, sleazy chords and a garage to play them in are still great models for music, and art.<\/p>\n Chelsea<\/p>\n Through July 27. Microscope Gallery, 525 West 29th Street, Manhattan; 347-925-1433<\/a>, microscopegallery.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTo Deceive the Eye<\/a>,\u201d a show by the experimental filmmaker and artist Ina Archer, hinges around a 1933 Bing Crosby film, \u201cToo Much Harmony<\/a>,\u201d that features a song titled \u201cBlack Moonlight.\u201d In that musical number, white chorus girls morph into Black performers through the use of special effects \u2014 a kind of technological blackface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Archer\u2019s 2024 video installation, \u201cBlack Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show,\u201d includes footage from \u201cToo Much Harmony\u201d and other minstrel performances. The images are arranged with clips from James Baldwin\u2019s famous 1965 debate with William F. Buckley Jr. about the American dream. Additionally, the walls are lined with Archer\u2019s watercolors of dolls and figurines, some racially charged, and a short 16-millimeter film, \u201cTrompe l\u2019oeil: Black Leader\u201d (2023), that features color charts and mannequin heads that allude to the difficulty of capturing dark skin on celluloid film.<\/p>\n Other Black artists, like Adrian Piper and Arthur Jafa, have made works extracted from Hollywood archives. What Archer brings is a canny sense of the bewitching potential of celluloid. Manipulating the archive into an art object, she seduces you into watching \u2014 and staring at \u2014 the appalling ways racism has manifested in cinema.<\/p>\n Tribeca<\/p>\n Through July 26. JDJ, 370 Broadway, Manhattan; 212-220-0611, jdj.world<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Susan Weil is lodged firmly in art history, but in an auxiliary way. After attending the famed Black Mountain art school in North Carolina in the 1940s, she married Robert Rauschenberg and the two made a series, \u201cBlueprints<\/a>\u201d (1949-1951), by capturing human bodies on light-sensitive paper. The body-silhouette idea has been explored by many artists, including David Hammons and Keltie Ferris, but Weil remains a lesser-known figure. Now 94 years old, she is still painting and writing poetry, and you can see 50 years of her work at JDJ in Lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those works, from 1969 to 2023, show a consistently clever approach to representing the body in two dimensions. A selection of pastel \u201cSpray Drawings\u201d from the early 1970s looks at first like geometric abstractions, until you realize that you\u2019re seeing the outlines of arms and legs and torsos. \u201cWalking Figure\u201d (1968), made with spray paint on plexiglass, revamps the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge<\/a>\u2019s \u201chuman locomotion\u201d experiments. Other works approach landscapes in a wildly inventive way, like \u201cSoft Landscape\u201d (1972), with its horizontal bands of earth and sky painted on canvas that has been draped from the wall like a jacket hung on a peg.<\/p>\n Recent works use opalescent or iridescent interference paint that causes the image to shift when viewed from different angles. Here, Weil tracks phases of the moon or the trajectory of the sun. Throughout, the common thread is a gentle, playful way of observing bodies, planets and the act of art making.<\/p>\n Gramercy Park<\/p>\n Through July 3. Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, Manhattan; 212-439-8700, goethe.de\/ins\/us\/en\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi<\/a> was born in Tehran 17 years before the 1979 Iranian Revolution that brought an oppressive Islamist government to power. She studied painting and stayed in her home country until 1990, when she sought political asylum in Germany, where she still lives.<\/p>\n This history informs Shahroudi\u2019s art, on view for the first time in the United States in the exhibition \u201cOf Weeping Trees<\/a>\u201d \u2014 but in a nuanced way. It\u2019s useful to know the symbolism of the green and red she uses (colors on the Iranian flag), but that doesn\u2019t offer a simple key to Shahroudi\u2019s world. She comes at politics through poetry, with sculptures, paintings and videos that are far more evocative than didactic. Some of the work has a dark edge \u2014 for instance, \u201cNet\u201d (2021\u201324), which is woven from artificial hair and looks like a cage, especially with chains weighing it down. But other pieces are more playful, their meaning more slippery. \u201cFfoossiillllllll\u201d (2024), with its droopy appendages dangling on a pole, could be a creature or a tree, alive or dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shahroudi is interested in repetition, as evidenced by her use of language: Words in German, Farsi and English appear throughout, from the automatic writing on the institute\u2019s street-facing window to conceptual videos featuring recurring actions and images. Sometimes the text is absurdist, gesturing toward meaningless; other times it\u2019s a powerful incantation. The show\u2019s installation is a bit crowded, but that may be fitting. It feels like Shahroudi is continually staging and iterating a set of questions. JILLIAN STEINHAUER<\/em><\/p>\n Chelsea<\/p>\n Through June 29. Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-243-0200; matthewmarks.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Charles Ray is very good at white. He\u2019s also good at silver, gray, variations of scale, excess and precision. But the three sculptures in this unfathomably elegant show \u2014 a 24-inch crashed car made of cut Japanese paper, a blurry nine-foot-tall, cast-paper-pulp woman, and two naked marble men lying on a slab \u2014 are all bright, bleachy white.<\/p>\n Whiteness of this kind offers all sorts of classical and scientific connotations for Ray to leverage and distort. And the pieces certainly have the undercurrent of horror that Herman Melville diagnosed in the \u201cWhiteness of the Whale\u201d chapter of \u201cMoby-Dick,\u201d<\/em> in part because in a white-cube gallery they mess with your sense of where the walls are. But mainly what struck me about them was how many subtleties of light and texture they let me see, particularly on \u201cTwo dead guys.\u201d<\/p>\n The surfaces of these two supine, naked, machined, slightly larger-than-life men have been sanded but not polished. Fine gray impurities floating just under the surface become freckles or veins, and if you lean in close, you can sometimes see fingerprint-like grooves. The men\u2019s faintly protruding nipples, catching the light differently than their smooth chests, were only just discernible. And as I crouched down to examine the sole of one foot, I discovered a minuscule bright red dot. Before I could notify the attendant, the dot began to move: It was a spider that must have fallen from someone\u2019s jacket or crawled up from the floor. I wouldn\u2019t have noticed it anywhere else. WILL HEINRICH<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n NoHo<\/p>\n Through June 29. Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 646-998-3727; ericfirestonegallery.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Naked women lounge across cotton feed sacks mounted on stretcher bars in \u201cNo Man\u2019s Land,\u201d the self-taught painter Lauren dela Roche\u2019s debut show with the Eric Firestone Gallery. Their heads all have the same dark hair and fine features, as if copied from the cover of a single Victorian calendar, and are two or three sizes too small for their statuesque bodies. An unbroken vista of fountains, butterflies, flowers, shallow tunnels and swans with chili-pepper beaks extends behind them.<\/p>\n Apart from their stockings and socks and the circles of red on their cheeks, the women are left the unpainted color of the sacks, which ranges from nearly white to cream of wheat, sometimes in a single figure. Occasionally one of the women wears an old brand name or farmer\u2019s name like a tattoo: \u201cCincinnati Seamless\u201d on a crotch, \u201cAl Dumdey\u201d on a leg. The feed sacks are also mended here and there, and the backgrounds balance the beige expanses of flesh with plenty of black and dark green.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard not to think of the great outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), despite all the differences in the emotional tone of his and dela Roche\u2019s work. She uses the same drifting, dreamy, not quite flat organization of space and a similar kind of 19th-century drawing that has more in common with cartography than figure study. Most of all, though, the chimeric reduplicating woman she keeps returning to suggests an unresolved fixation, like Darger\u2019s, on the equally unresolvable incongruity at the heart of human life \u2014 that union of the carnal and the ethereal that we call sex. WILL HEINRICH<\/em><\/p>\n Through July 7. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n My favorite clock of all time is a video: A camera looks down onto two skinny mounds of garbage, maybe 20 and 15 feet long, meeting at one end like the hour and minute hands on a watchface; for the 12 hours of the video, we see two men with brooms sweeping these \u201chands\u201d into ever new positions, at a pace that keeps time.<\/p>\n The piece is by the Dutch designer Maarten Baas, and it\u2019s among the 80 works in \u201cLife Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design,\u201d a group show now in MoMA\u2019s street-level gallery, which has free admission.<\/p>\n The \u201cmaterials\u201d of today\u2019s most compelling design turn out to be ideas, even ethics, not the chrome or bent wood that MoMA\u2019s title would once have invoked. This show\u2019s ethical ideas center on the environment and how we might manage not to abuse it.<\/p>\n Baas\u2019s \u201cSweeper\u2019s Clock,\u201d is perfectly functional \u2014 could I view it on an Apple Watch? \u2014 but it also works as a meditation on the Sisyphean, 24\/7 task of dealing with the trash we generate.<\/p>\n All-black dishes by Kosuke Araki look very like the minimalist \u201cblack basalt\u201d china designed by Josiah Wedgwood way back in 1768 (it\u2019s some of the oldest \u201cmodernism\u201d claimed by MoMA) except that Araki\u2019s versions are made with carbonized food waste.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Food not at all wasted, but consumed \u2014 by cattle \u2014 goes into making Adhi Nugraha\u2019s lamps and speakers, as explained by the title of the series they\u2019re from: \u201cCow Dung.\u201d BLAKE GOPNIK<\/em><\/p>\n TriBeCa<\/p>\n Through July 27. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), 142 Franklin Street, Manhattan; islaa.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For decades, textile art was trivialized as \u201ccraft\u201d and \u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d by mainstream U.S. institutions. That longstanding bias has started to erode<\/a>, but countless fiber art practices remain underexplored. \u201cThreads to the South<\/a>,\u201d a thrilling exhibition curated by Anna Burckhardt P\u00e9rez, spotlights some of them.<\/p>\n The show focuses on Latin America, a region with long and varied thread-based traditions. Many of the 22 artists from 10 countries draw on these heritages, including Julieth Morales<\/a>, a member of Colombia\u2019s Misak Indigenous community. Her piece \u201cUntitled\u201d (2022) is woven in the style of a striped Misak skirt, but hangs instead as an unfinished banner from the ceiling \u2014 a statement of pride and possibility.<\/p>\n The exhibition is intergenerational, but the knockouts are mostly older. Among them are Olga de Amaral<\/a>\u2019s \u201cTapete \u2014 N\u00famero 330\u201d (1979), a checkered wool and woven leather rug; Nora Correas<\/a>\u2019s \u201cEn Carne Viva\u201d (1981), an animalistic bundle of dark red and fuchsia wool forms; Jorge Eielson<\/a>\u2019s \u201cAmazonia XXVII\u201d (1979), a cross between ancient Andean and Western postmodernist traditions; and Feliciano Centuri\u00f3n<\/a>\u2019s embroideries on synthetic blankets from the 1990s. These disparate works are alternately visceral and cerebral, intimate and chic. They expand the canon and common understanding of fiber art and who makes it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Themes emerge throughout the show, but ultimately \u201cThreads to the South\u201d is about identity. Not in a reductive way, as has often been the case in the U.S. Rather, the exhibition argues convincingly that because fabric is at the root of so much Latin American art and life, it deserves, even demands, to move from the margins to the center. JILLIAN STEINHAUER<\/em><\/p>\n Through Aug. 18. Ortega y Gasset Projects, 363 Third Avenue, Brooklyn; oygprojects.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What makes a painting a painting? Is it the application of color to canvas or board? The fact that it hangs on a wall? What about different types of art that are informed by painting\u2019s histories and conventions? Where should we draw the line (pun intended)?<\/p>\n These are some of the questions raised by \u201cPainting Deconstructed<\/a>,\u201d an exhibition featuring 46 contemporary artists who work in a wide range of mediums and materials. That\u2019s what makes the show equally smart and fun: You won\u2019t find a straightforward painting anywhere. Instead you\u2019ll find pieces made of ceramics, fabric, photography, and even balloons that evoke paintings, and paint applied to all manner of surfaces, including T-shirts and palm husk.<\/p>\n For me, looking back and forth between the artworks and checklist became a kind of treasure hunt. I wanted to find out what elements made up Scott Vander Veen<\/a>\u2019s wonderfully tactile \u201cGraft #2 (Thigmomorphogenesis)\u201d (2023). Learning that Jodi Hays<\/a> used a found plein-air painting kit in her weathered \u201cSelf Portrait at 61\u201d (2024) made me chuckle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Kevin Uma\u00f1a<\/a>\u2019s \u201cSplit Apple Core\u201d (2023) is a technical marvel: a complex and sumptuous ceramic work that could be an abstract painting. I delighted in the conceptual cleverness of Erika Ranee<\/a>\u2019s multimedia and nonrepresentational \u201cSelfie\u201d (2024), which includes black-eyed peas, a plant and the artist\u2019s hair dipped in acrylic.<\/p>\n There\u2019s remarkable skill on view throughout \u201cPainting Deconstructed,\u201d but it doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s being deployed solely for technical ends. These artists experiment in order to open up the category of painting. They use what it has been to imagine what it might yet be. JILLIAN STEINHAUER<\/em><\/p>\n Chinatown<\/p>\n Through July 20. David Peter Francis, 35 East Broadway, No. 3F, Manhattan; 646-669-7064; davidpeterfrancis.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pat Oleszko has performed at MoMA, the Whitney, P.S. 1 and P.S. 122, but \u201cPat\u2019s Imperfect Present Tense,\u201d at David Peter Francis in Chinatown, is her first solo show in nearly 25 years. As you\u2019d expect, it\u2019s overflowing with five decades\u2019 worth of hats, costumes, signs and videos that delight in subversion and take subversively uncomplicated pleasure in delight.<\/p>\n In \u201cFootsi,\u201d two fingers in tiny shoes and socks tiptoe across a woman\u2019s naked belly. In \u201cWhere Fools Russian,\u201d Oleszko takes aim at Cold War paranoia, \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d style, <\/em>by putting on a dozen layers of clothing and submerging herself in the Atlantic. There\u2019s an enormous inflatable pelvis through which she can give birth to herself (\u201cWomb With a View\u201d), a \u201ccoat of arms\u201d made for the 50th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto<\/a> and a similar but more revealing \u201chandmaiden\u201d costume designed for a striptease in Japan. The punning is relentless.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a clear feminist bite to much of this, and a frequent political edge that ranges from pointed to broad. There\u2019s even a light tweaking of art-world categories, since you\u2019re never quite sure if these are sculptures masquerading as costumes or vice versa. But the real subversion here is simply Oleszko\u2019s full-scale refusal to take herself, or anything else, seriously: It\u2019s hard to participate in this kind of humor, even as a viewer, without losing hold of whatever serious, oppressive trip you may have walked in with. WILL HEINRICH<\/em><\/p>\n East Harlem<\/p>\n Through Dec. 8. Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-534-1672, mcny.or<\/a>g.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In celebration of its centennial year, the Museum of the City of New York invited Manny Vega to be its first artist in residence. Fabulous choice. Vega is a native New Yorker and a treasure, with a nearly four-decade track record of visual scintillation behind him. The essence of that career is distilled in a 24-karat nugget of a survey, \u201cByzantine Bemb\u00e9: New York by Manny Vega,\u201d assembled by Monxo L\u00f3pez, the museum\u2019s curator of community histories.<\/p>\n Puerto Rican by descent, Vega was born in 1956 in the Bronx, raised there and in Manhattan, and an immersion in art came early. One of his first jobs after graduating from the High School of Art and Design was as a guard at the Cloisters, the Met\u2019s branch in Upper Manhattan devoted to European medieval art. In 1979 he joined El Taller Boricua (Puerto Rican Workshop), the street-active artist collective and graphics workshop in the East Harlem neighborhood known as El Barrio.<\/p>\n In the early 1980s, he began traveling to Brazil, where he was initiated into Candombl\u00e9, an Afro-Atlantic religion that fuses West African Yoruba and Roman Catholic beliefs and has a vivid tradition of ceremonial art, including beaded banners and ritual utensils, both of which Vega has produced. Given these entwined influences, conventional distinctions between \u201chigh art,\u201d \u201cpopular art\u201d and \u201cspiritual art\u201d have never made sense to him, which explains the title of his show, \u201cByzantine\u201d suggesting intricate formal polish; and \u201cBemb\u00e9\u201d evoking drum-driven religious worship that is also a party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The mix is there in four small paintings he made in 1997 as studies for a set of mosaics commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the subway station at East 110th Street and Lexington Avenue. Brightly colored and packed with figures, the images depict El Barrio street life \u2014 neighbors jostling, vendors selling, bands playing \u2014 and give it a charge of devotional fervor, aural exultation. (A tour of other Vega commissions in East Harlem, all within walking distance of the museum, is well worth making, a highlight being his tender homage to the poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) on a building at East 106th Street and Lexington Avenue.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sound and movement are major components in Vega\u2019s visual universe. Icon-like images of Ochun, the Yoruba goddess of dance, and St. Cecilia, the Roman Catholic patron saint of music, appear in the show as tutelary spirits. And there are others. One is the Barrio-born jazz musician Tito Puente, whose album covers Vega has reproduced as glass mosaics. And in a large ink drawing, as crisp as a woodcut, we find the assembled performers of Los Pleneros de la 21, a local dance and music troupe promoting traditional bomba and plena.<\/p>\n Politics runs, like a bass note, throughout Vega\u2019s art. In his case, though, it\u2019s far less a politics of overt protest than of positive assertion.<\/p>\n In the work of this profoundly devotional artist, the presiding deity is Chang\u00f3, the Afro-Atlantic spirit of justice and balance, and also of dancing and drumming. A watercolor painting of him closes the show, and it\u2019s a classic Vega creation: formally precise, imaginatively stimulating, instantly accessible. And it has found just the right home. It\u2019s on loan to the show from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who, a wall text tells us, displays it in her chambers in Washington. HOLLAND COTTER<\/em><\/p>\n Upper Manhattan<\/p>\n Through July 14. The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, 613 West 155th Street, Manhattan; 212-926-2234, hispanicsociety.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There are places you can\u2019t easily return to, like childhood or, for many migrants and refugees, the country where they were born. This was true for Enrique Mart\u00ednez Celaya<\/a>, who was born in Cuba and relocated with his family to Madrid when he was a young boy. Mart\u00ednez <\/em>Celaya, now almost 60<\/a>, returned to Cuba only in 2019, but he has found a way of retrieving both childhood and homeland in this impressive exhibition at the Hispanic Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n Large canvases by Mart\u00ednez Celaya include blown-up snippets from his childhood notebook, surrounded by interpretations of waves and seascapes. In a stroke of kismet, the notebook from which these early drawings were copied was given to him by his mother and featured a reproduction of a painting on its cover: Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s \u201cPortrait of a Little Girl\u201d circa 1638-42<\/a>, which is in the collection of the Hispanic Society. That painting is displayed at one end of the room.<\/p>\n Objects and their historical hierarchies are irreverently jumbled in the show: Vel\u00e1zquez, the great Spanish painter, sits alongside Mart\u00ednez Celaya\u2019s childish doodles. In another series of paintings by Mart\u00ednez Celaya, the \u201cLittle Girl\u201d holds objects that he coveted as a boy. The exhibition also includes work by other artists, like the 1971 notebook of Emilio S\u00e1nchez<\/a>, an artist born in Cuba in 1921 who never went back to his homeland after 1960. In the end, the subject of the exhibition is really an immaterial poetic thread in which memory is fleeting but art, in its various forms, connects people, places and history. MARTHA SCHWENDENER<\/em><\/p>\n Financial District<\/p>\n Through July 31. 101 Greenwich Street (entrance on Rector Street), Manhattan; seestoprun.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The dilapidated 19th-floor office space hosting Christopher Wool\u2019s recent sculptures and paintings could not be more simpatico with them. In its state of abandoned tear-down, the venue offers melodious visual rhymes: electrical cords dangling from the ceiling ape Wool\u2019s snarls of found-wire sculpture; crumbling plaster mirrors the attitudinal blotches of his oils and inks. Scrawls of crude graffiti or quickly penciled notes left by workmen emulate the tendril-like lines dragged through Wool\u2019s globular masses of spray paint. The space is a horseshoe-shaped echo of Wool\u2019s work \u2014 raw, agitated \u2014 and the restless elegance he wrenches from a feeling of decay.<\/p>\n Wool said he started to think about how environment affects the experience of looking at art when he began splitting his time between New York and Marfa, in West Texas. Photographic series he made there, like \u201cWesttexaspsychosculpture,\u201d depict forlorn whorls of fencing-wire debris that look like uncanny mimics of Wool\u2019s own writhing scribbles, and which inspired scaled-up versions cast in bronze. (The Marfa landscape is fertile ground for New York artists. Rauschenberg made his scrap metal assemblages after witnessing the oil-ruined landscape of 1980s Texas, what he called \u201csouvenirs without nostalgia,\u201d a designation that\u2019s appropriate here, too.)<\/p>\n Place has always seeped into Wool\u2019s work. His photographs of the grime and trash-strewn streets of the Lower East Side in the 1990s \u2014 compiled as \u201cEast Broadway Breakdown\u201d \u2014 aren\u2019t included here, but \u201cIncident on 9th Street\u201d (1997), of his own burned-out studio, are. The chaos of those scenes repeat here, the wraparound floor plan and endless windows letting the city permeate the work, just as it did in their making. MAX LAKIN<\/em><\/p>\n SoHo<\/p>\n Through Aug 31. Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, Manhattan; 212-219-2747, juddfoundation.org<\/a>. Public hours: Friday\u2013Saturday, 1:00\u20135 p.m., or by appointment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1971 Robert Irwin installed a 12-foot acrylic column in the ground floor of Donald Judd\u2019s SoHo studio, a prism positioned to pick up light from the building\u2019s large southern and western windows. Since the early \u201960s, Irwin had been pushing the definition of art beyond objecthood, gradually reducing his work of distractions until he stopped producing salable art works. By 1970, he had abandoned his studio in favor of what he called a conditional practice: making subtle, barely perceptible interventions in architecture to tease out the marvels of visual potential. He viewed his installations merely as tools to induce the real art, which was perception \u2014 \u201cto make people conscious of their consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A later iteration of that work, \u201cSculpture\/Configuration 2T\/3L,\u201d first exhibited at Pace in 2018, is on view in roughly the same spot (the hole bored through the floor 53 years ago remains, never filled). More advanced, formed by two columns of stuttering panels of teal and smoky brown acrylic, it\u2019s beautiful, but its beauty is beside the point. It melts into the background, both there and not there. Sunlight catches a corner or flutters over a faceted edge as you move around it, splicing and refracting SoHo\u2019s thrum, making it new.<\/p>\n The installation\u2019s long run means the quality of natural light will change and so too will the effect. It\u2019s a slow, affecting distillation of Irwin\u2019s philosophy, which remains generously contra the art world\u2019s relentless demand for novelty. Irwin, who died last year<\/a>, refined an expansive vision, making us aware of the transitory, letting us see what was always there, for as long as we can. MAX LAKIN<\/em><\/p>\n Chelsea<\/p>\n Through Aug. 16. Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-421-3292; pacegallery.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Buoyed by a great sense of calm, and even silence, the paintings in Huong Dodinh\u2019s \u201cTranscendence\u201d represent an artist\u2019s triumph after decades of pursuing concision by adopting a minimalist vocabulary. It is this Paris-based artist\u2019s first-ever solo exhibition in the United States in her close to 60 years of painting.<\/p>\n Beginning with a rare 1966 figurative painting, whose colors seem to recall Pieter Bruegel the Elder\u2019s \u201cHunters in the Snow,\u201d<\/a> the show progresses to the \u201990s and to the last couple of years. Figuration falls away as the decades pass, the artist\u2019s hand becomes less pronounced, and by the 2000s Dodinh\u2019s central concerns emerge: light, density, transparency and how these interact with lines, forms and space. These come together gracefully in works like \u201cSans Titre,\u201d from 1990, in which three sensual curves depict what could be mountains in a desert, or layers of women\u2019s breasts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Dodinh\u2019s soft palette \u2014 a quiet but delightsome range of carton browns, light blues, and off-whites \u2014 originated from her first experience with snow in Paris, where her family fled from Vietnam in 1953 during the First Indochina War. She was a child in boarding school when she first witnessed snow<\/a> and marveled at how it revealed subtle colors underneath when it started to melt. Subtlety, a hallmark of Dodinh\u2019s work, is something she goes to great lengths to attain: She has always worked alone, without assistants, makes her own pigments, ensuring that every inch of her canvas is filled with an energy that is wholly hers. It has been a long solitary journey and after all these years, even while Dodinh masters the art of austerity, her work feels adorned. YINKA ELUJOBA<\/em><\/p>\n See the <\/strong>May gallery shows here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nJutta Koether: 1982, 1983, 1984<\/h2>\n
Ina Archer<\/h2>\n
Susan Weil<\/h2>\n
Last Chance<\/h2>\n
Farkhondeh Shahroudi<\/h2>\n
Charles Ray<\/h2>\n
Lauren dela Roche<\/h2>\n
Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design<\/h2>\n
More to See<\/h2>\n
\u2018Threads to the South\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Painting Deconstructed\u2019<\/h2>\n
Pat Oleszko<\/h2>\n
\u2018Byzantine Bemb\u00e9: New York by Manny Vega\u2019<\/h2>\n
The Word-Shimmering Sea: Diego Vel\u00e1zquez \/ Enrique Mart\u00ednez Celaya<\/h2>\n
Christopher Wool<\/h2>\n
Robert Irwin<\/h2>\n
Huong Dodinh<\/h2>\n