The hottest month this summer August promises us hot exhibitions. We elect the coolest and interesting exhibitions for you in New York. Do not miss the chance to spend time with inspiration!
Collaborations with queer voices, curated by Matthew Day Perez and Kate Hush.
Heller Gallery (303 10th Ave. (bt 27th St. and 28th St.) is pleased to present Collaborations with Queer Voices.
The exhibition features original neon works by a broad spectrum of notable queer artists in a collective declaration of where the LGBTQ community has been and where it is heading.
Neon is a bygone marketing tool that advertises, announces or points to something or somewhere. Language is an increasingly important aspect of the LGBTQ ecosystem. By marrying the two, FagSigns invited ten artists, whose identities and work span a full spectrum of age, gender, race, and medium, to meditate on a word or phrase and unpack that language into the light.
Participating artists include Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender non-conforming artist who challenges the gender binary. Thomas Page Mcbee, a writer whose contribution, Self Made, asks us to unpack the presented phrase. Gabriella Grimes, a black queer artist from New York City who challenges common perceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in the western world. Deborah Czeresko, a New York-based artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and collaboration. Stephanie Lifshutz, a Brooklyn based artist and photographer. She plays with the history of signage and uses it as a direct instruction to the viewer, inviting those who read the sign to act of their own volition - you heard me the first time. Rooney, a New York-based illustrator. Wednesday, a London based artist, designer, and activist. Shoog McDaniel, a self-declared “fat, queer, Floridian freak” who has been creating art in swamps from an early age. Patrick Church, a British multimedia artist, blurring the lines between art and fashion. Kate Hush, a Brooklyn based artist transmitting a secret scene in Five 107’s Outside of a Silver Buick. Brooklyn-based FagSigns, the queerest, brightest, neon shop that ever existed, is an inclusive public-access neon studio, with an emphasis on community engagement and eroding barriers to othered folks seeking work in the creative sector.
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Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes at MAD on 2 Columbus Circle brings together a vast grouping of the artist’s “Virtual Still Life” paintings (1995–97) made near the end of his career. By positioning these works alongside others that highlight their development, including early paintings demonstrating his interest in the stage and installations conveying the centrality of collecting to his practice, the exhibition lays out Brown’s process through the objects he collected and the spaces he created for and with them.
Known for his atmospheric paintings of architecture, landscapes, and simplified social dramas, Roger Brown (1941–1997) stylized an American “ambiance” influenced by the visual language of postwar advertising and film noir. His practice investigated the tension between illusionistic and “real” space, aestheticizing the national mood as one of artificiality and theatricality.
Throughout his life, Brown was a voracious collector; he amassed hundreds of thrift store and yard sale finds, from vernacular ceramics and kitsch objects to exceptional works of folk and visionary art, which he meticulously arranged and displayed in his studio and homes.
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Perrotin New York presents a group exhibition surveying contemporary, figurative painting that seeks to re-examine the romantic embrace. This exhibition proposes an investigation into sensitive depictions of romance and the poetry of contemporary quotidian queer life. Homosexual love often eluded the canon, and even when not outright censored, found entrance through the usage of tempered and codified presentation. In the wake of Stonewall, and later, in response to the AIDS epidemic, a stark and necessary political turn was taken. Artists shifted their practices to create iconic, combative works, which acted as virulent retorts to oppressive censorship and the urgency of the times. The artworks in 'Them' insist concretely on the plausibility for another more just and tender world. Through aesthetics, these works create a conceptual utopianist blueprint for us all. They trade the realities of the here and now for future worlds where the artists’ experiences and emotions are fully expressed. Respectively, they portray love without apology and bring a poetic voice to current perceptions of queer agency and visibility.
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Davidson Gallery presents 'Impossible Objects', an exhibition featuring the work of Frea Buckler, Jenna Krypell, Gabi Mitterer, Ricardo Paniagua, Richard Roth, and Matthew Shlian. The term “impossible object” generally refers to two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects that cannot physically exist as such. These optical illusions are accepted or rejected by the brain which, even after understanding their illusory nature, can still have trouble making sense of the image.
The exhibition consists of sculptural work that is a take on those illusory figures. Each sculpture uses geometric abstraction or repetition of form and references or pays deference to various genres, including (but not limited to) Op-Art, Concretism, and Neo-plasticism. All the sculptures in Impossible Objects are highly detailed, crafted, and finished, utilizing line and color to high effect. The combinations can be unsettling even while being aesthetically luscious and with a visual style that lures the viewer’s eye, whether intentionally or subconsciously.
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Anton Kern Gallery is excited to welcome back Chicago-based artist Margot Bergman for her second solo exhibition with the gallery. In Family Album, Bergman presents recent paintings and, for the first time ever, photographs. Margot Bergman has sustained an active painting practice in Chicago since the 1950s and honed a peerless style of figuration. For the last 15 years, her subject matter has focused on individual faces of imagined people, predominantly women. Her style is characterized by active expressionistic brushwork, unconcerned with symmetry, realistic proportions, and traditional notions of femininity. Bergman can adeptly shift styles within a single composition, juxtaposing photorealistic eyes and lips, with a scribbly green hair-do, and a thin wash of color for the complexion, creating distorted beauties reminiscent of Dadaist collage.
Hope you'll find yourself in some deep immersion of art with us.
Author: Irina Chistikina