The temperature outside is cooling, but in the galleries of New York City, it’s heating up with a crop of exciting and timely gallery shows. All across Manhattan, as visitors flock to the slew of art fairs that open this Armory week, commercial galleries are presenting solo and group shows that both harken back to history-making artists of the past, and present up-and-coming artists charting a new course. From super-sized sculptures to a resurgence of fiber art, plus mind-bending paintings and videos, here’s our pick of what to see around town.
Political upheaval, economic headwinds, and all-around conflict are all phenomena that mark not only our fraught current moment but also that of the 1960s and ‘70s, when the artists in this show—stanley brouwn, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Serra—hit their stride. Whether it was Serra throwing lead, Le Va smashing panes of glass, Nauman pacing his studio on film, or Rockburne creating delicate drawings that combined ideas from dance and the processes of nature, these practitioners pushed art beyond its boundaries, often asking the viewer to reconstruct the path the artist traveled to create the final work. In this timely group presentation, the works take on new meaning as they are viewed through the (fractured) lens of contemporary society.
David Nolan is located at 24 East 81st Street, New York, NY
