In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

Photographer unknown, Mind Crime Hookers party crew on 6th Street Bridge, Boyle Heights, 1993, in “Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory,” at Aperture Foundation.

COURTESY GUADALUPE ROSALES

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

Reading: Rodney Koeneke and Fred Moten at Dia Art Foundation
This reading brings together two writers whose work has been influential for a coterie of young artists. Koeneke’s work often focuses on the ways in which seemingly anonymous forms of writing bring together groups of people—his latest book, Body & Glass, came out earlier this year. Moten, who was profiled by ARTnews earlier this year, recently completed the series of books “consent not to be a single being,” which focuses on uncertainty and notions of blackness; he and Stefano Harvey are currently working on All Incomplete, a new book due out next year.
Dia Art Foundation, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, 6:30 p.m.

I.B. TAURIS

Talk: Barbara Pollack at Pace Gallery
At this event, Barbara Pollack will discuss her new book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, which focuses on the Chinese contemporary art world. Pollack, a longtime ARTnews contributor who has profiled collector Michael Xufu Huang and artists Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei, among many others, has written extensively about the nation’s art scene. Her talk will partially address Zhang Xiaogang, whose work can currently be seen at Pace Gallery.
Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, 6:30 p.m. Free with RSVP to rsvp@pacegallery.com

Opening: Guadalupe Rosales at Aperture Foundation
For the past few years, Guadalupe Rosales has been amassing an archive of photographs related to Latinx and Chicanx culture in Los Angeles in an attempt, she has said, to reclaim stereotypes about brown men, women, and kids in the city. Occasionally, Rosales has posted some of her images to two cult-favorite Instagram accounts—Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz—but rarely has her work been shown in New York. With one of her photographs featured prominently on the cover of the new issue of Aperture, the foundation that prints the magazine will show an installation of images Rosales has collected. At the opening for the show, Rosales will give a talk about her work.
Aperture Foundation, 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, 7 p.m.

Sarah Lucas, Selfish in Bed II, 2000, digital print.

©SARAH LUCAS/COURTESY SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

Exhibition: Sarah Lucas at New Museum
The first U.S. survey for the British artist, “Au Naturel,” will present over 150 works across the museum’s three main floors. The robust show brings together sculptures, photographs, and installations from various points in Lucas’s career, including her biomorphic “Bunnies,” “NUDS,” and “Penetralia” series. The artist—whose bold and witty output has long focused on the human body, gender, sexuality, and identity—has made new works for this New Museum show.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 11 a.m.—6 p.m.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

Joyce J. Scott, Breathe, 2014, hand-blown Murano glass, beads and thread.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, NEW YORK

Opening: Joyce J. Scott at Peter Blum Gallery
“What Next and Why Not,” Joyce J. Scott’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, will showcase about 20 sculptures made since the year 2000. The artist incorporates beading, blown glass, and found objects in her artworks, which often ruminate on history, race, gender, and violence. The works on view evidence Scott’s interests in many cultural and spiritual traditions—West African Yoruba weaving and Buddhism are among the reference points. The exhibition, which follows on the heels of a Scott survey at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, earlier this year is her first New York show in 20 years.
Peter Blum Gallery, 176 Grand Street, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Marcia Hafif at Fergus McCaffrey
“Marcia Hafif Remembered” commemorates and pays homage to the work of the pioneering abstractionist who died earlier this year at age 88. Best known for her monochrome paintings that were concerned with her medium’s process and materials, Hafif, who first got noticed by critics during the 1970s, worked under the assumption that abstraction wasn’t dead. If anything, she believed, it was entering a new, more exciting phase. This exhibition—which was co-curated by the artist’s friends Alanna Heiss, Richard Nonas, and Hanne Tierney—aims to survey the artist’s output, with works from her “Double Glaze” series, a selection of her “Black Paintings,” and her 1991 piece Table of Pigments represented.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Dr. Lakra at White Columns
The Oaxaca, Mexico–based visual artist and tattooist Dr. Lakra (né Jerónimo López Ramírez) is known for taking vintage magazine prints of pin-up girls and wrestlers, and tattooing them on people’s skin using pen ink. This exhibition, which was co-organized with Kurimanzutto gallery, of Mexico City and New York, will showcase a less flashy part of the artist’s oeuvre: his collages, for which he has modified portraits of revered historical figures, among them René Descartes and others of his ilk, using an arsenal of found images, including comic-book clippings and fragments of vintage anatomy texts. The portraits blur the boundary between “the comedic and the grotesque,” according to a release.
White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: Faith Ringgold at Brooklyn Museum
As part of the programming for the Brooklyn Museum show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” Faith Ringgold will discuss her career as an artist, activist, and educator. Having been in an integral force in alerting the New York art world to various inequities, Ringgold, who was profiled in these pages in 2016, has tackled issues such as racial violence and immigration using a range of mediums that includes stretched canvas and quilts. The subject of family will likely come up at the talk—Ringgold will be joined by her daughter, author and cultural critic Michele Wallace.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7–9 p.m. Tickets $14/$16

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #289, 1976, wax crayon, graphite pencil, and paint on four walls, in “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018,” at Whitney Museum.

©2018 SOL LEWITT AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

Exhibition: “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018” at Whitney Museum
This show will feature more than 50 works from 39 artists, all of them involving computer code or instructions. The exhibition is divided into two groups of work—“Rule, Instruction and Algorithm” and “Signal, Sequence and Resolution”; its centerpiece will be a newly restored Nam June Paik sculpture, Fin de Siècle II (1989), which is composed of more than 200 television sets. Christiane Paul, the show’s co-curator, said in a statement that the exhibition “strives to illustrate how art throughout the decades has been informed by technological and mathematical concepts and to provide insight into the increasingly coded structures of the contemporary landscape.”
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Miguel Cabrera, El Divino Esposo (The Divine Spouse), ca. 1750, oil on canvas.

RAFAEL DONIZ/©MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA, AND FOMENTO CULTURAL BANAMEX, A.C./FUNDACIÓN CULTURAL DANIEL LIEBSOHN, A.C., MEXICO CITY

TUESDAY, APRIL 24

Exhibition: “Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici” at Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici,” which first debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, brings together 110 works to trace stylistic and pictorial innovations of the era. Organized into seven thematic sections, the show considers the varied material production of 18th-century Mexico and artists’ crucial roles in society at the time. Featuring recently restored artworks, the exhibition focuses on the Mexican art world during a vibrant period in which painting schools were consolidated, academies were founded, and new iconographies were introduced.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25

Opening: “Gutai, 1953–59” at Fergus McCaffrey
In its newly expanded space, Fergus McCaffrey gallery will showcase some 70 large-scale artworks from the Gutai movement, a Japanese avant-garde swell that experimented with ideas related to chance and performance. In its spirit, artists like Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, and Toshio Yoshida grappled with the atrocities and traumas of World War II and sought novel ways of creating art, engaging with materials, and experimenting with forms. “Gutai, 1953–59” will include works created in the time leading up to the collective’s establishment, in 1954; some pieces in the show are being exhibited in America for the first time.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

David Salle, Mingus in Mexico, 1990, oil and acrylic on canvas.

©DAVID SALLE/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK

THURSDAY, APRIL 26

Opening: David Salle at Skarstedt
Known for works that combine photography, painting, and collage techniques, David Salle is often considered one of the most important figurative artists working today. This show, titled “David Salle: Paintings 1985–1995,” surveys a period in which he created canvases that appear to include appropriated images, often layering them to create dense compositions that blur the line between original pictures and ready-made ones. However contemporary the results, Salle also had art history in mind as he was producing these paintings: reference points here range from Diego Velázquez to Alberto Giacometti.
Skarstedt, 10 East 79th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: Iris Morales, Rosa Clemente, and Victoria Barrett at Brooklyn Museum
Coinciding with the museum’s exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” three Latinx activists will discuss strategies for community organizing in the United States and Latin America. Participants in the conversation include former Young Lords Party member and filmmaker Iris Morales, educator and activist Rosa Clemente, and environmental activist Victoria Barrett. The event will be moderated by Adjoa Jones de Almeida, director of education at the Brooklyn Museum.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7–9 p.m.

SATURDAY, APRIL 28

Dave Muller, S&D&RnR, 2018, acrylic and sign enamel on gessoed plywood.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND BLUM & POE

Gallery Walk: Madison Avenue Gallery Walk at Various Venues
In conjunction with the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District, ARTnews will present a day of gallery walks and events led by art-world experts. Forty-six participating galleries will host programs including curator talks, exhibition walkthroughs, guided tours, artist talks, and auctions. Among the day’s events will be a talk with ARTnews contributor Phyllis Tuchman at Van Doren Waxter about the collages of John McLaughlin, a walk-through of Dave Muller’s show at Blum & Poe, and a curated tour of various galleries by ARTnews editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas.
Various venues, consult website for details. RSVP necessary for certain events

Opening: Huang Yong Ping at Gladstone Gallery
For his fifth solo show at Gladstone Gallery—and his first in New York since Theater of the World, an installation that was to feature live animals, generated controversy for its inclusion in the Guggenheim Museum’s recent survey of contemporary Chinese art—Huang Yong Ping will exhibit his large-scale sculpture Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000–06). The work, which weighs 20 tons, is modeled on the former HSBC Bank in Shanghai, a Neoclassical structure built in 1923 by a British architecture firm. Yet despite its weight, the work is extremely fragile; made of sand and a small amount of cement, it can crumble at any time—underscoring ways that major historical structures can come apart and reveal their history.
Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, 4–6 p.m.

Opening: Takashi Murakami at Perrotin
Taking over three floors of Perrotin gallery’s outpost on the Lower East Side, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami presents a new suite of paintings inspired by the art of Francis Bacon along with other recent pieces. The “Homage to Francis Bacon” works, which Murakami began in 2002 and continued producing through 2016, feature some of the artist’s most familiar iconography—bulging eyes and mushrooms—in fields of color, all placed on platinum leaf. The exhibition also includes a 33-foot-long painting from 2017, Transcendent Attacking a Whirlwind, that is meant as a tribute to the Japanese artist Soga Shohaku. The painting continues Murakami’s ongoing interest in synthesizing styles culled from pop culture and more traditional Japanese forms.
Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, 4–9 p.m.

Takashi Murakami, Homage to Francis Bacon (Second Version of Triptych (on light ground)), 2016, acrylic, gold and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame triptych (three panels).

©2016 TAKASHI MURAKAMI/KAKAI KIKI CO., LTD., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/COURTESY PERROTIN

Opening: Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner
For her first solo exhibition in New York since 2010, the South African-born, Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas presents the exhibition “Myths & Mortals,” which features a series of works on paper commissioned for a recent Dutch adaptation of the William Shakespeare narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” The show will also include a series of new paintings that vary in size, from monumentally scaled nudes to more modestly sized canvases that explore bodies and facial features.
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, APRIL 29

Opening: “74 million million million tons” at SculptureCenter
The artists in this group show, curated by Ruba Katrib (formerly of SculptureCenter and now of MoMA PS1) and the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, attempt to articulate the elusive, abstract moments that often fill the time between major shifts in political, cultural, and technological consciousness. Among the works included are Shadi Habib Allah’s installation of cell phones playing recorded conversations of Bedouin smugglers and Carolina Fusilier’s abstract paintings, which explore the inner workings of mechanical devices. According to the curators’ statement for the show, artists here “anticipate and produce material documents even before the process has been deemed necessary.”
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 5–7 p.m.

Installation view of ‘Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings, 1961-1969,’ Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2016.

©MARCIA HAFIF/COURTESY FERGUS MCCAFFREY, NEW YORK

By the mid-1960s, it was assumed in some circles that all of the possibilities for painting were exhausted—that the medium had, more or less, died. But some painters pushed back against that idea, arguing that painting could reset itself, and one was Marcia Hafif. In an essay published in Artforum in 1978 called “Beginning Again,” Hafif wrote, “If one phase of this period of analysis is coming to an end, we may be ready to enter still another phase of abstraction, a synthetic period.” Over the course of her career, she continued a quest to propel painting into that new, synthetic period, often achieving awe-inspiring results.

Hafif, who has, for the past five decades, created monochromes or near-monochromes that investigate the structures that undergird painting itself, has died, according to Fergus McCaffrey gallery, which represents her in New York and Tokyo, and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, which represents her in New York and Los Angeles. She was 88.

Hafif was overlooked by many art institutions for much of her career, only to be recently rediscovered and hailed as one of the essential painters working during a time when her chosen medium was considered highly unfashionable. Her paintings were included in the 2014 edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, and in the past few years, she had major solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Baselland and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland, and at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California. A 100-work survey of Hafif’s work is currently planned to open this September at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont, California.

Marcia Hafif and Sandro Nitoglia, Rome, 1968.

©MARCIA HAFIF/COURTESY FERGUS MCCAFFREY, NEW YORK

“As is common with so many of the great American artists of her generation, Marcia’s work found favor first in Europe,” Fergus McCaffrey said in a statement. “Her ‘Italian Paintings, 1961–69’ exhibition in New York in 2016 provoked deep institutional soul-searching as to how such an important body of work by an American artist had remained unrecognized for so long. There is so much more for America to come to terms with. I will miss Marcia’s gentle laugh and steely certainty.”

Hafif brought a sly sense of invention to bear on the well-worn trope of the monochrome. In 2015, Hafif told ARTnews that she had “hit another brick wall” when she started thinking about painting. “Where can you go with abstract painting at this point?” she recalled thinking at the time. Her solution was an unusual one. Before creating one of her canvases, she would choose the brushes, paint, and supports she was going to use, and only then would get to work on a new piece. The result was a compromise between the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism—a type of abstraction that was at once programmatic and personal, at once critical of what makes a painting and also pure. (As if to subvert the idea of paintings as great, important things, she frequently referred to her work as her “Inventory.”)

“She was very involved in Buddhist thought and the idea of repetition,” Parrasch told ARTnews. Her continual layering on of strokes was not repetition for its own sake, he said, but “repetition leading to things. Her whole process is very Zen, and it’s very much about joy and pleasure, the focus of that stroke and repeating it over and over. She had an incredible sense of presence when she was painting.” He added, “She’s a very sensual person—I don’t think that should go unmentioned. Everything, for her, was about the appreciation of the beauty of things.”

Her work experimented not just with the conventions of painting, but also with the many ways artists could apply paint to a canvas. Her “Splash Paintings,” a series she began in 2009, were monochromes with paint flecked onto them that resembled sprays of water resulting from ocean waves hitting the shore. For Hafif, who was a colorist at heart, the paintings referred to the work of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca and their use of blue hues to mimic natural states. And in her “Shade Paintings,” a brightly colored series of monochromes, she made use of a technique known as scumbling, in which thin coats of opaque paint are applied to a canvas to make it appear to shimmer.

Installation View of An Extended Gray Scale (1972–73) at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2018.

©MARCIA HAFIF/COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM ST. GALLEN, SWITZERLAND

Hafif was born in 1929 in Pomona, California. She initially thought she might want to be an art historian, and even went on to study the field briefly at Pomona College during the late 1940s. But she soon realized that historians at the time didn’t study what is now termed “contemporary art,” and so she decided to take a different route. “I realized I wasn’t an art historian, but an artist,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. Her exhibition at the college’s art museum represents a homecoming, said Rebecca McGrew, the institution’s senior curator, who is currently organizing the Hafif show.

“Bringing her back to campus on multiple occasions over the last few months meant so much to her and to me to see her reflect back on the fullness of her life in Claremont,” McGrew said in a statement. “It was an immense pleasure to spend numerous sun-filled days at her beautiful home in Laguna Beach planning our exhibition and book. We collaborated at every step of the process, and the opportunity to talk in-depth about her work, art, and so many wide-ranging topics was an experience I will never forget. It has been an honor to work so closely with an artist in such command of her vision for her artwork, her life, and her legacy.”

After college, Hafif immersed herself in the Los Angeles art world at the time—during the ’50s, she was an occasional assistant for Ferus Gallery, the space founded by Walter Hopps and Edward Keinholz, which was the nucleus for a core segment of the avant-garde in California. In 1961, Hafif moved to Rome, where she produced canvases featuring lumpy forms against bright backgrounds. They resemble Ken Price’s sculptures by way of Ellsworth Kelly’s minimalist plays with perception. Feeling nostalgic for an American sensibility, however, she departed for the United States in 1969 and became a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of California, Irvine. She left for New York shortly thereafter, and found that there was an intense bias against painting at the time in the city. Hafif soon decided to think of ways to think about the materiality of paintings themselves—what went into them and how they were made.

Sometimes, Hafif’s works exceeded the traditional definition of painting. For the seminal 1976 exhibition “Rooms” at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, she created Schoolroom, a gallery-size installation in which Hafif carefully scrawled an erotic text in chalk on blackboards. It referred to her stint as a third-grade teacher, and was recently put back on view at MoMA PS1 as part of an exhibition called “Forty” that payed homage to the institution’s history. She also produced videos, such as one called Letters to J-C Broadway, 1999, #10 (1999), in which a voice speaks over footage of pedestrians walking around New York City.

Up until the end of her career, Hafif continued working. “I’m still painting,” she told ARTnews in 2015. But she added that she wasn’t done being critical of painting, either: “I’m just not painting a subject, other than the painting itself.”

Update, July 20: An earlier version of this post misstated Hafif’s age. She was 88, not 89.

Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991).

WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT

TUESDAY, JULY 4

Screening: Point Break at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Few action movies have made more a mark on their genre than Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), which is a heist film of sorts. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, an FBI agent who is assigned to infiltrate a group of surfers who have been holding up banks. That group, known as the Ex-Presidents because of the masks they wear during robberies, is led by Bodhi, played by Patrick Swayze. The film was met with a lukewarm critical response initially, but in the two decades since its release, a cult following has developed. It screens here as part of a series organized by Edgar Wright, the director of the new film Baby Driver, whose 2007 cop-movie parody Hot Fuzz pays homage to Point Break’s campy ending.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, screens at 6:45 and 9:30 p.m. Tickets $7/$14

WEDNEDSAY, JULY 5

Opening: “So I traveled a great deal…” at Matthew Marks Gallery
This group show, organized by Jordan Stein and artist Vincent Fecteau, brings together work by six Northern Californian artists. All the work on view carries what the curators call “ecstatic anxiety,” or the feeling of chaos or indeterminacy. Many of the pieces here have never been on view before. Some of the work will be trippy, if not downright hallucinatory—drawings by Jordan Belson, better known for his abstract experimental films, will offer patterns that resemble space imagery. Pieces by Isabella Kirkland, Joanne Kyger, Jack Mendenhall, Robert Strini, and Tisa Walden are also included.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

ASCO, Spray Paint Lacma, 1972, chromogenic print mounted on aluminum.

©1972 HARRY GAMBOA JR.

THURSDAY, JULY 6

Opening: “Feedback” at Marlborough Contemporary
What better subject for a summer group show than collaboration? Curated by actor-turned-dealer Leo Fitzpatrick, “Feedback” is almost entirely devoted to artworks made by at least two people. Richard Prince and Robert Gober, Hanna Liden and Klara Liden, and Ray Johnson and Joseph Rafael are just a few of the duos who will have work in this exhibition. Also on view in this three-floor show will be what is said to be Marcel Duchamp’s final readymade, Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), 1967, a heart-shaped print that was made by Alison Knowles and signed by the Dada master.
Marlborough Contemporary, 545 West 25th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “The Roger Ailes Memorial Show: Fair and Balanced” at Yours Mine & Ours
The press release for this group show is simply Monica Lewinsky’s New York Times op-ed about Roger Ailes, the former Fox News CEO who had been accused of sexual assault and who died this past May. Lewinsky wrapped up that piece by writing, “The late Fox chief pledged Americans fair and balanced news. Maybe now we’ll get it.” The artists in this exhibition—Rochelle Feinstein, Sam Jablon, Tony Lewis, Siebren Versteeg, David Wojnarowicz, and more—use the issues that surrounded Ailes’s career as a jumping-off point.
Yours Mine & Ours, 54 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.

Máiréad Delaney, Breach, 2017, performance still, at Fergus McCaffrey, New York.

©MÁIRÉAD DELANEY

Opening: “Remains” at Fergus McCaffrey
This group exhibition consists almost entirely of live performances. Taking its cues from the Gutai movement, the Japanese avant-garde from the 1950s that imploded the boundary between everyday life and art, “Remains” features artists who rely on performance as “a way of effecting change both materially and conceptually,” a news release notes. Artists in show include Hee Ran Lee, who will perform 50 Bulbs, a piece in which viewers hold a light bulb hanging from the ceiling and are instructed to throw it at the artist, Máiréad Delaney, Daniel Neumann, Clifford Owens, Nigel Rolfe, and Liping Ting.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, JULY 7

Opening: Bunny Rogers at Whitney Museum
Bunny Rogers’s subjects often feel dated, as if they are from a not-too-long-ago time that’s just barely irrelevant. That’s often her subject: how an image, person, or things gets forgotten, and how its memory lingers on, if not in our everyday lives, then on the web. A memorable show last year at New York’s Greenspon Gallery used computer-generated versions of characters from the short-lived MTV show Clone High to ponder the grief leftover from the Columbine shooting, for example. Her Whitney show, her first major museum exhibition, will feature new work from the young artist. Based on a teaser image, Rogers appears to have updated a piano-playing character from her Greenspon outing, this time in a video where she performs on an empty school stage.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Nora Berman, Snake Being Born, 2017, oil, acrylic, and oil pastel on canvas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DOWNS & ROSS, NEW YORK

Opening: Nora Berman at Downs & Ross
At a recent show at Ellis King gallery in Dublin, Nora Berman debuted a series of double-sided monumental paintings. The paintings weren’t hung on walls, but were instead exhibited standing up in the middle of the gallery, so that viewers could see their fronts and backs. On one side, they feature photos of the artist that have been painted over in areas; on the other, large gestural abstractions appear. For Berman, it’s up to the viewer to find the relationship between figurative and abstract styles, between personal and impersonal elements. She will continue thinking about those linkages with new work at this two-venue solo show, her first in New York.
Downs & Ross, 55 Chrystie Street, #203, and 106 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.

SATURDAY, JULY 8

Talk: Aki Sasamoto at the Kitchen
As part of an its series called “New York Close Up,” Art21 will premiere a new film about Aki Sasamoto, a performance artist known for bringing a makeshift maze to the Frieze New York art fair and doing an entire series of works about washing machines at SculptureCenter. Earlier this year, Sasamoto presented a new group of works at the Kitchen about the point at which an elastic object finally breaks when stretched. Sasamoto will return to the space for this screening, and afterward will talk about her work.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 5:30 p.m.

Melvin Van Peebles in his Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

©CINEMATION INDUSTRIES/COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Screening: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song at Metrograph
Melvin van Peeble’s incendiary 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song bore the tagline “RATED X BY AN ALL-WHITE JURY” when it was initially released, and even 40-plus years after its release, it remains potent. One of the defining Blaxploitation films, this movie follows Sweetback, a sex worker of sorts whose boss is murdered by LAPD police officers. Sweetback is blamed for the crime, so he goes on the run, gradually moving closer and closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. Critics of all races were divided by the film when it first came out, and it continues to be discussed by historians because of its radical politics and its ambiguous ending.
Metrograph, 13 Ludlow Street, 5 p.m. Tickets $15

Jiro Takamatsu (1936–1998) was about as seminal as seminal gets in postwar Japanese art. He was one-third of the Tokyo-based Happenings group Hi Red Center, a progenitor of Japanese conceptual art, and a significant influence on Mono-ha artists. As a maker of paintings, sculptures, experimental writing and xerographic pieces, and conceptual photographs, Takamatsu embodied the catholic cross-mediality of the 1960s and ’70s like few others. And as his mini-retrospective at Fergus McCaffrey suggested, he was also something of a prop and set designer for intellectualized play and theatricality in the white cube.

There were four vertical wood sculptures (all titled The Pole of Wave and dated 1969) that undulate when viewed from one angle and appear straight from another. There was a small blue cube with red perspective lines painted on it that give the odd impression that the cube is simultaneously opaque and transparent (Cube 6 + 3, 1968). There were two hanging grids of rope that sag in their lower registers due to subtle increases in the rope segments (Slack of Net, 1968–69, and Slack of Net, 1972). There were a concrete slab, a block of wood, a block of black granite, and red bricks whose tops had been chiseled out and refilled with the broken pieces, raising questions concerning wholeness and fragmentation (Oneness of Concrete, Oneness of Wood, and so on, all 1971). If a children’s science museum were to hold an estate sale to divest itself of old exhibits, it might look a little like the McCaffrey installation.

Takamatsu’s most iconic works are his shadow paintings. While he made full-scale murals within the series, the largest work at McCaffrey was the 7-by-9½-foot Shadow (Double Shadow of a Baby), 1969/1997, which portrays, in gray paint on a white ground, two intersecting silhouettes of a baby that suggest shadows cast by different light sources. More effective, for seeming less like the product of studio staging than like glimpses of everyday scenes, were the small shadow relief paintings, constructed out of white-painted wood panels with pieces of lumber attached to them into which metal hooks are inserted, the works simulating sections of residential walls with moldings. “Cast” onto the surfaces are the painted shadows of the hooks and the moldings, as well as those of absent objects that are implied to be hanging on the hooks: keys, hairbrush, clothes hanger.

What’s strange about these reliefs is that you don’t really feel anything to be missing. Thanks to the dissimulating power of indexical (or pseudo-indexical) signs, the absent objects seem palpable as invisible presences. Such ghosts speak to the limits of seeing Takamatsu’s work as a challenge to “the prevailing orthodoxy of paintings purged of representation and sculptures that emphasized truth to materials and the anti-illusional,” as the McCaffrey gallery statement claims, exaggerating the importance of Greenberg-style formalism and Minimalist literalism in Japan. Takamatsu’s optical illusions sometimes fail to transcend the academicism for which Op art has been criticized. Yet when his meta-visual experiments engage regions of the mind deeper than those assigned to visual processing, they open portals to realms of memory and fantasy refreshingly wider than those typically assigned to ’60s art.

Takamatsu’s shadow paintings, for example, could be related productively to playwright Terayama ShÅ«ji’s sentimental, fun-house shadow films of the ’70s. Meanwhile, his “Photograph of Photograph” series (1972–73) has a Tarkovsky-ian quality. For these black-and-white images, Takamatsu photographed photographs at such angles that the original images are obscured by glare and warping. The eight examples at McCaffrey show personal snapshots (a ski scene, a family portrait) photographed on various, often domestic-seeming surfaces and objects (tables, a balcony). Clearly these works extend Takamatsu’s interest in (as critic Junzō Ishiko put it) “seeing the act of seeing” and suggest that images can never be separated from their material matrix. But the soft lighting, the private atmosphere, and the gentle shimmer that cuts across all of them (one is even half-immersed in a developing tub) remind me of the many framed pictures, submerged mementos, and passages of water shown in Tarkovsky’s films. Likewise, Takamatsu’s images soak up and project back to us our own personal memories, as if we were in orbit around Solaris. 

Marcia Hafif’s monochromes, installed at Fergus McCaffrey’s booth at Frieze New York.

KATHERINE MCMAHON/ARTNEWS

Yesterday, at the opening for Frieze New York, New York–based painter Marcia Hafif could be seen chatting with a steady stream of friends and admirers near her monochromes, currently on view at Fergus McCaffrey’s booth. At 86, Hafif is more excited to talk about her work than many emerging artists, and she couldn’t help but walk me over to her small and squarish earth-toned monochromes from the 1970s.

“I had been working in other places, and I had been going to school in California,” Hafif, who was wearing a pink cotton shirt and blue jeans, told me. “I came to New York to think about painting, because that’s what I had been doing every day, and then I sort of hit another brick wall. Where can you go with abstract painting at this point? So I started to look into the materials and techniques of painting.”

From there, Hafif began making what she calls “experiments in the form of painting.” The small monochromes, with their smoothly worked surfaces, gave way to much larger ones. These were much more time-consuming than the smaller ones. It could take several hours make the paint, and then another seven or eight hours to make the work. “I had to delineate that time and then just do it,” Hafif said. “I got to know the pigments by doing that and how it becomes paint.” When I asked why she decided to do bigger canvases, Hafif chuckled and said, “Well, why not?”

Marcia Hafif, Splash Painting: Indigo, 2009, oil on canvas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FERGUS MCCAFFREY

Not content to stay in one place for too long, Hafif walked over to her “Splash Paintings,” named for the way these pale monochromes had a splash of paint on them. These paintings, made in 2009 and 2010, reminded me of ocean spray when a wave hits a rock, but Hafif told me these actually had an art historical reference. “I had been reading about Fra Angelico’s paintings and Piero della Francesca and looking at good color plates,” Hafif said. “I thought, ‘I love those colors. I wonder if I can do that.'”

“I had seen, in Florence, at San Marco, Fra Angelico had some area of false marble where there were splashes painted,” she continued. “I never thought the Renaissance painters would splat. I decided I wanted to do that, so I threw paint at the canvas.”

Her newest works, her “Shade Paintings,” are made using a technique called scumbling, in which light tones are placed over darker ones. Hafif told me that the colors chosen for these paintings would be based on a listing of colors used to paint walls in Rome. (She lived in Rome during the ’60s.)

Hafif has made more than 25 series of paintings, and she’s going to continue with her “Shade Paintings” for now. What will come after that? “I’m still painting,” Hafif said. “I’m just not painting a subject, other than the painting itself.”

Installation view of ‘Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino,’ currently on view at Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York.

TOM POWEL IMAGING/COURTESY DOMINIQUE LÉVY GALLERY

Gutai, the loose group of Japanese artists known for their work from the 1950s, is having a moment in America. Kazuo Shiraga, the abstract painter known for using his feet and hands in lieu of brushes, is the focus of not one but four American exhibitions in the first half of 2015. Shiraga’s work is currently the subject of a solo show at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, and shown alongside Satoru Hoshino’s clay sculptures at Dominique Lévy (also in New York) and Sadamasa Montanaga’s paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art. In April, Chelsea’s Fergus McCaffrey will mount a show about Shiraga’s relationship with his assistant and wife, Fujiko Shiraga. With such interest in Shiraga and the Gutai movement, we turn back to our 1958 review of the first Gutai show in America ever, held at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. At the time of the exhibition, Gutai was seen as a copy of Abstract Expressionism, and Thomas B. Hess’s review of the show, which appeared in the “New Names This Month” section, was also negative. (Gutai was not reconsidered in America until recently.) Hess’s thoughts on the show are reproduced in full below.

“Gutai”
By Thomas B. Hess

Gutai [Jackson] group, a number of Japanese artists much influenced by New York Abstract-Expressionism, and much in awe of Europe, were introduced in a fancy exhibition that was generally disapproved of as derivative and trivial. About five years ago, the Gutais sent some copies of their magazine to New York; it illustrated their extra-pictorial activities—creating earth sculpture by dancing and sliding in likes of mud, bustling through layers of paper stretched in front of a door; balloons filled with liquids, the soles of some one’s feet were painted—all highly esthetic in a California 1930s Frat-Rush-Week way. Their paintings showed no such verve, but a similar schizoid approach. The man splits himself in two—one half artist, one half Japanese intellectual. The artist half is kicked out of the personality and set to work flinging or blotting paint, after examples found in black-and-white reproductions from Paris or New York. The intellectual sits back and decides policy questions (a bit less Pollock, a bit more Still, add Kandinsky, what about Tobey… there is even a Mike Goldberg influence, I think). The artist is left to push himself through the wringers. The results are without personality. As such they will be interesting to many interior decorators who seek exactly this sort of chintz. Prices unquoted.

Nonas’s concern with space was honed by his experience of the American Southwest, where he embedded with Native Americans as an anthropologist in the early 1960s. Settling in downtown Manhattan in 1970, he quickly became involved with 112 Greene Street, an artist-run gallery traversed by such figures as Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra and Trisha Brown. Like 112 Greene, which countered the white-cube aesthetic of uptown galleries, Nonas’s materials oppose the slick plastics and shiny metals favored by some members of Minimalism’s first wave. His work partakes in the sensuousness not of the high-tech but of the organic: the furrows of unfinished wood, the flush of gently rusted steel.

Nonas’s latest show comprised over 50 works, spanning 1970 to 2014. Its temporal reach elicited a retrospective logic, with the attendant expectation of a mappable formal progression. Yet the material and morphological consistency of the work on view disallowed narrativization, collapsing the present onto four decades past. Each piece disposes solid geometries—cubes, polygons, etc.—in arrangements that dispense with the pedestal. Placed on the floor, buttressed by a wall, or set in the seam between the two, they claim coextensiveness with the viewer. Dense and compact, most lack a particular orientation and a sense of enclosed space. All are committed to a self-evidence of form and facture meant to thwart analysis.

Skid (New-Word Chaser Series), 2014, condenses these concerns. The work encompasses nine evenly spaced steel units that extend diagonally from the gallery’s door to its backmost room. Each unit consists of two upright slabs that meet in a “T.” The piece reads as a variant on Nonas’s 1970 Blocks of Wood (Light to Dark, Dark to Light), 17 wooden blocks aligned on the bias and exhibited in 112 Greene’s inaugural show (though not on view here). Both works make visual common sense in that they cleave to the Minimalist logic of “one thing after another.” The continuities between the two instance the peculiar achronology of Nonas’s art, which adopts strategies (seriality, sited-ness and so forth) only to endlessly rehearse them, as if stuck in a loop. Figured by Nonas, the field of Minimalism becomes an enclosure, self-contained and strangely timeless.

Striking, too, is the work’s scale, which is often emphatically small, reminiscent of an early Richard Tuttle or Joel Shapiro. Heightening our awareness of their spatial setting while rarely commanding much space, Nonas’s sculptures thematize their own contingency. Deadfall (1975) finds two midsize steel triangles stacked on the floor. Cut from a single square, then slightly trimmed, their subtle misalignments enact the dialectic of “almost clarity” and “not quite confusion” that Nonas, in his words, hoped to achieve. If, in 2014, his rhetoric of presence rings somewhat hollow, it’s because sculpture has moved so far beyond the utopian project inherent to Minimalism’s initial years: its promise of a sensory fullness that our mediated landscape seems to foreclose.

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01

Vermelho, São Paulo

Dora Longo Bahia, Farsa - Goya (Fusilamintos del 3 de mayo de 1808), 2013, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 114⅛" x 153½".
RAFAEL ASSEF

Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Will Cotton, Giverny Flanpond, 2014, oil on linen, 48" by 72".
COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK

Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

Joe Goode, X-Ray Drawing 99, 1976, charcoal on paper, 22" x 29½".
COURTESY KOHN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

Eduardo Terrazas, 14.2, from the series "Everyday Museum," 1987, wooden rulers mounted on wooden board.
DIEGO BERRUECOS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PROYECTOS MONCLOVA, MEXICO CITY

Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (HARD BODY LONG STORY I'M SORRY), 2014, digital print on vinyl, 110" x 110".
COURTESY SPRÜTH MAGERS, BERLIN AND LONDON

Peres Projects, Berlin

Mike Bouchet, Longer Pickle, 2014, oil on canvas, 82⅝" x59".
COURTESY PERES PROJECTS, BERLIN

mother's tankstation, Dublin

Mairead O'hEocha, Stray Centred Family, 2014, oil on board, 23⅝" x 31½".
©2014 MAIREAD O'HEOCHA/COURTESY MOTHER'S TANKSTATION, DUBLIN

Crown Point Press, San Fancisco

Charline von Heyl, Dust on a White Shirt (Stripes), 2014, mixed media on gampi paper chine colle, 31" x 25".
PUBLISHED BY CROWN POINT PRESS, SAN FRANCISCO

T293, Rome and Naples, Italy

May Hands, Casi Klick Chanel (Pink and Purple), 2014, mixed media, 78¾" x 59".
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND T293, ROME AND NAPLES, ITALY

Barbara Mathes, New York

Günther Uecker, Räumliche Struktur (Serial Alignment), 1974, pencil and nails on canvas laid on board, 20" x 20" x 3⅛".
COURTESY BARBARA MATHES, NEW YORK

Fergus McCaffrey, New York

Jack Early, Poolboy, 2014, oil on silkscreened canvas, 64" x 54" x 1¾".
COURTESY FERGUS MCCAFFREY, NEW YORK

Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin

Mathieu Mercier, LASCAUX 983 on background UNIK 027-6A, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 86⅝" x 43¾".
COURTESY GALERIE MEHDI CHOUAKRI, BERLIN

Peter Freeman, Inc., New York and Paris

Pedro Cabrita Reis, Do you still love me? #1, 2004, aluminum, glass, and fluorescent light, 35⅜" x 64⅛" x 26¾".
COURTESY PETER FREEMAN, INC., NEW YORK AND PARIS

Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

Evan Nesbit, La Brea V, 2014, acrylic, dye, and burlap, 79". x 68".
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS & TILTON, CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA

James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai

Bill Viola, Ablutions, 2005, color video diptych on plasma displays mounted vertically on wall, 40" x 48" x 4¼".
COURTESY JAMES COHAN GALLERY, NEW YORK AND SHANGHAI

SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy

Esther Kläs, Pazienza, 2014, bronze and wood, 87⅜" x 32⅝" x 2⅜".
COURTESY SPAZIOA, PISTOIA, ITALY

Reena Spaulings, New York

Josephine Pryde, Style, My Daughter, 2009, C-print on aluminum tube, 31½" x 2⅜".
COURTESY REENA SPAULINGS, NEW YORK

mor-charpentier, Paris

Oscar Muñoz, Palimpsesto, 2014, impression with coal powder (toner) on paper, 6" x 8¼".
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MOR-CHARPENTIER, PARIS

Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna and Geneva

Bernhard Frue, HUSTLER ENTRANCE, 2003, C-negative print, 37⅜" x 28¾".
COURTESY GALERIE MEZZANIN, VIENNA AND GENEVA

James Fuentes, New York

Alison Knowles, The Boat Book, 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable.
JASON MANDELLA

Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin

Thilo Heinzmann, O. T., 2014, oil and pigment on canvas behind plexiglass cover, 45⅝" x 42⅛" x 3⅜".
ROMAN MÄRZ/COURTESY GALERIE GUIDO W. BAUDACH, BERLIN

David Nolan, New York

Steve DiBenedetto, Red Interior, 2012, colored pencil and charcoal on paper, 22¼" x 30⅛".
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID NOLAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Louis Gispert, Louis Vuitton Monogramouflage, 2014, C-print, 48" x 85".
COURTESY RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY, CHICAGO

CRG Gallery, New York

Alexandre da Cunha, Fatigue (diagram I), 2014, metal and cement fondue 78⅞" x 78⅞" x 16⅞".
COURTESY CRG GALLERY, NEW YORK