This week in New York, the main attraction for many in the art world will be the Frieze art fair, which begins welcoming VIPs on Wednesday. As with last year, it will take place in the Shed, an arts venue in Hudson Yards, and it will include around 60 exhibitors. This all means that anyone who comes to Frieze will want to pay a visit to the nearby galleries in Chelsea that are about a 10-minute walk away.
Highlights on view there range from surveys of new work by today’s top artists to rare looks at under-recognized series by well-known giants of art history. At times, it can feel like there are too many exhibitions on view to know what to do with. To help you comb through them, ARTnews has selected five to see during Frieze New York.
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Lauren Halsey at David Kordansky
Image Credit: Photo Allen Chen/SLH Studio/Courtesy David Kordansky The latest entrant to the already-crowded Chelsea scene is the Los Angeles–based David Kordansky, which inaugurated its New York digs earlier this month. The debut show at this gallery, by Lauren Halsey, is a stunner—and a first in New York for this L.A.-based phenom, who has never before had a solo show here. Aptly, Halsey’s show is focused on transporting elements of her South Central neighborhood to Kordansky’s new Manhattan space. Her new sculptures and wall-hung works thrum with life. Advertisements in neon pink tones, pictures of kids with fresh cuts, tchotchkes, and even a tiny rendering of Summaeverythang, the community center Halsey founded in 2020, figure in My Hope (all works 2022), a large-scale amalgamation of objects and pictures evocative of the neighborhood that acts as the centerpiece here.
But Halsey has done more than simply staking a claim for the milieu and the people of South Central. She’s also situated them in a continuum of Black culture that reaches as far back as ancient Egypt, evoked here by way of images of pyramids, and as far forward as centuries from now. The science-fictional quality can be spotted in a series of lumpy-looking sculptures that resemble a more outré take on Ken Price’s ceramics. Peer inside one untitled sculpture, and you’ll find what appears to be a vortex of images of Black men and women. At its center lies a warning: “Obvious squares and turkeys attempting entry into the REALM will be reduced to basic atoms and radioactive turds.”
On view through June 11, at David Kordansky Gallery, 520 West 20th Street.
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Robert Rauschenberg at Gladstone Gallery
Image Credit: ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gladstone Gallery/Photo Ron Amstutz There have been so many Robert Rauschenberg shows since the artist’s death in 2008 that any new ones are likely to elicit a groan: “Another one?” Fear not: nary a “Combine” is to be found at Gladstone Gallery, which has admirably chosen to showcase two of Rauschenberg’s most challenging bodies of work, his “Venetian” and “Early Egyptian” series, both from the 1970s. In these sculptures, Rauschenberg continued his project of merging life and art, taking up materials that seem to bear signs of use (or disuse) and arranging them into assemblages that are stark because of their lack of color. They seem to have the air of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and elements of ’70s Minimalism, but these works cannot be neatly nestled into either lineage.
The weirdness that many have come to associate with Rauschenberg is thankfully still present. One untitled “Early Egyptian” sculpture from 1974 features two wheels that are encased in blocks of sand and acrylic; a rubber hose twists out from one end and rests on the floor nearby. Keen-eyed viewers may see in this an homage to Duchamp’s famed bicycle wheel readymade, though most will simply revel in how strange it all is. Another “Early Egyptian” from the same year includes a row of sand and acrylic rectangle that rest atop smaller platforms, causing them to tip forward at a gentle incline. The portions facing a gallery wall are painted a rich orange hue, making it so that they emit color in the same way Dan Flavin’s light sculptures do. Is this a madcap satire of Minimalism or a sly celebration of its pitfalls? Both, perhaps, or maybe neither—you be the judge. Those left hungry for more Rauschenberg can be sated by another show, at Mnuchin Gallery in the Upper East Side, that surveys his art from the ’70s through late ’90s. (International travelers can also head to Thaddaeus Ropac’s location in Salzburg, Austria, where works from the ’80s inspired by Japanese pottery are on view.)
On view through June 18, at Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street and 530 West 21st Street.
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Carmen Herrera at Lisson Gallery
Image Credit: ©Carmen Herrera/Courtesy Lisson Gallery When Carmen Herrera died at 106 earlier this year, the New York art world lost a giant. Lisson Gallery, which has staged a string of exceptional Herrera shows over the past decade, has wisely given over one of its Chelsea spaces to Herrera in an exhibition that now functions as a memorial to her. Its subject is a lesser-known part of her oeuvre, her paintings of the 1970s, which continue the experiments with shaped canvases, pared-down geometric forms, and eye-popping colors that she had begun two decades earlier.
Herrera’s work typically generates trite comparisons to art that looks like hers—the minimalist paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, the boldly hued canvases of Barnett Newman—but this show stands as proof that she cultivated a visual language that was all her own. Must a canvas be a rectangle or a square? Not so in Herrera’s world, where paintings have triangular sections cut away or, in at least one case, jut out from the wall. In the ones that are given the traditional rectangular format, sharp visual effects are enlisted to make the paintings appear kinky and strange—neon oranges and shocking yellows zig and zag, creating a deliciously off-kilter feeling. Looking closely, you won’t be able to find any evidence that Herrera ever touched these paintings, for her brushwork is just that smooth and even, but the canvases hardly ever feel cold, thanks to their warm hues.
On view through June 11, at Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street.
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Ebony G. Patterson at Hales Gallery
Image Credit: Photo JSP Art Photography/Courtesy the artist, Hales, London and New York, and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago The gorgeous maximalism of Ebony G. Patterson’s collages belies the darkness that percolates beneath her embellished surfaces. But you’re unlikely to sense any kind of darkness in Patterson’s work unless you look at it for a long time, which is the best way of viewing it. At Hales Gallery’s latest show with the Chicago- and Kingston-based artist, low lighting creates an ethereal atmosphere that fosters this kind of close looking required for Patterson’s new collages, which this time largely feature images of flora and fauna that are cut up and torn.
Amid all these dense arrangements of butterflies, leaves, and more there are strings of beads that pour down like blood gushing from a wound. They recall the violence wrought against lush locales like Jamaica, where Patterson was born, by colonialists throughout history without ever once directly portraying ecological destruction. At times, Patterson’s newest works dazzle a little too much, and the commentary gets lost in the visual pleasure they provide. For the most part, however, this is strong stuff with a poetic edge. The works’ titles hint at a kind of healing. One 2021–22 work featuring two paired dense collages bears the name …in the swallowing…she carries the whole…the hole.
On view through June 18, at Hales Gallery, 547 West 20th Street.
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Nicole Eisenman at Hauser & Wirth
Image Credit: ©Nicole Eisenman/Photo Thomas Barratt/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York Amid a rush of figurative painting shows, it is a joy to be reminded that Nicole Eisenman, a key influence for many artists these days, is still running circles around their many imitators. Eisenman’s adeptness when it comes to painting is still clear, but if anything, it is the sculptures in this show that stand out the most. Edie, the artist’s two-year-old cat, is the subject of Crazy Cat (2022), a deliciously odd sculpture of a detached feline head with a chain attached. It could be used like a wrecking ball, and it gazes back at its viewers with a slightly menacing death stare. Meanwhile, there’s Maker’s Muck (2022), a sculptural installation depicting a hunched-over artist at work with their various creations around them. A potter’s wheel turns a mound of putty that appears permanently wet, forever a work in progress.
But back to the paintings. As in the past, Eisenman has turned their eye on those in their orbit. Sometimes, these works seem to be set in another universe, as is the case with Nash (2022), which depicts the artist Nash Glynn in a state of dishabille before an effervescent cosmos. Other times, the paintings are set firmly in our world, as in the knockout work The Abolitionists in the Park (2020–21), which features a seated crowd of figures at 2020’s Occupy City Hall protest. At 10.5 feet tall, this work is done on a scale typically reserved for history paintings—which is no accident, even though the seismic events surrounding this protest go unrepresented. People remain Eisenman’s primary focus, even amid so much upheaval.
On view through July 29, at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street.