NEW
Lauren Fensterstock: Some Lands Are Made of Light
This solo exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery features new intimately-scaled sculptures and jewel encrusted drawings by Lauren Fensterstock. In response to our current climate of political polarization and social upheaval, Fensterstock seeks to create works that offer moments of reflection and inner peace. Believing that each person can be an agent for positive change—within themselves, their community, and the greater universe—she uses her devout meditation practice as an entry point for these new works. Some Lands Are Made of Light offers viewers a space to contemplate and reflect within the organic and spectral frameworks embodied by her sculptures and small-scale charcoal and embedded Swarovski crystal works on paper.
“Nothing unites [these artists] other than a common refusal to consider the artistic field as a battlefield, with its watchwords, its theorists, and its strategists, its avant-gardes and its front lines…For them, to use the language of war, it is more a question of for joining the rearguard and of consolidating and renewing the broken links with a certain tradition, which was also, perhaps, a certain joy for painting.”
2. A New Subjectivity 1979/2024
This exhibition looks back at the momentous exhibition Nouvelle Subjectivité (A New Subjectivity) organized by the essayist and art historian Jean Clair in Brussels at the Palais des Beaux Arts in 1979. The Parrish Art Museum pays tribute to the original exhibition by presenting a selection of works from several of the artists included in the original exhibition—Robert Guinan, David Hockney, Raymond Mason, Philippe Roman, and Sam Szafran as well as R.B. Kitaj from the Parrish’s collection—and works by artists whose work has continued the figurative traditions celebrated in Nouvelle Subjectivité, some also drawn from the collection of the Parrish, such as Rackstraw Downes, Jane Freilicher, and Howard Kanovitz, and artists working today not in the collection, such as Martí Cormand, Jordan Casteel, Peter Doig, Jenna Gribbon, and Arcmanoro Niles.
Nouvelle Subjectivité preceded A New Spirit in Painting, the legendary 1981 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, by two years. Like the 1981 exhibition, Nouvelle Subjectivité was an early tribute to new currents of figurative and expressionist painting in the mid- to late-seventies as a retort to the prevailing minimalist and conceptual trends in the art of the sixties and seventies. Both exhibitions made a case for painting returning to the “subjectivist passion” of painters like Pierre Bonnard or Balthus, long considered outdated.
3. Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation
On view at the Whitney Museum features new and recent black-and-white photographs by Mark Armijo McKnight. The exhibition focuses on his ongoing body of work, “Decreation.” The concept, originated by the French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943), describes an intentional undoing of the self, a process Armijo McKnight explores in images of bodies and landscapes in intermediate states, such as anonymous nude figures engaged in erotic play amidst harsh environments.
These photographs convey a sense of both ecstasy and affliction. A new 16mm film in the gallery plays a cacophonous symphony of gradually unwinding metronomes set within the dramatic geological formations of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico. Two large limestone sculptures, which double as seating, suggest the forms of a pair of ancient sundials. As a whole, Decreation simultaneously evokes tumult and quietude, darkness and light, isolation and togetherness.
This exhibition is on view in the Lobby gallery and accessible to the public free of charge.
4. Franz Kafka
When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, in 1924, few could have predicted the influence his relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum presents, for the first time in the United States, the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Kafka, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis. Other highlights include the manuscripts of his novels Amerika and The Castle; letters and postcards addressed to his favorite sister, Ottla; his personal diaries, in which he also composed fiction, including his literary breakthrough, the 1912 story “The Judgment”; and unique items such as his drawings, the notebooks he used when studying Hebrew, and family photographs.
5. Jadé Fadojutimi:
DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory
Closes December 21
LAST CHANCE
This is Jadé Fadojutimi’s first solo exhibition in New York, at the Gagosian Gallery at 522 West 21st Street. Featuring new paintings and works on paper, the project bears a title that combines the words dwell and delve, suggesting both domestic familiarity and sites that prompt further discovery.
In her large-scale acrylic and oil canvases, Fadojutimi uses color, space, and line to explore concepts of identity, emotion, and experience. Employing layers and gestural marks, she produces compositions that often suggest plants or landscapes, but which ultimately remain abstract. Each visual “environment” is constructed with strata of paint interrupted by lines of oil pastel and oil bar, the indeterminate contours of which suggest narratives of displacement. Fadojutimi also draws inspiration from animation, clothing, and music.
The paintings in DWELVE are distinguished by their vivid coloration and lush imagery; every inch of these expansive compositions is vital and active. The density of each arrangement also resonates with the notion of deep exploration contained within the exhibition’s title; the canvases are at once inviting and mysterious, key details often emerging from behind or between broader swathes of color and texture. In this they reflect visually an emotional realm that intersects with the everyday experience of struggle.
DWELVE represents the first time that Fadojutimi has incorporated the idea of a soundtrack into the space of an exhibition. Acknowledging the significant and evolving role that music plays in the production of her work, she invites viewers to consider the abstract nature of soundtracks (as opposed to “figurative” pieces) and the ways in which objects of personal importance might be discussed using the same terminology. Combining these ideas with the formal inspiration of textile design, Fadojutimi presents herself as at once a writer of scores, a composer of color, and a conductor of thought, and her paintings as both “visual essays” and extensions of bodily movement infused with texture and touch.