10 Art Shows to See in New York, September 2024

Tristan Unrau: Re-enactment

Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, 291 Grand Street, Fourth Floor, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 2

Tristan Unrau is the type of noncommittal art weirdo I adore. Each of the 12 paintings in this one-room exhibition are created in a different art historical style that he easily assimilates. The works resemble those of Pierre Bonnard, Gerhard Richter (the photorealist period), Max Klinger, and other bold-faced and not-so-bold-faced artist names in this puzzle of influences that refuses to congeal into any one thing. There’s something very internet-y about his obfuscation of a personal style while celebrating the absurdity that comes from paintings like “Academy” (2024), which depicts an art school for ants, “Death Peeing, after Klinger” (2024), portraying a urinating skeleton, or “Invitation” (2024), which looks like two jack-off buddies rendered with the same care that might be allotted to a Baroque Doubting Thomas scene. Even “Interior with Dog” (2024), which is one of the prettiest paintings, has a quality that vibrates off the wall and appears to come to grips with the unease of being alive in this time of monsters. —Hrag Vartanian

Leon Golub: Et In Arcadia Ego

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 19

Few words can fully convey the brutality Leon Golub’s paintings. On a sociopolitical level, the artist’s visceral images of mercenary soldiers and authority figures reify the power relations that bolster dictatorial regimes. But, like Otto Dix, Kim Jones, and other artists who experienced war and abuses firsthand (Golub served in World War II as an army cartographer), his art aims at the gut more than the mind. Rendered on linen tarps, sometimes using instruments like meat cleavers, works like “Mercenaries IV” (1980) and “White Squad V” (1984) perform intimidation and aggression as they record it. The blood red background in the former is a power move in itself, an assault on vision that at once commands and aggrieves attention. It serves as the stage for the five brute figures dressed in the khaki and green of camouflage, two holding machine guns. Yet a swath of saturated red in the composition’s center asserts the color as an equal actor in the scene, one reflected in the red, burned bodies of “Napalm III” (1969).

The two-part show also includes a selection of works by other artists who have tackled violence and corruption in their own trenchant ways (e.g., Teresa Margolles, David Hammons). Visit the group show, curated by artist Rashid Johnson, while you’re there but go to see Golub’s works, their vast expanses consuming the air, memorials to atrocity frozen in time. —NH

Naudline Pierre: The Mythic Age

James Cohan Gallery, 48 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through October 19

There’s no doubt that Naudline Pierre’s expansive paintings of fantastical femme figures are gorgeous, but what elevates them beyond their surface allure is the melancholy that suffuses them. As sprite-like forms coalesce and recede amid swirls of warm jewel hues, and blend into one another, they appear suspended between individuation and loss of self. In “A Hopeful Many” (2024), faces peer out from gray, cloud-like forms, just barely discernible, while the horizontal figure in “Longing For” (2024), rendered in a fiery orange-red, seems almost one with the Turner-esque storm of flames and clouds that surrounds her. Pierre’s elegant, expressive gestures activate the fluidity of the figures and evoke a realm that is forever in flux. These poignant paintings linger in the imagination long after seeing them. —NH

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos): milk and honey

Cristin Tierney Gallery, 219 Bowery, Floor 2, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 19

This is Sara Siestreem’s (Hanis Coos) first New York City exhibition, and it demonstrates her ease with various artistic registers that include, but are not limited to, petroglyph-style mark making, beading, weaving, abstract painting, and various printmaking techniques. Her process-based art makes you conscious of time, whether as a cumulative effect — as in her weaving, where you can see how things are made and sometimes cast or 3D printed — or in her paintings, where we see layers of line, image, and shape come together to reinvent notions of ceremony, ritual, and ancestral inheritance.

In “skyline” (2024), seven glazed slip cast ceramic baskets are placed in front of the windows, making us aware of the pattern of urban structures across the street from the gallery, which denote another type of rhythm in stacked forms. The three large paintings here are more austere than previous panel works, using graphite, acrylic, Xerox transfer, and other techniques that reclaim cultural forms that went into “hibernation,” a term she’s used before, during the 1850s, when her own tribe was dispossessed and persecuted by the US government almost to the point of complete genocide. Each of these art pieces, particularly the baskets and dance caps, renew the promise that art has an alchemical power that can be born from humble yet proud origins, and with the right care it can be woven into gold. —HV

Michael Bühler-Rose: I Want Your Skull

New Discretions at Situations, 127 Henry Street, Two Bridges, Manhattan
Through October 20

During the pandemic, some of us started baking sourdough or cleaning out our closets (I fall into the latter, while my spouse tried the first), but artist Michael Bühler-Rose took up marquetry, and these four works at New Discretions at Situations (why are gallery names getting worse?) are wondrous examples of what he calls the “collapse [of] my inner life … growing up in both the Hare Krishna movement and the punk/hardcore music scenes.” 
Inspired by the 15th-century Gubbio Studiolo on display at the Met Museum, his large “Bühler-Rose Studiolo Summer ’24 (FDR & Grand St.) 1–4” (2024) uses 40 different types of wood, including ebony, purple heart, jackfruit (light and dark), champa (four kinds), maddi, silver oak, and rosewood. It offers us a scene from his Manhattan studio, with its stacks of art books, boxes of vinyl, and items that suggest his life and interests, but in a manner that turns the everyday into a decorative feast. The gallery has done a particularly good job at placing the art on a wall that allows the outdoor light to enter the space in a manner that corresponds to the light source in the work itself. Only three panels are on display, as the fourth is yet to arrive from Mysore, South India, where the artist works with artisans who normally make religious objects for Hindu temples. The overall effect of the wood inlay artworks is very contemporary while consciously feeling rooted in a multicultural and multitemporal art history, which gives them an added sense of authority. —HV

Darrel Ellis and Miguel Ferrando

Candice Madey Gallery, 1 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 25

Exhibitions that pair artist friends don’t always offer much beyond the novelty of the friendship, but in this standout show, already impressive works by Ellis and Ferrando — who met while attending the High School of Fashion Industries in New York — become even richer in each others’ company. The artists’ aesthetics and subjects are distinct — Ellis worked mostly in black and white and reflected the world around him while Ferrando’s brightly colored pieces often evoke history painting — and, to its credit, the gallery doesn’t strain to make connections aside from some portraits the two made of one another. Instead, the works complement each other, the delicate, fluid lines and soft washes of gray in Ellis’s pieces giving way to the quivering outlines and translucent color in Ferrando’s. In this way, the art is an analogue to the friendship itself, as two visions that are different but aligned. Both artists died of AIDS-related complications within a few years of each other in the 1990s, adding a mournful dimension to the show, but it shouldn’t overshadow the delight that these artists seemed to take in creating and togetherness. —NH

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Caressing the Circle

Bitforms Gallery, 131 Allen Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 26

This is a must-see show that feels like a small glimpse into the future. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is always on the cutting edge of art and tech, but here his “Transparency Display” (2024), in particular, which he developed with his own “pixel glass” technology, plays with the viewer’s experience in the gallery as it reveals and conceals in real time, offering us temporary relief from the opacity of a triptych of glass walls. Another piece, “Shadow Tuner” (2024), was first developed as a public artwork in Abu Dhabi, but this smaller version still links to thousands of geo-located radio stations that respond to the viewers’ spatial relationship to the globe. The classic, much earlier work “Standards and Double Standards, Subsculpture 3” (2004) is a single fastened belt hanging in a roped-off gallery that gives the impression of following your movements. The belt, which hangs at roughly waist height, evokes a patriarchal figure through this symbolic object of authority and foreshadows the artist’s long-running interest in technology and power, and how viewers may have agency in determining their relationship to both. 

My guess is we’ll be seeing a version of “Transparency Display” in buildings everywhere in a few years, so I hope he’s got his patent. —HV