With so many great shows to see, we’re trying something a little different for our New York City guide: a weekly list of what we’re currently enjoying. You can find it linked in your Tuesday newsletter, to start your art week. You can also read our longer reviews of these shows. This week, we’re focusing on some legendary political artists, the Guerrilla Girls and Judith Bernstein (a former Guerrilla Girl, herself), along with purveyors of beautiful and mysterious imagery, late artist-poet Etel Adnan and up-and-coming artist Alexis Trice — plus an exhibition of imagined books! Hassan Sharif: Gathering at Alexander Gray Associates and Feliciano Centurión: Sol naciente at Ortuzar Projects, both in Tribeca, close this weekend, and Luna 10 Years at Dashwood Projects in the East Village, showcasing photographer Lele Saveri’s zine project, closes February 15. Make sure to add these to your list, too. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through February 15
Right off the bat, it’s clear that Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books was assembled by a bunch of absolute nerds — and that’s a compliment of the highest order. Curated by Reid Byers, who recently wrote a 500-page tome about the private library, and exhibited at the Grolier Club, one of North America’s oldest bibliographic societies — i.e., literary types of the most sincere kind — it may be the only exhibition I’ve seen wherein I’ll tolerate descriptors like “sublunary,” “thaumaturgical,” and “arealia,” all of which are included in the show materials…. Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished”…. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Read the full review here.
Judith Bernstein: Public Fears
Kasmin Gallery, 507 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through February 15
Public Fears is a mini retrospective of sorts. Filling one large gallery from floor to ceiling, plus a small space near the entrance, it traces Bernstein’s political paintings from the 1960s — when she was taking on Richard Nixon’s lies in works like “First National Dick” (1969), featuring a phallus flying an American flag — to her recent day-glo paintings, such as the searing neon “Death Heads (Four Eyes on Hot Pink Ground)” (2024). It also includes “Three Panel Vertical” (1977), a trio of drawings of giant phallic screws whose well-deserved “fuck you” to the aggressive misogyny underlying patriarchal power got her removed from an ostensibly feminist Philadelphia museum exhibition at the time and sidelined her in the art world for decades. This is what makes Bernstein so important: She’s talked the talk and walked the walk, and suffered the consequences. She knows both the stakes and the urgency of speaking out against injustices, and she continues to do so. —NH
Read the full review here.
Etel Adnan: This Beautiful Light
White Cube, 1002 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through March 1
In Etel Adnan’s exhibition This Beautiful Light at White Cube, an emerald color field unfurls on a wall-sized grid of ceramic tiles. Among the uneven washes of green are blocks of primary colors and a multicolored shape thrusting diagonally across the picture plane, creating a sensation of whirring motion. This work, “Apple Tree” (2021), is the clear centerpiece, but paintings and tapestries comprise the majority of the two-floor exhibition. The small paintings on view allude to both landscapes and geometric abstraction. Their swaths of color, applied with a palette knife, evoke eroding forms, or the dominance of nature’s will over humankind’s. A selection of tapestries reference the idea of home as both a real place and an unsettled abstraction for an artist who traversed multiple cultures. —NH
Alexis Trice: Deep Sea, Swallow Me
KDR Gallery at Long Story Short, 54E Henry Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through March 9
Deep Sea, Swallow Me is a fairy tale-inflected world of sentimentality and memory. Trice powerfully uses the metaphor of the pearl, which slowly forms in mollusks around an intruding irritant, to create an effect in which these scenes appear to secrete their own light. Her use of Old Master techniques, including an imprimatura layer, followed by a layer of grisaille, and then many glazes of color around what feels like a distant memory of pain or longing, generates these luminous images. Strong foregrounded focal points are framed by misty scenes often dominated by seascapes with low horizon lines. Trice’s art is lyrical, illustrative, and emotional. Like so much of the best painting being produced today, it casts its meaning just beyond our grasp in fertile soil that sprouts associations of all kinds. —Hrag Vartanian
Read the full review here.
Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art
Hannah Traore Gallery, 150 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through March 29
I stood in front of a poster created in 2016 by the renowned Guerrilla Girls collective titled “President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months!” and I was struck at how it could’ve easily been made last week. This one-room exhibition at Hannah Traore Gallery combines decades of visual activism from the OGs of art-world culture jamming. Early examples took close aim at museums and galleries, while the march of time turned the group’s focus to the broader political realities of the United States, reflecting the larger cultural footprint of the contemporary art field and its impact through visual activism. —HV
Read the full review here.
