031. Your weekend plan, sorted :)

See art from all around the world, right here in NYC.

I was in a terrible mood last Saturday, but I forced myself to go to the city to see some things on my list. Somehow, I am always surprised by how much seeing art shifts my days. New York City can be so grueling, it’s tempting to do nothing on the weekends, but living this close to all of this art is a privilege.

I didn’t grow up going to see art often. It was a world I knew little about other than my own undeniable leaning in towards it. You become the kid who excels mostly in art and English classes. You understand that the presentation of information, feelings, and ideas is very important, from a young age. It’s not to say that you love the blank page, but the compulsion to fill it is reliably all-consuming.

In high school, a friend told me she had taken an AP Art History course at our community college and thought I might enjoy it. I dropped out of high school and finished my last year and a half studying independently. I bought the AP Art History exam study book and read it cover to cover multiple times. I first learned about art history via tiny, grainy, black and white photos of the caves at Lascaux and Picasso’s Guernica.

I ended up at UNC Chapel Hill for college, where I did my work study hours at the Ackland Art Museum. A lot of my four years in Chapel Hill were spent in the little art complex, sitting in dark rooms in front of slide projectors, standing in museum galleries telling people not to touch the artworks, and poring over heavy, oversized books at the Hanes Art Library. When I graduated, I applied to entry level positions at marketing agencies and art galleries alike, open to wherever would have me.

My first few years in New York were so frenzied (I ended up with a marketing job), I didn’t make too much time for museums and galleries. I drew occasionally. The pandemic started when I was 26 and there was a year when I hardly saw anything at all. Online viewing rooms… not the same. When things finally reopened, I became a more frequent visitor. People ask me about my involvement in the art world and my response crystalized into, “I’m just a fan.” My art world view is not cynical. The most important thing, for me, is to be able to say, honestly, that I’m a fan.

Sharing some downtown recs for my fellow fans below!

Trương Công Tùng at Kiang Malingue (50 Eldridge Street, 4th floor - until 6/6) - This show took my breath away. I don’t know how I discovered it - something I saw on Instagram maybe, I hadn’t heard of the gallery, which is perched in an airy, well-worn loft on Eldridge (their other location is in Hong Kong). Trương fills the space with a presentation so rich, full of ideas, beautiful and tactile, it’s really a feast more than anything. On the floor sits When Nothingness Becomes an Echo of Something and Something is an Echo of Nothing (an installation of sculptures with sensor-activated elements that react to movement with sounds and twitches), which they told me was originally a work commissioned for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, brought to New York for this show. On one wall stretches an ongoing series of paintings on mylar, and on the others hang large panels of Vietnamese lacquer paintings. Trương bridges mediums and separately constructed works in this cohesive presentation, but beyond that, he bridges the past and present, the natural and artificial, the physical and digital, the foreign and domestic—what can and can’t be said, life and death and everything in between.

Paula Turmina at instituto de visión (88 Eldridge Street, 5th floor - until 5/23) - Another show that I was like, how did I end up here, at this gallery I’ve never heard of? But somehow I had it saved and got to see Paula Turmina’s dreamy paintings, based on Brazil’s early position on space exploration: “the cosmos must belong to everyone.” Fluid, angular, elongated female nudes zig-zag around star-studded deep space skies.

Greg Parma Smith and Elana Bowsher at Hoffman Donahue (99 Bowery, 2nd floor - until 5/23) - Go for Smith’s mind-bending geometric paintings, stay for Bowsher’s fluid landscapes of rich color tucked in the back office.

Joline Kwakkenbos at Galerie Sardine (61 Lispenard - until 5/12) - While I loved Galerie Sardine’s temporary home in an East Village townhouse, their new Tribeca space is lovely! Happy for them. And happy for Dutch painter Joline Kwakkenbos, whose thickly textured self portraits in traditional garb are especially satisfying to look at and getting a lot of buzz.

Xi Li at Hesse Flatow (77 Franklin Street - until 5/30) - Xi Li’s Cocoons of silk ready to be wound is hung in the lower floor of the gallery, a small and intimate room that was full of people (and one cute dog) when I visited. I love the method and materiality of these pieces—collage beneath a stretched silkscreen on wooden frames. There is a poetry to each one, collected and layered like the popular “junk journal” trend but with a finer touch—fragments of text are hidden like clues within, and it made me happy to see people examining them so closely.

Nina Hartmann at Silke Lindner (350 Broadway - until 5/30) - There’s something oddly sleek about Hartmann’s presentation of this body of work, called Actualization Machine, which incorporates imagery gathered during her “research into the U.S. government’s attempts to understand and develop methods of mind control, telepathy, and other mysterious phenomena during the Cold War.” In our current moment of unreality and susceptibility to highly sophisticated “fake news”, hacking, and scams, I think reexamining MKUltra is wise. Hartmann’s presentation is fascinating—a mix of lightboxes, encaustic panels, and resin sculptures that look like official signage for a cult’s HQ in a strip mall or something. Very mysterious and specific aesthetic.

Group Show curated by Andrew Durbin and Peter Hujar at Ortuzar (5 White Street - until 5/30) - Technically two exhibitions, but they sit together beautifully. Paul Thek (whose work is included in the group show, How Beautiful This Living Thing Is) and Peter Hujar are having a well-deserved moment thanks to The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a book written by Andrew Durbin (editor in chief of Frieze Magazine, curator of this show!) that I can’t wait to read. The book release is accompanied by a series of shows including this one, Paul Thek at Pace, Paul Thek at Galerie Buchholz, and a forthcoming show at the Watermill Center opening in August. Let me know if you want to do a book club!