Reframe is a monthly column in which contributor Sam Falb discusses timely openings to view in New York. Each edition offers commentary on the latest exhibitions, performances, and installations. Dynamic and ever-evolving, the content reflects the fluidity of the market it travels through.
Oh reader – the challenge of delivering a compelling gallery guide during New York’s upcoming fair week is vast, so we may as well lean into it. Between this month’s show recommendations, you’ll find the below honorable mentions (which could never include the full breadth and quantity on offer) for the week ahead – an assortment of other openings, word-of-mouth moments, and art world mainstays that are worth your fly-in time.
Lost this Art Week? Quick thoughts from Elephant’s New York columnist:
- Openings: Magenta Plains, Jack Shainman, Market Gallery, Hauser & Wirth
- Fair Bites: SARA’S at Esther II, Public Gallery At Frieze, Tina Kim at TEFAF, Fredericks & Freiser at Independent, Good Naked at Future Fair, Artist Plate Project at Frieze
- Limited Engagements: Blade Study at Beverly’s (and then for Sophia Giovannitti), Giovanni’s Room in New York, Rats Party at nublu, Ace Hotel x Civil Art and Stilllife
- Ongoing Shows: Foreign & Domestic x Alyssa Davis Gallery, Karma, LUmkA, White Columns, New York Life Gallery
Now to our bread and butter. This issue is as much about environments as it is the works within them. In Brooklyn, two spaces achieve a triumph of spatial awareness that allows works to breathe, flow, and achieve new meaning through the rooms they occupy and the founding credo behind their foundations. Up four floors of a nondescript Chinatown building (with a worthwhile Dim Sum parlor on the second floor, for hungry guests), an artist delves into an enthralling interpretation of the history of life and our contemporary relationship with its meaning, and at an Upper East Side gallery, a final show at their Madison Avenue space speaks volumes about a prolific artist and his legacy. I’m Each setting carries its own rhythm—some a quiet ascent into metaphysical inquiry, the others a culminating tribute wrapped in architectural intrigue. It’s sure to be a compelling month of artistic output ahead across the array of opening shows and fairs – go forth and enjoy.
Greene Naftali: New Paintings (May 2 – June 21)
Richard Hawkins’ new series of paintings, featured in a solo show and his eighth exhibition at the gallery, take Pierre Bonnard’s flickering interiors and vertiginous still lifes as starting points, then douse them in fandom and flirtation. Faces of celebrity crushes (Mike Faist, among others) hover like saints or hallucinations across dappled, post-Impressionist dreamscapes (All Hands on D*ck). The all-male boating party from 1924 sets the stage and excuse for painterly mischief: a sensually-imagined Faist floats above a field of Ryman-esque dabs, each swipe of paint precise and libidinal. The effect of the show is decadent, devotional, and just envelope-pushing enough to be sincere. Hawkins refers to his most obsessive flourishes as “captivation traps,” and he sets them well: a nipple rendered with radiant realism, a subverted, fruity-forward still life tipped just off-kilter, a field of color that veers into pure joy. Throughout, the Bonnardisms parry between homage and creative license. Distorted sightlines and playful perspectives—already present in the late artist’s work—become vectors for desire, queered and rerouted through Hawkins’s own mythologies. Show notes share it best: “Hawkins takes Bonnard interiors and landscapes as prompts to loosen those genres from their genteel moorings, studding his lush, dappled gardens with floating faces of pretty young men.”
Luhring Augustine: Wish Maker (May 1 – June 21)
At Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea and Tribeca locations, viewers are invited to take in new paintings, etchings, and works on paper by Salman Toor which inflict pointed stares, a contemporary tableau of mischief and gastronomic ambiance (that’s The Joke), and a series of narrative arcs which illustrate “vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity,” as show notes read. The exhibition shimmers between the theatrical and the tender, employing visual wit and moments of painterly suspense to navigate desire, distance, and the performance of belonging. The result is both intimate and expansive, gesturing toward solidarity while maintaining a sense of artful, if uneasy, play. Toor’s canvases – frequently cast in a viridescent haze – toggle between the heartening and the harrowing, finding tension and tenderness in scenes of queer social life. His characters lounge in private interiors, wilt in bureaucratic holding zones, or collapse into his now-recognizable “fag puddles” – opulent heaps of matter which combine limbs, objects, and lived experience.
El Museo del Barrio: Circle, Point, Hoop (April 24 – August 3)
Candida Alvarez is the type of multi-hyphenate artist that leaves the viewer wondering, as they traverse each room of this unfolding exhibition, how one person could possibly produce such vast enormities in style, color, shape, and texture (physical and metaphorical). At El Museo Del Barrio, guests are treated to a solo retrospective of her work in deliciously expansive proportions. The show represents an exciting chance to view the storytelling of her world in real-time – the first large-scale museum survey of its kind. From some of her more conventionally recognizable style à la Clear, Mary in the Sky with Diamonds, and Partly Cloudy to the richly conceptual lithograph Nueva York and Extension [Extensión], a wall-mounted piece composed of pencil, colored pencil, wire, metal grommet, and nails on a birch panel, Alvarez is a master of wielding materiality and personal histories as powerful messaging tools. Her works don’t just sit on the wall – they radiate, they hum, they insist on being heard and spoken to. Whether through the diaristic immediacy of her brushstroke or the bespoke integrity of her mixed-media pieces, Alvarez creates portals into memory, identity, and the borderless expanses of imagination across her varied paths through her Puerto Rican heritage, New York, New Haven, where she earned her MFA from Yale, or to Chicago where she currently resides. “Working with, or simply being in the orbit of, Candida, one quickly learns she is a true reflection of her artistic practice – multifaceted, ever evolving, curious, and deeply thoughtful. In capturing 48 years of her career and artistic journey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop provides just a glimpse of the dynamism and creative fervor Candida embodies,” Curatorial Assistant Alexia Arrizurieta shared.
Management: LUCA (April 23 – June 1)
Anastasia Komar’s LUCA demands physical presence from you, reader. Be bathed in the warm, red light of the womb-like state that the artist has conjured in Management’s rather special fourth-floor space on 39 East Broadway (past the second-floor dim sum parlor and through the narrow elevator). Once inside, LUCA envelops viewers – a bioplastic brain-like shape, crimson lighting, and layered sound wash over the senses, dissolving the boundaries between installation and environment. At the center of the show is a bio-synthetic being – both mythic and material – whose entourage features a series of miniature LUCAs on the opposite walls, petite, 3D-printed tentacles of deep gray. The room pulses with questions: is the tentacled figure feeding the space, or is the space feeding him? His sinewy limbs, produced from a custom program developed by the artist, stretch across the gallery like veins, conduits, or roots—drawing power or giving it, depending on where you stand. Komar’s installation toys with origin stories and evolutionary fantasies. The name LUCA, referencing the Last Universal Common Ancestor, signals a speculative biology: not just the beginning of life, but of feeling, of consciousness, of memory coded in movement and texture. The Baby LUCAs serve almost as seedlings or satellites of this theme. Perhaps the exhibition text by Maya Kotomori shares the feeling of this show best: “Lines emerge from the void, glowing filaments that tangle and weave into fractal patterns. These are cells, or not cells, but the idea of cells—their earliest echoes, when life was a thought not yet spoken. From the central chamber, a translucent mass writhes and divides, a digital rendering of genesis itself.” With LUCA, Komar invites us not only to witness the origins of life, but to feel them ripple through the air, the walls, and our own nervous systems.
Gagosian: Tête-à-tête (April 18 – July 3)
One could argue that there is little left to be said for newness as it relates to Pablo Picasso. What proverbial rock – academic, artful, inquisitive – hasn’t yet been turned over in the name of Picassoist study? At Gagosian, the unique curatorial perspective of Paloma Picasso is central to that answer, exploring how her personal relationship with the artist and his oeuvre shaped the exhibition’s selection and arrangement (a mixture of sculpture and paintings in the last exhibition at the gallery’s 980 Madison Avenue space). While viewing, be sure to examine the “tête-à-tête” concept not just as a juxtaposition of artworks, but as a conversation between Picasso’s artistic intent and Paloma’s thoughtful interpretation. “Showing my father’s work as he wanted it to be seen—in conversation across subjects and periods—is a fitting tribute to his legacy,” she shared. After all, given the variety of rarities available for viewing – never-before-seen works, a selection of pieces that haven’t been shown for decades, and the large selection from Picasso’s estate – there is an inherent intimacy, and perhaps secret meaning to be discovered, as it relates to insights on the artist’s creative process.
CANADA: Couch Paintings (April 18 – May 24)
What does it mean to sit with a painting – literally? Couch Paintings, the new group exhibition at CANADA, transforms the gallery into something closer to a very chicly-appointed living room: a space to gather, to linger, to talk things through amidst the series of canvases that have been assembled for a rather expansive group showing. On view through May 24, the project pairs a lineup of canvases with an arrangement of actual couches installed throughout the space, inviting viewers to engage from a different posture: at ease, in conversation with a fellow viewer, or perhaps deep in thought on one’s own. Paintings hang on the walls in concert with the installed seating, a kindred sight to an apartment or other lived-in setting, their adjacency perhaps part of the point. Events, performances, and rendezvous moments have unfolded across the weeks and will continue to do so in the modified space (from a stand-up set by Clare O’Kane to a reading by Casual Encounterz and a conversation by Ariana Reines and Naomi Fry on the occasion of Reines’ book launch for The Rose. This is a show that rewards lingering, whether it be for a one-night event, or to immerse oneself in the selection of works while perched in a rare moment of lived-in repose (not always available in a gallery setting). With Couch Paintings, CANADA upends the passivity of looking by reframing viewership as something embodied, social, and heartily situational.
Amant Arts: On Education (March 20 – August 17)
There are two things to consider at Amant Arts, the East Williamsburg arts outpost and nonprofit with decidedly cool, clean architecture, expansive gallery space, and a cafe ensconced in greenery (and playfully technicolor seating). First, is the sheer range of content available for viewing, from the lacquer on vinyl poster Nightschool to the baby monitor installation Monitors, and to the faux fur humanoid Course Casualty. Next, the walls of the space further drive the experience forward to a plane of zen-like, reposed energy. Silver, metallic sheeting for many of the walls, twists and turns in gallery space 932 Grand and across the street at the Géza space are experiences that shouldn’t be missed before the space’s exhibition closure in mid-August. As exhibition notes read, “Through its multifaceted exploration of education’s structures, contradictions, and possibilities, On Education invites viewers to reconsider the ways knowledge is shaped, transmitted, and contested — both within and beyond the walls of the classroom.” It’s an invitation we suggest you accept.
Center for Art and Advocacy: Collective Gestures: Building Community through Practice (March 27 – August 23)
On a quiet Bed Stuy street, a new kind of art institution has opened its doors. The Center for Art and Advocacy, complete with high ceilings, movable shelving, and a springboard of potential years in the making, marks a landmark shift in visibility and support for justice-impacted artists. At its core is its first exhibition – Collective Gestures: Building Community through Practice – a vibrant assertion of what it means to create within, and in spite of, systems of control. The works on view, by over 35 formerly incarcerated artists who have participated in The Center’s Fellowship Program, thread together intimate forms and monumental ideas: an acrylic in painting work (Cell 011) which features hand-stitched leather handbags in the shaping of a cell block with fearful eyes peering from behind a small window, a quilt rooted in the care traditions of hospice care and safeguarding one’s humanity until the end (Cousin), and a resin Mexican paleta featuring ICE insignias transformed into tools of criticism (SANDIA PRAYER FLAVOR). Each piece is steeped in lived memory, shared resistance, and a fierce grip on contemporary beauty. A piece that demands particularl attention and creative reverence turns Sudoku puzzles into portraits, incorporating prison identification numbers into a complex network of very human design (Family Portrait #SW-3). As the Center for Art and Advocacy opens its doors, it opens a necessary conversation that will sustain itself through progressive shows: about art as lifeline, as documentation, and as an act of freedom in the making.
INDUSTRY RECOMMENDATION: Artist Angelica Hicks
Adler Beatty: Magical Creatures (April 24 – June 20) + David Zwirner: Clearing Unfolds (April 24 – June 27)
On Madison and 69th Street, you’ll find two fabulous new shows in the building shared by Adler Beatty and David Zwirner. ‘Magical Creatures’, an exhibition showcasing the work of Karachi-born artist Hiba Schahbaz, with a particularly enchanting cut-out room on the top floor. ‘Clearing Unfolds,’ an exhibition of new paintings by Yu Nishimura at David Zwirner marking the artist’s first solo show in the USA.
INDUSTRY RECOMMENDATION: Chief Creative Officer, Chandelier Creative, Michael Scanlon
Tiwa Select & The Future Perfect: Lucid Dream (May 2 – June 21)
I got a sneak peek of Faye Toogood’s new show at my friend Alex’s gallery, Tiwa Select (the show continues at The Future Perfect). I’ve been into Faye’s work for a long time — her pieces always ride that perfect line between brutalist and twisted, like if Noguchi had a goth twin who did acid. But these new works go even further into a dream state. She’s hand-painted a series of wrought-iron and paper lamps with fluid, gestural lines that make the shapes feel like they’re in motion — somewhere between sculpture and sketch. It’s all very sensual and strange and kind of perfect.Tiwa’s 5th floor home-cum-gallery is the perfect setting too, with its crafty domestic ambience — I’d make sure to see the work during these early-summer sunsets. As someone who collects more lamps than friends (a fact, not a complaint), I love seeing furniture cross over into the art world. Faye’s making functional things that evoke soft power, high design, and just enough weirdness to keep it interesting.
Written by Sam Falb
