Capsule Reviews #1

Cybergardens, mass graves, and gay Seurat

This is the first post of an ongoing effort to publish five short reviews of art exhibits I saw in New York this week. These are not necessarily the five best shows I would recommend. It’s just five shows that left an impression of some kind– good, bad, or remarkably indifferent. 

In this edition, we have four shows from 22nd street and one from 24th. 

“Delcy Morelos: El abrazo” at Dia Chelsea (October 5, 2023 – July 20, 2024)

The first room in this two-part exhibit at Dia Chelsea contains a bed of gravel and other industrial detritus, with a walkway cleared to the center. It’s dark. The walls are black. Pipes and rods are laid about as if there was a brief moment of intentionality, and there are rows of tiny mounds of pebbles reminiscent of a mass grave. Viewing the work feels like a helicopter tour over an abandoned battlefield. In the second room, there is a massive structure of dirt suspended in the air with protruding organic filaments suggestive of a plant’s root system. The room smells like the Adirondacks, and walking around the sculpture makes you feel like a worm squirming through the soil. OK, the show is about “life” and “death,” but the thesis is subtle and rooted in a zen touch for materiality. 

“No One Thing – David Smith, Late Sculptures” at Hauser and Wirth 21st Street (February 1, 2024 – April 13, 2024)

These David Smith sculptures should be outside overlooking a mountain landscape. Smith was a painter turned sculptor, and these works make it seem like he wanted to paint directly on top of his field of vision, like drawing on glass. Placing them in front of a garish yellow wall, as Hauser and Wirth have done, neuters them. They’re meant to frame what’s behind with holes and cutouts that cleverly conceal select parts of the environment. Instead, our attention is turned to the sculptures as objects, which may or may not be the right frame of mind for appreciating these more painterly sculptures. Walking around them can feel awkward and wrong given their flatness. Formally, they toe the line between industrial blocky structures and construction paper flowers cut by children. Hopefully one day, they’ll be returned to the wild.

“Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude” at DC Moore Gallery (February 8 – March 16, 2024)

As a young man, Paul Cadmus traveled Europe to visit every major art museum and monument on the continent, nursing a love for art history and developing artistic intuitions deeply informed by the past. He worked in egg tempera, a medium rarely used since the Renaissance, and he often directly borrowed compositional motifs from painters like Titian and Rembrandt. He then used these techniques to depict gay life around him. For example, this exhibit contains drawings of men in academic poses traditionally performed by women models. He softens male curves and positions them in calm everyday settings like Degas’ paintings of ballerinas at rest. In one painting, he captures the sunlight through a window cast on a man lying in bed with the color palette and pointillist technique of Seurat. It seems cheap to merely say that he homoeroticized the canon because he did much more than that. Still, standing before each painting at DC Moore, I found myself thinking: “It’s a gay Goya!” “It’s a gay Picasso!” Paul Cadmus is an "painter’s painter" but in a different way than we usually use the term. He did not deal with themes that only artists can relate to, but he loved art history so much that it bursts through his work in a way that other artists (with envy for the prowess of the Great Masters) understand best.

“Making Their Mark” at the Shah Garg Foundation (November 2, 2023 – March 23, 2024)

This show displays some of the most accomplished women artists of the past half century, but as a whole the exhibit is a hodgepodge. The supposed theme of the show is “intergenerational” conversation between artists, but the proposed dialogues are scattered and a bit too obvious to be true. One room groups paintings seemingly because they all have brightly colored squares. Another groups sculptures made of beads and tchotchkes. It could have been curated by Chat GPT. The artworks are too strong individually for the show to be a waste of time, but they’re all made worse through the suggestion that the artists borrowed from each other with such superficiality.

“Apollinaria Broche | In the distance there was a glimpse” at Marianne Boesky Gallery (January 24 – February 24, 2024)

This exhibit feels like a walk into the psyche of a sixteen year old e-girl. It is a collection of cutesy and somewhat depressive ceramic sculptures in the iconographic style of anime. They feel appropriately deformed, as if they came to us directly from cyberspace. They appear to melt like they were zapped through interdimensional travel, and they’re shiny because they come from a land of high resolution perfection. It’s a real life version of “Space Jam'' except instead of the Looney Toons it’s droopy anime flowers, and instead of playing basketball with Michael Jordan, they sit in the closet with teenage girls listening to indie music (which plays overhead in the gallery). There’s one red ceramic flower with messages inscribed on the heart-shaped petals that say things like “call me” and “i was hoping your email would find me well, but it never found me.” The works evoke compassionate awareness for a certain breed of mopey internet loneliness. It’s too adorable to be genuinely depressing, but it makes you want to bring someone a box of tissues.

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1. All images are copyrighted by their respective galleries