Art Review

Roaming Imagination

Millree Hughes — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:54:51 +0000

Roaming Imagination Millree Hughes March 1, 2026 - 11:54

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Mike Cockrill: Falling in Place
Mosaic Artspace, 19-28 31st Place (Andromeda Building)
Long Island City, NY 11101
Thru March 20th

I became a curious fan of Mike Cockrill's paintings and drawings on Facebook, beginning in 2022, when the artist returned from a Covid-imposed isolation to meet in public. I approached him at a Mark Kostabi show on West Broadway. He's tall and confident, easy to pick out in a crowd. One of the reasons I was attracted to his FB art profile is his graphic versatility, drawing skills, and sharp imagination. Artists such as Daumier and Goya, and editorial cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, created nightmare fantasies and ironic jokes with their pens.

His technical facility is deceptively mainstream, serving a subversive bend. "I had an early fascination with popular forms like magazine illustration and political cartoons." As a young artist, he took a job designing business forms in the financial district for Merrill Lynch, getting an inside view of cubicle life.

By the time we became acquainted, I had morphed into a veteran of the outdoor billboard-painting scene. In the blue-collar circus of ropes and ladders, the painter of big signs was called the "mechanic." Apart from a chuckle about the sinister Charles Bronson movie by that title, I identified with the cold impersonality of the content (cars, bottles, fax machines). The old-school bosses and shop managers put complete trust in my hands. I often dreamed about a clean job at a Madison Avenue desk.

1> Office Drones

In The Idea Room, a distressed gray office like a prison cell, three co-workers are pitching a campaign proposal. They are dressed in sparse Mormon black pants and shoes, white shirts, and ties. The result of their labors is demonstrably futile, the floor littered with paper airplanes and crumpled pages. An executive sucks on the lifeline of a cigarette while another sketches an invisible idea on a floating easel, yet a third lies supine in the exhausted pose of a patient in a psychiatric session. The figures are rendered as ciphers, thin suggestions with clown noses. A clockface stares like a merciless moon.

The Idea Room

2> Maps and Neighborhoods

Mike is from Virginia, a bedroom community close to the nation's government offices. In other paintings, he shows off his gift for storytelling in sunny, halcyon landscapes. The types of children and activities in those are deceptively innocent and attractive. Mike's plots add a sinister twist. In earlier works of lawn parties, sweet girls in pastel pinafores hold pistols aimed at cowering clowns.

His views of suburban houses are devotional and can resemble pre-Renaissance Italian art. The ranch-style houses are composed with a model-maker's care and patience, often using multiple perspectives, or more pastorally, seen from a bird's-eye view. In these, we see a sharp-edged Japanese space, the curved roads gracefully disobey logical connections. The surface is layered and scraped to reveal hidden layers, with drips and veils, seams of patchwork, affirming the flat canvas. Nowhere do we see the anecdote of dogs, figures walking, and cars on errands. An eerie quiet prevails, as if the families have all departed for offices and schools–perhaps a reminder of the Cold War.

Maps and Neighborhoods

The grinning malevolent map of the USA is another of Cockrill's inventions. The omnivorous face of a US map grasps with tentacles and mechanical arms, a reminder of MAGA's threats of rogue imperialism, the face of America: arms dealer to the world. Heads roll, and bloody conquests from history are revived: the map is an ogre–the tenuous Union affirmed by Lincoln at the surrender of Lee's army still festers, remains a squirming, itching bed-case. Anger against scapegoated minorities is normalized.

The Skull Gatherer

3> Falling in Place: Watteau and Fragonard

One wonders whether, by drawing on Watteau and Fragonard, Mike gives free rein to beauty and refinement without contemporary content. Or maybe the bubble-dwelling courtiers of the Rococo era mimic the climate deniers or the isolationists of today's head-in-the-sand retreat from stable alliances? The Rococo world, highly decorated and refined, is now the poster child of a blind and willful negligence of the social order. A student of history knows what followed the last Bourbon monarchy: The French Revolution. Who can say, as some historians claim, that the violence of the 1790s was seismic, causing a chain reaction of mass death, into the Russian Revolution and the two World Wars? The expedient of the guillotine is expressed in Mike's related drawings of decapitated heads.

PUDDLE OF REGRETS

These concerns seem secondary to his fun in picture making, teasing delicate gestures of storybook women and girls from homely scraps and playful accidents on the canvas. The clash of materials and subject is charming as it is contradictory. His attachment of layers and shifting of the focal length on the players in this farcical, self-conscious space vibrates like an earthquake.

Blindfold Falling

4> Parents

There is a similar cancellation or discretion in this canvas. A traditional painter would be locked into the tedious posing of the couple in tiring positions, the result usually forced into its own stiff reality. Mike suggests a dreamlike flash as the principals assume the pose–a memoir deliberately faded, a fashionable red blazer worn by dad, a stylish car coat and handbag for mom. The likeness is an homage, emerging from the mystique of unity.

Parents

In modern culture, the painter is an uneasy hero, constantly striving towards a more complete reality. Bonnard said: "...the artist is grounded in the palette, but when the illusion appears, that's when the nonsense begins." Degas worked on Young Spartans Exercising for ten years. Hopper spoke of "a deepening affection" in his slow process, coaxing finality out of only two paintings a year. They were fiercely committed and took painting as far as their talent would allow. Revision for Cockrill is a source of life.

5> Destruction and Reconstruction

Perhaps living in our challenging, densely opinionated society requires nimble reassessments and constant reactions to the latest shocks. Who is not aware of some imbalance and insecurity? For artists, self-awareness is a top concern, as a daunting field of competitors claim and fight for their own style message. His painting, Fighter Jet No. 3, channels amoral, jarring realism—a pathos like stepping near a bird flattened by car tires. The layering of accurately cut textile shapes conveys a grim, inhuman force.

Fighter Jet No. 3

There was a saying from the abstract painters of the 1950s: "...you paint it out, and it is still there." What was the "it?" Could the artist see the ghost of his failed attempt through the veils of overlaid paint and start over on a new tack?

I think of the myopic trance of Melville's anti-hero, Captain Ahab, searching oceans for the white whale. Mike Cockrill's process of scavenging layers of textile, building images with ready-made colors from the thrift store racks, feeds and satisfies this anxiety. It comes of an impatience with fixed goals and of his roaming imagination. His work is from a tradition in which talented admirers of past masters allow themselves gauche manners and not-so-subtle jokes. Painters hope to surprise themselves, and maybe get some laughs.

John S. Paul, Brooklyn 2026

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Thank you for the review

What a pleasure to read John Pauls insights and reflections on my current exhibition of collage paintings. Thank you JP, Millree Hughes and Culture Catch.

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PSYCHOPOMPS

Millree Hughes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:12:52 +0000

PSYCHOPOMPS Millree Hughes February 23, 2026 - 20:12

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Josh Smith: Destiny
David Swirmer Gallery, 519 West 19th Street, New York
January 21 - February 28, 2026

I believe that I can use a combination of mental looseness and an almost meditative concentration to access Consciousness. The same place that the artist goes to make the art.

Giacomo D'Ariano and Frederico Faggin's new theory of Consciousness* claims that it is not linked to the functioning of the body and can persist even after death. That it is somewhere else, in another dimension. The body behaves like a drone controlled by this source.

Josh Smith's new show at Zwirner is of paintings of Grim Reapers on bikes on New York streets.

I believe they are painted from AI-generated images. AI really doesn't understand how bikes work at all, any more than it understands how arms connect to the body under that shroud. The hands become wheels, and some join the body to the bike. AI is looking for patterns on the plane at the front of the image, mainly because it has difficulty with the Z-axis. Consequently, wheels order themselves decoratively; lines of handlebars or cross braces link with bike chains in gestural strokes.

AI is perfectly situated to communicate with another dimension.+ It has become like a global unconscious. A dream state that is in danger of becoming a mass hallucination.

Before that happens, perhaps it can reveal pure states of being.

What other ways can I use to access the creative infinite? I have read that drugs can help, but which ones? The shimmer of ketamine? The feel-good confidence of MDMA? There are Halloween colours here that could've come from a 'shroom schema. Purple skies, dirty yellow lights, Pepe the Frog green bikes. Do I need to be on drugs to understand them?

This painting depicts a reaper at the top of some subway steps wieldinga bike object. Josh Smith makes his paint the consistency of a high-class moisturizer. Slippery but not drippy. The line bears no pretense of elegance. It has a hand-wavy quality, a little flutter that gives you the sense of an activity that may vibrate to the point of falling apart.

It is a good example of Smith's tendency to turn an image into a symbol. The amalgamated reaper and bike form an X shape in the middle of the canvas. I closed my eyes and tried to deepen my connection to the piece. But the symbol became an obstacle barring the way to the city and to life itself. The British slang term "Christ on a bike!" connotes surprise.++

This image is of inevitability.

In some areas of these canvases, the figure, bike, and bike chain become obnebulated. AIhas given up, and the artist has rendered its ejecta as is. Abstraction that is merely confusion.

In an attempt to reach out to Consciousness, I took dowsing rods to the gallery. They can also be used to foretell the future or divine hidden truths by bypassing the mind's logical processes. Unfortunately, although they told me where the water pipes were in the building when I asked, "Is this a good painting?" They did not respond.

Conclusion:

What can I understand about Josh Smith's new show at David Zwirner Gallery called Destiny in terms of quantum Consciousness?

Embrace Uncertainty.

Smith's work thrives on contradiction. Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, let them exist simultaneously, much like a quantum system holds multiple potentials. That state of not-knowing is central to the experience.

Deep Seek.

*"Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach" by Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin, January 2021

+According to Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, "A structure trapped in an endless feedback loop of self-referentiality." https://iai.tv/video/the-language-of-the-unconscious

++Similar, less common variations include "Christ on a stick" or "Christ on a cracker."

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thanks Millree - deep dive into AI and risk

The underworld carnival mask shares the high risk thrill of urban youth culture – train surfing, skateboard stunts & those tags on impossible hi-rise construction projects & bridges where there is no safe place to stand. (an “angel spot” )– in a kid’s mind the risk is the payoff.

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Routes/Roots

Millree Hughes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:58:53 +0000

Routes/Roots Millree Hughes February 3, 2026 - 19:58

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Odila Donald Odita: Shadowland
Kordansky Gallery, NYC
January 15 – February 28, 2026

"Fear is the flash, the gorgeous dress our skeleton wears." - Dambudzo Marechera.

It's better if the content of a painting is clear or at least available when you look at it. If not, you need a statement to guide the observer. Often, with abstract painting, writing the statement may require more lucubration than usual. Why these colours, why these forms as opposed to any others? It might end up being as significant an artwork as the paintings themselves.

Odili Donald Odita creates acrylic paintings and wall murals. He was born in Nigeria and raised in America. He has made the intersection of the two cultures a reason for making the work.

This is Odita's second show at Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea. He has included some paintings by his father, who was an artist in Nigeria, and some of his own identity-oriented photographic work from the '00s. The inclusions suggest that he's not sure if the work will communicate its purpose without some background information. The rest of the show is work made in 2025.

At some point in the late '90s, the influence of Illustrator, the vector graphics editing program, was felt across the visual culture. The patterns were used for digital wallpaper, desktop backgrounds, and in the physical world, sometimes as nightclub murals. They seemed to reflect the digital optimism of the era. You could hover over an area with your dropper tool and fill it with your bucket tool in any colour you fancied. Fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg used it to update Emilio Pucci's patterns, and some artists decided that the vector images might make good paintings. It was a large part of Franz Akkerman's work. I think I noticed it first in 2000 in a Mathew Ritchie show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

But after a while, it faded away. There were all kinds of other ways to make images on the computer.

Once Odita had adopted the look, he took a few years to refine it and then produced a lot of quite similar-looking paintings. There are some key motifs in the work. The squashed and fractured stripe painting that might be seen as a landscape, as inHeavy 2025 or Future Perfect from 2008. The loose verticals with a diagonal cut, as in Cut 2025 or Cut 2016 (lithograph). There are the diamond-shaped patterns that appear to have a figure in the middle that could either be "Nude Descending a Staircase," or a figure (sometimes figures) dancing. Like "Protector" in this show or "Here and There" from 2008. You get the idea.

There are lots of interviews online in which the artist talks about his relationship to Nigeria and how it informs his work, yet "Protector" has twenty-eight different colours. I still can't pick out which ones are Igbo and which are American. It's not like looking at a Mary Heilman. There is a lot to choose from. Also, I don't know why a digitally derived image should be a painting rather than a print. The associations are with weaving and block printing, so is the complete lack of human touch somehow ironic? Only the slightly raised ridge along the taped edges remains.

Protector, 2025 acrylic on canvas 90 x 40 x 1 3/8 inches

But more than that, there is a caution at the centre of the work that I can't ignore. For example, he often uses a marigold yellow as a highlight colour, but unlike Akkerman, he can't let it stand on its own. In "Camouflage," on either side of this coloured shape, there is a sliver of yellow ochre, or in other places, it has been backgrounded by a low-key azure blue. One shape has a line of dusty mauve running through it, but despite being its colour opposite, it merely subdues it. The whole effect throughout is one of balance, of resolution. The colour arrangements have sanded down any rough edges, and the forms themselves have suffered from the heavy toll that Shutterstock vector wallpapers have demanded. It looks too much like graphic design.

"How do you observe a stone that is about to strike you?" - Dambudzo Marechera

Watching them pluck our friends and neighbours, our loved ones, out of the crowd because of the colour of their skin is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. But anger and fear alone cannot make great art. Max Beckmann's ghastly shadows depended on his detachment, and David Hammons' blade was whetted by critical judgment.

I don't think all artists should or could be actively political; the act itself is political.
I understand that Odita came up at a time when it was harder for black artists to get gallery shows; he may have felt it was necessary to get his point across subtly. But today, I believe, if it can be said, it should be said without a filter.

Odita's statement at the gallery's front desk asks you to consider his work as a philosophical reflection and a meditation on how political forces shape what you perceive. It's a lot for this work to carry.

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modernism (post modernism)

thanks for your concise review of these vigorous works by O. D. Odita, released amid the turmoil of today's unacceptable reality. Odita's work reminds me of another black artist, William T Williams, who chose a similar path: hard edge colors in a structure influenced by the Bauhaus and the geometric fan-shaped spectrums of Frank Stella. In the figurative world, there is also a hard edge approach to the heart-wrenching stories painted in modestly small tempera panels by Jacob Lawrence. At the end of 2025, the Jewish Museum celebrated Ben Shahn, at a time where being Jewish is under increasing attack. As you mention, not everyone can take to the high ground of political commentary.

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Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:15:57 +0000

Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins Thalia Vrachopoulos February 2, 2026 - 12:15

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Han Ho, 21c The Last Supper, 2017 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED 1,350x6x300(h)cm

Han Ho ETERNAL LIGHT
Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, N.J.
Nov 21st - Dec. 10th, 2025

I recently encountered a consummate and mature articulation of the aesthetic imagination in Han Ho’s solo exhibition, Eternal Light, at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. While differing from such artists’ work as Yuan Goang-Ming’s in his meditations on domestic fragility and geopolitical tension, it achieves an equal, if not markedly greater, degree of intensity. Internationally renowned for his monumental light sculptures, spatial installations, and large-scale works imbued with biblical and metaphysical symbolism, Han Ho constructs environments in which illumination itself becomes both the medium and the message, using Marshall McLuhan’s phrase.

Entering the exhibition resembled stepping into a prismatic, otherworldly field of perception rather than a conventional gallery setting. Vast luminous structures, radiant surfaces, and kinetic constellations of LED punctures upon traditional Korean Hanji paper generated a transcendental atmosphere of refracted light that seemed to suspend gravity. In a way, such an experience inevitably recalled the medieval cosmology of Robert Grosseteste, for whom lux was not simply illumination but the metaphysical origin of matter; the first corporeal form from which spatial extension and physical reality unfolded. In Han Ho’s installations, a comparable intuition is materialised sensorially. Light operates simultaneously as both the material and the ontological agent, shaping space while also suggesting its own pre-existence to it.

This metaphysical primacy of illumination finds a particularly forceful expression in the monumental work 21C The Last Judgement. A vast mixed-media composition of charcoal, oil with traditional black ink, Korean paper, and embedded LED constellations, in which light operates not merely as an accent but as the principal medium from which the entire visual field emanates. At once painting, relief, and glowing installation, the work evokes the grand iconographic lineage of Western art history, especially Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Simultaneously, the piece displaces it into a contemporary register marked by nuclear anxiety, territorial divisions, and the fragile dialectics between war and peace reminiscent, in thematic gravity, of Yuan Goang-Ming’s reflections on state fragility and mediated disaster. Yet where Yuan often situates the viewer within the hyperreal circuitry of simulation, Han Ho propels the spectator toward a more cosmic horizon.

Structured in a tripartite vertical narrative of celestial aspiration above, the anguished threshold of lived reality at the center, and the infernal debris of human destruction below, the composition stages an allegorical drama in which clouds oscillate ambiguously between heavenly vapor and nuclear mushroom, embodying the Janus-like conceit of humanity’s technological triumph and existential peril. The punctured Korean paper, illuminated from within by LED light, produces an ethereal radiance that renders figures and gestures almost immaterial, as though suspended in an aethereal continuum where matter itself seems provisional; this internal luminosity simultaneously evokes the silent diffusion of radioactive glow and the spectral afterimage of irradiated atmospheres of nuclear fallout. Subtly interwoven into this vertical apocalypse is the unresolved memory of Korea’s partition, whose geostrategic fracture reverberates less as a cartographic fact than as a psychic and metaphysical condition.

Han Ho, 21c The Last Judgment, 2022 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED Variable Install

This particular concern likewise inflects the almost stereographic The Last Supper, in which Han Ho extends his theology of light into a historical and political allegory, reconfiguring Leonardo’s canonical tableau as the Last Supper of the Twenty-First Century and inscribing it with the unresolved tensions of the Korean peninsula. Christ occupies the center not as a doctrinal sovereign but as a luminous nucleus of life, of inexhaustible radiant vitality amidst collective precarity. Around him, the disciples are reimagined as fractured embodiments of contemporary subjectivity. A uniformed NBC-clad sentinel registers nuclear anxiety, and the aluminum mirror embedded in a Chinese costume reflects not only the spectator but also the weight of hostile forces bearing upon the peninsula. The nude figures facing toward a primordial Korea, silently split across the pictorial axis into North and South. Upon the table, symbolic objects such as tanks and barbed wire cruelly transmute into aestheticized toys, Peter’s denied chicken, kimchi as a sign of cultural homogeneity, and the sushi bomb as purposeless destruction, coalesce into a post-modern still life of poised devastation.

However, it is again light that confers metaphysical coherence upon this dense iconography. These images resist total instrumentalization even within a technologically mediated platform, understanding the form as a vital force rather than an inert representation. In a way, light here becomes a spectral intermediary, binding fractured histories, divided territories, and dispersed identities into a single, trembling field of presence; an eschatological supper staged at the end of time and history.

My encounter with Han Ho’s Eternal Light at Mana Contemporary became an occasion to contemplate through association the unsettling proximity of large-scale annihilation, sensing that the spectre of a global war no longer belongs solely to speculative discourse but hovers as a tangible possibility within the collective imagination. Yet the exhibition does not succumb to despair; rather, it staged the primordial element of light as a fragile but persistent counterforce, offering these aesthetic environs in which existential fear and the enduring human impulse face toward transcendence.

Han Ho’s sublime works, radiating an otherworldly glow, function as a spectacular luminescent architecture of consciousness, dissolving the boundary between sensuous experience and philosophical inquiry. In a way, Han Ho strongly affirms that even when art confronts the imagery of conflict and violence, it retains the singular capacity to momentarily liberate the observer from the contingencies of personal will and social turmoil, reconstituting the viewer as a disinterested and lucid subject of pure contemplation.

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Surface Tension

Millree Hughes — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:29:05 +0000

Surface Tension Millree Hughes December 14, 2025 - 15:29

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Lynn Chadwick: Hypercycle - Chapter II: Archetype (1963-1977)

Perrotin Gallery, NYC

Til Dec 20th

Herbert Read used the term "Geometry of Fear" in his introductory essay for the show he had curated as part of the British entry for the Venice Biennale of 1952, "New Aspects of British Sculpture."

Lynn Chadwick's pieces from that show, Beast, Bullfrog, and Maquette for an Unknown Prisoner, were in keeping with his theme of sculpture that emanated the collective anxiety of the post-war period.

He would later distance himself from the appellation, believing that his work did not have much to do with the war. I think he was more concerned with alluding to the engineering and architecture of rebuilding, while also evoking the landscape the British soldiers had been fighting for.

The small figures in the Perrotin show appear with their gowns caught in the breeze, advancing on tiny tarsi, ready to fly. This entomological association contrasts with the more industrial structures that appear to be just beneath the surface in other pieces.

"Sitting Elektra II" (1968) is an elegant female figure that resembles a resting dancer, with a bright triangular face and a bob haircut. Her small breasts and a possibly newly fertilized belly are represented on a highly polished square breastplate that contrasts with the rest of the grey figure. The posture with its broad shoulders and erect head has the quality of theatrical catalepsy. Like a figure chosen from the audience for a hypnosis act.

"Monitor" from 1965 is a tall piece that appears to have a soft, tentlike body with a batwing motif on the surface that suggests the nature of its understructure. It has a more manufactured "head" composed of two thinly separated, lens-like structures. These two flat rings look manufactured, almost as if they were found objects. The name helps redirect the gaze back to the viewer. It could be a tower in Foucault's Panopticon system of surveillance.

The dusty, tan-coloured surface re-humanizes the object, making it more tactile.

Chadwick's pieces have a fascinating surface created by different firing techniques, ranging from an almost matte ceramic feel to the ashier, lead-like surfaces of the figures.

"I actually wanted to produce a sort of touchable object, a tangible object. I really wanted to do that rather than be involved with intangible things like architecture." - Lynn Chadwick

He began his sculptures with a steel skeleton, often adding clay to the interior so that the structure showed through. He would cover the armature, wholly or partly, with a composite of plaster and iron filings, working it with his hands or tools to generate a gesture-scaled surface. This was the master model for lost wax bronze casting. There were a lot of finished experiments made in the Lyppiat studio forge to create the texture and colour of the final piece.

We would all like a little more geometry with our fear. Ours seems to come from all directions with no visible structure behind it. Lynn Chadwick does not make ironic statements through highly polished surfaces, as many of our contemporary sculptors do. His work is intratextual, relating to other elements in this dimension that he has created rather than quoting from other artists. It is a singularly personal work that relies on imagination and observation.

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WARP

Millree Hughes — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:32:51 +0000

WARP Millree Hughes December 2, 2025 - 17:32

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Trespasser no. 4, 2025, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 96 inches

KARIN DAVIE: It Comes In Waves

Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Through 20 December 2025

Karin Davie is famous for a suite of extraordinary paintings that she showed in the 00s. They seemed to be her last word on the Stripe Painting, which had been her subject since the early 90s. She cut the stripes loose from the edge, and they recoiled like heavy rubber bands. These large abstract works consist of wildly interweaving fist-sized strokes on a coloured ground. The lines are painted wet on wet, picking up colour as they travel, each brush stroke loaded in such a way as to imply weight and volume and evidence of a light source or sources hitting the surface of the line. She never lets you forget, however, that this is paint speaking the formal language of Art.

In her dynamic new show at Miles McEnery, the stripe is back with a new set of instructions. The show consists of two sets of glorious paintings. Two red wave-like paintings, made up of two joined canvases, and a second group of wavy paintings, each in a predominant colour. They are unusual colours that can appear natural, artificial, or both. All of the second set has a divot cut into the top in the middle of the canvas, as if a giant's thumb has pushed into the picture plane.

"Trespasser No 4" is a particularly lovely golden-haired painting. Lines move horizontally in sensual gestures from one side to the other with a kink in the middle, so that by the time the last line is made, there is a groove or path running vertically through the canvas, finishing at the cut-in divot at the top. As the line moves, it picks up lighter or darker versions of the prevailing colour. The way that darker tones gather in parts of the image makes me think that the shadow of clouds has been cast on Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows." The line sometimes stops firmly before the edge or runs on as if it didn't exist. Drawing attention to the formal limits of the canvas and then sometimes totally ignoring them.

Words have worked for Davie in the past. Not in a literal way that say "container" did for Ross Bleckner with his paintings of the '90s made in the shape of urns. But her '90s pieces were "wavy" Davie's and sometimes "curvy" Davie's. But after the '00s, she began looking inside for inspiration rather than at how she looked from the outside.

"Abstractionists see no more sections, no divisions between different sections of reality, and this is not surprising since reality has been transferred from the outside to the inside of the artist, where experience is all one, and everything exists on the same plane." - Guillaume Apollinaire

Strange Terrain no. 5, 2025, Oil on linen, 60 x 105 inches

A more internal perspective persists in the Red Wave paintings. In "Strange Terrain No. 5," we are reminded of both the sea and the body. These are gorgeous paintings, but she doesn't let you just fall into fairy-tale beauty. She brings you back to the real condition of the body. At one point, a cut opens up between the lines and drips over the undulating surface.

There's a carnal shadow. It's not only a billowing pomegranate sea at dusk, but it's also viscera heaving with the breath, the tissue that covers the ribcage.

Both Strange Terrain paintings are composed of two canvases. It means that when she is painting the horizontal stroke, she has to stop and then continue the line again on the next canvas. This deliberate obstruction asks the question, 'Is the action still authentic if it is made a second time?'

Or in this case, if the line is continued.

It harks back to one of her earlier diptychs like "Ummm….#1 & #2," 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Where a curvy form covered by stripes had to be repeated in the second painting.

Ummm….#1 & #2, 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Oil on canvas over shaped stretcher. Each canvas: 90 X 60 in

This emphasis on the performance side of painting reminds me of the difference between the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan. It didn't matter whether Jimi was playing with his teeth or behind his back; you took the notes he played to be an authentic response to the music. But in a performance by T Rex at the Rainbow music venue in the early '70s, Marc ran his tambourine up and down the neck of the guitar until he finally ejected the tambourine into the audience. It really didn't matter what the sounds coming out of the speaker were; it was about the performance of the action. Marc was no slouch as a guitarist either, but he sometimes used the guitar as a prop as well as an instrument.

While I recognize that this example is not exactly the same thing, because Karin very much cares about what the painting looks like. I'm just using it to make a comparison between how glam was much more playful with the rock music form in a way that is similar to how the post painterly abstract artists used Minimalism. The exact same thing would be if Marc played an impassioned solo and then reproduced it, immediately note-for-note. That would be very Karin Davie.

Karin's work is about aesthetics and poetry. She asks: can a painted performance be authentic? Is the edge of the canvas the end of this particular state described by the painting? At the same time she's alluding to places and things in an optical way. This line casts a shadow, this one emanates light. This picture reminds you of waves. Consequently, the image seems to shift constantly between different states.

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Makers Mark

Millree Hughes — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:51:41 +0000

Makers Mark Millree Hughes October 31, 2025 - 21:51

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Stretch, Hold, Release
Picture Theory at 548 West 28th Street, NYC

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition." - Walter Benjamin

AI is not regarded as a tool by artists the way the tools of the past were: burnt willow sticks, polished lenses, and Photoshop, because it’s seen as a threat to the artist’s existence.

Walter Benjamin's "Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is in full flow. Music, images, and books are being created to order by producers. Soon, just as Spotify is making its milquetoast music, Netflix wants to generate ambient, half-digested TV using AI and other means. It will be created according to the digitally tracked needs of the public in the service of the corporation. Mechanical Reproduction intends to obliterate the ‘who’ of art making.

Craft-based art returns the focus to the object—how it was made, where it was made, and by whom it was made.

At Picture Theory, the gallerist Rebekah Kim has curated a show of craft-based art called "Stretch, Hold, Release."

The relationship of the artist to where they are from is significant here. Unhitching art from its tethering post of origin has been useful for corporate-made content. It wants to make a global product from a global culture. The specifics of the place make it harder to control.

Luis Emilio Romero paints Guatemalan fabrics, going as far as to imitate the raised stitch in paint. They remind me of Scottish Tartan, '60s hard-edge abstraction, and city plans. However, here, all the shapes and colors that comprise a traditional woven piece can refer to animal, plant, or cosmological patterns. It’s a metaphor for the Mayan worldview.

Lior Moran is an Israeli artist, raised in a country partly populated by people who came there because they had to hide their religion, now caught in a terrible darkness where the objectives on both sides are hidden. He takes found objects or makes sculptures that he hides under a velvet canvas. He shaves off the protruding planes, creating an inverse shadow. He uses twilight colors in his work. They are then bound along the side with a flesh coloured belt that sometimes has a buckle, like a bundle wrapped for a hurried exit.

The multiple handles and thick knotted rope, the little pinafores that she makes for her examinations of Peruvian pottery, draw attention to the utilitarian character of Terumi Sato’s own Japanese ceramic traditions.

Elisa Lutteral is an Argentinian artist born in New York. She is represented here by hanging lengths of woolen fabric with a glove at each end. In the video, the glove-wearing performers are positioned in a specific location from the camera's perspective. The resulting braid is achieved by their movements around each other. It’s an improvised group performance of one of the first crafts that we learn as children.

JaLeel Porcha’s contribution is the least didactic in the group. It’s a deep-pile hanging rug. It appears to represent a clearing in the woods, featuring two black children and a pond, perhaps. He’s influenced by the illustrators of classic American children’s books. The nostalgic quality is enhanced by being a knitted piece, which adds an ironic element to its shadowy mood.

An object that has only been created by hands and shows ´where’ and ‘when’ it is made and ‘what’ it is made from is crucial to understanding ‘what’ it is. Without these interrogatives being answered, it probably isn’t Art at all.

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The New York Art World Rebooted

Mary Hrbacek — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 01:54:55 +0000

The New York Art World Rebooted Mary Hrbacek October 9, 2025 - 21:54

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painter

Nathaniel Mary Quinn Study for Grange Copeland, 2025 Oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel 18 x 15 inc

Gagosian Gallery: Nathaniel Mary Quinn - Echoes from Copeland (9/10–10/25/2025)

Hauser and Wirth: Ambera Wellmann - Darkling (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Company: Ambera Wellmann - One thousand Emotions (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Marianne Boesky Gallery: Celeste Rapone - Some Weather (9/4 – 10/18/2025)

Nathaniel Mary Quinn explores personal, family, and historic narratives in twelve intense new oil and oil pastel paintings on linen, where he uncompromisingly excavates pictorial planes in his search below surfaces for the underlying, intrinsic, emotionally charged forms that spur and motivate his life and his art. His meticulous, exquisitely composed vision displays a strong formal connection to the methods employed by Francis Bacon, while also delving deeply into the visceral underpinnings of the personalities he constructs and describes. This is the primary focus of the complex, highly empathetic structures that build the psychological force that each image conveys. Quinn’s mastery of the paint medium and its many possibilities provides a level of expertise that has long been scarce in contemporary art. The intimate works are forcefully compelling and meaningful. Their complexity draws viewers into the process of painting, assaulting their senses to make them experience otherwise subconscious or unexpected feelings.

Quinn’s ability to submerge the main subjects in a revealing context accentuates their truth on a number of levels in their attempts to escape racism, in their efforts to flee poverty in rural and urban America, and in their desire to put the slave heritage that haunts their quest for freedom and equality behind them. His search for self-realization involves a closer look at the circumstances of his dysfunctional family members. The hope and possibility of redemption is inspired by the novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” by Alice Walters.

Quinn’s dynamic blue, red, and yellow hues activate the central themes of his plots to a level of power that sensually engulfs the viewer. The combination of black and white within the maze of the facial forms and features sets the stage for deep introspection and personal tandem feelings one may relate to in one’s own family history and experience. Quinn explores the emotional pain frequently released through the painting process by creating fierce shapes and expressive forms that may function as a healing measure. One can only appreciate the artist’s special ability to transform disturbing-looking structures into unusual embodiments of beauty that grow from facing harsh realities. His distinctive “paint-drawing” technique enlivens the authority of each vignette, where scenes and backdrops express a graphic sensibility that is counterbalanced by his painterly interpretation of the facial features and specific body parts. The show is unique and powerful.

Ambera Wellmann, Mother, 2025 Oil on linen 45 x 49 in 114.3 x 124.5 cm (AW152) Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Ambera Wellman’s two current shows in New York overlap in their visual narratives with the “One Thousand Emotions” coming in as an edgy depiction of the destructive forces in former times aimed against women who are discerned to defy societal conventions. In “Darkling,” her seven oil on linen paintings feature masked congregations who have gathered, as in James Ensor’s masked assemblies, to commiserate, to support, or to experience a sense of communal dread that foreshadows the impending apocalypse. Her painting style is semi-representational, not realistic, which provides a successful vehicle for her phantom-like reveries. Wellmann’s visions of the naked and departed, in a feast that hints at an interim stage of the afterlife, seem to refer to a frightening existence devoid of the order to be found in everyday life. These specters and hallucinations relate to the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch projected forward into the contemporary mind.

Wellman is one of the present-day artists to visualize and express the unsettling implications of the current world turmoil. The artist’s beautifully rendered works express emotions of terror and foreboding. She intimates in the painting entitled “Siren,” that our original human genesis as sea creatures will become our endgame. Wellmann delves into her personal philosophy to explore the path to oneness with the Universe; her meditations hint that through the release of the ego, we will achieve that unity. She explores personal, societal, historical, and philosophical ideas in forceful, intricate visions set in fraught outdoor settings and in ethereal evocations of mystical, sensual inner worlds.

Wellmann’s show, “One Thousand Emotions,” displays six oil on linen paintings that are connected by photographic and drawn wall imagery in installation formats. Her emotionally charged images are steeped in nudity, sexuality, and flirtation with the spiritual dark side. Wellman evidently intends to conjure the apparitions of disobedient women from dark, unstable ages, who were persecuted as witches and executed as dissenters. Death is depicted as a metaphor for chaos and change. Wellmann has the courage to explore subjects that spark our fears and resistance to the reality that life is transitory, changeable, and fleeting. Her provocative, intriguing work represents a committed intention to bring universal meaning and philosophical content into the contemporary art arena.

Celeste Rapone Poised, 2025, Oil on canvas 32 x 28 inches 81.3 x 71.1 cm

Celeste Rapone’s large-scale oil on canvas paintings, presented in her current show “Some Weather,” provide a clear vision of believable, ultra-personal imagery that describes a quotidian life every viewer can relate to. In an unusual perspective, Rapone infuses her contemporary imagery with art historical spatial interpretations that evoke the work of Cezanne and Modigliani. Her anatomical distortions accentuate an arm around a shoulder or a female figure shuddering as wind blows her hair under an inadequate umbrella. She piles figures on top of each other in what appears to be the morning after an all-night drinking party. Figures in a hot tub swelter red against glowing white bubbling water. Rapone has a very European vision of the figure, where elongated legs or enormous hands call the viewer's attention to the distorted, accentuated anatomical forms. Her colors are muted, sophisticated, moody, and convincing. The facial features seem morose and reserved, not exuberant. A figure wearing a LOVE T-shirt sits with a girl, suggesting the pair is a couple. There is a sense of orderly melancholy in this vision that is quietly believable. The artist paints beautifully; the subtle tones distinguish these paintings. By their extreme introspection, they create a calming effect that allows the viewer to focus on the personalized, elongated distortions. The group formats allude to unsurprising ordinary relationships present in the everyday lives of the majority of people, which provide a sense of community in life. The elegant rendering of the forms puts these works in a category of their own, as a formal achievement well beyond the usual depiction of common objects and normal people. The delicately modeled, unique figures set in distinctive milieus are poetic and mesmerizing.

The three exhibitions reviewed above, as well as the solo shows “Yuan Fang: Spaying” at Skarstedt and Austin Martin White's “Tracing Delusionships” at Petzel, indicate that the windows in Art have been opened to allow fresh air to circulate. The New York Art World seems to be diverging from past constraints, which have long determined the style of art that holds dominance here. There is a refrain from a song from 1963 by British folk-pop duo Chad and Jeremy called “Yesterday’s Gone.” Its sentiment expresses the space and opportunity for the freedom to flourish that is enabling a new trajectory to flow in the Art World. Unrest and chaos in society often spur creativity. I think this is an upbeat time to encourage and foster the daring types of individualized art that are entirely acceptable, very marketable, and above all exciting and engaging.

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Art Is Funny, Sometimes

Dom Lombardi — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 01:47:49 +0000

Art Is Funny, Sometimes Dom Lombardi September 7, 2025 - 21:47

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group show

"You Think That's Funny?"

September 6 to November 16, 2025

Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden

D. Dominick Lombardi, curator and participating artist

Cary Leibowitz, Painting is Not Dead? Painting is Dead? (1998), marker on found photographs, 10 x 16 inches, 11 x 17 x 1 inches framed

Humor in Contemporary Art is a funny thing. Seriously. An exhibition with humor as its specific theme is not something you often see in galleries or museums. There have been exceptions over the years, where artists like Saul Steinberg, who straddled the two worlds of fine and commercial art with his many brilliant The New Yorker Magazine covers; and the outlandish works of Marisol Escobar and H. C. Westermann who have their own unique brand of humor, can be seen in museums throughout the world–artists that would not have been as successful without the recognition of their wit and humor. Today, some form of humor, albeit on the darker side, can be experienced in the contemporary works of numerous well-known artists such as Carroll Dunham, Sarah Lucas, Barbara Kruger, Peter Saul, Erwin Wurm, and last but definitely not least, Maurizio Cattelan, who all have varying levels of dark humor in their creations.

Maurizio Cattelan, A Perfect Day (1999)

The title of this exhibition, "You Think That's Funny?," comes from an email conversation I had with Mike Cockrill, one of the artists in the exhibition, who has been toying with the limits of humor in art since forever. He sees humor and the extent of what can be publicly tolerated as a satisfying challenge. He, like many of the artists in the exhibition, presents us with something to make us laugh privately, but maybe feels a bit uncomfortable when expressed in the public realm.

The artists selected for this exhibition have accepted the fact that there is humor in their art. Using a variety of media, styles, references, and messaging, they have all created narrative art that should make visitors smile, at the very least, or even laugh out loud. What is also important to note is the substance beyond the initial humor. Humor only goes so far, so while these artists have your attention, you can appreciate the abilities and techniques used in the fabrication of their very intriguing work.

(left) Todd Colby, To the Future (2024), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches; (right) Peregrine Honig, Wonky Donkey (2006), pen and ink, Gum Arabic, pigment on Strathmore, 10 ½ x 10 ½ x 1 ½ inches, all images courtesy of the artists

Todd Colby uses words and images to create weirdly symbolic, diaristic mixed media collages, paintings, and sticker commentary that all have a substantive impact. As a poet, writer, and visual artist, Colby blends an endless series of investigative thoughts and images ignited by keen observations that, when added to a common surface, shed a humorous light on the often brazen and hard-to-bear new realities in our current sociocultural and political landscape. Peregrine Honig also utilizes words and images to create humorous vignettes; however, in this instance, Honig's art is more specific and far more intimate. Working with pen and ink, Gum Arabic, and pigment on paper, Honig presents previously innocent stuffed animals in far more mature social situations that many adults can easily relate to. In doing so, humor is maintained, but in a very different light, whereby the source of one's distinct personality traits, positive and negative, can be traced back to one's early days at play.

(left) Rita Valley, WTF (2019), mixed materials: silk brocade, vinyl, satin, paracord. 48 x 47 inches; (right) Norm Magnusson, Horse (2025), archival computer print, 24 x 18 inches

Rita Valley is fed up with the state of our union. Utilizing her skills with fabric and fringes, Valley gets right to the point as she confronts the viewer with familiar terms of dissent. Using fancy patterns, shiny surfaces, and heavily textured accents, Valley projects a passionate belief system that is being attacked on all sides. However, at first glance, the feeling one may get from her art is one of a universal, reactionary type of humor, pulling the viewer in, as they think more deeply about what is haunting their own worlds. The art of Norm Magnusson reveals a multi-pronged approach to humor that varies between county fair controversy and lowbrow art bombs to more serious issues regarding our collective state of mind. Magnusson is a master at pairing words and images, contrasting references and recognising timely subliminal links that creep up on you unexpectedly. Magnusson constantly reminds us to stay engaged and to look at the world with both delight and suspicion.

(left) Judy Haberl, Sausages (2020-25), jewelry, pearls, sausage casings, acrylic medium, sizes variable; (right) Bret DePalma, Art Ham (2024), acrylic, collage on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Judy Haberl grew up in a home where food was often extremely experimental, as her father advised NASA on their "food in space program…". Her family ate "...dehydrated foods to test for edibility," which were usually godawful, as these early experiences with laboratory food still influence her art to this day. Included in this exhibition are her humorous sausage casings filled with faux jewelry, and witty Baby Cakes made of colored Hydrostone, as she reminds us that it's all getting too far afield from wholesome whole foods. Bret DePalma pushes his narratives well past reason. Nothing fits, yet it all works once his paintings are completed. No color, perspective, symbol, or representation is off the table, as he weaves through uncharted spaces that sweep across his mind. The humor, which is very complex and layered, begins slowly and tentatively as the viewer comes to terms with what is in front of them, as they wonder where all this wizardry comes from.

(left) Susan Meyer, Maggie, 2025, wood, foam, acrylic, Apoxie Sculpt, paint, 2 x 3 inches; (right) Jeff Starr, Landolakes (2024), acrylic, marker on paper, 15 x 13 inches

Susan Meyer's sculptures have a B-movie type futuristic look to them that feels timid in one way and grandiose in another. A bold mix of emotions that gives her work a unique sort of humor that is subtle but effective. This is not to say that there is no depth here; there is, and much of it, as exemplified by elements of High Modernism as a distinct placeholder, especially with respect to the aesthetic, while the presentation of materials in their curious shapes and colors adds contrasting notes of frivolity and seriousness. Jeff Starr creates mixed media paintings that feature multiplanar realities. These planes, which could not be more different, shift back and forth between an idealized 'real world' and an imagined astral plane that transcends what is considered normal processing of space and time. This overlapping of universes forms a visually halting transition, perhaps the way alien space travelers may perceive our world on their terms, focusing more on unknown elements we can not see, while turning the whole thing into an absurd visual conversation.

(left) Jim Kempner, The $6 Million Dollar Banana Split, video, running time 5:33; (right) Cary Leibowitz, Cubism? (1998), marker on found photograph, 8 x 10 inches, 11 ¼ x 9 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches framed

Jim Kempner, a well-known, decades-long art dealer on the corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue in New York City's Chelsea District, is one of the more colorful individuals on the scene. A passionate purveyor of prints, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, Kempner sees the humor in his daily reality and does something about it. His seven-season video series, The Madness of Art, is a much-needed breath of fresh air, a break from the austere atmosphere that many NYC galleries often project when interacting with the general public. Cary Leibowitz uses words masterfully, and we never know if he is being cheeky or in the middle of a crippling crisis. Or is it both? Either way, Leibowitz's art will forever stir things up by disrupting the viewer's typical train of thought. Whether it's cute stuffed animals, symbolic ceramics, intricately cut placards, pennants, paintings, shopping bags, or an all-out outdoor installation, Leibowitz leaves us with an indelibly blazing, bold, and unexpected mark on many things, searingly sociopolitical to the brilliantly benign.

(left) Mike Cockrill, The Door (2013), acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches; (right) Mary Bailey, Pox - Let's Go Viral (2025), wood, acrylic paint, 5 x 2 ½ x ⅞ inches

Mike Cockrill's art portrays feelings of hopelessness, futility, ecstasy, or enlightenment. Using easily recognizable figures like clowns and the typical office worker stuck on a never-ending wheel to nowhere, Cockrill strikes at the heart of the circumstances he presents in ways that will make the viewer smile or laugh at first, until the weight of the situation breaks through. After that, it's back to the humor in a continuous cycle of responses that would never be as potent if not for the clever, straightforward, high-quality art of Cockrill. Mary Bailey's primary medium is painted or scribed wood that, when messages or symbols are added, has anywhere from unique tinges of Surrealism to a persuasive form of Pop. In her most recent series of symbolic cigarette packages, Bailey sends powerful socio-political statements utilizing her own brand of dark humor to make her point, concerns that are growing more and more troubling every new day. In the end, Bailey dives deep into realities that are best served with a little humor, or all is lost.

(left) Cathay Wysocki, Expeller of Erroneous Thought (2022), acrylic, collage, sand, glitter, beads on canvas 20 x 16 inches; (right) D. Dominick Lombardi, CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), sand, papier-mâché, gesso, acrylic medium and objects, 11 1/2 x 12 x 9 inches

Cathy Wysocki makes art that swings back and forth between fear and fantasy. Wild colors and crazy narratives somehow make everything oddly copacetic. The limits of which are stretched to the breaking point in every imaginable way. Hideous/Beauteous comes to mind here as Wysocki weaves her way through highly textured surfaces where emotions run raw and rampant, propelled by a limitless and lively aesthetic. Very often in my paintings and sculptures, humor is presented as a prompt or a reward for looking at the art. With the sculpture CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), I take a shot at the art world in general, and Damian Hirst specifically by referring to his most famous early work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) where a tiger shark is suspended in a clear glass and steel tank filled with a 5% solution of formaldehyde.

Adam Niklewicz, ERWIN (2024), cardboard box, rubber boot, 30 x 12 x 14 inches

Adam Niklewicz joins the fun with ERWIN (2024), an homage to the outrageous sculptures and photographs of Erwin Wurm. Like Wurm, Niklewicz often pairs absurdly unlike objects in penetrating ways to twist, confuse, and delight–it's physical comedy in 3D. Yet, there is something deeper and darker looming in the unconscious here. It's called unencumbered imagining, free association, the ability to literally think outside the box and get excited about some of the most banal objects of the day-to-day.

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Mastery of Faux Finishes

christopherhartchambers — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:36:10 +0000

Mastery of Faux Finishes christopherhar… July 7, 2025 - 12:36

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sclupture

Hiroyuki Hamada, #100, 2023, Painted Resin, 38 x 63 x 26.5" Base: 35 x 46 x 26.5"

Hiroyuki Hamada: New Sculpture
May 6 - June 13, 2025
Bookstein Projects, 39 East 78th Street, NYC

This exhibition of Hiroyuki Hamada’s new sculptures comprises eleven works, both free-standing sculptures and wall hangings. I hesitate to term all of the latter “bas reliefs,” while several of the major works certainly are. A nd those are very similar in formulation to the free-standing sculptures, although they are sans the hallmark pedestals, which stand to be part and parcel with the abstract forms they support.

The smaller wall-hung pieces are more akin to bricolage painting, as folded, bent, and twisted scraps of what looks like metal or leather are affixed to flat, subtly toned, apparently wooden substrates. The larger works impart a distinctly Japanese aesthetic in their elegant, zen-like, and graceful simplicity of pure form; as such, without any backing besides the wall, or they are free-standing. What appear to be natural materials, such as white or black ceramic tile, rusted iron, or stone, are also displayed on bases of what look to be thoroughly rusted pipes. To be clear on this point: the artist considers these works painted sculptures. They are all constructed of synthetic materials. Hamada’s masterful use of trompe l'oeil surfacing is astounding. The rusty piping is, in fact, PVC, and the aquiline shapes they support are carved insulation foam coated with painted plastic resin. Polystyrenes have been popular with artists since at least the 1950s and '60s when Jean Dubuffet and Nikki de Saint Phalle first explored the then-new found resource.

Hiroyuki Hamada, #88, 201 - 20, Painted Resin, 29 x 47 x 41"

The properties of these media allow for direct impulsive carving and so generally disregard the conventional sculptural necessity of pre-construction of an armature, or so to speak, skeleton within, thereby allowing the artist an unrestrained free hand in expression. Notably, Dubuffet topped off his monumental works with stucco while de Saint Phalle frequently embellished her works with mosaics. More recently, others have crusted the artifice with epoxies, fiberglass, urethane putties, or other substances; then painted them in order to stave off degradation resulting from exposure to sunlight. These are industrial materials often used in construction, or automotive assembly, shipbuilding, and even for making surfboards. Significantly, pragmatic considerations have enabled artists to explore and discover various possibilities. These newfound materials were lightweight, comparatively inexpensive, and easily manipulated without the need for a foundry. If Hiroyuki Hamada’s works were composed of what they convincingly appear to be, they would weigh more than could be lifted in this gallery’s elevator, or hung on its sheetrock walls. Yet there are laborious old-school techniques that could enable his vision with a forge and kiln. Frankly, Hamada’s mastery of faux finishes over the coated, smoothed, and refined forms is so complete that I didn’t notice until he mentioned it.

The illusionistic pragmatism is not what grabbed me. I was attracted to the work purely for it’s aesthetics–it’s elegance: the simple smooth forms which reference predecessors Isamu Noguchi and Jean Arp’s exigencies, amongst many functional designers, who modeled their modernist forms in traditional materials–whilst Hamada’s tasteful combinations of industrial supplies are not what they seem to be at all, presenting a fascinatingly duplicitous conundrum.