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On View

By Andrew Russeth 5/22 5:30pm

On View

Installation view with 'Beloved (Cairo)' (2013) by Mehretu. (Courtesy the artist Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris)

‘Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared’ at Marian Goodman Gallery

Julie Mehretu’s new paintings feel looser, more intricate and riskier than any she has done before. Influenced by the events of the Arab Spring, the artist, who was born in 1970 in Addis-Ababa and works in New York, has again filled huge canvases with skeins upon skeins of architectural plans, city maps, darting lines and free-flowing, undulating attacks of ink that are more powerful than ever, abstractly suggesting wild rivers, treacherous mountains and bombed-out landscapes. Marks sprawl across these 13 canvases in unexpected ways, stopping far from the edge, or spilling over into unseen territory. Critics could once accuse her masterful works of looking mannered or overthought; here they’re just masterful. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/21 6:19pm

On View

'Siegfrid’s' (2013) by Alex Hubbard. (Courtesy the artist and Maccarone)

‘Alex Hubbard: Magical Ramón and The Five Bar Blues’ at Maccarone

The hints of melancholia and breezy bathos that have long made Alex Hubbard’s work so interesting are strongly present in his newest pieces, called “one-person portable drinking bars.” These five Kienholz-worthy stalls are each about the size of two phone booths and stocked with alcohol, complete with a working beer tap. You can saddle up to the bar with its lone chair, pour a drink and enjoy it while staring at yourself in a mirror. It’s playful and humorous—until it gets lonely. Whatever Mr. Hubbard means to get at with these boîtes—the inherently solitary nature of looking at art?—this show, his sophomore outing at Maccarone, has him bringing his typically inventive, light touch to a variety of mediums, and continuing to eschew a signature style, a refreshing stance in a city that all but demands its artists adopt a recognizable brand. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/21 5:23pm

On View

Still from Maria Petschnig's 'Petschsniggle' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays)

‘Maria Petschnig: Petschnigs’ at On Stellar Rays

Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/21 4:41pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Bradley Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000′ at the Jewish Museum

If you’re turned off by the bombast of infinitely escalating auction prices and big-tent contemporary fairs, take refuge in the elegant first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Organized by Orange County Museum of Art guest curator Philipp Kaiser, and in New York by Jewish Museum Assistant curator Joanna Montoya, the show is the gloomy B-side to the relentless pop staccato of blockbuster contemporary art. Yet artists today owe much to this cult figure. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/14 6:08pm

On View

'Metallic Venus,' 2010–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

‘Jeff Koons: New Paintings and Sculpture’ at Gagosian Gallery and ‘Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball’ at David Zwirner

Jeff Koons’s two-gallery blowout, his first large-scale appearance in commercial galleries in the city in 10 years and the unrivaled event of the spring art season (barring, perhaps, the Frieze Art Fair), is a roaring success, filled with feats of engineering and artistic choices that are as gleefully peculiar and perverse as any he has ever made. Mr. Koons strives to please, and he delivers. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 5:22pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Audio Visual Arts)

‘Ben Vida: Slipping Control’ at Audio Visual Arts

Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a “score” consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/14 4:47pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy 303 Gallery)

Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery

Old Punk on Pay Phone, a color transparency mounted on an aluminum lightbox, shows the artist Rodney Graham at almost life size. He’s standing on a sloping wet sidewalk in Vancouver, against a brick wall painted yellow and blue. His black leather jacket is covered in studs and crude lettering, his graying hair is greased up into a faux-hawk, and there’s eyeliner on his eyes. Holding the handset of a much-abused, wall-mounted pay phone to his ear, he looks off in shock—as if he’s just learned, say, that his father has died, and he is realizing for the first time that when it comes right down to it, he’d be glad to put on a necktie for his widowed mother’s sake. Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/14 4:35pm

On View

Facsimile of CBGB bathroom, New York, 1975. (© Metropolitan Museum of Art)

‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

It’s too easy to make fun of the Met’s new “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. There was the chipper press preview at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning bustling with well-groomed junior fashion editors in leather pants and Walter Steiger heels, the facsimile of CBGB’s bathroom circa 1975, complete with graffitied urinals and cigarette butts, and Anne Hathaway and Miley Cyrus playing platinum punk Barbies at the Costume Institute gala—mockable incongruities served up on a silver platter. Read More