Sold-out gallery exhibitions make news, which can lead art collectors and enthusiasts to believe the phenomenon is a frequent occurrence. We hear about Loie Hollowell selling out at Pace, Carol Bove at David Zwirner, Brice Marden at Gagosian, Ebecho Muslimova at Magenta Plains, and Avery Singer at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.
What happens, in such circumstances, when more collectors want the work? What if demand for an artist’s work exceeds supply? Often, rumors circulate about massive waiting lists drawn up by galleries, organized according to mysterious priorities, and kept hidden from public view.
But according to many dealers, that’s hardly standard industry practice. Below, seven gallerists share their experiences with waiting lists and the delicate art of handling collector demand while protecting their artists’ interests.
The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but torsos are even more telling in this mid-career New York artist’s new group of intimate, numinous paintings. In this show, titled “Altar-ed Bodies,” Haynes explores the possibilities of feminist figuration in cropped compositions whose subjects are frankly depicted, in frontal poses, with their scars, stretch marks, and sagging flesh.
Rendered in a rainbow of vibrant colors, Clarity Haynes’s portrayals of queer, heavy, and disabled bodies reimagines the white box as a communal space that allows for the possibility of healing.
Nicky Nodjoumi’s dreamy serial paintings; Albert Oehlen’s “mirror paintings”; Clarity Haynes portraits of breasts; Kim Tschang-Yeul’s abstract brand of Pop Art.
As a lesbian woman, artist Clarity Haynes is aware that her “contributions to culture are likely to be erased as I am doubly marginalized”. However, her paintings of torsos and altars, which play a cathartic role both on her, the people who model for her, and the audience, will go down in history. With the aim to promote peace, empower the marginalized and fight the patriarchy, her beautifully honest, raw and truthful artworks serve ulterior purposes of healing, self-acceptance and love. Currently exhibiting at New York City’s Denny Dimin gallery, we sit down with the artist to talk about gender identity, sexuality, censorship, beauty and the healing properties of art.
The art world returns from winter break.
Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.” Dana Sherwood puts this observation to work in her fantastical art, which gives a voice to the world’s non-human inhabitants. In a time when man has an overarching influence on the environment, Sherwood’s work reminds us that we forget the intricacies of other living creatures. A new exhibition of Sherwood’s work is inspired by the multimedia artist’s time in Mongolia. —J.V.
A roving exhibition, now on view in Manhattan, looks back on capitalism and its “artifacts” from an imaginary future after the system has disappeared.
Make a day of it with our roundup of Tribeca highlights.
What’s old is new again in Tribeca, the neighborhood that fell off New York City’s cultural map when galleries moved en masse to Chelsea. Today, the area is booming again as dealers rapidly relocate their galleries to the triangle below Canal Street.
Please give us some background about yourself and your development as a photographer: How did you come to be interested in exploring the relationship between photography and violence and the viewer in your work?
While it’s true that things aren’t always what they seem, it’s also true that things can be hidden in plain sight. A show of new works by Erin O’Keefe embraces both maxims. Just as Photorealist painters flipped the script on their medium, a number of photo-based artists of late have been tinkering with processes and materials to painterly effect. Consider the process-based abstractions by Matthew Brandt and Alison Rossiter, or even the video reenactments of Old Master works by Eve Sussman and Bill Viola.
From the pocket of a white denim jacket in the back of Denny Dimin Gallery, Dana Sherwood pulls out a rock. Not just any rock, though: she’d picked this one up while visiting the Gobi Desert. Shortly after, she took it to a Mongolian shaman, who blessed it and handed it back to her as a sort of talisman.
For her stunning new series of paintings, New York artist Dana Sherwood centres on her experience of living and working amongst nomadic tribes in Mongolia.
by Erin O’Keefe
Selected by
Rebecca Leona van Enter, Artist and Gallery Liaison, Unseen
“Carefully aligning colourful 3D blocks, Erin O’Keefe’s abstract compositions play with space and spatial perception. The resulting photographs trick the eye, and are often mistaken for paintings.”
As David Little sees it, there’s a fair amount of gray in that definition, since there’s debate about when modern art, the dominant theme of the 20th century, segued into contemporary art — sometimes broadly defined as “the art of today.”But the director and chief curator of Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum also notes that many contemporary artists are willing to work in multiple mediums — painting, printmaking, photography, video — and can comfortably integrate those fields, while also finding inspiration from multiple sources, from the media to found objects to plastic and plexiglass.
JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 large scale color photographs, framed in grey and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the divided gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2019. Physical sizes range from 25×20 to 50×40 inches, and all of the prints are available in editions of +2AP.
Erin O’Keefe at Denny Dimin Gallery
As a student of Western art history, I have been asked to study the work of Pablo Picasso a little too frequently for my taste. I thought I could confidently say that I had puzzled over his collages—you know, the famous still lifes that incorporate wine bottles and cut up pieces of le journal—enough to be thoroughly fed up with seminar table conversations on representation and reality in pictorial space.
At the center of iris yirei hu’s installation is a tapestry hanging from a Navajo loom atop clay shards that resemble dry earth mounded over a grave. The woven image is of a weaver, a picture hu pairs with a print of a woman weaving silk (the source image is a Chinese work found in the nineteenth century), which rests on the clay bed.
Glasgow International, Scotland’s biennial festival for contemporary art, has announced the details of its upcoming program, which will take place from April 24 to May 10, 2020. More than one hundred artists—including Kader Attia, Yuko Mohri, and Eva Rothschild—will participate in the approximately sixty exhibitions and other events that will be staged in various venues across the city.
With the decline of retail, storefronts in the Triangle Below Canal Street are filling with galleries — it’s New York City’s most unlikely new art scene.
When the artists started moving in, five decades ago, TriBeCa was a winsome village of empty warehouses and forsaken loading docks. A few artists, like my own sculptor father, are still in their lofts, making work. But the neighborhood has long since transformed into a bustling hive of boutique hotels and high-priced condos. So it’s strange, and a little magical, to see it suddenly filling up with galleries — with three more opening in just the last two weeks and about a dozen participating in last week’s Tribeca Gallery Walk, a biannual tour experience and mini-festival founded by the art fair Independent New York.
Something wonderful is happening in the once and future art neighborhood of Tribeca. On the first Friday after Labor Day, these blocks were populated with crowds of artists and art lovers, all drawn by the siren song of possibility. But the smell of money, hustling collectors, and deal-makers was nowhere to be found. Instead, the air was filled with a feeling that’s been hard to come by for some time: hope. A batch of galleries opened for the very first time that night. Others had been there for a while. Many have come looking for new homes, trying to escape the alienating slew of High Line tourists and the costly rents of Chelsea.
