Exhibitions

A recently rediscovered masterpiece by the Baroque painter Guercino made headlines in 2022 after it overshot its $6,000 estimate to sell for a whopping $600,000 at auction in Paris. The dramatic portrayal of Moses looking up to the heavens with his palms raised will now go on public display at Waddesdon Manor in England, having been recently acquired by the Rothschild Foundation.
The specialist at Chayette and Cheval auction house, who was tasked with appraising Moses (ca. 1618–19), presumably regrets attributing the work to an anonymous follower of Guido Reni from the 17th-century Bolognese School. In the catalogue notes, it was even explained that Guercino had been considered a possible author.
The real attribution did not escape the expert eye of Old Masters dealer Fabrizio Moretti, who snapped up the sleeper hit. “We never questioned the attribution,” he said in 2023. “From 100 meters, you can tell this is an early Guercino.”
Moretti Fine Art had the painting restored, uncovering a striking luminesce beneath the aging vanish and several centuries’ worth of filth. It was exhibited at the gallery’s Paris location in September and put back on the market for a major markup of €2 million ($2.2 million).
The painting now returns to the public eye for the special exhibition “Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women,” where it will be joined by four more paintings by Guercino that were all painted in 1651. Spanning just over three decades, the exhibition will offer visitors a sense of how the Master’s style evolved during his lifetime.
Born Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Guercino was a highly sought-after artist who was regularly commissioned by dukes, popes, and foreign courts. He is known for his masterful use of chiaroscuro, of which Moses is a prime example.
The other paintings in the exhibition are King David, already part of the collection at Waddesdon and three sibyls: Libyan Sibyl on loan from the Royal Collection, and The Cumaean Sibyl with a Putto and The Samian Sibyl, both from London’s National Gallery.
The Rothschild Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Jacob Rothschild. On behalf of the National Trust, it manages Waddesdon Manor, a 19th-century estate that originally belonged to Ferdinand de Rothschild and is now open to the public.
“Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women” is on view at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England, March 20 through October.
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At this year’s Venice Biennale, Brazil’s representatives will shine a light on their home country’s indigenous peoples, once brought to the brink of extinction by colonial rule and now fighting to reclaim what was taken from them. 
The mission starts with the name of the exhibition site, which has been rebranded from the Brazilian Pavilion to the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion—a reference to the Pataxó people’s word for the territory before it was colonized by the Portuguese. Artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá has been tapped to take it over, but hers isn’t the only work that will be on view. Artists Olinda Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó also have contributions planned. 
For Denilson Baniwa, Arissana Pataxó, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana—the three curators behind the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion—a communal approach was central to the message.  
“The show brings together the Tupinambá Community and artists coming from the coastal peoples—the first to be transformed into foreigners in their own Hãhãw (ancestral territory)—in order to express a different perspective on the vast territory where more than 300 indigenous peoples live (Hãhãwpuá),” the curators said in a joint written statement.  
For them, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion “tells a story of indigenous resistance in Brazil, the strength of the body present in the retaking of territory and adaptation to climatic emergencies.” 
Curators Denilson Baniwa, Arissana Pataxo, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana. Photo: Cabrel. Courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation.
“Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds” is the name of the show planned for the pavilion—and it too says a lot about how the curators are thinking of their Venice project. The key phrase, Ka’a Pûera, is a portmanteau that suggests dual allusions: first, to a type of cropland that, after being harvested, yields a wave of low-lying vegetation; and second, to a small bird that expertly camouflages itself in dense forests. 
Both images reflect the Tupinambá, who were considered extinct until 2002, when they were finally recognized by the Brazilian State. In this sense, the Tupinambá are both birds and resurgent croplands: nearly erased but never gone, powerful in their ability to blend in, more powerful when they demand not to. 
Artist Glicéria Tupinambá. Courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation.
A series of mantles—feathered capes made by the Tupinambás—are included in a pavilion installation planned by Glicéria Tupinambá, who has pushed to have the few remaining examples from the 17th-century repatriated to Brazil. One of just 11 known mantles from this period was recently returned from the National Museum of Denmark, where it had lived since 1689. The other 10 remain in European collections. 
“The garment spans time and brings the issues of colonization into the present day, while the Tupinambá and other peoples continue their anti-colonial struggles in their territories—like the Ka’a Pûera, birds that walk over resurgent forests,” the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion said. 
Glicéria Tupinambá, Manto tupinambá (Tupinambá Mantle) (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
“We are living in a moment of convergence between the past, the present, and the future, in order to find a path towards sustainable ways of life and a rethinking of human relations,” said Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. “The questions raised by the work of the curators and artists point to relevant paths for the arduous process ahead of us.” 
The concerns of the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion mirror those of the main exhibition at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, organized by another Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa. A sprawling presentation of 332 artists titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” his planned show is all about outsiders. The exhibition includes numerous indigenous artists—including the Brazilian collective Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin—who are, according to Pedrosa’s curatorial statement, “frequently treated as [foreigners in their] own land.” 
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The haute couture shows have just ended in Paris, following another round of men’s collection in Europe. So, while you’d be excused for feeling a little fashioned out, don’t hit pause for too long because the New York shows are less than two weeks away. As a palate cleanser, we propose a trip to the pocket-sized yet treasure-filled fashion exhibition “Fashion Forward” at B Dry Goods gallery in Brooklyn.
Tucked away on a side street in Crown Heights, B Dry Goods feels every bit the high-end curiosity shop. Objects are hung densely and stacked high, every one of them handpicked by gallerist Gabe Boyers, who’s as generous with his boisterous laughter as he is knowledgeable about the 170 items on display, which range from rare vintage mementos to contemporary finds.
Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, telephone dial powder compact (ca. 1950s), black enamel, brass and glass, $1,500. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
I popped in a few days before the January 25 opening of “Fashion Forward” (through March 30) and we perused the weird and wonderful wares together. The first order of business was a telephone dial-shaped makeup compact from the 1950s, which the Italian avant-gardist Elsa Schiaparelli had actually come up with in the 1930s. “It’s based on a design by Dalí,” enthused Boyers, who said he found it in a Paris flea market some years ago (and it’s not the first one he’s sold). “They were just ‘funning’ around when she said, ‘Let’s make it!’”
Several paper dresses caught our eye next, one bearing an outsized face of Bob Dylan and another, produced by Campbell’s Soup, that “capitalized on the Warhol craze,” said Boyers. “They called it the Warhol ‘Souper Dress,’ and it was originally folded inside of a magazine.”
Andy Warhol, Souper Dress (ca. 1965), A-line dress made of screenprinted tissue, $4,500. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Next came a group of items that belonged to Josephine Baker, including a feathery pink hat—similar to one she wore to the Battle of Versailles—as well as her infamous banana belt (ca. 1930). Baker herself wore all the items on display, confirmed Boyers, who acquired them from a Paris sale of deaccessioned items from France’s national public radio (ORTF). It is a stunning find, even if the cloth bananas now look like they saw their best shimmy long ago. 
There is another Josephine Baker item in another display. When Karl Lagerfeld gifted a cape he’d designed to André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor and quippy fashion juggernaut, he included a portfolio of original fashion illustrations by the French poster artist Paul Colin. Some of those images, which were published unbound in 1930, depict a young, fresh-faced Baker—whose journey from a small Missouri town to the center of the Paris beau monde was the source of immense fascination for Talley. “It’s pretty rare to find a complete set of these pictures,” said Boyers, “made extra special because of the Lagerfeld provenance.”
Trunk belonging to Marie Antoinette, oak and cyprus, studded leather and hammered metal, $200,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
The centerpiece of the show—literally in the center, stopping us in our tracks—is a large trunk owned by Marie Antoinette, so battered that it looked as if it had been buried under the sea for centuries. “This was used to transport Marie Antoinette’s famous gowns and finery from palace to palace,” explained Boyers. “Versailles had a trunk-maker on site, as one does.” As such, they were not “fine things” meant to be kept, like furniture, so they were typically destroyed after trips in horse-drawn carriages on unpaved roads rendered them unusable—which makes the existence of this one all the rarer. “I’m sure she had hundreds at one time, but Versailles only has three of them left,” offered Boyers, who said his sample most recently belonged to a well-known designer who probably had an inkling of what it was. After all, the trunk reads “Garde-robe de la Reine” across the top, or “Wardrobe of the Queen.” 
The asking price for the trunk is $200,000. “That’s the price we put on it based on recent rare trunk sales,” said Boyers. “There were sales happening at Christie’s of Supreme Louis Vuitton where trunks were going for $280,000, and Marie is very hot right now as the goddess of fashion.” The highest price in the show, however, goes to a collection of 119 drawings by Hubert de Givenchy, costume designs for the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of Giselle in 1997. “They were gifted to his coordinator in New York, but we can only show a handful of them as they are so delicate.” Given their fragility, this archive is selling for $250,000.
Left: David Hockney’s silk red bowtie, $8,500. Right: Sonia Delaunay fabric printing mold (ca. 1924), $6,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Mixed among the bigger-ticket objects are smaller, more moderately priced pieces, too: a necktie worn by David Hockney; a Sonia Delaunay fabric printing mold (ca. 1924) containing remnants of pigment; two Nike quilts by Amy Rauner—former footwear designer at Converse—celebrating the Air Force 1 shoe; a T-shirt screenprinted by Andy Warhol with the likeness of Keith Haring (ca. 1986); a metal couture belt attributed to Paco Rabanne in 1970; a magazine photo of a model wearing an Oleg Cassini outfit with a handwritten message from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, telling the designer she wanted one (“A great wool dress—would love this”); and a bronze Roman belt buckle dating back to 100 C.E., more or less.
Patrice Yourdon’s ‘bralette’ (2022) with stainless steel screws, $3,900. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Contemporary fashion makes an appearance, too. The most eye-popping is a “bralette” made out of thousands of metal screws by New York-based artist Patrice Yourdon, whom Boyers discovered on Instagram years ago. “That would send quite a message on a first date,” he cracked. Elsewhere, Boyers included the paper disc dresses of artist Karina Sharif, also found on Instagram. “They might be difficult to wear on a rainy day like today, but perfect for laying around on a chaise.” Then there’s the “Big Hat Energy wall,” which is how Boyers describes a cluster of paintings by local artist Paul Gagner showing an exaggeratedly long cowboy hat.
Left: Paul Gagner, Big Hat Energy (2022), $3,500. Right: Paul Gagner, The Wig Shop (2022), $3,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Part of Boyers’s job, as he sees it, is to save archives from the dustbin of history. He once got a call from a picker—the people allowed to enter forgotten storage lockers for non-payment—who had opened a locker in Chicago and “not only found a piano, but a trunk full of musical manuscripts that turned out to be incredibly rare jazz manuscripts by Charlie Parker. If that guy hadn’t been there, they would have been lost.” Boyers and his team saved the musical treasures, which ended up with a “wonderful” collector, then surfaced again after his death. Which is to say, they wound up in the collection of Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones and one of the great jazz collectors of all time. “Not to toot my own horn,” tooted Boyers, “but about 70 percent of the things in the Charlie Watts auction at Christie’s came from me.”
“My biggest fantasy,” said Boyers, “is that people will buy these things and actually wear them.” The gallerist said he himself owns and uses two soup cups and soup spoons belonging to Anna May Wong. “It’s so much fun. There’s nothing very special about them except that they belonged to her—but it’s a vibe. And, you know, you could easily wear Paul Newman’s trench coat or Frank Zappa’s leather jacket covered in pins. You’d be wearing a piece of history.”
“Fashion Forward” at B Dry Goods, 679 Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, January 25–March 30, 2024
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For a trailblazing female artist and Art Deco star, beloved by celebrity collectors from Madonna to Barbra Streisand, Tamara de Lempicka has surprisingly not yet recieved a major retrospective in the United States. That is, until now. 
This fall, the de Young Museum in San Francisco will open the first retrospective in North America to spotlight the creative life of the Polish artist. “Tamara de Lempicka” will bring together her ultramodern masterpieces (the Centre Pompidou, for one, is loaning its entire Lempicka collection), while exploring her lesser-seen design process and the complexities of her biography. Following its run in San Francisco, the show will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the spring of 2025.
“The primary goal is to provide a more three-dimensional understanding of Lempicka,” Furio Rinaldi, the show’s co-curator, told me over the phone. “We wanted to provide a unified portrait of this incredible artist in a more complex and layered way—and not just as a poster girl for Art Deco.” 
Tamara de Lempicka, Jeune fille dessinant (ca. 1932). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Lisa Sardegna and David Carrillo, Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard, and Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, 2022.10. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
The seed for the exhibition emerged three years ago, when the de Young Museum acquired a rare Lempicka drawing from 1932. A graphite sketch, it is a finely shaded portrait of Lempicka’s daughter Kizette that bears out the artist’s accomplished draftsmanship. For Rinaldi, it further offers a glimpse into her creative process, an aspect of that isn’t immediately apparent when viewing Lempicka’s polished, highly pictorial paintings. 
“Drawing is the way she fine-tuned the figurative aspects of her compositions,” he said. “She always started everything on paper or by drawing directly on the canvas. It is essential to understanding her linear aesthetic.” 
The show will be organized chronologically to capture the various identities that accompanied Lempicka’s evolution as a painter. On the surface are her names: when she first emerged in the Paris salons in the 1920s, the artist signed her works Łempitzky, using the male delineation of her (or really, her then-husband’s) last name. Her 1925 solo exhibition in Milan saw her switch to the moniker Lempitzka, revealing her female identity for the first time. 
In 1933, when Lempicka wed Baron Kuffner, she took on the title of Baroness Kuffner. As Rinaldi pointed out, the artist’s thicket of collected names would bewilder even her close friend Françoise Gilot, who once recollected how Lempicka would confusingly call on her as Tamara one day and as the Baroness on another.  
These were hardly Lempicka’s efforts to conceal her gender or self, but more so, reveal how she was comfortable in fluidity. She seduced and loved both men and women; she never stuck in one place for long, moving from Paris to New York City to Mexico. As she once declared: “I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”
Tamara de Lempicka, Saint-Moritz (1929). Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, Gift of the artist, 1976, inv. 76. 121. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
Lempicka’s many facets will inform the retrospective’s various chapters. “Russian Heritage” delves into the artist’s roots, while “Mannerism to Modernism” explores how the works of Old Masters and Renaissance painters animated her style. Her name-making paintings such as Young Woman in Green (1927–30) and Portrait of Ira P. (1930) are gathered in segments dedicated to “Society Portraits” and “the New Woman,” which also draw out Lempicka’s muses. 
“Painting of female nudes has a long tradition of in art history,” Rinaldi said of Lempicka’s portraits of women. “But it rarely was depicted in such a powerful way by a woman. The paintings were done for Lempicka’s pleasure, from a woman’s point of view.” 
Finally, a section called “Tamara in America” surveys her latter-day career. Lempicka moved to the U.S. in 1939, where, after World War II, her figurative style felt out of time and taste. She would venture into still lifes and abstraction, but after a disappointing showing at Iolas Gallery in New York in 1961, she never exhibited in public again. 
Still, a century since she announced herself at the Milan show, Lempicka remains a potent figure. The de Young retrospective joins a forthcoming musical and documentary celebrating her richly layered life, just as the artist continues to hold sway at auction (her 1932 portrait of Marjorie Ferry set a record when it sold for $21.1 million in 2020) and in pop culture (Madonna’s current Celebration tour pays tribute to Lempicka throughout). It’s an enduring legacy befitting a woman who crafted herself in her own image.
“Lempicka was not the daughter of a famous artist. She was not the companion, lover, or wife of a famous artist. She never really recognized anyone as her teacher,” said Rinaldi. “She really saw herself as a work of art and her paintings are an expression of her life and her self.” 
“Tamara de Lempicka” is on view at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, from October 12, 2024 through February 9, 2025. 
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Over the weekend, January 27 and 28, Casa Batlló in Barcelona was transformed with light, color, and motion. About 95,000 visitors turned up to watch the kinetic display, in which artist Sofia Crespo’s artificial intelligence-assisted scenes and textures were projected onto the Antoni Gaudí-designed monument. 
The Lisbon-based Crespo, best known for her use of technology to explore biological structures, is the Casa Batlló’s second artist-in-residence, a role created as part of its Heritage of Tomorrow program. Just as Refik Anadol before her, Crespo was invited to create new works referencing Gaudí’s design; the first of these, titled Structures of Being, was unveiled at the live projection mapping event (other installations from Crespo’s residency are forthcoming).
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Across 12 showings, Crespo’s art danced over the facade of the building. Her luminously hued organic forms—florals, coral reefs, butterflies, and other natural phenomena—rippled and morphed in tandem with music by British composer Robert M. Thomas. The images also played off Gaudi’s surreal architecture, itself inspired by the shapes of the sea and marine life. 
“The fact that he’s using architecture as a way of connecting with the natural world,” said Crespo about the Catalan designer in a video accompanying the event. “In a way, I see a big parallel with what I’m doing.” 
Rendering of Structures of Being by Sofia Crespo. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The work was created by Crespo in partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which provided the artist with data on the behavior of marine currents. With this, Crespo used A.I. to generate her projection, emphasizing the “active effort of creating datasets… of training… of directing where that output goes,” she said. Thomas’s score, too, was an algorithmically generated piece that was performed by local performers.  
“We wanted to have this sound that illustrates Gaudí’s transitions,” Crespo explained. “There’s a big part of Gaudí’s work that is largely alive because it’s constantly being interpreted by people and literally being built right now. We wanted to tell that story.” 
See more images from the event below. 
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
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For homosexuals and other queer folks, dry January can make the start of the year feel like staring into a gaping maw. Luckily, there is a slew of invigorating New York art shows catering to a broad spectrum of tastes and moods. Thank the goddess! From disrobed rebels to poetic and somber parables, the LGBTQ art squad really threw down. What links all of these exhibitions is a shared element of storytelling and myth-making. They’re all compelling in their own way—and each propose a disparate desire.
Karlheinz Weinberger, “Subsequent Icons,” at Situations Henry Street
Karlheinz Weinberger, Portrait, (c. mid 1960s). Courtesy of Situations Gallery and the Karlheinz Weinberger Foundation 
The Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger is best known for his 1950s and 1960s images of the “Halbstark” subculture of beatniks, motorcycle gangs, and the big-haired ladies with questionable taste in men who love them; even if you’re unfamiliar with the images, you’ve certainly seen many fashion shoots that have hijacked them note-for-note since the ’90s. But Weinberger was much more prodigious with his personal stash of revealing rough trade portraits, which he made in the makeshift studio in the apartment he shared with his mother. “Subsequent Icons” showcases a series of sequential images of men disrobing from workwear and construction gear to nothing.
Gallery owner Jackie Klempay curated the exhibition. “I wanted to show the serial nature of the photos and imagine his interaction with these people in his mother’s home,” she said. “You see little bits of motorcycle jackets, boots, or helmets even while they’re totally nude. You can see the crossover between his interests. They’re not like Bob Mizer physique shots where they have perfect bodies. They have character.”
As a bonus, there’s a selection of unframed, one-off, full-frontal prints for sale. At the heart of Weinberger’s work is a fascination with vagabonds and rebels. “He’s portraying outsiders and people that have unconventional lives,” Klempay said. “That’s always attractive.”
“Subsequent Icons” is on view until February 25 at Situations, 127 Henry Street, NY, NY.

Mark Flood, “Tommy Puett,” at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts 
Mark Flood, Body in Space (1998). Courtesy of Elliott Templeton Fine Arts
“Tommy Puett,” a dynamo of masc bro blond mullet machismo, is chilling a few doors down at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts. Posing in a revealing tank or sprawled on the hood of a pink Cadillac, he looks like a ripped and raring-to-go 1991 porn bottom, featuring in these vintage late ’90s Mark Flood works. Yet Puett’s claim to fame was really as an actor on Life Goes On, a treacly prime-time ABC soap where he played the best friend to lead character Corky, who had Down’s Syndrome (Puett’s character met his tragic end drunk driving).
The portraits are lifted from teenie-bopper magazines—the divide between a 13-year-old girl and an adult gay man can indeed be very narrow. The artwork embodies equal parts sex jams and adolescent scrapbook obsessions as well as a touch of the unhinged and foreboding.
“I can act out my sex addiction or stay home and make art,” Flood explained in the 2020 artist monologue Mark Flood in the Nineties. Puett would pop up as a motif in Flood’s work throughout those years like a sun-kissed Zelig. Though the actor retired from Hollywood decades ago, perhaps grudgingly, he forever stars in Flood’s art. But who is the voyeur? Is it Flood or the viewer? Or is Puett watching us? Is he omniscient?
“Tommy Puett” is on view until February 11 at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, 105 Henry Street, store #6, NY, NY.

Brian Buczak, “Man Looks at the World” at Gordon-Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects 
Brian Buczak Male Painting [View 1], (c. 1980). Courtesy Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects New York
Brian Buczak, who died of AIDS at age 33 in 1987, is getting his first solo exhibition since 1989 with a concurrent joint show at Gordon Robichaux in the Flat Iron and Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca with “Man Looks at the World.” Most of the works displayed had been hidden away for decades at the townhouse and studio he shared with his partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks who passed in 2018 (Alice Neel painted the duo, and Hendricks commissioned Phillip Glass to compose a requiem piece for Buczak).
Buczak wielded an arsenal of mediums and styles, but the Gordon Robichaux component focuses on his usage of symbology that incorporated Masonic imagery, corporate logos, Buddhist philosophy, porn mags, comics, phallic tower and silos, as well as breathtaking vistas. It was as if he was trying to simplify and make sense of the sensory overload of modern life and his place in it (as well as his destiny), juxtaposing visions of the westward-ho American dream and scenic buttes next to a hardcore cop three-way. In his spare time, he’d stencil his runic language on abandoned buildings.
“Man Looks at the World” runs until February 17, at Gordon Robichaux, 41 Union Square West, #925 and #907 New York, NY and at Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, NY, NY.

Linus Borgo, “Monstrum,” at Yossi Milo 
Linus Borgo, Narcissus at the Halsey Street Oasis, 2023 © Linus Borgo. Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo, New York.

In Chelsea, Linus Borgo’s enthralling debut solo show “Monstrum” is dense with mythos (both self-mythology and the ancient polytheistic sort). Borgo is a trans man who lost his hand in a near death experience his first year at RISD. The ramifications of this are rife in the work: Borgo deftly weaves between planes of existence, life, death, and the dream world in-between, piling up Renaissance master references and nods to the Greek pantheon next to glimpses of modernity. There is a gory element of soothsaying from reading animal entrails and a proud portrayal of the trans body clashing with scenes that correlate to societal vivisection.
Borgo himself makes frequent cameos, always staunchly depicting the reality of his hand—including multiple appearances as a merman—twice in the more classic sense, seemingly riffing off The Little Mermaid in the Copenhagen harbor whereas in another, he’s splayed out in a bathtub reminiscent of Darryl Hannah in Splash but with evident top surgery scars.
The work Narcissus at the Halsey Oasis depicts what looks like a late-night post-disco highway underpass revery—the subject is looking fly in his fur coat nightclub outfit and is looking at his reflection in a puddle. He doesn’t seem to see perfection in himself, but rather projects it onto the world and into this makeshift liquid mirror—the puddle is filled with flowers and lily pads instead of Brooklyn sludge.

“Monstrum” is on view until February 3 at Yossi Milo, 245 10th Avenue, NY, NY.

Richmond Barthé, Black Narcissus (1929) and Julius (1942). Courtesy of the estate of Dr. Samella Lewis and Ryan Lee Gallery.

Around the corner at Ryan Lee gallery, the 1929 sculpture Black Narcissus by Harlem Renaissance master Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) is a truly magnetic presence. (Barthé was the first Black artist to have work acquired by The Whitney). “In This Moisture Between Us Where the Guinep Peels Lay” is an intriguing dual show that pairs his sculptures with multimedia artist Christopher Udemezue, who was three when Barthé died.
“How he could make the Black male figure so strong, but so soft is something I thought about a lot,” said Udemezue, resplendent in a lace top and black cargo kilt, at last week’s opening. “I wanted to make the pictures have this kind of balance. How do we show Black men in this soft but very masculine way?” Both artists deal with Black figuration using very different methods of grace. Barthé’s work exudes spirituality; Udemezue channels and depicts it. “It makes sense on a spiritual level,” Udemezue said of the pairing.
Richmond Barthé and Christopher Udemezue: in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay installed at RYAN LEE, 2024.

The link between the two artists is Jamaica, which they both see as a place of healing and queer rebirth. Barthé decamped there in the wake of a nervous breakdown and stayed for decades. Udemezue’s family hails from the island nation, and he is also founder of RAGGA NYC, a platform connecting queer Caribbean artists.
The second room segues into a solo Udemezue outing and is where the artist really hits his stride, with his feet on the ground connecting narratively to the past while reaching for the cosmos. A wall is painted black and overlaid with a ghostly apparition of his family’s countryside house, a constellation of family photos hovers above. An assemblage of foliage and rocks is placed in the foreground. Orbiting the room are stylized images of a Technicolor queer utopian Jamaican fantasia, complete with pointed ear demigods and starry skied bliss.
“in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay” is on view until March 9, at Ryan Lee, 515 West 26th Street, 3rd floor, NY, NY

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