Zoe Leonard's "Display" at Maxwell Graham Gallery - revised

"Display" showcases photographic work from Zoe Leonard. Six photos of suits of armor between 30-50 inches tall, originally taken at the Musée de l’Armée and the Worcester Art Museum in the 1990s, attract attention amid the gallery’s largely empty white walls and high ceilings. Attached to the walls with only l-pins and sheets of plexiglass, there is an undeniable sparseness to the show which brings both the content of what is displayed and the act of displaying to the forefront.

While a knight in armor may convey a sense of masculine heroism, empty suits as seen in

Display I (1990/2025) seem more like shells; masculinity becomes a performance.  In the premeditated poses of the armor – hunched forward, embarrassed shoulders, and empty crotches – there is a comedic aspect to these photographs which further undercuts ideas of valor. What remains then, in addition to performance, is the implication of violence.

Leonard has previously used photography to question the act of looking, and how something is made to be seen. She continues to do so here, confronting the seemingly neutral museum vitrine and institutions which house these suits of armor. To display this armor is to uphold the violence it implies, and to place that violence in an untouchable space, in the realm of ‘history.’ 

Leonard’s photographs then shine a light on the ‘normal’, forcing us to question the violence present in all aspects of society.

'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney

 By Isabella Mendez

The exhibition explores the profound cultural changes of the sixties in America through a surrealist style. The diverse array of artists offers many perspectives on topics like the Civil Rights Movement, space exploration, war, and feminist sexual revolutions. 

Each section of the exhibition echoes the "unreal" feeling that surrealism promotes: first, three large camels greet you at the entrance; then, a dark room filled with psychosexual work that explores the normalization of female and male anatomy; next, more structural work; followed by political and feminist work. The floor plan and layout of the exhibition can feel disorienting, and the deep purple and vibrant orange chosen for some walls add to the "unreal" feeling. However, I did appreciate the exhibition's approach in showing parts of history in a way that shows what has brought artists together as they face different issues.

Works featured by Luchita Hurtado, Martha Rosler, and Barbra Hammer explore the feminist movement through dynamic painting, photography, and even film. Works by Kay Brown, Shawn Walker, and Romare Bearden explore the Civil Rights movement through captivating photography and collage. Sculptures by Robert Arneson explore the psychosexual with a play on words in his sculptures, "Klick" and "Call Me Lover." 

Overall, while there were various takes on surrealism, it was interesting to see artists' voices united through the Whitney's curation, which suggested a new history of the sixties.

Sophie Calle: "On The Hunt" (Revised)

 Sophie Calle’s curiosity about people - specifically ordinary, everyday people - is undeniable. She has an ability to turn her subjects into art without asking much of them at all. She presents to us what is already there, and what has always been there, and allows us to see it with a whole new perspective. 

Calle may appear to be a journalist more than a visual artist, but every written page is strong enough to stand on its own. Seeing her work in a gallery setting was a new experience, and because most of her work takes the form of writing paired with photography, in a volume that can be slightly overwhelming. Select pages of her pieces are framed, some with very small text, the pages filling an entire room. Due to this, her work isn’t received well if the viewer is under a time constraint; there is a lot to take in.

One of her most memorable works was The Address Book (2012). After finding a lost address book on the streets of Paris, Calle set out to create a character profile of the owner. She interviewed each of the contacts and eventually constructed a portrait of him through his associates. The work became a eulogy for a living person; his own words completely absent from his life story.

Calle is an artist through and through. While her pieces can be enjoyed in a gallery, they can also be consumed alone, over time, using the solitude of the reader. 

Alix Cléo Roubaud "Correction of perspective in my bedroom"

Alix Cléo Roubaud

Correction of perspective in my bedroom

Galerie Bucholz

Curated by Hélène Giannecchini

Gigi Moss

            Walking into Galerie Bucholz, a single window filters a small amount of natural light into the room. The photos of Alix Cléo Roubaud are small, even in the delicate glass framing them, they take up little more space than a sheet of copy paper. Laterally displayed at eye level, they invite the viewer to examine up close. In this gallery stark LED lights against  cold white walls and dark grey carpet create a strange liminal space, as though I have stumbled upon an empty or abandoned office space. The environment highlights the haunting quality very present in some of Roubaud’s photos, and juxtaposes the emotion and sentimentality in the others. One of the throughlines of this body of work is that all the images have been shot in the bedroom of her Paris apartment, then developed in the bathroom. Her bedroom, a deeply personal space in contrast to the sterility of the gallery, becomes an embodiment of her consciousness as the room transforms in each image - some very grounded in the physical space and others where the room disappears completely and the subject rests against the white of the paper in no environment at all. In this gallery there are no distractions, the viewer must concentrate on the images and the feelings they stir. The softness and ambiguity in her images evokes feelings of familiarity and memory while staying inventive and curious. In her diaristic work, a documentation of life in this one space, the images act as representations of memory as it transforms with time.

Formal Wear by Diane Simpson

Walking into Diane Simpson’s exhibition, viewers encounter a series of sculptures that blur the boundaries between the two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional space. Constructed from corrugated board, fiberboard, aluminum, brass, linoleum, and galvanized steel, these forms shift under changing viewpoints, generating a sense of disorientation. The material qualities recall everyday life and domestic contexts, yet the geometric abstraction disrupts direct recognition— a chair’s slats spiral like a vanishing staircase, a column stands wide yet impossibly thin. This tension between familiarity and estrangement highlights Simpson’s interest in how utilitarian materials can be reorganized into new architectural forms.

The exhibition continues on the lower level, where Simpson reveals her meticulous process. Axonometric drawings, garment sketches, and archival photographs reveal how each piece originates from historical women’s formal wear. Corsets, bonnets, collars, and hoop skirts become the basis for sculptural frameworks, allowing viewers to see the structural logic shared by clothing and architecture. For example, a bonnet rendered in brass tubing becomes an arched, open form whose negative spaces imply the absent head.

Moving between floors, viewers trace the transformation of pattern into geometry, and garment into architecture. The human body itself is absent, but its implied presence emerges through the negative space of sculptures. Simpson presents an original and inspiring reimagining of how the overlooked structures of daily life and wears shape identity.

"Formal Wear Diane Simpson," at The American Academy of Arts and Letters

Underskirt, 1986 

Oil stain and paint on MDF, cotton mesh 

Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

    Diane Simpson’s Formal Wear, spread across two floors at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, felt like walking through a spatial sketchbook, each work translated from drawing into geometry. The show traces Simpson’s decades-long dialogue between clothing and architecture, showcasing how the nature of fabric can serve as both a support system for the body and an expression of form.

    I was especially drawn to the play of distortion in her pieces, the way geometries become fluid and,-softened, while maintaining their complexities. Underskirt (1986), with its green lattice and gauzy cotton scrim, looked like scaffolding and fabric that was beautifully suspended. Amish Bonnet (1992), is perched on a shelf, with brass tubing bending into an almost breathing curve. Lastly, Window Dressing (2007–08) composed of hard industrial materials like - aluminium, wood, and industrial fiber - somehow evokes the softness of cloth, creating tension between rigidity and drape. Her works reminded me of industrial design prototypes, objects whose precision carry quiet emotion. 

    

    Simpson’s mastery of materials is evident in her work, which is controlled yet deeply human. Her sculptures don’t imitate garments but reimagine how structure might inhabit space as if it were built to stand on its own, inviting interpretation rather than delivering a fixed message. In Formal Wear, Simpson transforms geometry into something that evokes warmth, proving that discipline and distortion can coexist beautifully.

Window Dressing, Window 6: Collar & Bib-Deco (2007/2008)
Linoleum, paint on aluminum and wood, industrial fiber
Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Rodrigo Hernández: A Personal Constellation of Images

 Chrystal Gayle

October 17, 2025

Blog Post Entry Assignment

Rodrigo Hernández’s first exhibition at ChertLüdde Gallery offers a focused, poetic journey through material, myth, and memory. Known for working across painting, relief, sculpture, and installation, Hernández builds what he calls a “personal constellation of images,” a title borrowed from a poem by Bernadette Mayer. It captures the show’s drifting, dreamlike rhythm, where meanings shift and overlap.

Walking through the exhibition felt like entering a space where restraint and imagination meet. Many works shimmered with subtle gold tones that gave them an ancient yet refreshing presence. In one piece, a small brass figure emerges from a hammered surface. Its tiny scale and smooth, continuous curves create a feeling of vulnerability and quiet reflection, as if the form is caught in a moment of inner stillness.

Another relief, also in gold tones, leans toward an architectural composition. Layered planes create rhythm through repetition, while tight spacing introduces a sense of containment. At the bottom, a lone human figure walks beneath the towering shapes. The contrast in scale makes the work read like a meditation on how individuals move through memory or history, navigating structures far larger than themselves.

Hernández’s careful layering gives the exhibition a cinematic quality, as if time unfolds through overlapping images rather than a straight line.

Weather Report by Shara Hughes

    

    Shara Hughes' exhibition at the David Kordansky Gallery features nine paintings of imaginary landscapes representing Hughes’ internal psychology of being human. Each landscape is created instinctively and allowing for mistakes to create works that come purely from her inner world. The vertical orientation of the paintings is meant to be immersive for the viewer, to fully experience Hughes’ true emotions.

   “MaMa” (2025) is one piece representing a forest with many emotions within it. There’s intensity and beauty in the vivid, warm colors and quick brushstrokes in the center of the piece, but also a quieter and sadder feeling in the dull, cool colors and slow brushstrokes on the outsides of the painting. The inclusion of various flowers and trees represents the constant evolution of nature and its reflection of emotions like beauty, pain, peace, and sadness, which reflects the unchanging nature of humans and the emotions we feel.

  The exhibition space is organized to allow viewers to move from one painting to the next to explore Hughes’ representation of the complexity of the internal human experience. The gallery's open space is split by a wall in the middle, making the spaces feel smaller and adding to the intimate experience. Shara Hughes’ exhibition is very well executed in the presentation of her expressive paintings that pull viewers into the imaginary landscapes and help give us a deeper understanding into her inner world of human psychology.

FINAL VERSION

Sasha Gordon; Haze (revised edition)

Sasha Gordon’s new exhibition, Haze, currently on view at David Zwirner, is a collection of oil paintings with interrelated narratives that unravel through each painting. The themes draw from myths, Asian cinema, and Gordon’s psychological experiences and struggles with her Asian identity. Ambiguity is a key theme, and the works are purposely not shown in narrative order. 

It Was Still Far Away, inspired by Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, depicts an explosion that lights up the background. Oblivious of her surroundings, the figure clips her toenails with her headphones on. This figure reappears with different roles, either becoming the victim or doing the action. In some, she eats her nail clippings, is forced underwater, and is fed by another seemingly identical figure. 

Immense detail is shown in Flame Like Blush, where the figure is bathed in a blazing orange, casting a vivid glow on the face. The reflection of clouds in her eyes hints at the continued narrative through her work, resembling the explosion from It Was Still Far Away and provides a reason for the radiant illumination and sweat. The size of both works is massive, each being over 60 inches tall. 

Overall, Gordon’s works are realistic yet uncanny. The continued narrative of the figure put in bizarre scenes, combined with her own life, evokes a psychological and dream-like experience where continuing themes are threaded throughout the works. 

The Drawing Center, In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney exhibits nearly 100 works that serve as benchmarks of the different stages of Delaney’s career. Moving the focus away from some of his more famous on-canvas works, the exhibition chronicles Delaney’s life, and in turn, the way his experiences influenced the development of his artistic style and greater presence in the world of art. Including supporting materials such as the published writings of his close friend James Baldwin, and newspaper clippings documenting the societal reaction to the success of black artists, the gallery halls narrate the eras of Delaney.

While both the exaggerated portraiture and naturalistic landscapes of Delaney’s works from the 1930s through the early 1950s do feature two of the primary colors, yellow and red, the majority of his works lack a primary blue. Layers of teal, aqua, and turquoise can be found in his watercolor paintings, inks drawings, and oil prints, but in very few did he dare use an out-of-the-tube ultramarine. It is my belief that this decision is what keeps his pieces from reading as somber as they could, considering the lack of smiling and overall signs of life, that being either flora or fauna. By leaving out primary blue, his work is able to exist in the space between melancholic and chipper.

Hayden Holmes

Detritus: Tom Friedman at Lehmann Maupin

 

Detritus: Tom Friedman at Lehmann Maupin

Tom Friedman’s solo show commands the viewer to look at the ordinary objects that fill our lives.

The exhibition explores both solitary subjects and elaborate compositions that create webs of focus

rather than a singular point of interest. 

His cluttered compositions begin as photographs which the artist then works to replicate as paintings. Reflections and individual contours abstract during this process. In Detritus, the abstract stands next to the fully rendered, exemplified in spirals morphing out of other objects. The bird’s eye view gives a warped sense of scale and grandeur abstracting the painting further. 

The paintings that illustrate singular objects also act as collections. Their details become pieces of a complicated group. Wise Old Sage depicts a crumpled up water bottle, unrecognizable at first due to its large scale and magnification. The over 50” x 40” painting requires the viewer to stand back for a full view, a clear demand of attention. Parallel white lines running down the work and light brushstrokes contour the form, seemingly abstract until a recognizable image forms. 

The strength of this show is found in the detail of a singular subject and in the cluttered compositions painted at a grand scale. The ordinary is elevated by being placed at our feet, the only perspective in which collections can be fully seen and recognized as a sight to behold. 

- Lucia Bautista  HAD 472-02

*Revision*

Robert Longo; The Weight of Hope at the Pace Gallery

Robert Longo’s exhibition The Weight of Hope continues his exploration of large-scale, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings. The works confront the turbulence of contemporary American life by combining the visual authority of photojournalism with the restrained emotional depth of classical painting, prioritizing idealized beauty and harmonious composition over individual expression. The exhibition suggests that in the age of political crisis and collective grief, images can still represent collective memory and experience. Throughout the show Longo depicts symbols of hope, crisis, power, and destruction, alongside figures representing social, political, or historical events in order to explore ideas of intimacy and monumentality. 

I was drawn to Longo’s piece Untitled (St. Louis Rams / Hands Up), 2016 depicting wide receiver Nick Toon with his arms raised in protest of the police killing of Micheal Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Longo captures the charged stillness of Toon’s stance, turning a fleeting gesture into a lasting symbol. 

Equally striking is the work Untitled (Iceberg for Greta Thuberg), 2020 which depicts a towering iceberg as a fragile symbol of ecological urgency, showing the precariousness of systems — natural, political, and moral — under threat. 

Though visually stunning, the exhibition at times leans heavily towards melodrama. Its solemnity, boarding on self seriousness, and moral ambition feels heavy-handed, partly due to Longo’s highly aestheticized approach and reliance on appropriated media imagery. The absence of diverse perspectives — due to his primary focus on Western, white, corporate, and male-coded symbols — limits the breath of his social critique, making the show both visually commanding and conceptually constrained.

Audra Castle

Revised - version 2

Austin Martin White; Tracing Delusionships

                                                                        Composite Ruin 1 (after Piranesi), 2025

    Austin Martin White has crafted an endearing display of work with Tracing Delusionships at Petzel Gallery.

The show includes eleven pieces, depictions of dark and whimsical worlds, the majority of which are at a very

large scale. White evokes a unique dimensionality within some of his paintings, a depth achieved through a

layering of materials. Screen mesh forms the base of the canvas, creating a moiré pattern with the illusion of

wavy stripes in the background, appearing almost holographic. I found his paintings much more interesting

than his works on paper due to this quality of the mesh, as it adds movement to the pieces as the moiré shifts and

changes with the angle at which you view it.

     I was drawn to his series of paintings titled Composite Ruins that were painted with this technique and layered

with thick, textured, brightly colored paint. These pieces are truly monumental and impressive to stand before.

As you move closer, the image of massive ruins falls away and the marks become an abstract maze of vibrant

color. This experience of oscillating between these two dimensions in the work made them feel like a psychedelic

vision.

    White was inspired by artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose work I can see in these pieces- Yet Piranesi's

detailed etchings of ruins give the impression that they are recordings of an earthly traveler, while White's

paintings feel completely otherworldly. Outside of his Composite Ruins series I found his interpretation of the

Massacre of the Children of Bethel arresting. This piece references the artist Bob Thompson’s La Mort des Enfants,

a version of the biblical massacre of the innocents. This reinterpretation of his influences reinforces his similar

motivation to reimagine history and its crumbling civilizations. I found this show to be inspirational in its

unique material exploration, and strong in its conceptual ties to the imagery regarding reinvention.

Massacre of the Children of Bethel Variation 5 (after B. Thompson), 2025

*Revision

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

Ahmed Bioud, 1961

Oil on paper

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

The exhibition "In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney" features many works on paper, a medium that is more vulnerable and easier to obtain than other materials like canvas or wooden panels, and is generally smaller in scale than traditional formal media, making works on paper easily dismissed as drafts. But this exhibition expresses a different view, that Beauford Delaney's works on paper showcase his more experimental side.

His works reveal a sense of ease and freedom. They are vivid and have obvious brushstrokes with no transitions, making the drawings feel relaxed. Some of the paintings contain short, superimposed lines that enrich the texture and visual depth of the paintings. I was impressed by his work, "Ahmed Bioud." The theme is a portrait of the artist's close friend. The artist didn't describe many details of the subject's features in the painting; the outline of the portrait is broken and overlapped with each other, creating a sense of memory together with the main color of yellow. This gave me more space for imagination about the unseen forms and the portrait's inner world. The work employs a combination of oil paint on paper, which presents a transparent sheen.

The exhibition focuses on Beauford Delaney's neglected, non-traditional techniques, such as oil and pastel on paper to express the artist's thoughts, but the overly dense display of small-sized works in paper media makes viewing the show tedious and fatiguing. If the exhibition displayed the works in themed sections, it might help regulate the viewer's pace and bring more interest to the audience. WC 244 ROSEN CHEN LUO

Haze by Sasha Gordon (at David Zwirner Gallery)

 

Sasha Gordon: Haze, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

In Sasha Gordon’s exhibition Haze, Gordon captures her body and flesh in a hyperrealistic style presenting bizarre and somewhat surreal scenarios. Painting herself eating toenails Gordon had clipped in a previous painting, the works of Haze build a witty narrative illuminating the interface of alter egos. 

To follow Gordon’s visual storytelling, viewers must walk through the large, white gallery as the paintings are hung far from one another, each earning their own wall. The gallery’s absence of wall labels is disorienting, referring to the ambiguous stories Sasha Gordon wishes to convey. 

Although her themes of the body and the bizarre align with the imagery familiar from Surrealist art, certain pieces in Haze lend themselves more to cliche rather than uniquely imaginative artistry. The alter ego storyline was created to explore the tug-of-war between an individual’s personas that at times may be at odds, introducing an internal struggle to find personal reconciliation. Amidst Gordon’s darker and combative pieces like Pruning, the imagery projects the artist's sense of humor. While the humor adds to the complexity of emotions, it detracts from the exhibit’s overall impact.

Haze is a notable exhibition with which audiences can ponder, laugh and engage. Ultimately, art meets the audience where they are, making each person’s journey through the exhibit unique.