Talia Glazer's Final Review: Matt Mullican's The Universe

            From February 28 through April 11 2026 Peter Freeman, Inc housed an exhibition titled The Universe, a solo show of Matt Mullican’s single artwork of the same title. The piece, produced between 2023-2025 is a series of every image from the 1990 edition of the Random House Encyclopedia. The artist cut out every single image and chapter title and collaged them onto sheets of paper numbered in black marker with a line through the middle. When laid together the lines draw a sequential path from one sheet to the next. The piece comprises 9, 519 collaged sheets.     

            Upon first entering the gallery the viewer sees the two encyclopedias from which the images were taken. One is opened to a section titled “The Universe” and the subsequent several hundred pages are missing. In their place is straggled paper hugging the spine of the book, spindling off in shredded pieces. This is where the artist’s blade extracted each image. The book foreshadows what is to come in the exhibition, careful order marked with an edge of ruin. A table shows stacks of thousands of sheets of paper included in the series and manilla envelopes. This is a small bit of the assemblage, a preview comfortably displayed as a familiar stack of papers. 

Then, after crossing the threshold of the partial wall in the gallery’s entry way, the viewer is confronted with an expansive, high ceiling room covered in images. The sheets of paper line every inch of the walls, are displayed across a platform in the center of the room, half walls, bulletin boards, only broken by windows and columns permanent to the space’s architecture. The sheer volume immediately imparts a feeling of megalophobia. The viewer is made to feel small in comparison to the grand, all encompassing nature of the immersive piece. Mullican has essentially made tangible the feeling of how insignificant one is in the scheme of the entire universe by overloading the viewer with visual information. One is overwhelmed by the scene, but eventually the eyes focus on a piece of the assemblage, and the order begins to become more clear. Thematically linked images are ordered together, and upon following the lines the viewer rests on a title introducing the next series of images. The numbers on the tops and bottoms of each page are in sequence, letting one know where in the grand scheme of The Universe they are looking. It would be impossible to see the entire thing as many pictures are high above the sightline. 

Each image is closely cropped so the image stands apart from context backed only by white, creating a strong sense of uniformity in isolation. Topics from art to science to politics are organized but entirely cluttered together in covering every inch of space. One is not imparted with actual encyclopedic knowledge as much as with a staggering feeling that there is an oversaturation of information. The entire piece functions as a systematic, highly ordered act of chaos and destruction.

Nicole Bunis Final Review - Ceija Stojka: Making Visible

The Drawing Center’s Ceija Stojka: Making Visible features over sixty artworks by the Roma artist in her first comprehensive retrospective in New York. The work spans the two and half floors of the SoHo gallery. The gallery walls alternate between deep purple and white which provides a nice backdrop for Stojka’s vibrant color choices. Stojka received no formal training as an artist. The exhibition has a greater impact thanks to the inclusion of Stojka’s journals and sketchbooks on the lower level of the gallery. There is also a large timeline detailing the chronology of Roma history which tracks the growing persecution they faced as Hitler came to power. These archival pieces offer an intimate look into Stojka’s artistic process and her personal reckoning with her trauma. 

Stojka’s artwork shines a light on the often overlooked and untold story of survival and resilience among Romani Holocaust survivors. The artist herself survived multiple concentration camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück. The exhibition features paintings and sketches that encapsulate life before and after Stojka’s family was deported from their hometown of Vienna and forced into concentration camps. 

The introductory text reveals that Stojka did not start painting until her late fifties, when she picked up a paintbrush with her granddaughters. So many years after her internment, Stojka turned to art as a therapeutic act of processing past trauma and bearing witness to moments of persecution that history has largely left untold. 

One painting titled Auschwitz, 1944, is a perfect encapsulation of the duality at the heart of Stojka’s work. A field of green is dotted with purple flowers; in the distance a smokestack pours clouds of gray and black smoke across a cloudy gray-pink sky. A flock of large birds move across the sky and in the right corner there is a guard tower with an inscription that reads “Auschwitz, 1944” in white letters.The scene is at once peaceful and deeply unsettling. 

Stojka’s artistic style evokes a haunting children’s-book quality. Much of her work taps into memories from a childhood spent in unimaginable circumstances. Stojka was only nine years old when she first entered the camps. The bright colors, loose brushstrokes, small stick-like figures, and animals take on a monstrous quality within the context of the camps. The artist’s decision to paint on cardboard suggests a sense of urgency to paint these scenes as quickly as possible. These images and stories of survival demand to be painted immediately no matter the material at hand. 

Running through it all is Stojka’s fierce pride in her Roma heritage. This is visible in her scenes of life before the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Fields of sunflowers which are a symbol for Roma people, are a beautiful reminder of the artist’s unshakeable optimism in spite of the horrors she endured. Stojka’s paintings force us not to look away from the atrocities of the past while presenting moments of quiet beauty in spite of the devastation. The exhibition runs from February 20th to June 7th, 2026 and should not be missed. 

Ksenija Carleton Final Review of 'The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli' (Lévy Gorvy Dayan)

 

In early April of 2026, when walking past New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery, one could easily find themselves face to seed, with the inside of an apple. From March 18^th to May 23^rd, Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s stone façade was decorated with a banner, advertising the gallery’s retrospective on Italian artist Domenico Gnoli, that showcased the interior of a quartered apple. Evoking a yonic shape, the sexual suggestiveness of the cut apple is increased by two brown seeds, which are perched in the upper quarter of the fruit. Although the painting referenced in the show’s banner (in which the entirety of the apple is displayed) is far less erotic, it nonetheless prepares us for the contained intimacy that constitutes a throughline throughout Domenico Gnoli’s work.

Domenico Gnoli was born in Rome in 1933. His early career in illustration, then costume and set design, ostensibly inspired the great attention to detail, and interest in the physicality of objects that characterized his painting from 1964 onwards. The works displayed at Lévy Gorvy Dayan span from 1956 to 1969, with the first floor of the gallery showcasing Gnoli’s later paintings. The show opens with Striped Trousers (1969), which depicts the upper half of a pair of worn pin-striped pants, spanning from the pants’ top hem to a few inches above the knee. The pants are displayed against a dark gray background, and appear to be floating in indistinguishable space.

Striped Trousers is an introduction to Gnoli’s consistent interest in material and texture that characterizes the following works displayed on the first floor. Other paintings include similarly zoomed-in images of isolated objects, such as an armchair, an apple, a brick wall, and the back of a painting. In the central room of the second floor, the gallery displays the artist’s early illustrations, preparatory sketches, and photographs of him in the studio. The room in the gallery’s southern wing exhibits a group of paintings that all depict variations of a bed. Some are unmade, some inhabited, and others neat and seemingly untouched.

L’inverno (Couple au lit), 1967, encapsulates the artist’s play with intimacy and distance particularly well. The painting shows a couple, whose intertwined bodies are silhouetted under the blue paisley sheets of an off-white double bed. Peeking through the covers, only the tops of their heads are shown. The point of view is zoomed in to the point that the bed itself spills beyond the canvas – the limits of which crop the pillows at the top of the painting, and the couple’s feet, at the bottom. Yet the visual proximity with the couple creates no sense of intimacy with the viewer. Rather, by hiding the couple from our view and emphasizing what we cannot see, Gnoli establishes an uncanny sense of distance. The perspective also intimates the bed-spread with the flatness of a canvas, onto which Gnoli conducts a pictorial exploration of color, shapes, and shadows.

Indeed, through his masterful investigation of texture, Gnoli tempts the viewers with an intimate foray into the materials of everyday objects. He depicts the everyday at a closeness that would be impossible to replicate in the real world. Yet ultimately by getting so close, Gnoli oxymoronically paints the eerie alienation of material culture in the modern world.     

Ksenija Carleton

The Cats and the Rats (Dean Millien) Review by Janine Olshefski

 The Cats and the Rats (Dean Millien) PS1 Moma. Queens, New York

Janine Olshefski 

Surrounded by the modernistic pieces that inhabit the MoMA PS1, the work The Cats and the Rats by Dean Millien stands out and gives the space a breath of fresh air. During my visit to the museum in Queens, New York, I found the layout frustrating at times because it was slightly difficult to navigate, and when I did come across artwork, I felt little to no emotion towards it. Most of the artwork shown during my visit felt very repetitive, which is why, when I came across the work by Dean Millien, I felt a sense of relief.

My initial feelings were joy and excitement. I enjoyed the skillfully sculpted aluminum foil figures and the narrative at play between the aluminum foil cats and rats. As I kept looking, I became even more intrigued and wanted to read about the work itself because it’s not every day that you see an artist use such a basic household item as their main medium.

After reading the plaque on the wall, it became clear that the reason Millien chooses to use such a juvenile medium is because that’s all he knows how to use. He explains that in his youth, his father took away his toys because they were too loud, so he was forced to build his own fun. While it saddened me to read this, I was able to develop a greater appreciation for both the art and the artist by viewing the work through a different lens.