(Revised Version) Shim Moon-Seup, A Certain Scenery, Perrotin Gallery, New York | February 28 – April 12, 2025

In A Certain Scenery, Shim Moon-Seup presents a body of paintings that draw on memories of the sea and the quiet persistence of natural rhythms. The exhibition, composed mainly of works from his ongoing series The Presentation and Re-Present, invites extended viewing, offering moments of subtle beauty, though occasionally lapsing into uniformity.

Each canvas features horizontal bands of acrylic, painted in restrained palettes of blue, gray, and black. In The Presentation (2022), shifts in tone across the bands recall the slow undulation of waves. Other works approach full monochrome, invoking the obscurity of night or the sensation of vanishing into horizonless space. This repetition of form and palette may evoke meditative stillness, or, for some, a sense of stagnation.

Shim’s early work as a sculptor remains palpable in his treatment of surfaces. The brushwork accumulates like sediment, as though pulled across textured resistance. This physicality suggests a transformation between material and gesture. However, without the grounding context of his sculptural practice, the paintings occasionally risk becoming aesthetically resolved but emotionally remote.

Rather than aiming for traditional representation, the show engages with sensation and presence. Shim does not depict the sea so much as evoke its pulse, steady, unresolved, and quietly insistent. These paintings do not demand attention but instead reward patience, returning the viewer’s gaze with a kind of hushed persistence.

Cynthia Hawkins: Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D

 

Cynthia Hawkins most recent show at Paula Cooper Gallery, Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D is aptly named as the paintings function as maps that register time as well as form, flat shape, and line. 

Maps generally have the latter two attributes, sometimes three dimensional form, but time is the tricky one to represent. Hawkins paintings map time through their indexing of their own construction. When you look at a Cynthia Hawkins painting you do not wonder how it was made, the paintings themselves explain they came into existence. You can track each of Hawkins' decisions. 

Hawkins uses layering, transparencies, and grids that imply perspective to create depth without relying on representation. The grids, as well as the title of the show, give the feeling that these are maps – but in their spacial disagreement they impart a dizzying vertigo like quality onto the paintings. 

The viewer can see objects in the space of the paintings yet can’t understand or agree on what they are. The forms are varied, geometric, organic, and gestural shapes are all included without it feeling overly busy – they walk the thin line between activated business and overwhelmed crowd. 

Hawkins has an acute understanding of color and subtlety, the choice to use high saturation and chroma is intentional and skillful. I am particularly fond of the relationship she creates between the recurrent lavender in her works and the variety of yellows it always seems to sit near as well as her use of orange red next to deep rich blues. She is to be able to balance the decidedly off kilter compositions of her paintings with a few key color choices. 

(Final Revision) Nicola Tyson at Petzel Gallery: An Exploration of Playfulness and Ambiguity

    Nicola Tyson’s exhibition I am a teapot investigates the material qualities of paint while playfully exploring themes of the body. Her paintings are bold in size and color, and Tyson’s simplification of the human/animal form into a gestural language of mark-making feels just as confident as her choice of color palette and scale. Simultaneously, her brush strokes feel haphazard or coincidental, placing the figures in her paintings and us as the viewer in a precarious position, teetering between certainty and vulnerability. This in-between space that Tyson creates, and that we and her characters are left in, extends past mere preoccupations with the painted surface and moves into a realm where topics of bodily ambiguity unravel: Tyson approaches this topic with a genuine humor, making the images — although elaborate in their dualistic nature of being intentional yet incidental  — easy to digest. In Their Dog, an image of a conjoined couple enveloping their dog rests atop a vibrant, red background. The couple’s facial features are simple yet effective: with two holes for eyes and a half-circle for the mouth, Tyson intentionally carves the rest of the figure’s form around these negative spaces to reveal the underpainting. Excluding the simplified yet distinct facial features, Tyson removes any indication of the figures’ genders. The interplay between clarity and ambiguity – persistence and restraint – sums up the complex quality of the show itself.

Tyson, N. Their Dog (2023). Acrylic on canvas, 77 x 66 in.

    - Molly Keenan

Yancey Richardson Gallery - Sharon Core: Facsimile

 Yancey Richardson Gallery

Sharon Core: Facsimile

The Show “Facsimile” by Sharon Core in the Yancey Richardson Gallery depicts a variety of painted reproductions of Irving Penn’s 1920 book of photographic still-lifes titled “Flowers”. The work being painted version of the photographs lends to a handcrafted realism. 

These large-scale paintings hold a natural warmth in their use of pinks, reds, and yellows. They capture the movement of followers blooming. Staging the level of maturity gains a wider understanding of the life of the flowers. Some petals are wide open, well the others are sealed tight. One seems to be hanging on to its last bit of life. The viewer gets a sense of these flowers' journey through spring. 

The diversity in both plant species, colors, and layouts of the paintings adds an interesting nuance to the work. For the work being a replication of others from a book, the assumption would be that all pages would be the same in layout, but Core deviates from this. She uses both he landscape and the portrait as well as some smaller and larger images that are the size of the book. This change of layout from wall to book allowed for the art to be viewed as singular pieces as well as in contexts of the whole body of work. 

The flowers hold a handcrafted quality, being almost tactile in nature. The paintings feel like old field journal illustrations in a scientific journal. This is further displayed through her copying of the text from the original book. The lettering is highly crafted with a painterly touch. The mix of handcrafted and realism shows Core’s roots as both a painter and a photographer.    

HAD-472-02

Sonja Stein

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos at the Americas Society

 Exhibition Review: Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos at the Americas Society

Earth and Cosmos at the Americas Society brings together the works of Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza, exploring themes of migration, memory, and the movement of ancient knowledge across ”space” and “time”. The exhibition merges ancient traditions with contemporary artistic practices, focusing on the flow of cultural artifacts and their impact on modern identities.

One of the key pieces, esparza’s Hyperspace: -100km + ∞ (2025), is a sculpture made from basalt and adobe, referencing the Olmec colossal heads and the journey of magma from the Earth’s crust to the surface with the usage of basalt. The combination of raw materials and esparza’s familial connection to adobe-making infuses the piece with a deep connection to his ancestral land.

Cortez’s Cabeza de Jaguar (Monumento #47) (2022) and Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws (2023) stand in contrast, their sharp steel forms reflecting the violence of displacement and the ongoing journey of looted ancient objects. These works confront the movement of history and the legacies of colonization.

While the exhibition succeeds in its materiality, grounding abstract themes in tangible forms, it occasionally falls short in offering new insights into these conversations about displacement and cultural preservation. While the works are visually interesting, the thematic focus on migration and cultural memory is somewhat predictable, like the 3-D printed artifacts, with few surprises in how these ideas are presented. Nevertheless, the show’s strength lies in the connection between the ancient and the contemporary, offering a tactile experience to its viewers as they drag the dirt across the gallery's floor. 

Danka Latorre, Current Season 472-02

Danka Latorre, Current Season 472-02

(Revised) Tavares Strachan’s Starless Midnight

 

Marian Goodman Gallery offered mystery and transcendence through Starless Midnight by Tavares Strachan. The exhibition began with Encyclopedia of Invisibility on a pedestal and a half-piano emerging from the wall, playing a self-generated melody that reverberated throughout the space, as if sending subtle messages through the structure itself.

Across the room, the other half of the piano stood surrounded by dry grass, yellowed dirt, and bright lights—evoking solitude and contrast. Strachan’s work explores themes of cultural displacement, aspiration, and limitation through scientific and cosmic frameworks like astronomy, climatology, and deep-sea exploration. His installations create monumental allegories of identity and understanding, merging art with science and myth.

Born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and now based between Nassau and New York, Strachan combines complex materials to build atmospheric, immersive environments. One highlight was a room shrouded in dusk-like darkness, reached through a rounded arch. It glowed with three giant star-like structures—or perhaps boards of thousands of pulsing digits—casting pearlescent light. From a distance, the effect was misty and dreamlike, blurring the boundary between celestial and digital.

While I was less taken with the neon lights, which clashed with the precision of his engineered instruments, their dissonance may have been intentional—highlighting contrasts between the organic and synthetic. A self-playing marimba nearby emitted delicate, rain-like notes, blending nature with machine. The result was a dense yet ethereal experience, bridging the digital and the natural in a space that felt both otherworldly and deeply human.

edited: Marcel Alcala's Devotions at Lyles and King

 Devotions was a group exhibition at Lyles and King featuring work of trans femme artist Marcel Alcalá, Ren Light Pan, Paola Angelini, and Brian Oakes. Her paintings stand out among the other artists showing at the gallery thanks to their vibrancy, impasto technique, and confrontational nature. They are a breath of fresh air and an exciting inclusion in the show. Alongside Alcalá's works were Ren Light Pan’s multimedia prints and experimental 2D works, sculptural low-hanging lamps by Brian Oakes, and other paintings from Angelini. While the exhibition itself was eclectic, it seemed to work in Alcalá's favor. The techno-inspired lamps pulled the warmth from Alcalá’s paintings into the center of the room. The ghastly well dressed femmes of Alcalá's works are painted simply, not restricting themselves to realism or anatomy. Instead, her work is very gestural, with some areas even wandering into impressionistic territory. The harsh lines on the figure in her painting Looking Back contrast with the ambiguity of the floral tapestry and shadowy back turned to the viewer is appealing. Alcalá's style is welcoming and cozy, which is complimented by the size of her canvases. Her small and intimate paintings fit nicely with the low ceilings the gallery, and with the subject matter of Pan's works. Pan's print style paintings feature sultry girls in a monochrome palette, girls that are much more realized than the figures in Alcalá's paintings. But they are brought together by the same sense of emotion. The other paintings in the show, by Angelini were outshined by the brightness and characterization of Alcalá’s work. Angelini had very intricate large scale works next to Alcalá. They used similar color palettes, but the complexity and detail in Angelini’s work felt a little lost. Her paintings, welcoming at least 48 inches wide, were full of imagery and imitated the clutter of altars and the close details of textile works. While they could hold their own in a different context, the works are at a disadvantage in this show.