REVISED: The End Time! by Fia Huston

THE END TIME!

By: Fia Huston

     The End Time! by Sin Wai Kin at Canal Projects was groundbreaking and timely given today’s climate. The exhibit’s themes regarding toxic masculinity and the pressures of gender roles in society are not only relevant in today’s climate but also essential for both introspection and mental health awareness. Shown through the artist’s faux reality sitcom, The Time of Our Lives (2024), gender stereotypes are represented in a way that allows viewers to question gender’s relationship with societal standards. The portrayals of these roles enable the audience to reflect on how deeply ingrained these expectations are and how they affect individuals.

    Grappling with the masculine and the feminine sides of one’s self, especially within a male-dominated and binary society, is such a tough reality for the queer community. The other main work of the exhibition, Essence (2024), further explores this by displaying a faux perfume ad, allowing the viewer to look inward at their own biases/experiences, involving themes of self-realization within a society that capitalizes off of these journeys of self-discovery. As film was the medium, the visual storytelling of the exhibit was incredibly impactful, raising both awareness and questions concerning gender and gender roles through a queer perspective.

    Overall, I found the entire exhibit to emulate the idea of constructing one’s reality beyond societal standards and norms for the benefit of queer communities that are underrepresented in today’s culture. It was a powerful and thought-provoking multimedia experience that left a lasting impression on those who engage with its themes.

(First draft) Shim Moon-Seup A Certain Scenery Solo Show

Perrotin Gallery, New York | February 28 – April 12, 2025

In A Certain Scenery, Shim Moon-Seup presents a suite of seascape-inspired paintings that hover between recollection and repetition. The exhibition, composed largely of works from his ongoing series The Presentation and Re-Present, cultivates a space of durational looking, at times compelling, at others perhaps overly subdued.

Each canvas is structured through horizontal bands of acrylic, rendered in restrained palettes of blue, gray, and black. In The Presentation (2022), the delicate tonal gradations mirror the slow rise and fall of ocean swells, while other compositions verge on the monochromatic, evoking nightfall or visual disappearance. Depending on the viewer’s disposition, the repetition can feel contemplative, or verge on monotony.

Shim’s background as a sculptor informs his approach to the surface. There is a density to the brushwork, a sense of paint accumulating like sediment or dragging across resistance. This materiality hints at transformation, though it occasionally feels tethered to the conceptual weight of his medium shift. Without the contextual anchor of his sculptural past, the paintings risk becoming formally elegant but effectively distant.

Ultimately, the exhibition is less concerned with depiction than with presence. Shim offers not an image of the sea, but its rhythm, insistent, measured, and unresolved. It is an atmosphere more felt than defined, one that hovers on the edge of stillness and returns the gaze with quiet persistence.

Exhibition Review: Cy Twombly’s Landscape Abstractions and the Fragility of Nature

  Exhibition Review: Cy Twombly’s Landscape Abstractions and the Fragility of Nature

galleries at 980 Madison Avenue, 

On view in Gagosian’s recent exhibition, Cy Twombly’s Untitled paintings from 1981–1986, created in Bassano in Teverina, Italy, mark a profound shift in his engagement with nature and abstraction. Rendered in lush greens and layered with fluid gestures, these works evoke the sensory immediacy of earth, air, and water—an elemental trinity central to both ecological life and human experience.

The sense of light, speed, moisture change between drawings, people always putting themself connect with nature while painter using landscape as the object. The abstract way of drawing bring viewer’s curiosity and memories out of box. As one moves through the series, the quatrefoil-shaped frames act like portals, subtly altering the viewer’s perspective with each step. The spatial relationship between the paintings mimics a journey through a landscape—not linear, but fluid and ever-changing.

The social resonance lies in the subtle commentary on humanity’s disconnection from nature. These paintings, while abstract, suggest a plea for reconnection—where the liquidity of paint mirrors the ebb and flow of natural forces that sustain life. In this way, Twombly transforms abstraction into a poetic form of environmental reflection, inviting viewers not only to see, but to feel the landscape’s fading presence in our collective consciousness.

(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