David Armstrong: Portraits Review

Artists Space

David Armstrong: Portraits

David Armstrong is a well-renowned photographer in any educational photography program. It was amazing to finally be able to see their work in person. It was really interesting to see how the exhibition was sequenced on the wall, where there seemed to be a clear distinction between the styles of the work. By this, I mean how the black and white prints were printed and framed more traditionally, with the black film bordered prints put into a white-framed shadow box, highlighting the materiality of the prints. This varied greatly from some of the other color prints, which had really massive black borders reaching back to the frame. For most of the exhibition, these forms of display were installed in the traditional manner of a straight line, semi-seperated by style, except for one wall. This one wall had all of these projects merged together, tacked to the wall in a really interesting way, creating a new way to interpret the work. This modern salon style hang started to resemble open image files on a desktop or some of the new photobooks of Vince Aletti’s archive, such as The Drawer. Together, the collage starts to change the focus of the people in the images into a collection forming an archive on queer existence. The range in printing style creates a visual timeline for audiences that may not be aware of the advancements of the artist's works, building a larger conversation of queer existence

    - Lewis James

MOMA PS1: JAMES TURRELL "MEETING"

    When I visited James Turrell’s Meeting at MoMA PS1, I was surprised by how such a minimal installation could feel so immersive. The work is simply a quiet room with benches surrounding a square opening in the ceiling that frames the sky above. At first, it seemed almost too simple, but after sitting in the space for several minutes, I began to notice how differently I was perceiving the light and atmosphere. The sky slowly started to look flat and artificial, almost like a monochrome painting suspended above the room rather than an actual opening to the outdoors. Instead of focusing on an object, I became aware of my own perception and the act of looking itself.

    What affected me most was the slowness of the experience. Unlike many exhibitions where I quickly move from one artwork to another, Meeting forced me to slow down and remain still. As the daylight shifted, subtle changes in color and brightness transformed the mood of the entire room. The installation felt calm and meditative, almost detached from the energy and noise of the city outside.

    I also found it interesting that the piece contains so little physically, yet still feels emotionally powerful. Turrell uses light and space in such a controlled way that the work becomes less about viewing something and more about becoming aware of time, space, and my own presence within it.

-iAN CHEN

Review of MoMA PS1: Chang Yuchen's Coral Dictionary

Among the works in MoMA PS1, Chang Yuchen's Coral Dictionary (36 Sentences) stands out through its careful and restrained presentation. Installed as a combination of graphite drawings, coral fragments, and handmade artist books, the work initially resembles a scientific archive. The arrangement feels systematic and precise, encouraging viewers to slow down and examine the details closely. At first glance, the drawings appear abstract, but their repeated forms gradually suggest a language-like structure.

The project began when Chang collected coral fragments washed ash
ore on Dinawan Island in Malaysia. Since then, she has developed an ongoing system of classification based on the shapes and textures of the coral. The graphite drawings record the porous and fractured surfaces of each fragment with close attention, while handwritten labels and artist books suggest a process of naming and translation. Rather than functioning as scientific documentation, the installation proposes an alternative form of communication, assigning meaning through shape and observation.

What makes the work compelling is its quiet approach. Unlike large-scale installations that rely on spectacle, Coral Dictionary demands close viewing and patience. Through simple materials and careful organization, Chang raises broader questions about language, communication, and relationships across species and environments. While understated in presentation, the work succeeds in creating a thoughtful and carefully constructed system of meaning.

—Kaixin Lu

Ishana's final Review: Manuel Neri by Ruby Neri

 The Manuel Neri exhibit at the Andrew Kreps Gallery gives viewers the unique experience of seeing Neri's work through the eyes of his daughter, Ruby Neri. Manuel Neri was born in 1930 in Sanger, California. His parents immigrated to America, leaving their home in Jalisco, Mexico due to political unrest following the Mexican Revolution. Manuel attended the California School of Fine Arts and became an important member of the Bay Area figurative movement. He passed away in 2021. Because of this long history in California, Ruby Neri describes her father as being part of a kind of counterculture to the New York art scene. 

We can see the influence of post-war abstract expressionism on Neri’s work, though his interest in human figures differentiates him from the most popular artists of the time, like Pollock or Rothko. As Ruby states in the press release, Manuel Neri was “influenced by yet entirely separate from the abstract expressionism scene.” 

In M.J. Series I, Neri manages to capture emotion and movement in a still figure through texture and shape. To me, the figure’s body language feels timid or shy, as though the model was slightly uncomfortable in their pose. This slight awkwardness and imperfection is perhaps what makes the figure feel so natural. The plaster surface is heavily textured and has painterly brush strokes in blue and black across the body. The rough, almost unfinished texture of the sculpture allows us to see Neri's mind-to-canvas process. What makes the sculpture so compelling is how human and expressive the figure feels, despite having very little details to denote the facial expression. 

Neri is very sparing with his use of color throughout, using mostly primary colors and usually only featuring one color at a time against a white background. For example, Makiko III depicts a head where the nose is cut off, and blue paint is smudged over the area in its place. The exhibit is minimal and spacious in its presentation of the pieces, allowing us to appreciate the subtle textures, colors, and brush strokes. Apart from the sculptures, the exhibit also features four paintings. Window Series no. 17 stands out from the rest in that it’s an almost fully abstract piece with a much darker tone. It still feels strongly connected to his sculptures, however, because of the brushwork and the color. We can see a very abstracted form of a window with light coming in. Like the figures, he mostly uses green and primary colors. True to Ruby’s assessment of her father, even in Manuel’s abstracted work, the brush strokes feel very delicate and controlled in comparison to paintings more typical of the abstract expressionism movement. 

Knowing that Ruby Neri is an artist herself, I feel she perhaps missed the opportunity to include her own artwork alongside her father’s – even if just a few images were added to the press release – as I found myself interested to see how her own craft took shape under Manuel’s influence. Nevertheless, Ruby Neri’s love and admiration comes across in the press release, and the exhibit serves as a beautiful homage to her late father. 

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