New Year, New York: A Review of This Year's Must-See Gallery and Museum Exhibitions

Feb 7

Written By

February 7, 2018

Winter 2018 in New York is brimming with exciting new museum shows and gallery exhibitions. LSS Art Advisory reviews the most anticipated offerings of the season below:

GALLERIES

David Zwirner

On the occasion of the gallery’s 25th anniversary, David Zwirner presents David Zwirner: 25 Years, a museum-worthy, sprawling group exhibition celebrating the artists who have shaped the gallery’s extraordinary program since its founding in 1993. The exhibition, on view across all of the gallery’s Chelsea locations, features significant historical work, alongside new and never-before-seen works commissioned specifically for the show. Among the more than 50 internationally-renowned artists on view through February 17th are Alice Neel, Kerry James Marshall, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Yayoi Kusama.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Love Lettersand Yard Work, two concurrent exhibitions of new work by Eddie Martinez, are now on view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash. The Love Letter series expands upon Martinez’s recent practice of utilizing enlarged silkscreens of small Sharpie drawings as a starting point for large-scale works on canvas. Yard Work, a separate but related body of work, was created in the summer of 2017, where Martinez, unable to find a studio, started painting on his lawn. He then allowed these paintings to dry there, exposed to the elements. Although these compositions did not originate as drawings, Martinez uses the spray can as a drawing tool, creating compositions that range from completely abstract to figurative still lives.

Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone 64 is pleased to present Mostly Drawing, Amy Sillman’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition, on view through March 3rd, is comprised primarily of works on paper incorporating silkscreened, painted, and drawn elements, continuing the artist’s decades-long exploration of the ideological underpinnings of the term “Drawing” itself. In each work, Sillman employs formal dualities from the art historical canon – namely, narration versus abstraction, color versus line, flat versus recessive space, and painting versus drawing. The works on view therefore defy easy categorization, as each one appears to vacillate between overt abstraction and coded figuration, between traditional painting and comic illustration.

Other Must-See Gallery Shows:

Lehmann Maupin
- Robin Rhode, The Geography of Colour, January 18 - February 24, 2018
- Galerie Lelong
  - Sidelined, curated by Samuel Levi Jones, January 5- February 17, 2018
  - Matthew Marks Gallery
    - Thomas Demand, February 17 - April 7, 2018
    - Robert Gober, February 23 - April 21, 2018
    - Marianne Boesky Gallery
      - Serge Alain Nitegeka, Personal Effects in BLACK, January 11 - February 24, 2018
      - Acquavella Galleries Kirkeby
        California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, February 1 - March 16, 2018

*Robin Rhode’s Frustum (2017) is featured in “The Geometry of Colour” on view at Lehmann Maupin through March 20, 2018 (image courtesy of Lehmann Maupin).*

MUSEUMS

Guggenheim

Take My Breath Away, the first comprehensive survey in the United States to date of work by Danish artist Danh Vo, is opening at the Guggenheim on February 9th. Filling the ramps of the museum’s rotunda, the exhibition will offer an illuminating overview of Vo’s production from the past 15 years, including a number of new projects created on the occasion of the exhibition. Ranging the full spectrum of Vo’s oeuvre – from early conceptual works to his recent sculptural hybrids of classical and Christian statuary–the exhibition will interweave installations, photographs, and works on paper from various points in the artist’s career to amplify their thematic resonances.