Winter Gallery Guide Part II
In the Galleries
February 19, 2025
Winter isn’t over, and neither is this fantastic season of shows to see in New York!
We invite you to join us for an artist talk this weekend and see the many wonderful gallery exhibitions below.
Artist Talk with Catherine Howe & Natasha Schlesinger
Please join Artmuse founder Natasha Schlesinger for a talk with artist Catherine Howe on the final day of Howe’s exhibition Mineral Spirits at Winston Wachter. In this conversation, Schlesinger and Howe will discuss the artist’s practice and new work.
Where: Winston Wachter, 530 West 25th Street
When: Saturday, February 22 at 2pm EST
With her dynamic new paintings, Howe presents organic, botanical forms that appear to shapeshift on metallic surfaces. These luminous works are composed with metallic leaf, reflective mineral pigments, and glass beads so that they glimmer in the light as the eye moves over Howe’s canvases. Howe’s works possess great expressive power as she re-imagines natural forms with her rhythmic visual language.
Image: Catherine Howe, Mineral Spirits No. 2 via Winston Wachter
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance
at Pace
The giant of abstract expressionism Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) is known for her carefully-conceived, monochromatic wooden wall pieces and sculptures that are constructed within the lineage of Cubism and Constructivism. With Shadow Dance, Pace Gallery presents a special collection of works made primarily in the 70s and 80s, including several rare and never-before exhibited works. These works display Nevelson’s later developments, including the incorporation of energetic diagonals that depart from her strict adherence to horizontal and vertical lines. This exhibition also presents unique collage works by Nevelson that transpose her sculptural practice to unexpected materials and forms.
January 17-March 1
540 West 25th Street
Installation imagery via Pace
John Divola: The Ghost in the Machine at Yancey Richardson
For five decades now, the California-based artist John Divola has turned photography on its head as he explores the intersections of photography with painting, performance, installation, and, now, artificial intelligence. Always experimenting and pushing his medium, Divola introduces AI-generated imagery into his work with his latest series Blue with Exception (2019-2024), inserting idealized images of songbirds into dilapidated buildings and crumbling interiors. The new works show the artist’s evolution, exhibited alongside works from Divola’s seminal series Vandalism (1973-1975), wherein Divola broke into and photographed abandoned homes.
January 9-February 22
525 West 22nd Street
Image: John Divola, GAFB B16576 (12_16_2020) via Yancey Richardson
Sebastien Blanck: My Heart and Eye Agree at Miles McEnery
With a sunny series of portraits, Sebastian Blanck presents a love letter to his wife and muse, artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders, capturing her at different angles. Though these intimate works are based on photographs of his wife, Blanck’s loving portraits are not consumed with photorealism; instead they are joyous explorations of light and vivid colors. Gazing at these portraits you are suddenly swept up into their relationship: as Blanck paints light falling onto this wife, the intimacy of her face distinctly captured by a loving partner.
January 30-March 15
525 West 22nd Street
Image: installation view via Miles McEnery Gallery
Serge Alain Nitegeka: Configurations in Black at Marianne Boesky
South African artist Serge Alain Nitegeka presents colorful new paintings and sculptures that collage together abstract figures, shapes, and forms. The result is works teeming with political charge. Informed by Nitigeka’s experience as a refugee, these works reappropriate tenets of minimalism and geometric abstraction—particularly the use of color line, and space—to explore the personal and political repercussions of forced migration. The frenzied and dynamic compositions of his paintings and sculptures are filled with barriers, obstacles, and borders, evoking the feelings of unsettlement, chaos, and disorder that come with political displacement.
January 30-March 8
507 West 24th Street
Image: Serge Alain Nitegeka, Displaced Peoples in Situ: Studio Study XXIX, via Marianne Boesky Gallery
Todd Gray: While Angels Gaze at Lehmann Maupin
Todd Gray’s sculptural photographic compositions weave together and juxtapose ideas around art history, architecture, colonialism, societal power dynamics, and the African diaspora. These entrancing photographic assemblages often feature imagery of imperial European gardens, West African landscapes, pop imagery, and self-portraits. Teeming with emotion, power, and beauty, Gray’s new works integrate Roman Catholic and architectural imagery with self-portraits, scenes of Ghanaian landscapes, and pop music figures like Al Green and Iggy Pop. The result are emotional collages that teem with power and beauty in their pursuit of personal and collective histories.
January 23-March 22
501 West 24th Street
Image: Todd Gray, Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla) via Lehmann Maupin
Etel Adnan: This Beautiful Light at White CubE
Honoring the late Lebanese-American poet, writer, and artist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) on the centennial of her birth, White Cube presents an exhibition of colorful works by this leading voice of Arab-American arts and culture. This exhibition charts the progression of Adnan’s work over six decades and includes lyrical paintings, a joyful ceramic wall sculpture, and beautiful, tactile tapestries that pay homage to the flat-weave rugs or kilims Adnan encountered during her time in Tunisia and Egypt in the 1960s.
January 22-March 1
1002 Madison Avenue
Image: Etel Adnan, Oasis via White Cube
Deborah Kass: The Art History Paintings 1989-1992at Salon 94
A must-see for all art history lovers, Deborah Kass’s “art history paintings” respond to the patriarchal, exclusionary art historical cannon. Painted between 1989 and 1992, these dynamic works probe and challenge iconic cultural imagery to raise questions regarding gender, race, ethnicity, and privilege. With dark humor and unabashed criticism, Kass cites the “greats”, including Picasso, Pollock, Johns, Warhol, Cezanne, Motherwell, and even Walt Disney, to make her voice known and question the power structures underlying our economy and culture.
February 19-March 29
3 East 89th Street
Image: Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After via Salon 94
Antonio Santín: Puente de Panta at Marc Strauss
Antonio Santín’s unique paintings—and, yes, they are paintings—push painting’s capacity to represent objects in two dimensions. These mixed-media, illusionary works depict exquisite carpets that appear lifelike—standing in front of them, it is almost unbelievable that they aren’t exquisite rugs that are folded and pinned to the wall. Santín’s training as a sculptor is evident with these tactile works, whose layers upon layers of paint (painstakingly-applied in millimeters with needles and compressors) demand to be experienced in person.
January 10-March 1
299 Grand Street
Image: installation image taken by Samantha Kohl
Emil Lukas: Infinite Edge at Sperone Westwater
The abstract works of Emil Lukas summon the infinite poetry of space and time. With his new works, the Pennsylvania-based artist once again returns to his characteristic materials: thread, acrylic, ink and larvae. Lukas presents amazing circular thread paintings—each spreading 60 inches in diameter—that feature layers of threads that reflect and refract light; new larvae drawings, which involves Lukas’s signature technique of allowing larvae to drag ink across his paper; and a new series of lattice paintings, which include work created wherein two complementary paintings, an under- and over-painting, are processed at the same time on a single canvas.
February 6-March 15
257 Bowery
Image: Emil Lukas, In Wave via Sperone Westwater
Natasha Law: Bend Here at Voltz Clarke
The London-based painter Natasha Law returns to her gracefully figurative yet chicly abstract signature representations of female figures. Using close friends and family as models, Law’s women stretch, bend, fold, and reach beyond the confines of the canvas, participating in the intimate actions of their lives. These flattened figures appear glossy against textured cartridge paper, with her figures reduced to minimal details of color, shape, and line to emphasize their action and form.
February 12-March 21
195 Chrystie Street
Image: Natasha Law, Redine in Pink via Voltz Clarke