Editors’ Selects: March 2025
Deborah Kass: The Art History Paintings 1989–1992
Salon 94 | 3 E 89th Street, New York
February 19th – March 29th, 2025
Installation view, Deborah Kass, The Art History Paintings 1989-1992, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94. @Deborah Kass. Photo credit: Elisabeth Bernstein.
At Salon 94, feminist painter Deborah Kass presents large-scale works in The Art History Paintings 1989–1992, subverting narratives of legitimacy and legacy fraught with patriarchal influences. On her expansive canvases, Kass combines imagery that the art historical canon may consider “low-brow”—cartoons or wrestling manual illustrations—with specific allusions to artistic movements that almost exclusively lauded the achievements of white men. The third edition of H. W. Janson’s History of Art sits on a table at the entrance of the show, testifying to how, until very recently, a version of history that completely erases women was taught and propagated. In My Spanish Spring (1991–92), for instance, a Robert Motherwell rendition somewhat phallic in form shares a canvas with Ferdinand the Bull, a queer-coded 1930s character often interpreted as an antidote to the political violence of WWII and the Spanish Civil War. In Making Men 2 (1992), two foot outlines from Andy Warhol’s dance diagrams are superimposed on two mid-wrestling young men, one of whom is almost grinning as the other grabs him by the neck. Irreverent in her reconsideration of masculinity as a force and structure, Kass told me about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1985 book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, and a 1981 Barbara Kruger piece that reads: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.”
The works in The Art History Paintings 1989–1992 were created during a time of grief and anger following the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, but it was also when a proliferation of writings and theories fueled the rise of gender studies as an intellectual discipline. “There was a lot of pushback when I first made these paintings—things were different back then,” Kass said. “But I was feeling overall optimistic, and it’s different looking back today.” Notifications from my NYT app went off a few times when I made my way through the show. A sense of doom seemed to float in the air, but I felt once again grounded by Kass’s vitality, cheeky humor, and optimism. Though the show was not planned to respond to the new presidency, in the context of March 2025, it is especially salient and necessary.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence
Swivel Gallery | 555 Greenwich Street, New York
February 25th – March 22nd, 2025
Installation view of Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence. Courtesy of Swivel Gallery. Photo by Cary Whittier.
I rarely read press releases, but I liked the curatorial statement for Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence at Swivel Gallery, presumably authored by the show’s curator Elisa Carollo. I enjoyed that the three fast-rising artists included in the exhibition are positioned to be constructing scenarios rather than forwarding conclusive statements on the role of technology in contemporary life. Scenario is a succinct word to describe these artists’ speculative practices; it entails a certain kind of openness to its own emergent status and forces of formation and deformation that an unresolved situation will encounter. To describe a practice as a scenario is to evade the all-too-popular curatorial presentism, which can be overly eager to close the door of future interpretation and fail to understand the essential ambiguity or belatedness of history, which is to say an event’s significance can only be retroactively extrapolated and confirmed. In this sense, the exhibition is particularly poignant in fleshing out the hovering imperative to redefine what it means to be human, building upon the recent discovery that we have failed to fully integrate nature into culture. To co-exist with nature is to work around displacements across times and spaces engendered by the shattering of the humanist hegemony and to know that alienation and subjugation can be generative ways of relating.
The exhibition’s greatest revelation for me was sculptures by Milan-based artist Camilla Alberti, whose research-based practice delves into the ancestral, the paraphysical, and the collapsing of boundaries between technology and spirituality in their shared affinity for administering our relation to the world. Alberti’s The Out-Side Myth. Altarolo per culti meno umani (2024) takes formal cues from cabinet of curiosities and treasure box in speculative fiction. Computer-generated embroidery inserted into the steel apparatus deploys organic patterns (neural networks? cellular interactions?) that hinge on the border of specificity and escape legible identification—an allusion to how culture was and will always be a hybridizing process. Inside the functioning machinery, a lichen (a composite organism with a lifespan beyond the scale of human time) in anhydrobiosis sealed in a glass sphere presents itself as an object of devotion awaiting activation. Alberti harvests the mystical in biology—while it is not our destiny, it certainly promises ways of life exceeding the mimesis of technoscience—and hopes it carries us into the future.
Elsewhere, two artists with whose practice I am rather familiar continue to delight. Russian artist Anastasia Komar—I enjoyed her solo show at Management three years ago—plunges into the molecular with Striatum II (2024). Her energized brushstrokes somehow feel cosmic simultaneously. I had seen Bai Yiyi’s paintings at two group shows at BANK, Shanghai before, but his practice is rapidly evolving, offering pleasant surprises each time. Here, Bai seems to theorize that the world of appearances crumbles apart under the image-regime’s totalizing forces. My two favorites are Crowds Drift With The Wind, Gradually Dissipating Like A Whisper (2024) and Time Pass Slowly Flowing Away In The Form Of Water (2024). The former ascends into the metaphyseal dramas of souls and essences, and the latter retreats into the fever dream of crystalline time.
— Qingyuan Deng
Joël Andrianomearisoa: Miracle
Almine Rech | 39 E 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York
March 6th – April 19th, 2025
Installation view of Joël Andrianomearisoa: Miracle. Courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery.
Antananarivo- and Paris-based artist Joël Andrianomearisoa’s solo show Miracle at Almine Rech also has a compelling press release (penned by curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, co-founder of the grant-giving nonprofit ARTNOIR) that traces three themes central to the artist’s practice: the circulation and production of labor in a world where the definitions of and boundaries between metropole and periphery become muddy, interplays between constructions of memory culture and constructions of the national, and the shifting ground of contemporary art’s recent (re)turn to materiality. The show itself is divided into three sections, each section loosely corresponding to one aspect delineated in the essay. Andrianomearisoa resists the literality common to identitarian logics, instead interpreting forces of globalization that connect Africa and Europe, Madagascar’s national memory, and histories of exclusion and inclusion between high art and craft in emotionally expansive terms. Perhaps this ease with operating at different registers comes from the artist’s early training in architecture, a discipline which acutely understood that impressions effected by spatial organization always move and shift across peoples, with an eclectic immediacy. Language serves as the initial parameter for each of Andrianomearisoa’s exhibitions—in this case, it is the idea of miracle, possibly the miracle of postcolonial survival, the miracle that things and people travel and the border is always weaker than each of us anticipated despite its enforcement, or the miracle that an object can find resonances with cultures that have inherited vastly different traditions—but does not strictly demarcate the field of interpretations available to each work. Working with raffia palm, a plant native to Madagascar and the source of fiber prized by French luxury fashion brands, the artist is committed to investigating how it could be unbounded by its utilitarian function and enter otherworldly terrains.
In the first section, “Hand,” Andrianomearisoa rearranges textiles in the tradition of abstract, monochrome painting. Lighter parts of these wall-based works appear to be closer to their raw material, which is raffia, and the darkened parts are more processed. An intimate connection between the material and the artist’s hand is explicitly stated in the works’ titles, for example, HANDS, FIGURES AND MIRACLE ACT II (2025). I could not help but wonder if the focus on the hand is a reference to Heidegger’s theorization of the human hand as a figure of thinking that forms a fundamental link between the subject and the world. While Heidegger’s hand is allergic to the circulation of dematerialized information that collapses copy and original, here the artist seems to propose nothing can truly be divorced from its contextual origin, and abstracted or disembodied symbols still can be grounded in their materiality. The works in the “Figures and Gestures” section—a line of minimalist figures, each of them made from several strands of raffia knotted together, which is also a quiet nod to Arte Povera—are transparent in their unmediated embodiment of nature and serve as reflexive allegories for conditions of being in the world. In the final section, “Miracles,” we see more wall-based works made from raffia in the shape of flowers attached to canvas and aphorisms communicated in three languages. Again, these works still showcase the energy and dynamism of their materiality while extrapolating from the slipperiness of translation and the tensions between ephemerality and immortality. For Andrianomearisoa, embodiment and disembodiment are two sides of the same coin.
— Qingyuan Deng
Ho Tam: Haircut 100
carriage trade | 277 Grand Street, 2nd Floor, New York
February 15th – April 6th, 2025
Installation View of Ho Tam’s Haircut 100 at carriage trade. Photo Courtesy the artist and carriage trade.
Amid Manhattan’s bustling Chinatown exists a paradisiacal haven where you, too, can get a reasonably priced haircut on any given block. Adapted into an exhibition from Tam’s 2015 photography book, Haircut 100 is a chronicle of the multitudinous hair salons and barbershops in Chinatown, Manhattan, consisting of photos and text taken directly from the original book and presented as a wall mural. Tam takes a stance of genuine interest and fascination. The photographs are full of life and personality, capturing the eclecticism and ever-moving pace of the neighborhood, detailing the history of individual streets and establishments with an eagle’s eye. The textual elements were touching: Tam retells his experiences getting a $10 haircut at a Chinese barbershop on Eldridge Street, interviews an elderly barber who has been cutting in the area for decades, shares his musings on salon-based money laundering, and tells the story of the closure of Mei Dick Barbershop, a local favorite, partly for its slightly unfortunate English pronunciation.
Haircut 100 is an interesting viewing experience with current knowledge of how gentrification would progress in the area since 2015: looking at Tam’s map of hair salons in the area, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of those little dots have ceased to exist, pushed out by an overpriced cafe or scene-y wine bar, and how those who relied on those shops adapted, and continue to adapt, to the ever-changing downtown landscape. Tam shares a photo of the Eldridge Synagogue, a vestige of the early 20th-century Jewish predominance in the neighborhood, standing steady among a street lined with Buddhist temples. The neighborhood has changed before, and it will change again: this exhibition is a reminder to ride the wave, to trust in the human ability to adapt, and to get the hell out of your house and explore your neighborhood. The siren’s call of a value-priced wash and trim awaits you if you would only go out and seek it.
— Zara Roy
Maria Kulikovska: Once Leda Found an Egg — Blue Like a Hyacinth
Mriya Gallery | 101 Reade Street, New York
February 24th – March 5th, 2025
Installation view of Maria Kulikovska: Once Leda Found an Egg — Blue Like a Hyacinth. Courtesy of the artist, Rukh Art Hub, and Mriya Gallery.
Spanning the two floors of Mriya Gallery, Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska’s solo exhibition presented by Rukh Art Hub intimately addresses the resilience of existing in a uterine body amid violence and wartime displacement. Born in Crimea, she was banned from her hometown since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. In this exhibition, with a wide range of mediums and materials such as ceramics, soap sculptures, watercolor drawings, tapestry, and performance, Kulikovska considers matrilineal love, childbirth, and generational trauma through a practice tender yet poignant in its critique of power abuse.
Installation view of Maria Kulikovska: Once Leda Found an Egg — Blue Like a Hyacinth. Courtesy of the artist, Rukh Art Hub, and Mriya Gallery.
In crimson and fuchsia tones, she renders pregnant bodies using watercolor on government documents that were issued during her journey of forced migration. She says, “During my pregnancy, which was really difficult, I was painting and drawing almost compulsively. It was not just a way to process how I was feeling, but it was also therapeutic.” Her soap sculptures of hands, feet, and her own body are embedded with flowers and bullet casings, evoking an aesthetic of fleeting ephemerality in all their metaphors of survival and fragility. She had sourced the bullet casings from those who witnessed or experienced the war. The medium itself references how ballistic soap is used for bullet testing because of its consistency, which is similar to that of the human body. As this daring, powerful show connects the historical past with the present at a point of rupture, Kulikovska channels resilience via bodily autonomy and agency.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang