Editors’ Selects: April 2025
Lyric Shen: There is an occlusion
Silke Lindner | 350 Broadway, New York
March 28 – April 26, 2025
Installation view of Lyric Shen: There is an occlusion. Courtesy of Silke Lindner.
Walking down Broadway through a gray neighborhood of exhaust and offices, I looked through the windows of Silke Lindner’s Tribeca space to see a surprisingly intimate house blocking my view. The structure is both delicate and sturdy, with a frame of thick beams and a pointed roof of diaphanous paper. Light dimly filters into the space through paper swathes cut out of pockmarked clay walls, illuminating three small hanging works. Lyric Shen’s There is an occlusion recreates where the artist’s mother lived with seven family members in the 1960s. During this time, Taiwan was governed by the Kuomintang (KMT), a rightwing political party that ruled via martial law for nearly four decades, throttling free speech with brutal authoritarian tactics. Shen here reconstructs the home using drawings and descriptions, providing her mother’s memories with a brick-and-mortar approximation. In doing so, she eschews unimpeachable or official fact for tactile and personal feeling, seeking real and embodied experience.
Both in and outside the house hang small porcelain slabs with blurry digital photos on them. Using a water-transfer technique, also called immersion printing, Shen prints her own photos, perhaps taken on a phone, onto thin films. When placed in water, the films disintegrate. Shen then dunks dense slabs of porcelain into the remaining ink, imperfectly capturing the imagery. The resulting works are dappled with holes, tears in the image, or pinches, doublings of pigment, as the artist tries to stretch the two-dimensional photo (of a three-dimensional sight) onto a three-dimensional object. The salon with bubblegum pink furniture shown in Hua is so textured that the scene appears underwater, punctuated by frothy bubbles. The speckles and spots have an aging effect. Appearing damaged or faint, the pictures depict quotidian moments of new things mapped onto old ways. Often just snippets, the scenes are observational, revealing instances of contradiction or irony. Head shows an off-center strip of body close-ups, unappealing photos advertising various piercings, shown outside a shop. Huzi reproduces a fruit protected by a foam net sleeve, though the fruit is still on a branch, the plant snaking through a metal grate. The closely-cropped subject of Joss is a trash can, a ribbon tied into an elegant bow decorating the lid.
Immersion printing mixed with ancient porcelain techniques yields a kind of mismatched timewarp, a tenuous pairing. Shen here uses tools both modern and old to tell a story of right now and long ago, transferring the digital and the disembodied to physical forms.
— Theodora Bocanegra Lang
Rahim Fortune: Reflections
Howard Greenberg Gallery | 41 East 57th Street, STE 801, New York
March 22 – May 24, 2025
Rahim Fortune, Praise Dancers, Edna, Texas, 2020. From the series Hardtack. Silver gelatin print, 30 x 40 inches. Copyright Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery.
In Reflections, Rahim Fortune turns ten years of documentary photography into a meditation on memory, regional identity, and cultural inheritance. The exhibition, curated in collaboration with Sasha Wolf Projects, pairs two of Fortune’s poignant series—Hardtack and I Can’t Stand to See You Cry—with selected works by Black photographers from the gallery’s collection. Fortune’s framing is both personal and political. Hardtack—named after a shelf-stable cracker eaten by Buffalo Soldiers—threads metaphor and metaphorical endurance into portraits of Black communal life in Texas. He draws on vernacular and community photographic lineages not simply as inspiration but as modes of resistance and self-determination: “Communities [have long used] photography to document joyous moments, to mark time, and to create their own story.”
In I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, the photographs offer sustained attention to intimacy, family, and the unspoken emotional textures of daily life. That depth stems in part from Fortune’s own biography. Across both series, he emphasizes not just documentary fidelity but aesthetic labor: precision, the physicality of prints, and a deep care for composition. Still, he is attuned to the audience’s gaze: “I don’t try to interject necessarily what I want people to respond to… but I hope that people can enjoy maybe learning something about Black culture in the South that they didn’t know before.” In Reflections, Fortune assembles a visual archive that is as much about looking back as it is about looking across—between generations, between artist and viewer, and between personal loss and collective endurance.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Alina Bliumis: Gut Feelings
SITUATIONS Gallery | 515 W 20th Street, 3rd floor, New York
March 27 – May 3, 2025
Alina Bliumis, Fruits, Cigarette Butts And Worms Via Drone, 2024. Oil on wood panel, 16 x 20 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Alina Bliumis reinvigorates still life as a mode of sensuous contemplation, rather than an exercise in mimetic precision. In Gut Feelings at Situations Gallery, the New York-based artist explores fruit as a vessel of desire, a charged site of fantastical projection rife with symbolism. Bliumis evokes ripeness not through the jewel-toned language of Baroque opulence but rather through plump yet loosely defined forms that seem to glow from within. In Peach Is a Verb (2024), a flock of silhouetted birds encircles a luminous peach, framing it as a celestial orb. Oyster with Lemon at Dusk (2024) depicts a surreal landscape in which a floating citrus slice hovers opposite an opened oyster that seems almost to melt into the abstracted environment. Throughout, delicate pencil lines contour otherwise imprecise forms rendered in a soft, low-contrast palette.
If Bliumis’s playful, ethereal compositions are vaguely reminiscent of children’s book illustrations, such associations are undercut by the palpable sensuality veering toward the erotic. Fruits gleam and open, shells part, and juices seem to swell just below the skin. In Mother of Pearls Papaya (2024), the tropical fruit bursts with oysters, berries, and stone fruit. The anatomical metaphor is unmistakable here, amplified by a title alluding both to female pleasure and Baroque adornment.
Amid these harmonious arrangements, though, are subtle yet unsettling markers of human incursion. In Fruits, Cigarette Butts and Worms via Drone (2024), the ghostly trace of a hovering aerobot lends crucial complexity, situating the idyllic scene in our present era of surveillance, bioengineering, and environmental depletion. In this hedonistic picnic, excess teeters toward decadence—in the true nineteenth-century meaning of the word—as the mauve hues of fruit severed from the vine gesture toward inevitable decay. Conjuring fantasies of perennial ripeness while intimating the transience of pleasure, Bliumis restages the still life for this age of ecological precarity—luscious and longing, though laced with unease.
— Aidan Chisholm
Arca: Angels
Cordova Gallery | Carrer de la Riereta, 29, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona
February 22 – April 19, 2025
Installation view of Arca: Angels. Courtesy of the artist and Cordova Gallery, Barcelona.
At Cordova Gallery in Barcelona, Venezuelan-born artist and musician Arca debuts Angels, her first exhibition dedicated solely to her visual work. Each of the twenty-two large-scale paintings is born from a process that is both urgent and deeply intimate—glitter, makeup, and pyrotechnic residue merge with conventional media to reflect the physicality of her practice. Arca has described these canvases as “her angels,” an endearment that attests to the radical closeness she shares with them; their surfaces carry traces of her hair, her skin, and the psychic energy she poured into them over the years. Much like a series of coded diaries or personal confessions, the paintings reveal the intensity of her creative process. They are displayed in a linear arrangement that presents an almost cinematic unfolding of tensions between rage and devotion, violence and redemption.
Each painting pulses with a singular energy. Figures hover somewhere between abstraction and vestiges of the body, a nod to Arca’s exploration of gender, identity, and the politics of survival. It’s not difficult to see why these intimate works feel like guardians, or angels. They refuse to be merely decorative, instead surfacing feelings about trauma and transformation. With this debut, Arca places herself among a wave of voices that posture painting as both a site of vulnerability and a tool of resistance—proving, once again, that the stakes of art-making transcend the gallery walls.
— Pola Pucheta
Drink Me
SPIELZEUG | 27 Arion Place, New York
March 8 – May 10, 2025
Installation view of Drink Me, courtesy of SPIELZEUG.
There are quite a few galleries in downtown New York that try to leave behind the consensus of what a gallery should look like. SPIELZEUG is their radical Bushwick apartment gallery counterpart, with a name borrowed from the German words Spiel (play) and Zeug (thing), already evoking associations with sadomasochistic worlds and aesthetic visions. Climbing up the exterior ladder of the apartment building, maneuvering through narrow corridors, by the time you enter the space, you’ve already imagined that the scene has the potential to unfold into something radical: a secret porn studio or a drug lab. But it is indeed a gallery—set in the living room of Evan Karas, who left his job and opened the space last August. He teamed up with writer Qingyuan Deng to create an exhibition that feels almost like a manifesto or a personified self-expression of the gallery, spielzeug itself.
Before visiting the show on a Monday morning, I read the press release—a very long, complex, sensitive, and stylistically distinctive text that blends literary, psychoanalytic, sexological, and philosophical language while recounting personal experiences in a provocative and raw manner. Its hypersexual tone, its confessional psychoanalytic mode, and the extremely graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse, combined with the show’s cover image—“drink me” written with ejaculated sperm on the lower belly of a man—initially gave me a feeling of vertigo and made me want to stop and say: this is too much. But Karas gave me a hint: “This exhibition isn’t about sex—it’s about sexuality.” Through that lens, I started to understand what the eight international early- and mid-career artists (Sophie Jung, Tim Brawner, Maia del Estal, Kristýna Matalová, Ava Marzulli, Atanáz Babinchák, Ellie Krakow, and Karla Zurita) are communicating through drawings, paintings, books, sculptures, and videos.
There are moments of humor, like Ava Marzulli’s The Miracle of Life (2024)—a kinetic, pumping heart behind a latex curtain that looks like a perpetually thrusting penis. There’s lust and seduction in Tim Brawner’s hyperreal painting of a reclining figure, Roses (2025). Sadness surfaces in the dissociating eyes of Kristýna Matalová’s female figure, awaiting rear penetration (“You will never escape,” but I did. Who’s crying now?, 2024). And revulsion hits in Atanáz Babinchák’s video (Study for Kama IV., 2025), in which the subject defecates directly onto the camera. In a nutshell, what struck me in this show is that for a generation raised in a hypersexualized, pornographized, and deeply traumatized social media culture, there needs to be space to process moral and sensual questions. And that space can only take a radical form. Even if the format feels a bit eclectic for now, it has the potential to be synthesized and distilled over time.
— Lili Rebeka Tóth
Pia Paulina Guilmoth: Flowers Drink the River
CLAMP | 247 West 29th Street, Ground Floor, New York
March 7 – May 3, 2025
Pia Paulina Guilmoth, daisy-eye (2024). Archival pigment print in stained ash wood frame (Edition of 3 + 2 APs). 22 x 27 inches (image); 24 x 29 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and CLAMP.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth’s most recent project Flowers Drink the River (2025) is a visual analogy for the complexities of both internal and external forces amidst her gender transition in rural Maine. Guilmoth explores the tribulations of transitioning against a harsh social landscape with portraiture and imagery of a natural landscape that’s simultaneously raw and magical.
The ethereal beauty in the project juxtaposes the starkness of grassy fields and ghoulish animals in predominantly black-and-white, large-format photographs. The images titled night sky #3, night sky #9, and night sky #7 most closely encompass this contrast based on their depictions of the moon and stars surrounded by ghostly reflections. Some of these images, like #9 and #7, include color to create an explosive, energetic feeling.
Upon seeing all of the images in person, the black-and-white photographs felt eerily comforting. For example, as I stood in front of daisy-eye, I couldn’t help but feel as though the image was breathing and had a sense of warmth and life that I had never before encountered in photographic portraiture. Another image, titled i’d look like a flower if i could, shows a horse lying in front of a burning building. The black and white image positions the horse in the foreground while the building is situated in the background, almost floating above the horse’s head like a thought. Both entrancing and unsettling, it acts like a visual manifestation of our deepest thoughts, fears, and anxieties about what becoming one’s true self may mean, but conversely, it may appear to some as a rejection of what once was and an acceptance of what is to come next. In accepting my own queerness, I had to let go of internalized homophobia to become my most authentic self, and Pia Paulina Guilmoth’s depiction of such an experience nearly brought me to tears.
— Julia Norkus
Taezoo Park: Maze
GHOSTMACHINE | 23 Monroe St, New York
April 4 – April 26, 2025
Installation view of Taezoo Park: Maze. Courtesy of the artist and GHOSTMACHINE.
At GHOSTMACHINE, the Korean-born, New York-based artist Taezoo Park’s solo exhibition, Maze, curated by Magdalena Dukiewicz, unveils layers of digital-age memories, musing on nostalgia entwined with fascination and caprice. A disorienting, immersive cabinet of curiosities, Maze presents shelffuls of machines and objects deemed “obsolete”—radios, discarded monitors, CRT televisions, touch sensors, and even exit signs. They hum, flicker, glitch, emit light, and respond to the human hand. Everything is familiar, but when stacked in a configuration that resembles an overcrowded urban housing project, nothing behaves quite as expected.
Maze feels like a memory palace—it asks what we owe to the machines that once kept us company, and what parts of ourselves we’ve uploaded into their fading circuits. The artist arrived in New York in 2008 and observed firsthand how digital broadcasting technologies replaced analog media. As he subsequently started exploring what he calls “digitology,” i.e. the afterlives of no-longer-new devices and the real or imagined progress that e-waste suggests, the acceleration of digital and mechanistic renewal also began taking place at an exponential rate. In Park’s work, these “Digital Beings” document and recontextualize how their own utility has become fragmented, albeit sentimentally.
In a world racing toward the next upgrade, Park reminds us that even the obsolete hum with meaning—if we’re willing to listen.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Light into Space
Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre | Mumbai, India
Feb 13 – May 11, 2025
Courtesy of Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Dia Foundation.
A monumental international collaboration, Light into Space is the joint effort of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and Dia Art Foundation. The first large-scale group exhibition presented outside of Dia’s spaces, Light into Space was conceived out of curator Jessica Morgan’s long-standing relationship with the Centre as a member of the advisory board, as well as Isha Ambani’s involvement in Dia Art Foundation as a trustee. According to Ambani, the show is momentous for “connecting global cultures through the power of art.”
The exhibition focuses on how natural light and artificial illumination alike found their way into artmaking in the 20th century and how artists activated architectural spaces to create immersive, ethereal settings that transcend and inspire. About the premise of the exhibition, co-curator Min Sun Jeon says, “We were particularly interested in how, in the ’60s and ’70s, many artists challenged the emphasis on gesture-based artmaking and traditional notions of sculpture and painting. They began using light and space not just as materials, but as central concepts—tools to explore perception and its limits. The idea was to highlight the experiential qualities of art, especially how it's encountered by viewers in space, with their bodies.” The curator further clarifies that instead of strictly focusing on the Light and Space Movement through a categorical lens, the exhibition is more concerned with this investigation of (im)materiality, including artists interested in such ideas as removing gesture or narrative content from their work through the many interpretations of light.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang