Page 16 - Rt Critic News Today

In a refreshing display of collaboration, two galleries across the Lower East Side are staging a joint solo show of Ethiopian artist Hana Yilma Godine. Spread across Fridman Gallery and Rachel Uffner Gallery, A Brush in the Universe features new and recent mixed-media paintings of still lifes and otherworldly women inspired by mythology, Ethiopian history, and religious iconography.

Mike McCormack seems to be tuned in to a different cosmic frequency than the rest of us. Whilst almost all of his work begins in a small, sleepy village in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, he has a unique way of making familiar landscapes and usually quiet lives extraordinary and surreal.

More than half of the works included in Edward Hopper as Puritan date from the first half of the 1920s, specifically the years 1922–24, a momentous period during which the artist began spending summers on Cape Cod, met and married his wife Josephine (Jo) Nivison, temporarily gave up etching to focus on watercolor, and had his first museum acquisition.

What about stating the obvious? When there is significant institutional investment in the performing arts—i.e., France since the 1980s, with their “Centre Chorégraphique Nationaux (CCN)”1—the field radically expands, creators explore, and new dances flourish. The French Dance Reflections Festival in New York this past fall, presented by jewelry company Van Cleef & Arpels, really brought this home to me.

In this exhibition, superbly curated by Molly Warnock, the paintings of Simon Hantaï are presented in New York, a city that has been very slow to appreciate and acknowledge the importance of this Hungarian French artist.

In Maria Hummel’s new novel, two women (Edith and Lacey) form a friendship as children that lasts into adulthood, but at the start of the novel, they’ve been estranged for more than forty years. Chapters shift across time, the novel focusing mostly on the privileged Lacey Crane.

This is no trickery: the pleasure of an optical illusion is in illumination, proliferation. In these dexterous (at times, ambidextrous) poems, fog is not disorientation, for the book’s title is subject-predicate more than adjective-noun: fog notes, draws attention, sketches—mementos to the self, tasting notes, half-caught snatches of music.

Astrid Klein’s “photoworks,” on display in New York for the first time at Sprüth Magers, operate on several levels. The eight photographs of collages, printed at movie-poster scale using a photographic enlarger, depict female film stars of the 1960s and ’70s.

Monster Mourning is a delightfully unhinged-in-the-best-way evening of movement, music, and storytelling created by Workum and Weena Pauly.

Leaving Earth, Mary Lucier’s immersive video installation at Cristin Tierney, tests the limits of attention with its Whitmanesque expanse. Nine screens, set on individual poles around the room, like a grove of monitors, feature unsynchronized video loops, some with sounds.