What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in February
Looking for new art in New York this weekend? Start in Chelsea for Nicole Eisenman’s retrospective and Ayanna Dozier’s solo show. And don’t miss Dave Schubert’s photographs.
By Holland Cotter, Blake Gopnik, Jillian Steinhauer, Travis Diehl, Max Lakin, Arthur Lubow, John Vincler, Will Heinrich and Martha Schwendener, Published Feb. 1, 2023
Updated March 10, 2023
LOWER EAST SIDE
‘Labor of Love’
Through March 4. Rachel Uffner, 170 Suffolk Street, Manhattan; 212-274-0064; racheluffnergallery.com.
Each artist in “Labor of Love,” an unusually cheerful group show of labor-intensive paintings, sculptures and photographs at Rachel Uffner Gallery, presents the eye with just a little more than it can take in. Arcmanoro Niles, in his oil and acrylic portraits of Black life, leans on dense, unexpected colors, like glittering, hot-pink hair, while Hilary Pecis’s “Yellow Still Life” has an equally saturated but lighter palette. Bold and graphic as a wallpaper pattern, it’s crowded with finely observed details that seem to jostle one another for the viewer’s attention. Anya Kielar constructs flat, heroic figures from upholstered wood and foam, setting up an interesting visual clash with the beige and gray pattern of the fabric that she uses, and a sweet little mixed-media crocodile by Sacha Ingber looks like an ottoman come mischievously to life.
But the artists who really stood out to me — or, to put it another way, whose work looks best against the background of the others — were Talia Levitt and Dietmar Busse. Levitt’s colorful trompe l’oeil quilts, actually acrylics on canvas, radiate warmth and generosity. Busse, a German-born, New York-based former fashion photographer, uses darkroom chemicals like paint to make busy, naïve images on glossy black photo paper. Five oversize faces festooned with flower petals, thousands of white dots, and extra eyes, look neither psychedelic nor obsessive, though they brush against both qualities. Instead they read as a kind of self-portrait, a strangely innocent exposure of the artist as he communes with his materials and imagination. WILL HEINRICH
