Stately, totemic, physical: Peter Sacks’s densely layered paintings exalt in juxtapositions of texture and form, chaos and cohesion. Five monumental works announce the exhibition, towering over ten feet high on both sides of its first gallery.
Kyungmi Shin’s Monsters, Vases and The Priest at Sperone Westwater is an act of ceremony. Moving between timelines, the artist has collapsed the space of images through painting to form an important site for contemplation; for gathering distant experiences and ushering them into the present. In understanding her family lineage she avoids self-mythologizing and instead, more broadly, examines the beauty and dignity of the Asian experience.
No one really wants to paint like an athlete, unless by painting Katy Moran means something like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. Lots of people would like to paint like Moran, but precious few have the wherewithal. The seventeen works here, mostly—following her signature modus operandi—acrylics on found painting, constitute an affirmation of abstract painting, a genre many consider outmoded. How utterly wrong she proves them!
Melancolia, Alexis Rockman’s fifth show at Sperone Westwater, concerns a series of iceberg paintings on the first floor. On the second floor is a selection of slightly earlier work, concentrating on brilliantly detailed, surreal images of flora and fauna. Rockman has long been recognized for the attention he pays to nature, finding in it not only visual tropes of the most remarkable kind, but a cautionary tale emphasizing our ever-increasing vulnerability to damages brought about by climate change.