Taryn Simon
On view until March 26
Gagosian will be presenting the works of Taryn Simon. This will be the artist’s first exhibition at the New York gallery. The new series comprises 12 unique sculptures and 36 editioned photographs.The photographs—large, colorful, and spectacular with a nod to Pop art, and custom-framed in mahogany to emulate the style of boardroom furniture—speak to the bombast of national and corporate symbolism; the sculptures—stylized concrete flower-presses containing delicate preserved floral specimens and their documentation—operate in a discrete and classified zone.
Peter Hujar
On view until February 27
Peter Hujar worked in photography’s classic genres: the nude and the portrait. His portraits evoke the same spirit and starkness as August Sander and Diane Arbus before him. He worked predominantly in black and white and with a medium format camera, and for most of his portraits he preferred the controlled environment of his studio or other indoor spaces, quietly working one-on-one with his sitter. Hujar was driven to capture the essence of his subject, finding the vulnerability shared between the photographer and the sitter, and a simultaneous acceptance of it.
Patrick Shoemaker
On view until April 2, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 25, 6-8PM
Anna Zorina Gallery will be presenting the solo exhibition, Fire on Fire, featuring the paintings of Patrick Shoemaker. The artist depicts his subjects incited by a flaming passion essential to the polar ends of the spectrum between love and hate. Fire embodies the same double-edged character of a pharmakon, a dual reference to both a cure and a poison in ancient Greek, the substance is a remarkably vital resource that can be deadly as well. The reflexive nature of the exhibition title Fire on Fire reveals an ambiguous center of the inherent binary interpretation. This self-reference can allude to an opposition of divided forces or to the fueling of the element’s volatile power through unification.
Alex Katz: Present Tense, a survey of sixty years of master drawings by Alex Katz
Opens February 29
Richard Gray Gallery is presenting Alex Katz: Present Tense, a survey of sixty years of master drawings by Alex Katz. An illustrated catalogue with essay by Yale School of Art Dean Robert Storr accompanies the exhibition. Totaling seventy drawings from across Katz’s ongoing career, the exhibition will occur simultaneously in Richard Gray Gallery’s New York and Chicago spaces.One of the most influential and widely known artists of the past half-century, Alex Katz remains, at age 88, a leading voice in American art. Alex Katz: Present Tense asserts the vital importance of drawing to the artist’s practice.