Zeke Berman
January 9 – February 20
Julie Saul Gallery will be presenting an exhibition of still life photographs from the 1980s of Zeke Berman. Berman’s formal yet playful images evoke both Surrealism and Constructivism. Combining everyday objects easily found in the Chinatown/ Lower East Side neighborhood where he lived at the time, we find teapots, rubber balls, canes, and newspapers (a witty reference to cubist collage). Berman’s theatrical use of lighting, black velvet and ordinary out-of context elements present a mysterious theatrical place. The richness and precision of these illogical spaces is enhanced by the increasingly rare silver print medium.
Izumi Kato
Janurary 7 - February 27
Gallerie Perrotin will be presenting an exhibition of Izumi Kato. Izumi Kato is an artist who, by avoiding tools, he applies layers upon layers of pigment with his hands. In this way, he depicts creatures with human contours, two staring eyes, a head, hands and feet. Those bold, forceful curves, throwing into relief the human shape, those organic lines, that distortion and simplifying of form, are inevitable products of painting with the hands, and as a result, Kato’s works possess a powerful presence that seems to illuminate the core of the human body.
Ann Veronica Janssens
January 9 – February 20
Bortolami will be presenting a solo exhibition of Ann Veronica Janssens, coinciding with her show at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Using light as her primary material, Janssens manipulates negative spaces to create interactive experiences. Janssens focuses on challenging viewers’ percep- tions. Her luminous installations create gradient zones between light and shadow, and opacity and transparency. The exhibition begins with an eight-foot fluorescent light piercing the wall. The light accompanies visitors as they pass from the entrance to the main gallery, linking the two different spaces with shared luminosity.
Jonathan Lasker
January 7 – February 13
Cheim & Read will be presenting an exhibition with the recent work of Jonathan Lasker. Lasker’s previous show with the gallery, comprised of early work (1977–1985), was in 2012. The current exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Raphael Rubinstein. Rubinstein also curated Cheim & Read’s 2013 show, “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” which included Lasker.
Jacco Olivier
January 10 – February 14, 2016
Boesky East will be presenting an exhibition by Dutch artist Jacco Olivier. This is Olivier’s fourth solo show with the gallery, and includes a selection of the artist’s films and paintings. For this exhibition, Olivier presents these abstract works that are meant for contemplation and pause, as suggested by the most prominent film’s title Adem, meaning “breathe.” To create Adem, Olivier focused on the parts of his paintings that were not consciously applied, the strokes on the edges of his boards for example, or those hidden between layers. By lifting those subtle moments in paint with a camera and “adding the element of time,” as Olivier puts simply, the artist creates an endless, dense, and highly textured sequence of meditational frames that submerge the viewer in their mysterious tranquility.