The walk begins at 19th Street and 11th Avenue, where "Surreal America" is up til Nov. 8th at Rosenfeld Gallery, which greets you with works on paper by Federico Castellón and then several works by James Guy that tend less towards his socialist realist style in favor of the subconscious imagery of the original Surrealists. In addition to John Graham and Gordon Onslow Ford, the show features the early work of abstract expressionists influenced by Surrealism. Turning onto and crossing 20th Street, Ricco Maresca features 1940s works by Morris Hirschfield at no. 529, 3rd floor, til Nov. 15th.
At no. 513 is the last day of Hayv Kahraman's works from this year inspired by January's Altadena fire that made her home studio uninhabitable. Growing up a painter from childhood in an artistic milieu of Baghdad as well as a uniquely flexible acrobat, her artistic persona has in part followed those two practices, the variety of postures migrating around the compositional frame seemingly with the “true freedom” Artaud promised in the body without organs. The tortured, interrogating black pupils looking back at the viewer of the corporeal spectacle in earlier works eventually gave way to an eye completely devoid of color, “I have heard stories of refugees who burn off their fingerprints to avoid being tracked across borders. I was thinking about iris scans and facial recognition when I left the eyes blank, but I also wanted to allow them to look inward, refusing to meet the viewer’s gaze.” The eyes have made their way to the hands, referencing the nazir ornament believed in Iraq to ward off the curse of the unintentional evil eye. “My purpose as an artist is that of a mediator. I have succeeded if I can somehow make you feel seen” which places the viewer on the stage of 2018’s The Audience. The eye on the hand can also suggest the visionary quality of the artistic process, with the purpose of producing a sighting of the viewer. Like Duchamp, she is adverse to fixed meanings of her works, and ambiguity tends to make the beholder of artworks see themselves. Works by Giorgione like The Tempest and The Three Philosophers have for centuries inspired prominent Renaissance scholars to reveal their personal biases and wish fulfillment, while the artist’s intention remains an eternal mystery.
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| Invocation on gray flax, 2025, 35"x35", oil, acrylic, and flax on linen |
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| Burning Womb 2, 2025, 32"x21", oil and acrylic on fax |
Burning Womb illustrates “a parable told by her great-aunt in Iraqi Kurdistan that begins with a flea falling into a fire. After a series of beings — crow, palm tree, water buffalo, river — destroy themselves out of grief for the insect, the tale ends with a mythical Ur-mother who is so distraught at the carnage that she sits on a hot oven to destroy her womb, signaling the end of humanity.. ‘a story about extinction, and the idea that the extinction of one thing can be a trigger event for all kinds of extinctions.’” The large canvas Anqa' features the figure sitting on an active volcano, but the title referring to the Arab version of the Phoenix holds the promise of rising out of the destruction eternally, while rejecting fate. “Mentioned in Qazwinis cosmological book Aja’ilo al-Makhluqat, and in Ibn Arabi’s mystical poetic writing, the Anqa lives atop the inaccessible Mount Qaf (distant mountains on the edge of the world). This bird is associated with all that was marvellous, occult, and strange. It is said that she collects palm fronds to build herself a nest to then set herself on fire. In order to be reborn again.”
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| Anqa', 2025, 78"x78", oil and acrylic on linen |
Several works in the show contain flax fibers, “a material that is produced with the aide of a bacteria in the soil.” “Immunology produces a relationship to ‘difference’ in which eradicating the Other (no matter the consequences) is acceptable.. ..the connections between the language of disease.. ..and immigration policies.. An example is Say Aah, a painting that depicts a figure swallowing or regurgitating a mortar, an object that followed me through my childhood in Iraq, during the war.”
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| Say Aah, 2021, 64"x42", oil on linen (not in current show) |
At 521 W. 26th is a retrospective of the Cuban painter Rafael Soriano, who became an American Surrealist for a time, til Nov. 22.
Omar Ba at 293 10th Ave at 27th Street, ending today: The disappearance of Ba’s utilization of animal imagery for military satire while spending time in the United States recalls for me both the disappearance of caricatures of military personnel when George Grosz had to leave Germany for the US in the thirties as well as Gothic sculpture’s movement away from bestiary symbolism, to my tastes unfortunate in both cases. Ba’s work of five to eight years ago appears to the viewer like opening a supernatural epic of African history to the illustration on page 300. Though Ba’s father had been Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the government of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Negritude poet who became independent Senegal’s first president, Ba was born in a Serer village between Dakar and the River Gambia, a region known for its ancient animist religion and for featuring animals in oral folktales.
When Grosz settled in the US, his initial inclination was to paint Long Island landscapes and fruit vendors that were suddenly of no interest to art historians. Grosz described himself in America as an immigrant rather than an émigré, and Ba’s work, especially in the 2022 Templon show that produced his English language monograph, took on the subject of immigration during a residency in New York, moving on from the West African Générals with animal heads which haunted the Same Dream retrospective that I saw in Toronto and Montreal. This also happened to coincide with the 2022 military coups in Burkina Faso followed by the Western propaganda that derided its uniformed leaders. The affirmative portraits of the current Templon show have, in their last week of exhibition, become concurrent with New Yorkers’ protests against ICE’s arrests of Senegalese vendors that hang around at the corner of Canal and Church, evoking a Dakar street market along the stroll between Wooster Street and Walker Street.My perception of the meaning of Lascaux, similar to Bataille’s view, is formed by Jean Rouch’s 1966 documentary La Chasse au lion à l'arc, which depicts the iconography and rituals of ancient initiation culture of lion hunters, before modernity and urbanization affected the role of the animal kingdom in the subconscious.
As the human mind becomes less preoccupied with the animal kingdom, bestiary symbolism is selectively reintroduced to the subconscious by artists that are so inclined. If mention of the River Gambia invites a craving for a Guinean buffet, there’s B&B’s (165 West 26th) on the way to the Cindy Ji Hye Kim/ Sydney Cain show at 121 West 27th, ending today. Kim’s utilization of grayscale human skeleton imagery of X-rays in acrylic, graphite and charcoal and influenced by early photographic methods goes well with the Man Ray show at the Met. Cain also uses acrylic and graphite for grayscale in her first New York show, with some animal figures in African social settings thrown in.
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| Sydney Cain, Sights, 2025, acrylic, pigment and soft pastel on wood, 18"x24" |
Man Ray at the Met presents his rayographs on interior walls with a density that spreads out the crowds that can form in those galleries, arranged by Stephanie d’Alessandro who co-curated Surrealism Without Borders, taking several opportunities to hang paintings by the photograph it was based on “I maintained the approach of a painter to such a degree that I have been accused of trying to make a photograph look like a painting… Many years ago I had conceived of the idea of making a painting look like a photograph!” A few blocks North, three days remain of the Ben Shahn show, organized by the Reina Sofia, at the Jewish Museum, where Anish Kapoor opens a presentation of his early work while clarifying that he’s “deeply against what’s going on,” as we can only guess at what Shahn would say. Though not politically vocal, Man Ray was the rare soul that could side with Paul Éluard when André Breton attacked him over politics while staying in Breton’s good graces thereafter. Over at the Neue Galerie, museum founder Ronald Lauder recently had a cordial meeting with former Al-Qaeda leader Al-Jolani but any requests to destroy the Egon Scheiles have yet to be heeded.
+ Ruth Asawa at MoMA and Magritte/ Les Lalanne at 744 Madison which I haven't seen yet. The two Ambera Wellman shows, ending today and connected by a few Soho blocks are well worth visiting, with the 145 Elizabeth Street show resembling the sinopie of the future bathroom stall of the larger 134 Wooster Street show.
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Ambera Wellmann, People Loved and Unloved, 2025, Oil on linen, 84 x 144 in |
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