New Shows at Pioneer Works, Anton Kern & Essex Flowers
Art shows you can’t miss this week in New York City. We pick only 3.
1. Francis Upritchard & Martino Gamper @ Anton Kern Gallery
January 14 — February 20
The collaborative work of Francis Upritchard and Martino Gamper brings them together as not only husband and wife but also as two artists with very differing perspectives on the artistic process. Their joint exhibition showcases an amalgamation of Upritchard’s sculpting skills and Gamper’s design prowess to create a series of furniture-sculpture hybrid works. The pieces “…blend sculpture and furniture in such a seamless way that genre or category seems temporarily thrown overboard.”
On view at 532 West 20th Street, New York, NY.
2. Charles Harlan @ Pioneer Works
January 15 — February 28
Charles Harlan’s new solo show at Pioneer Works, Flood, consists of a 10-foot x 10-foot brick cube, a 6-foot wide chain link fence, a piece of fencing into which a tree grew and 736 square feet of roofing shingles, tiled on the floor to walk on. The exhibit turns our attention toward those industrial textures and materials that surround us every day, but that we rarely, truly notice. Furthermore, by exhibiting the sculptures on such a large scale, Harlan forces the viewer to move around (or even on top of) the works, contrasting the stationary nature of these monolithic materials with a sense of artistic, dynamic movement.
On display at 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, NY.
3. Patrick Brennan @ Essex Flowers
January 24 — February 21
To celebrate Essex Flowers’ self-described, “new and unorthodox gallery space,” they have turned to the abstract paintings of Patrick Brennan. In his new solo show, Up Against Nature, Brennan showcases highly material works that engage in the physicality of the medium, symbolize a reaction to natural spaces and meditate on our place within larger environments: “Confronting the natural world with a synthetic dream-like version of its self, these paintings decontextualize our understanding of traditionally perceived ideas around the sublime.” Thus Brennan reflects a larger, more transcendent form of spatial awareness, which the gallery itself is undergoing in a new exhibition environment.
On view at 54.5 Ludlow St, New York, NY.
