Opens May 18, 2023
Independent New York
Independent New York is one of my favorite ways to see a wild and wonderfully curated mix of contemporary art, lots of it, known and unknown, in one place. It’s back this year on May 11 for four days at Spring Studios in Tribeca, with 120 artists and 74 galleries chosen from around the world. Twenty New York artists will have their debuts here. Founded by Elizabeth Dee fourteen years ago, Independent New York offers up a cornucopia of themes that include: gender as a social construct, a return to childhood, post-figuration and magical realism, and career reassessments and rediscoveries.
May 11-14, 2023
Maiden Voyage at Clearing
After a dozen years in Brooklyn, Clearing, one of the most influential young galleries that put Bushwick on the art scene, is moving to Manhattan, in a three-story building on the Bowery across the street from the New Museum. All grown up, Clearing is opening on April 26 with Maiden Voyage, a group show of every artist in its stable. Known for identifying and nurturing such emerging talents like Harold Ancart, Calvin Marcus, Korakrit Arunanondchai, this is a gallery to continue to watch.
April 26, 2023 – May 21, 2023
Bob Thompson
Bob Thompson gets a double header: Agony & Ecstasy at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and So Let Us All Be Citizens at 52 Walker. Thompson’s life was cut tragically short by a heroin overdose at the age of 28 after gallbladder surgery, but in the eight years he painted, he managed to make about a thousand paintings and drawings—figurative, often reinterpreting works of the Old Masters, put through the mix master of his imagination using fauvist-like colors. Five large paintings from 1963, an important year in Thompson’s oeuvre that summed up the two years of his travels in Europe, along with ten other paintings in addition to works on paper, and archival photographs and sketchbooks, are in the Rosenfeld show. At 52 Walker, Thompson’s jazz-influenced style will be on view. His particular use of color, line, and figuration contrasts with the prevailing abstraction of his time.
Bob Thompson: Agony & Ecstasy at at Rosenfeld Gallery, April 1 – May 26, 2023; Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens at 52 Walker, April 21 – July 08, 2023;
Ellsworth Kelly at Glenstone
Ellsworth Kelly would be 100 this year and Glenstone, Mitch and Emily Rales’ idyllic museum in Potomac, Maryland, is celebrating him and his career with one of the biggest retrospectives he’s ever had. Ellsworth Kelly at 100 will show nearly 70 works—paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and photographs—across his seven-decade life as an artist, from the 1950s to the 2010s, confirming his deep contributions to the language of abstraction. His dedication and ever-playful probing of shape, line, color, and space will be on full display. Yellow Curve (1990), Kelly’s monumental floor painting covering about 1000 square feet will be exhibited for the first time in thirty years. After nearly a year at Glenstone, the party will continue: first stop Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, next, Doha at the Fire Station.
May 4, 2023 to March of 2024
Uman at Nicola Vassell Gallery
Uman’s show I Want Everything at Nicola Vassell Gallery is a romp through this self-trained, multidisciplinary artist’s very painterly practice over the past decade. Uman was born in Somalia, grew up in Kenya, spent her teenage years in Denmark, her twenties in New York City, and now lives in upstate New York. She brings all this and more to the lexicon of mythical beings and geometrical symbols that mingle on her canvases. Uman is an artist who has many stories to tell and this show presents a new chapter.
May 4 to June 17
