What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in April

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Want to see new art in the city? Catch Helen Lundeberg's bracing canvases and Erin Jane Nelson's biomorphic ceramics in TriBeCa, and Sarah Palmer's photomontages in Queens.

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By Holland Cotter, John Vincler, Travis Diehl, Max Lakin, Blake Gopnik, Seph Rodney and Martha Schwendener

TriBeCa

Through May 6. Bortolami, 55 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-727-2050; bortolamigallery.com.

In the 1930s the Angeleno modernist Helen Lundeberg advanced a style referred to as Post-Surrealism, an American splinter movement meant to temper the European version's weirder imagery (but not by much; one of her early efforts includes a wrench plucking a wilted nail out of a crimson pool). By contrast, the ‌10 bracing canvases ‌here share more with the strain of work Lundeberg created contemporaneously as a W.P.A. muralist in Southern California: hard-lined geometric abstraction rendered in plush color delineating domestic zones. But Lundeberg's feel for space wasn't entirely rigid, leaving room for Surrealism's psycho-geography to haunt its corners.

Made between 1952 and 1975, the selection here focuses on bands of vertical color, soft tones dialed up or down the spectrum to achieve an enigmatic interplay of shadow, flatness and depth — an uncanny sense of spatial perception that collides classicism with the illogical dimensions of de Chirico, his empty arcades shot through with ‌Los Angeles's‌ sepia-smog light.

When Lundeberg's uniform fields are ruptured it's with beguiling effect: punctuated by three-dimensional still lifes, as in two versions of the same arrangement called "The Mirror and Pink Shell." The earlier painting, from 1952, appears to fuzz, its brushwork legible, while the later version, started in the same year but not completed until 1969, stiffens into focus, its fields smoothed and amplified. This vignette — a simple chair, a mirror reflecting a bare bulb — was one Lundeberg returned to for over ‌30 years, the contours of her life distilled into the metaphysical plane. MAX LAKIN

TriBeCa

Through May 6. Chapter NY, 60 Walker Street, Manhattan; 646-850-7486, chapter-ny.com.

Erin Jane Nelson's ceramics seem curiously alive — not as recognizable creatures, but as biomorphic forms, maybe microorganisms blown up to visible size. Mounted on the wall, they have irregular, curvy shapes and short, spindly tentacles. They’re almost always clumped together, in pairs or larger groups, as if each one were dependent on the others for its existence.

If you’ve seen some of these pieces before, like in Nelson's contribution to the 2021 New Museum Triennial, it may not come as a surprise that her current exhibition, "Sublunary," was inspired by the Okefenokee Swamp. There's a purposeful murkiness to the work of this Atlanta-based artist, who is also a curator and writer. Nelson's creations are rarely one thing or another, but hybrids that thrive in between.

"Sublunary" displays the outgrowths of a private performance Nelson conducted on multiple visits to the Okefenokee. There are quilted silks featuring photographs; a set of 365 glazed stoneware mounds titled, collectively, "Chronomicrobiome" (2023), that could represent a kind of ritualized, abstract calendar and the wall-bound ceramics, which still intrigue me most. They have rims and are covered with a clear layer of waterlike resin, so that looking at them recalls peering into a series of shallow pools.

What's inside? Sculpted mini-mounds, flowers, and fungi; multicolored patterns; and real photographs, sometimes of Nelson. If these complex artworks were alive, I would imagine them as swimming or slinking omnivores, accumulating bits of swamp and traces of Nelson's experiences as they go. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

SoHo

Through May 13. Ulterior, 424 Broadway, #601, Manhattan. 917-472-7784; ulteriorgallery.com.

I’ve never seen watercolors quite like Mamie Tinkler's. The still lifes of "A Troubling," her second solo show at Ulterior Gallery, depict densely patterned textiles, unusually tinted feathers, mirrors, skulls, curious rocks, glass globes and crackling flames. All these things shade imperceptibly into patches of saturated color that sometimes read as continuations of the pictures — as red velvet backdrops, say, or deep black shadows — and sometimes as a loosening into abstraction. The contrast between exactingly rendered detail and the paint's naturally soft edges is subtle, but it registers as an undertone of tension, even anguish. It's as if Tinkler is using her medium against itself.

This tension struck me as very apropos to a moment when many old certainties are melting away. Things that used to look solid, like science, journalism, the Arctic ice shelf or liberal democracy, are starting to seem more like passing apparitions. But it also says something about perception and knowing. In the show's title piece, a golden finch alights on a twig atop a blue celestial globe. Above it and beside it, as reflections or possibly familiars, two more finches rest on two more globes, their highlights indicated by larger or smaller circles of unpainted white paper. The "real" twig, in front, is loose and fuzzy, like a vision or a dream; the shadow it casts is as crisp as a razor blade. WILL HEINRICH

Queens

Through May 6. Mrs., 60-40 56th Drive, Maspeth, Queens; 347-841-6149, mrsgallery.com.

Photography was well on track to becoming Image Producer of the millennium — then came smartphones. Now we are so inundated with images artists have to work like archivists to wade through the morass. Sarah Palmer, a Brooklyn-based artist, does this, using images from old catalogs, New York Public Library archives, slides bought on eBay and A.I.-generated images to create photomontages. The curious and uncanny results are on view in "The Delirious Sun" at Mrs.

Recycling and repurposing are essentially the subject of the work, immediately obvious in the jumble and juxtaposition of image fragments. But Palmer teases out some through lines, like how the female body is represented in photography. In "Age of Earth and Us All Chattering" (2022), an assemblage tinted an eerie orange, photos clipped from a vintage bondage catalog sit alongside an A.I. representation of a bouncy blonde. The bondage magazine images are attached with hot pink tape to a landscape photograph of the American West taken by Palmer, and rephotographed. "Under the Tangled Forest" (2023) visually rhymes human hair, tape and ribbons; other works feature a sculpture of a female torso and close-ups of the artist's pregnant belly.

Palmer scrambles the codes of photography that tell us what, when and why an image was produced — which is what A.I. does too. However, by putting her own body in the image, Palmer reminds us that making, crafting and contemplating photographs remain a deeply human and embodied enterprise, even at a moment when machines, once again, seem to be taking over. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

West Village

Through April 29. The Kitchen at Westbeth, 163 Bank Street, fourth floor loft, Manhattan; thekitchen.org.

It's hard to recapture, in an exhibition, the fresh, experimental, now-feeling vibe of downtown avant-garde New York art in the early 1970s. But this four-artist show gets it. Organized by the Kitchen, one of the city's oldest alternative spaces (founded in 1971), and installed in a loft-like, window-filled gallery at Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex in the West Village, the show is an evocation of two Kitchen "concerts" presented in December 1972 and April 1973. Like much of the most interesting work of that era, the events were interdisciplinary, combining video and performance. More radically, they were shaped by what we now call identity politics.

The title of the original program, "Red, White, Yellow, and Black," referred to the racial and ethnic backgrounds of the collaborating artists: Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015), born in Japan; the white American Mary Lucier; the Native American Cecilia Sandoval; and the African American Charlotte Warren-Huey. Much of the work on those two occasions referred to these identities in fluid, light-touch ways, though at a time when feminism still splintered along racial lines, it was the simple fact of the artists’ collaboration that really broke ground.

By necessity, the current exhibition has a light touch, too. Some installations have been lovingly recreated, but most of what's here is ephemera: exhibition posters, reprints of texts and letters exchanged among the four artists. The letters are wonderful, a reminder of how much art of the time was communal, social, ad hoc, proudly unmarketable. After the project's conclusion, the four participants took different directions. Kubota and Lucier continued with art careers; Sandoval became a nurse; Warren-Huey went into teaching. But at the Kitchen their brief, lucid togetherness burns bright. HOLLAND COTTER

Upper East Side

Through April 29. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College Art Galleries, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, leubsdorfgallery.org.

Wang Chi-ch’ien, or C.C. Wang (1907-2003), began painting when he was 14 years old in China, but he thrived in a very different atmosphere: New York, where he emigrated in 1949. Wang was the rare artist versed in both traditional Chinese art and radical modernism. He copied Chinese old masters and practiced calligraphy, but he also took classes at the Art Students League from 1949 to 1974 and studied the work of Cezanne, Matisse and Georges Braque. What emerged in his work, on view in "Lines of Abstraction" at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, was an extraordinary fusion of Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary.

Several hanging scrolls copy or emulate Chinese landscape painters like Wang Meng, Dong Qichang or Ni Zan. A cityscape that includes Mark Rothko's old carriage-house studio shows Wang absorbing Cubist influences. In addition to learning-by-copying (Chinese masters explicitly did this, often to cement their aesthetic-political alliances), like a good modernist, Wang innovated: He used fibrous paper to emphasize geologic textures in landscapes, employed ox blood as pigment, or dabbed the painting's surface with ink applied to crumpled rice paper.

Wang's calligraphy transformed, too. Initially, he dutifully quoted classical texts. Later, scrolls of "abstract calligraphy" are filled with engorged characters that tease the line between text, image and graphic design. Wang even used the telephone book — that old 20th-century relic — to practice his calligraphy. The dance of his brush stroke over rectilinear columns of names and numbers formed a perfect marriage of traditional technique and quotidian New York. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Through May 6. Templon, 293 10th Avenue, Manhattan. 212-922-3745; templon.com.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Michael Ray Charles's paintings excavated the ugly history of antebellum minstrelsy with nervy appropriations of ubiquitous racist imagery — the grotesque faces and rictus grins of Sambos and mammy figures — and not always to appreciative reception. He was accused of perpetuating painful stereotypes when many people would have preferred they remain buried. For the last 20 years he has shown sporadically, mostly in Europe.

The pictures in Charles's first New York exhibition since then finds an artist still surfacing that past, but with a slicker veneer. Where the demeaning depictions of minstrel performance and advertising were replicated at confrontational scale, unblinking in their harshness, here their bitter taste is blended into ornament. The shining obsidian bust in "(Forever Free) Veni Vidi" (2002) sits in a richly appointed Baroque interior, a recognition of the ways racism smooths itself into the background of modern life.

These are contextually complex paintings, incorporating ideas about performance (of gender, race, sexuality) and the theatricality of identity. Blackface caricatures still haunt the canvases, but they’re flattened à la wheatpaste street art and spliced onto burlesque dancers and dominatrixes. The figures are often half-formed — Black faces grafted onto white bodies missing limbs or segments of torso, obscured by gimp masks or African ones studded with cowrie shells, performing in circuses and masquerades — a dizzying cascade of historical references that reveals the nightmare of our insatiable need for extravaganza. The metaphors can get tangled, but Charles's equation of American racism with entertainment is hard to shake, a sadomasochistic relationship dependent equally on pain and pleasure. MAX LAKIN

Upper East Side

Through April 29. Meredith Rosen Gallery, 11 East 80th Street, Manhattan; 212-655-9791, meredithrosengallery.com

Feel like you’re trapped inside today's technology?

Like your tech has you twisted into a pretzel?

Like your apps have you strapped in for a ride you don't want to take?

Then get a look at the sculptures of the Swedish Berlin-based artist Anna Uddenberg … for a perfect summing-up of how you feel.

Uddenberg's three imposing objects in her show "Continental Breakfast" at Rosen, as immaculately crafted as any industrial prototype, look like they cross a first-class airplane seat, a gym's pec machine and a gynecologist's exam table. Actually climbing into one would seem to have as much chance of causing bodily harm as curing what ails you.

But even if these sculptures invite us to think about machines and bodies — almost to feel that interaction in our muscles and bones — they also work as a powerful metaphor for what our brains are up against as A.I. asks us to mind-meld with it. Over coming months and years, real human intelligence will get as pretzeled-up with the artificial kind as our limbs could ever be in one of Uddenberg's infernal machines. BLAKE GOPNIK

Upper East Side

Through June 24. Gagosian, 821 Park Avenue, Manhattan; 212-796-1228, Gagosian.com

There can't be many artists whose works are as textbook-famous and as rarely encountered as Chris Burden's. We can't expect to see repeats of the 1970s performances for which he was nailed to a Volkswagen Beetle or shot in the arm with a .22. He died in 2015, and even when he was living those were one-offs. But this rare Burden show presents other examples of the Angeleno's radical works of the 1970s. They shifted the boundaries of art, which makes them now look safely "artistic" and gallery-worthy.

The show gathers several of the "relics" — Burden's term — meant to stand for his performances: An empty display case represents "Disappearing," a piece for which he made himself scarce for three days; a telephone and cassette recorder represent "Wiretap," for which Burden taped calls with art dealers.

There's also footage of Burden's shooting and of "Bed Piece," a well-known performance that had him lying in a gallery for 22 days.

More surprising are the one-minute "TV Commercials" that let Burden infiltrate art into broadcast TV, after buying the ad space required. One of them, "Full Financial Disclosure," sits in Andy Warhol's Business Art genre, revealing the numbers for Burden's 1976 income and expenses — and for his paltry profit. In "Chris Burden Promo," names of world-famous artists fill the TV one after another: "Leonardo da Vinci," "Michelangelo," "Rembrandt," "Vincent van Gogh," "Pablo Picasso" and then … "Chris Burden." That final name would once have seemed a joke or wildly wishful thinking, but now it lives cozily with the others. BLAKE GOPNIK

Chelsea

Through April 22. Kasmin, 509 West 27th Street, Manhattan. 212-563-4474; kasmingallery.com.

Jane Freilicher's paintings of the late 1950s are technically abstractions, though like those of many of her second-generation Abstract Expressionist peers, they speak with a representational lilt, her washy daubs resolving into the open landscape of Southampton on Long Island, where she spent her summers. They’re less a departure from the traditional compositions of intimate domestic scenes‌ — cut flowers and still lifes — she was making before than a layover, eventually returning to them.

Perhaps the East End, with its ghosts of Pollock, loosened Freilicher's brush. There's a stirring tension between form and object in the dozen pictures on view here, numinous, brushy oils made between 1958 and 1962. Maybe that's because they were not made en plein air but rather after Freilicher returned to her Greenwich Village studio, and so depict less the salt air and patchy scrub of South Shore marshes but inventions of them, their memory effervescing like sea spray.

Freilicher's dedication to her unfashionable subject matter is transfixing; she never tired of the languid view from her window — "opulent beauty in a homespun environment," as she put it. "Untitled (Mecox Bay and Field)" circa 1958, with its loosely applied strokes on a creamy ground redolent of sand dunes, is like an exploded Bonnard, lyricizing the ambient East End light in blotches of gold and green refracted as if off water. These aren't so much about sentimentality than reverence. They flatten the space between foreground and background, their lack of pictorial depth contributing to a weightless quality, like a free-floating world tethered to but distinct from the visible one. MAX LAKIN

Chinatown

Through April 23. Dracula's Revenge, 23 Pell Street, second floor, Manhattan; draculasrevenge.net.

The five works by sidony o’neal at Dracula's Revenge parse the argot of algebraic functions and personal poetry — its energy comes from shuttling between the two. All from 2023, the installations and prints have titles like "U+220E 0" and "Mo osit." The name of one spindly, oiled steel sculpture, "Hash Table 4 Tensors Like Us," punningly invokes the vocabulary of computing: A "hash table" is a quickly searchable way to store large sets of data, but the sculpture is also a table, as in furniture. Its razor-blade-like legs and distended paisley top suggest the aesthetics of a head shop: "hash" as in hashish.

The language of abstract math underlies the show; its forms seem describable with ornate equations. The reaching fractal shape of the tabletop, and of two leggy gray prints framed with sloping hardwood, have the sense of being tugged by vectors and anchored by points. Abstract art, so-called, comes from the artist's head, while abstract math (for example, the Cartesian grid) derives from the observed world; they meet here in a kind of wild philosophy, where bodies and memories have lines of force and proper places in the matrix. "Generating fn," two unfurling holes roughly sliced in the gallery's grimy gray carpet, applies two mathematically pure shapes to the impurity of the built environment, stains and all; the imperfection of the world refutes the abstraction of algebra, while the floor also takes on some of the promise of a perfect plane. TRAVIS DIEHL

Chelsea

Through April 22. Nicola Vassell Gallery, 138 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-463-5160, nicolavassell.com.

Before, after, during, long ago — it's hard to determine when things are happening for Che Lovelace's figures in his show "Bathers" at Nicola Vassell. Not all of the framed paintings, rendered here in acrylic on board, suggest a narrative, but many do, such as "Shallow Pools" (2022), so I want to see temporal progression in it. Are the two embracing women in the foreground at the bottom of the painting the same women seen separately in the composition's receding distance, perhaps at another time that day, or in an imagined future? Adding to this fey lyricism are Lovelace's formal choices, including the quasi-Cubist fracturing of each scene into four equal squares that don't quite align. Hues so bright they are almost garish hum through prismatic washes. Linear time stops, then staggers dazedly.

Born and based in Trinidad, Lovelace portrays people who dwell in the waters of the Caribbean, but more, they bend and stretch, squat or sit, pose with an arm akimbo, or flung over a head, while the other arm supports a languorous torso arcing like a crescent moon. The water is a transformative, poetic medium — through Lovelace's attentive gaze — the otherwise prosaic routines of his fellow Trinidadians become lyrical. Even our inherited classical mythology can be transmuted. In "The Gun" (2022), a figure peers intently into a pool, but the scene isn't a version of Narcissus falling in love with himself. Rather it's an act of seeking in those depths something bygone, antiquated that may be rescued and made anew. SEPH RODNEY

TriBeCa

Through April 22. PPOW Gallery, 392 Broadway, Manhattan; 212-647-1044, ppowgallery.com.

Shellyne Rodriguez's terrific debut exhibition at PPOW is forthrightly political art warmed by tender personal detail. The artist was born in the Bronx in 1977. That's the terrain she focuses in her photographically precise color pencil drawings on black paper. And a wide terrain it is, global in population, rich in cultural history.

Rodriquez broadly charts it in three big word-and-image pieces generically titled "BX Third World Liberation Mixtape." Stylistically, they’re modeled on early 1980s hip-hop event fliers designed by the Bronx-based handbill artist Buddy Esquire. Compositionally, they’re action-packed interlaces of figures and words: lyrics, rap group names, magical numbers, and place names spelled in Arabic, Chinese, English, Bangla, Spanish and Twi.

Each "Mixtape" functions as a nodal point for a gathering of large portraits. Several are of Rodriquez's neighbors — bodega owners, barbers, playground kids. Others are of activist friends and mentors: the abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore; the queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar; the former gang matriarch, now community leader Lorine Padilla. As in Baroque paintings of saints, each is depicted with symbolic attributes: Gilmore and Puar with books; Padilla with a compact Santeria altar.

Just as art and life meet in the paintings, so they do in the gallery. A real altar sits on the floor near Padilla's portrait. And Rodriguez has turned the space into a study center, a reading room, with a table holding revolutionary literature, and pens and paper for taking notes. Pull up a chair. You’re in awesome company. HOLLAND COTTER

Chelsea

Through April 22. Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, Manhattan, 212-255-1105; paulacoopergallery.com.

Bubbles combine the geometry of perfect spheres with the chaotic behaviors of floating, bursting, conjoining and pressing up against one another. In the dozen paintings, each titled "Foam" (all 2023), Tauba Auerbach finds a mass of bubbles a fitting subject for their coolly elegant art. The exhibition, titled "Free Will," is this New York-based artist's first hometown gallery show since the success of their 2022 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art survey exhibition. The paintings reproduce images of bubbled foam photographed through a microscope, here painted using accumulations of pointillist-like dots. When viewed up close, they resemble topographical maps marked by multicolored pins or even reptile skin.

Shown alongside the paintings on four low metal tables are six beaded glass sculptures, also all sharing a title, "Org" (2023 with one from 2022). In the front of the gallery, where light floods in from the street through frosted windows are seven semicircular arcs of kiln-fired glass mounted on vertical aluminum armatures, again all titled "Spontaneous Lace" (2023). These translucent half-moons feature colored powdered glass that after heating look delicately patterned, like melted lacework. The tabletop beaded sculptures suggest minimalist jewelry as well as instructional models of complex molecules. All of Auerbach's works here seem to capture order at a moment before seizing into chaos, or vice versa. The works may seem at a glance almost coldly scientific, but is there anything more human than the struggle of barely maintaining order with grace? JOHN VINCLER

Chinatown

Through April 15. Anonymous Gallery, 136 Baxter Street, Manhattan; 646-478-7112, anonymousgallery.com.

"Photography Then?" The title of this group show takes a swipe at perennial museum exhibitions ("Photography Now") that try to sum up the state of the art. The six artists here exploit the broad cultural fluency in the medium to variously frame American masculinity as fraught, turgid and heavily constructed. Alyssa Kazew's portrait of five muscular, shirtless young men looks Photoshopped: Even if they earned their abs the hard way, their bodies look strange and taut, disjointed from their laughing faces.

In this show, photography has been manipulated to manipulate. For the photo "Saying Goodbye," Jesse Gouveia staged a tearful embrace at the airport, the son clutching the father as if for the last time. As the soft-focus strangeness of the moment settles in, the cherry-red tags on their clothes punch through, and the eerie feeling dawns that this might be an ad for Supreme x Levi's or an airport. Buck Ellison stuffed "Christmas Card #2" with upper-class signifiers; as for how the other half lives, Chessa Subbiondo gives us an Instagram star posing like a cutoff-jean-shorts Venus in the flash-lit night, in front of a Big 5 Sporting Goods, while an awkward, awe-struck boy behind her spills his drink. This is the desirous world photography makes.

Not all of the artists in the show identify as photographers. When everyone and their mother has a 12-megapixel digital camera in their pocket, photography is a choice, not a vocation: "Photography, then." TRAVIS DIEHL

Upper East Side

Through April 15. Meredith Rosen Gallery, 11 East 78th Street, Manhattan; 212-655-9791, meredithrosengallery.com.

The painter Rudolf Maeglin (1892-1971) grew up upper-middle class in Basel, Switzerland, and studied medicine after high school. He worked as a doctor for only a year, though, before making a radical break: He decided to become an artist. Maeglin spent the next eight years traveling around Europe and studying art. Then he returned to Basel, where he worked in chemical factories and building sites. Those places, and the people who labored there, became his subjects.

Maeglin didn't work in solitude; in 1933, he helped found the antifascist Gruppe 33 and exhibited publicly. But his art hasn't been seen much beyond Switzerland. This exhibition is its first outing in the United States.

The show consists entirely of portraits, to mixed effect. On one hand, the larger context of how these painted people relate to Maeglin's architectural scenes, and thus his project of rendering the city, is missing. On the other hand, seeing just the portraits — small, colorful oil paintings on board — emphasizes how beguiling and modern they are. Almost all depict flat, frontal, full-body figures, almost all of them men. Maeglin was gay, and there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in his subjects’ pursed lips and cocked hips. Especially in paintings like "Controllore" (1960) and "Junge" (1961), I got a sense of gender as a performance — not necessarily on the sitters’ part, but on Maeglin's. These aren't romantic renderings of the working class or faithful likenesses of people, but rather, intimate character studies that fall somewhere in between. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of Rudolf Maeglin's show. It is at Meredith Rosen Gallery on 11 East 78th Street, not 80th Street.

How we handle corrections

Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic of The Times. He writes on a wide range of art, old and new, and he has made extended trips to Africa and China. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009.

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