From A to T & Back Again: Openings, Part One

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Artforum editors Theo Belci and Alex Jovanovich assess some of the New York shows inaugurating the fall exhibition season. A NAZI LESBIAN is ascending in German politics, there is a 10 percent chance that AI could extinguish the human race within the next decade, and Rudy Giuliani suppressed reports about the air toxicity around the site of the fallen twin towers in 2001. Barely a week after the disaster, New Yorkers were told it was safe to go back to work in Manhattan’s Financial District when it absolutely wasn’t. These and other terrible things are frequently at the forefront of my mind. But beauty can offer a reprieve and, like a desperate butterfly hunting for nectar in a landfill’s flowers, I search for it in art. Right after Labor Day, New York’s galleries reopened for business, kicking off the fall exhibition season. On Wednesday night, I hit up Garth Greenan in TriBeCa. The gallery’s splendid new digs, at both 10 and 25 Greene Street, featured shows by Cannupa Hanska Luger and Rosalyn Drexler, respectively. The latter’s exhibition, “My Life Has a Life of Its Own,” was pure joy, offering a vast selection of the artist’s collages and paintings that featured hard-boiled, Hollywood-style scenes of dames and dudes either fighting, fucking, posing, or preening. Among these works were vitrines containing oddments from the artist’s life, including notebooks, sketches, softcore porn, and an embroidered powerlifting patch from the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States. Drexler—who was not only a painter but a novelist, playwright, professional wrestler, and Emmy-winning screenwriter—died in 2025 at the age of ninety-eight. The show gave viewers a thoughtfully curated glimpse into the Bronx-born polymath’s multifarious and fabulously perverse imagination (reissued copies of Drexler’s 1974 novel, The Cosmopolitan Girl—about a woman who has a sexual relationship with a talking dog—were on display at the front of the gallery). Just a few blocks north (and up four flights of stairs) at 72 Walker Street, Michael E. Smith transformed Maxwell Graham’s cavernous new space into a caliginous lair, resembling an abandoned storeroom or a shooting gallery (the kind in which we find blackened spoons and syringes, not squirt guns and rubber duckies). Among the nondescript objects arranged on the floor (folding tables, a cardboard box) was a selection of down comforters, moving blankets, bedsheets, tablecloths, and drop cloths, which had been tacked over the gallery’s many windows, hindering the fading light of day. People milled about the opening while chatting, drinking, and visibly perspiring—the air was overly warm and stagnant. Smith’s barely-there display called to mind Fischli & Weiss’s famous exhibition at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in 1994, where scrupulously handcrafted bits of polyurethane foam—resembling banal or throwaway objects like paint cans, cleaning supplies, and cigarette packs—were strewn all over the place, making the show look like a messy deinstall. I also thought about David Hammons’s 2016 survey at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, in which the artist’s conceptually deadpan and class-critiquing sculptures—a full-length fur soiled with paint, an expensive antique mirror adumbrated by musty gray padding—disturbed the overweening elegance of the Upper East Side town house space. My immediate impression of Smith’s exhibition was that it was unvarnished, blunt, even mean, as it eschewed the visual hermeneutics of Hammons and the wow-wee trompe l’oeil subterfuge of Fischli & Weiss. The show possessed a denuded spiritual quality, as if the artist had tried scouring away any nascent streak of transcendence. The presentation reeked of hopelessness, sorrow, diminished returns—a rather apt reflection of life now and into the foreseeable future. No sweet nectar for this butterfly—just the dirty, piss-bitter juice of today. On Thursday evening in Chelsea, the throngs were bright-eyed and giddy, seemingly ecstatic to be out and about on a balmy city night. I, alas, was a dyspeptic noodge. I spent the two-hour march between West Nineteenth and Twenty-Seventh Streets grumbling about my tired legs, my aching cankles, the rivers of sweat cascading down my back and wide flat ass, as well as the lackluster art on view. But a good night’s sleep took the acid away, and on Friday morning I found myself thinking about several worthwhile exhibitions, including Pablo Bronstein’s presentation at Olney Gleason, which is filled with exquisitely rendered acrylic-on-paper drawings of mantel clocks—fantasy amalgamations of evil aristocratic grandeur à la Madame de Pompadour, Meissen porcelain, and monarchist architecture. At Matthew Marks, the former YBA Gary Hume’s enamel-on-aluminum paintings—mostly pastel-hued, eroto-modernist abstractions and loosely figurative compositions—are hung atop a wall mural containing trippy, Brobdingnagian renderings of Mickey, Minnie, and other creaturely cartoon characters. Nearby, at Luhring Augustine, is the photography group show “settle for a good fantasy,” featuring contributions from Janice Guy, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Shaun Pierson, and David Seidner (highlights here are Guy’s glamorously structuralist black-and-white self-portraits and Mama-Nitzberg’s funny and often heartbreaking faux ads and theater posters that embrace the more Cimmerian dimensions of gay-male culture and high camp). ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, I went back into Chelsea to take a closer look at shows that I only skimmed on opening night, including Magalie Guérin (protean Laskeresque oil paintings and jewel-toned ceramics) and Malcolm Peacock (elegiac drawings and synthetic-hair works) at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins; Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (drawings and drawing-sculptures of mythological imagery executed in materials such as graphite, gouache, watercolor, beeswax, and paper) at Tanya Bonakdar; Maia Ruth Lee (hallucinogenic abstract paintings and oddly creepy luggage sculptures) at Tina Kim Gallery; and Masamitsu Shigeta (tweaked-out modernist furniture and dreamlike paintings on canvas and wood, some of which possess hinged shutters to keep them safe from overly prying eyes) at Situations. David Zwirner’s exhibitions by Nate Lowman (painted and silk-screened canvases in the shape of house, car, and storage-locker keys) and Thomas Ruff (oversize JPEG images of downtown New York after the 9/11 attacks) left me cold. But the nocturnal landscapes by octogenarian painter Scott Kahn hit me with a sublime chill. The artist’s pictures of eerily empty countrysides and ominous skies nod to Charles Burchfield, George Tooker, and Fra Angelico in their darkly beatific atmospheres and stylized use of perspective. Kahn’s Berkshire Nightscape II, 2005, depicts a wintry midnight paradise. Shadowy evergreens seem to crawl around a frigid valley like lost penitents, looking for a God that isn’t there. On Saturday, I was angrily cursing that nonexistent deity before heading to the Upper East Side to see shows—I had stepped into a pile of excrement (likely human, not dog) outside the subway station near my apartment. I scraped my sneakers as thoroughly as possible before getting on the train, nervous that I was going to stink up the car I boarded. When I got off the train—with my shitty shoes and even shittier attitude—I walked into Gladstone 64 to investigate Marc Kokopeli’s bedazzled technological bijoux and tabletop tableaux (N.B.: Theo Belci wrote beautifully about the artist’s work in the summer 2026 issue of Artforum). There, my poo-fueled irritation vanished (though the aroma may have lingered). The exhibition, set up like an über-ersatz Bulgari showroom, is both figuratively and literally dazzling. The artist’s elaborate cocktail rings, some of which possess tiny LED monitors playing videos (of what, I do not know . . . the screens are really small!), are wonders of miniature and mechanical craftsmanship. One guy was swooning over a ring that paid homage to the American game show The Price Is Right. “My mom would really love this,” he said. “Yeah, well, I don’t think she’d be smart enough to appreciate it,” responded his surly companion. Before the Gladstone sojourn I stopped off at Ceysson & Bénétière to see the paintings of Richard “Prophet” Jennings (1922–2005), the Midwestern-born journalist, dancer, and self-taught artist who was friends with jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk. The show’s curator, Parker Jones, happened to be at the gallery when I visited. Jones shared that comedian Richard Pryor was a collector of the artist’s work and organized a show of his paintings at Comara Gallery in Los Angeles in 1975—his last exhibition before this one. Jones also told me a story in which Pryor shot up his own home during what was probably a drug-fueled rage, destroying a portrait by Jennings of saxophonist Charlie Parker. (Another casualty was Pryor’s fish tank.) One of the pieces on view, a sci-fi nightmare, features a nude woman kneeling before a giant line of white powder (heroin, cocaine?), a tipped-over wineglass, and a pair of winged hundred-dollar bills. Above her is the decapitated head of a grimacing man. Tentacles sprout from his pate and latch onto an assortment of celestial bodies. More than half of his face is covered by a gelid, semen-like substance. This 1979 canvas, titled Wired, is funny, gnarly, upsetting, and utterly magnetic. I took a generous sip of the work’s anxious and druggy ambrosia—it made this shit-scented butterfly very happy. Alex Jovanovich is an artist, writer, and senior editor of Artforum.