What's On offers a snapshot of the New York art scene and flags must-see exhibitions that are closing soon. Consider this a beta version of what’s to come as we add features and build out our new Critics’ Table platform.
LAST CHANCE TO VIEW
Camille Henrot through April 12
Hauser & Wirth | 542 West 22nd Street
American Artist through April 13
Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn
Laura Owens through April 19
Matthew Marks Gallery | 522 & 526 West 22nd Street
Marlon Mullen through April 20
The Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd Street
MIDTOWN
Marlon Mullen
Where: The Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd Street
When: December 14 – April 20, 2025
Studiously enlarged renderings of art magazines become strangely lyrical, sumptuously flat compositions. Barcodes and stripes of text—freed from their prosaic functions—appear as surprising rhythmic moments in fields of thickly applied acrylic color. In Marlon Mullen’s first major institutional solo exhibition, on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby-level Projects gallery, 25 canvases from the past 10 years vibrate with his signature appeal.
Though the paintings are varied, unpredictably translated from their sources, radically modified according to no discernible formula, Mullen’s unfailing, inimitable style is instantly recognizable. Here, at the hallowed institution, Mullen’s choice of source material takes its place among the equally, or more important, formal decisions responsible for the startling radiance and sense of conviction that defines his work.
Read more here.
CHELSEA
Camille Henrot
Where: Hauser & Wirth | 542 West 22nd Street
When: January 30 – April 12, 2025
At 24 feet tall, the sheer scale of the largest bronze sculpture in the gallery makes you feel small. Camille Henrot has positioned 347 / 743 (Abacus), 2024, to catch your gaze upon entering—a reminder of how the world looks through a child’s eyes. With its willowy rods suggesting wetland grasses as much as tabletop bead mazes, the work is one of three large-scale pieces that echo nature’s unruly forms in the busy environmental installation of the artist’s Hauser & Wirth debut, “A Number of Things.”
The various discrete sculptures on view are greater than the sum of their parts thanks to the intervention of a custom green rubber floor. Together, the objects conjure a deconstructed jungle gym at a playground, and, as at any park, there’s a posse of dogs. Toying with our pareidolia, Henrot asks: What’s the most minimal gesture she can make to recognizably represent dog? Each texture she deploys is exquisitely intentional, the artist’s command of her materials—from concrete to rope—revealing not only an instinct for absurdity, but also the poetry possible in post-structuralism.
Read more here.
Laura Owens
Where: Matthew Marks Gallery | 522 & 526 West 22nd Street
When: through April 19, 2025
Early in her career, the Los Angeles painter Laura Owens placed the brushstroke in scare quotes and never looked back. I’m thinking of a small, untitled canvas from 1995 in which an enlarged daub—a cartoony version of a slightly drippy mark made by a flat brush loaded with gesso—hangs in black space. It looks like it could have been cut out: painting’s fundamental gesture recast as a gash. But the silhouette isn't empty; it’s been filled in with horizontal bands of thinned-out acrylic color. Brown on top, pink on bottom, a bright stripe of vanilla in the middle, it's a Neapolitan “brushstroke”—a new shape for ice cream.
For three decades, the artist has put her medium through the paces with her nose-thumbing post-post-modernist feminist formalism, a resolutely intellectual as well as humorous project of synthesizing alleged opposites—deskilled and reskilled aesthetics, the handmade and the digital, Greenbergian precepts and illusionistic space (for example). But all the while, dessert has never left the table.
Read more here.
Steve McQueen
Where: Dia Chelsea | 537 West 22nd Street
When: September 20 – Summer, 2025
McQueen, never easy on viewers, this time asks nothing less of us than to stare into the sun. The bitterly titled Sunshine State, 2022—which is, as those familiar with the artist’s sensibility might guess, not a smiling advertisement for Florida—opens with two views of our fiery star from outer space. (The two-channel work is shown on adjoining screens that bisect the cavernous gallery, so the film can be watched from either side.) The double image works as a kind of existential establishing shot: The terrifying molten sphere, which fuels life on earth, sets the stage for a story of near-death, told in the artist’s own voice.
As the British McQueen recounts his immigrant father’s experience as a worker who traveled from the West Indies to Florida to pick oranges, we are reminded—by the film’s pointed title—of the symbolic significance of the troubled and troubling place. The Sunshine State is home to the seat of would-be authoritarian power at Mar-a-Lago and a metastasizing hotspot of the right-wing culture war, where, among other travesties, the discussion of “critical race theory” is banned from public schools.
Read more here.
MEATPACKING DISTRICT
Christine Sun Kim
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art | 99 Gansevoort Street
When: February 8 – July 6, 2025
Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career retrospective “All Day All Night” at the Whitney isn’t one of those exhibitions that reactionaries can use to claim identity’s role as some dour bogeyman in the art world. Thanks to Kim’s witty, piercing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny pieces across video, ceramics, and drawing (which span the early 2010s to the present), such a reductionist reading would be impossible.
For Kim, a native user of American Sign Language, Deaf identity is an open door, and musical notation is a universalizing motif. The works, installed throughout the museum and on the entire eigth floor, include black, blue, and red charcoal-and-pastel drawings—ranging in scale from roughly poster-size to A6 paper—that are like better, smarter David Shrigleys, or akin to Cy Twombly’s work in their use of rhythmic mark-making.
Read more here.
LOWER EAST SIDE
Kenny Schachter
Where: Jupiter | 55 Delancey Street
When: March 13 – April 26, 2025
In Kenny Schachter's show at Jupiter gallery on the Lower East Side, I was struck by a sense memory—a visceral jolt of déjà vu. It was the feeling I had in the basement of my first New York apartment over a decade ago, when I looked up and realized all the piping above my head was covered in aging—and in places crumbling—asbestos insulation. It was as if my body, even before my mind, was telling me: Get out. This isn't good for you. This will cause you harm.
The surfaces of some paintings in "Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction” recall the texture of drop-ceiling tiles, stucco, and, yes, the wrapped asbestos insulation on boiler room steam pipes in decrepit, not-up-to-code New York basements. I would soon learn, from the press release, that the artist made the works in collaboration with Matr Labs, a company that "develops bespoke robotic hardware to transform digital imagery into richly textured oil paintings" (emphasis my own). But let's be clear: the uncanny valley of this gag-inducing texture is a bug, not a feature.
Read more here.
BROOKLYN
American Artist
Where: Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn
When: January 24 – April 13, 2025
In the new video and sculpture installation “Shaper of God” by American Artist, which is staged on a low platform in the cavernous space of Pioneer Works, the past, the present, and the fictional are layered for an effect of both simultaneity and continuity. Geography is one point of connection between Artist and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who both grew up in the nearby California communities of Altadena and Pasadena, respectively, a half-century apart.
The show’s title is taken from the religious text written by Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Butler’s novel Parable of a Sower, 1993, whose post-apocalyptic setting seems especially prescient in light of last month’s devastating fires. (Artist’s exploration likewise feels especially well-timed, though it is the culmination of years of work.)
Read more here.
BEACON
Cameron Rowland
Where: Dia Beacon | 3 Beekman Street, Beacon
When: October 4 – October 20, 2025
Rowland, who is in their 30s, has been exhibiting for only a decade or so, but they have, since the outset of their career, gained attention for their exacting conceptualism, its balance of cryptic gestures and distilled exposition, as well as for the subject matter of their art: racial capitalism.
In using contractual relations to unveil institutional histories and complicities—and perhaps especially in making their work unavailable to purchase (the artist negotiates rental and loan arrangements)—Rowland sails against the headwinds. They are something of an anomaly in this era of frictionless transactions, in an art system that rewards thinking small.
Read more here.
