Co-Chief Art Critics John Vincler and Johanna Fateman join forces this week to present a few of their favorites on view in New York now.

Sue Williams, "Unspeakable"
303 Gallery | 555 West 21st Street
Through December 20

Since the late '80s, the painter Sue Williams has, with uncouth feminist candor, exposed both deep and just-below-the-surface cultural undercurrents of sexual violence and patriarchal power. In early canvases, she deployed the cartooning style of a toilet-stall vandal; later, she found painterly analogues to misogyny in the muscular expressionist traditions of art history, embedding fragmented imagery in savvily borrowed gestures. Veering from crude figuration to abstraction, and then back to representational work—but with a more graceful line—she has achieved a command of both modes, and an eerie fluency in a host of historical styles.

For some time, and certainly with the group of paintings in her new show, “Unspeakable,” on view at 303 Gallery, she has shown an ability to produce (what look like) spontaneous compositions, born of an automatic process that accommodates—in the same breath—both nonobjective lyricism and lewd, cryptic outbursts of the unconscious. From a distance, the all-over compositions of pictures like Designer Sack, 2024 (whose title perhaps references the odd, green checkered form in its upper right) or the airier Anniversary, Waiting on Spirit, also from this year, recall—a little—the airborne tangles of Joan Mitchell. Up close, buttocks, testicles, intestines, scatological references, and abbreviated vignettes of conflict emerge in painted doodles. Once you clock the obscene details of Williams’s chaos, the work seems more Boschian than AbEx.

Another twist is her palette. Partial figures and suggested scenes are limned delicately in fuchsia, lime, periwinkle, and purple (on unforgiving, un-gessoed canvas). You might, momentarily, see her paintings as exploded toile or swaths of floral print—they are, in a sense, pretty. But her insistent themes of power, abjection, and violence are untempered, and even sharpened, by an ever-evolving approach that appears, simultaneously, both more spontaneous and refined.

—Johanna Fateman

Stuart Middleton, "18"
Chapter NY | 60 Walker Street
Through December 7

It's not a beanstalk, but Jack, the giant, and the castle in the clouds come to mind when viewing the fantastically long plant in the front room of Chapter NY. The stalk in question—stretching horizontally, not vertically, across the long narrow space of the gallery’s front room—is in fact the stem of a sunflower. It’s also an artwork by Stuart Middleton, a polymathic British artist currently based in West Wales. 

But the sculpture is firmly rooted in the realities of this world (and only the better for it). Middleton’s overlong title plainly lays out its component parts: Three generations of the same sunflower specimen grown in the UK and cut and dried (including root and a flower-head bearing seeds), threaded aluminum bar & connecting hardware, piano wire…, 2022–2024. 

Organic and starkly minimal, the installation seizes the entire space: The sunflower is dramatically suspended in a rigid geometric grid of tempered steel wires, so that you have to carefully navigate around it as you walk. Notice how these crisscrossing lines loosely echo the exposed piping in the ceiling above and more closely mirror the grid of the concrete floor. This excessive armature holds up a once-living, Frankensteined flower-as-document, which charts procreation, growth, and seasonal time.  

In the back room, four works read, at a glance, as paintings. Instead, they are composed of clock components, splayed out and attached to the surface of colorful lengths of museum-case lining cloth (mounted on wood). Each panel records the disassembly of a timepiece, from the first item removed at the top, to the last at the bottom, pinned in a satisfying, descending geometric arrangement that suggests an animal vivisection. In our own tense and manic historical moment, Middleton’s show is a balm: a taking-apart of time and an invitation to enter the sublime slowness of his art.

—John Vincler

Olafur Eliasson, "Your Psychoacoustic Light Ensemble"
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery | 521 West 21st Street
Through December 19

In Your psychoacoustic light ensemble, 2024, the title work of Olafur Eliasson’s new show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, the “ensemble” is not a group of musicians. Five large lenses on tripod stands, huddling behind the seating in the dark room of the installation, do look a bit like stick figures with giant heads, though. Their anthropomorphic presence adds a touch of warmth to an otherwise chilly spectacle. Known for his popular and affecting (and sometimes rather twee) large-scale commissions, the Icelandic-Danish artist here choreographs an experience of trippy interiority, projecting shimmering orbs against a wall, each with an undulating aperture at its center. Morphing, disappearing, and reappearing in response to a melancholic ambient composition of overlapping tones, the forms evoke jellyfish, eyeballs, and entrances to deep-space wormholes.

In another gallery, upstairs, a simpler trick—white light bounced off of a prismatic arc—produces a band, positioned at the artist’s eye level, composed of every color in the visible spectrum. With its curious, static vibrance, cutting through blackness, the wall-spanning strip resembles nothing found in nature, and yet Eliasson, with the captivating, minimal gesture, manages to evoke the symbolic, poetic uses of the rainbow (while leveraging the powerful pictorial anchor of a blazing horizon at sunset or daybreak, too). The work skirts sentimentality or cliché—as do the understated, low-tech rainbows in the nearby, skylit room. In these six large-scale watercolors, horizontal color gradients vary in intensity, as though seen through different densities of mist. Executed with an impossible seamlessness, at odds with their hard-to-control medium, they are an entirely different kind of mysterious spectacle. The palest and largest ones of the series, with their almost undetectable shifts in color, steal the show.

—Johanna Fateman

Astrid Dick, "Kamikaze Ponzi" 
M. David & Co. | @ Art Cake, 214 40th Street, Brooklyn
Through November 30

Illuminated by a spotlight in a darkened room, the sequined surface of Astrid Dick's canvas 0/1, 2024, all but begs to be touched. Don’t do it: The orientation of the innumerable tiny, reversible discs—metallic black on one side, silver on the other—sewn to its surface, captures a quiet dance of light, and records a stroke or swipe of, presumably, the artist's hand.

In this work, there is no paint involved, but 0/1, like the whole of this sprawling show, delights in the freewheeling fun still to be had with the medium. The use of glitter and the artist’s thrilling willingness to experiment recall the paintings of Chris Martin and Keltie Ferris, respectively. I'd gladly take the Paris and New York-based Dick's comically titled, One Take Redux Tiger Hunt 2021, 2024—a composition featuring vertical rivulets of paint—over any of Sean Scully's stripe paintings now on view across the East River, in Chelsea. There are big gestural AbEx numbers here, of which Dick’s Piétiner (complementaries for P.M.), 2024, is the stand-out. I am just as smitten with Petite Ponzi, 2024, a work consisting of bubble wrap covered in glitter on a small canvas—a bauble of haptic delight.  

It is the black-box room in the back that makes this show truly exceptional: 0/1; the giant glitter skull of Vanitas, 2023; a digital projection of a Super-8 film about making a painting of a black square; and the floor work For Pope.L., 2024. This patch of glitter in the center of the room rests assuredly, as if answering philosophically, iridescently, the question: What is the opposite of a black square, really?

—John Vincler