For my year-end round-up of best shows, I've clustered my favorites, loosely, into themes. I'm not numbering them, though I count 13 (a number that the contrarian in me has always found to be lucky). As a coda, I offer an assessment of the worst of the year that sticks with me still.
Innovative Sculpture
2024 was a year of exceptional sculpture and installation work. Andrew Kreps Gallery, in its pair of Tribeca spaces, led the way with genius back-to-back shows. First, He Xiangyu's tidied mess of ceramic, cast aluminum, and found metal objects displayed on the ground. In my review, I described them as "suggestive of urban architecture, a construction site, or a child’s make-believe world." Next, Jes Fan's organic forms composed of silicone, soy, and aluminum were equally engrossing and mysterious: kin to the latex innovations of Eva Hesse.
The rows of patch cords and flashing lights in Brian Oakes's show at Blade Study announced a stand-out young artist to watch. Their complex systems are full of wonder and offbeat wit. In one memorable work, a camera trained on a set of lava lamps provided the input for a random number generator contained in a contraption topped by a miniature model of Plato's allegory of the cave. My favorite show of the year was Álvaro Urbano's elegiac "TABLEAU VIVANT" at SculptureCenter, which salvaged parts of a disassembled 1986 work by Scott Burton made for the lobby of a Midtown office tower. The work led me to ask: "Why don’t we spend more time turning our collective trash, excess, errors, and ruin into beauty?"
Subtle Painting
I'm a painting obsessive who was largely disappointed by the state of painting as reflected by New York gallery fare this year: a dull banquet of stagnant, conservative work. The canvases that did stand out for me were mostly subtle, modestly scaled works, rather than performances of showmanship. The Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda's brilliant studies of light and landscape commanded the large rooms at David Zwirner even though many were diminutive in size. Nengi Omuku’s New York solo debut at Kasmin still has me thinking about its groups of figures and scenes that collapse architectural interiors with landscapes and otherworldly space. In NLC, 2024, a crowd holds up flags and marches forcefully forward toward the viewer in a timely spectacle of collective protest. (Is it ironic that one of her paintings now hangs at 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister's residence in London?)
While there was nothing subtle about the technicolor crowning birth portraits in Clarity Haynes's "Portals," at New Discretions, the show was evidence of a subtle breakthrough in her practice. One of the most memorable paintings was the artist’s Big Birth II (Night), shown this year but painted in 2022, a canvas that immediately called to mind, for me, Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels. If Haynes is a painter of indelible images, Emi Mizukami is a maker of painterly objects. In her show at King's Leap, the reverse sides of her canvases were often of equal interest to the fronts. Sand and thick pastes are incorporated into her surfaces; linen cascades from the sides of her stretchers; and a strange storybook world emerges from her amalgamation of William Blake, late Guston, and Edo period art. The artist made the small space a cosmos.
Surprises
Stuart Middleton's nearly 70-foot long sunflower at Chapter NY was one of the year's best artworks: a marvel I described in my review as "an invitation to enter the sublime slowness of his art." A different reflection on time was found in the vast accumulation of objects in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s plainly titled "Polyurethane Objects" at Matthew Marks. Their exhibition documented four decades of collaboration, through approximately 300 facsimiles of commonplace objects made from polymer, convincingly painted to resemble real things, usually banal consumer products. Magic.
Matthew Barney's DRAWING RESTRAINT 28, 2024, consists of a nearly 45-minute three-channel video of Alex Katz painting in his studio. What could be a lionizing film of the nonagenarian painter is instead a subversion, with an audiotrack enhanced by Foley effects comedically dramatizing Katz's every gesture. The whole enterprise at O'Flaherty's—a stripped-down bar turned gallery—is disconcerting: Why am I here? And what am I watching? Please let more exhibitions in 2025 feel more like whatever they’re serving up at O'Flaherty's.
The Major Museums and Mega Galleries Sometimes Deliver the Goods
“Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney provided a new model for a lively—and loud—museum show. The music of Alice Coltrane played while a series of screens showed archival footage of Ailey or his company in motion. Dance took center stage, supported by archival material and artworks that served as footnotes: a lush display of history and creative community.
At Hauser & Wirth, Rashid Johnson’s selection of massive Leon Golub paintings was a perfectly-timed reflection on the destructive power of masculine, especially militarized, violence. The more intimate accompanying group show added another layer of resonance, with its tight edit of works by, among others, David Hammons, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Philip Guston, who was represented by a majestic dark abstraction.
The Worst of the Year: Minor Drama Against a Backdrop of Institutional Silencing
Over time, I’ve grown more annoyed by two critical pans of Carmen Winant’s Whitney Biennial installation,The Last Safe Abortion, which may have been the most important work in this year’s edition. Winant's photo-mosaic was composed of some 2,500 archival snapshots depicting the everyday life of workers at abortion clinics—a monumental grid systematically, perhaps obsessively, indexing the unvaunted labor of those who do the stigmatized and increasingly impossible work of providing basic reproductive health care.
Jason Farago, writing for the New York Times, and Jackson Arn, Peter Schjeldahl’s ill-prepared successor at the New Yorker, reflect the careless paternalism that Winant's work counters in her rigorous, visionary, and, yes, feminist practice. Farago finds it "as formless as a social feed.” (Even if we accept this misguided comparison, isn’t a social media feed itself a form?) In a hysterical projection, he finds a recrimination in the piece: If he doesn’t love it, he’ll be found “guilty of minimizing threats to women’s health.” He’s guilty, instead, of failing to grapple with the true subject matter, materiality, art-historical grounding, and methodology of Winant’s sophisticated conceptual project—not to mention where it falls in the trajectory of her influential career. Arn, in turn, shruggingly, cluelessly, accuses Winant of—in a particularly vile phrase—“mooching off the pathos of the abortion clinic.”
Winant's agglomeration of images made a monument of collective feeling and community, as well as the drudgery of hourly labor, what Winant has called the "recurrent tasks that occupy a day.” For an installation that was as much about labor as it was about health care, these critics failed to put in the work.
With that off my chest, the very worst trend of 2024 was the continued institutional silencing of artists, authors, and journalists regarding Gaza—from Masha Gessen’s mistreatment after being offered Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize late last year, to recent and ongoing disciplinary actions against journalism professors at NYU for recording protests on campus. I am thankful for Nan Goldin’s speech in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie, thankful even that Klaus Biesenbach's bothsidesing institutional response at least reaffirmed the centrality of the free expression of artists, and to Jasleen Kaur’s Turner Prize speech (which my co-chief art critic Johanna Fateman also highlighted).
