This week, we welcome two new critics to the fold. Joining Johanna Fateman on Sanya Kantarovsky’s weird-in-a-good-way new works are Mary Simpson, writing on the acerbic conceptualism of Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeanette Bisschops on a posthumous exhibition of intimate and irate drawings by Chloe Dzubilo.
Sanya Kantarovsky
Michael Werner Gallery | 4 East 77th Street
Michael Werner Gallery | 1018 Madison Avenue
Through July 3, 2025
A whippet named Hera is an enchanting subject of Sanya Kantarovsky’s first New York solo show since 2019. The dog (companion to the artists Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood until her passing last summer) moved like a “broken marionette” in her last days, Kantarovsky writes in the exhibition text accompanying “Scarecrow,” which spans Michael Werner Gallery’s two Upper East Side locations. In the new Madison Avenue space, paintings, monotypes, and a glazed stoneware vase bear the dog’s sinuous form. This last, ancient medium heightens the iconographic archaeological quality of Hera’s silhouetted profile, as though to memorialize her in myth; nearby, the heart-piercing, oil-on-linen death portrait Hera, 2025, captures the particulars of her earthly send-off. The viewer sees her small body from above, curled among flowers that recall the scuffed vibrance—and almost everything else—of a bouquet by Odilon Redon, taken from its vase and laid flat.
On East 77th Street, the large canvas Stage (Watteau), 2025, based on the Rococo artist’s Pierrot, c. 1718–19, does not bring the historic painting into the present. By some strange trick, Stage seems to belong, with its predecessor, to the past: Kantarovsky has chosen Pierrot’s best parts—its sheepish entertainer and the cropped face of a beautiful, knowing donkey—and retained some melancholic, desaturated essence of Watteau’s palette, so that his version can be imagined as a centuries-old study or underpainting. It’s almost too pretty to be a gobsmacker, but that makes it even better.
I’ve mentioned just the outliers—the paintings that do not pair a semi-cartoonlike figure with a spectral presence; that fall outside Kantarovsky’s tradition of dream scenes, and small-s surrealist vignettes (which are often broken marionette-ish and Munch-like in their articulation). But some excellent, serenely perplexing examples of those works are here as well, with their related inscrutable suggestions of narrative and telescoping relationship to history. Heartfelt and naturally weird—not random or wacky—the power of “Scarecrow” is largely in its confident mix.—Johanna Fateman
Chloe Dzubilo
Participant Inc. | 116 Elizabeth Street
Through July 13, 2025
Chloe Dzubilo’s first posthumous exhibition “The Prince George Drawings” at Participant Inc. brings together a selection of the artist’s diaristic, manifesto-like line drawings, created between 2008 and 2011. Curated by Alex Fleming and Nia Nottage, the show takes its title from the Prince George, a HASA (HIV/AIDS Services Administration) supportive housing site, where Dzubilo lived for more than a decade. After moving to New York in 1982, Dzubilo quickly became a fixture of the blossoming East Village art scene, with jobs at Studio 54 as well as the art magazine East Village Eye, and as the lead singer of the punk band Transisters. Her HIV diagnosis in 1987 thrust her into the frontlines of Trans and HIV advocacy.
Going into the exhibition, I expected the artist’s simple drawings—scrawled in pink, red, green, and blue ink on paper, neatly framed and hung interspersed throughout the gallery—to feel like a poignant, but distant, historical record, a time capsule. Instead, Dzubilo’s acidic voice, defiantly and humorously captured in her penned narrations, collapses the distance in a chorus of conversations, rants, and hopes that feel urgently current in a time of Trans persecution. Dzubilo’s starkly evocative phrases—like “bed bugs in building funded for people w / AIDS,” “lost SO much art in the 80’s, 90’s,” “too fired up for political correctness”—are sometimes accompanied by drawings of herself in a hospital bed. For one scene, in which she’s shown attending a medical appointment with her friend Lori, the artist has rendered her own body in pink ink; she lies on her side facing us as she’s examined by a top gastroenterologist “for people w/ Aids,” his eyes wide with excitement as he recounts a story about a “hot transexual blonde” he once knew.
Dzubilo died in 2011 at the age of 50. Her partner, T De Long, would later call it a “pharmacide.” The surviving drawings aren’t just a testimony to her legacy, they are also depictions of embodied analog resistance from a bygone era of activism, predating the aesthetics of digital self-disclosure. Their power lies in how they resist spectacle, documenting survival without the urge to perform, insisting on unfiltered intimacy.—Jeanette Bisschops
Rosemarie Trockel
Gladstone | 515 West 24th Street
Sprüth Magers | 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor
Through August 1, 2025
“I’m not a humorous person,” Rosemarie Trockel has said, but her work takes humor very seriously, as her two concurrent gallery shows demonstrate. In 1990s Cologne, while her jokey male peers were rapidly gaining attention in an art market that shrugged off women, she spelled out, with stitch-like lettering on upholstery foam, “ichi auchi,” a German children’s phrase meaning “I want this too!” The unsexy foam has yellowed in 35 years while the work’s market value has skyrocketed, which only heightens the joke: Isn’t misogyny funny?
This piece is included in “Material” at Sprüth Magers, a small survey of works from the 1980s through 2024. Admittedly, there’s nothing very funny about the series “Less Than 1–6,” 2017/24. These manila-colored plexiglass wall pieces with cryptic cutouts are based on 19th-century punch cards for programming semi-automated looms, which shifted the textile industry toward cheaper production while undercutting skilled workers. Mute Servant, 2024, a ceramic replica of an 1800s English musket, faces—across the room—Speakers’ Corner, 2012, an unassuming, two-tiered ceramic soapbox. Between these pointedly opposed works is the comic Untitled, 2006, in which a platinum-glazed leg rests on a foam pedestal, like a bottle of wine on a mattress.
Meanwhile, in Chelsea, The Kiss, 2025—the title piece of Trockel’s concurrent Gladstone show, which features recent works—two flat-screen TVs, fused face-to-face and cast in aluminum, are installed at a ridiculously low height. The sculpture hangs directly opposite Ally, 2025, composed of a repeated photograph of a man with a white bandage over his ear, like those worn by MAGA rallygoers after Trump’s assassination attempt. (The image also conjures a self-mutilated Van Gogh.) And, suspended from the ceiling is the dryly titled Bird’s Eye View, 2025. Made from bronze and iron—two of the heaviest materials in art—it’s cast from a 1930s French prison door, hung upside down to resemble a guillotine blade. As usual, Trockel gets the last laugh, with a work that’s mordant not just in concept, but also in execution.—Mary Simpson
