New York is a city that quickly cycles through artistic trends, so it’s been surprising that figurative painting has hung on for the better part of a decade. But now, there are signs that abstraction is roaring back in galleries after a period of relative dormancy. Gestural strokes and off-kilter color fields are becoming the norm, slowly replacing the portraits and surrealist tableaux that have for so long been a fixture of storefront spaces and auction house salesrooms.
What kind of abstraction is this? It’s not quite zombie formalism, the name that critic Walter Robinson gave to the largely rote output of bad-boy painters during the early 2010s. It’s not quite Neo-Neo-Expressionism either, nor is it Neo-Neo-Geo or even neo-anything, because some of it is actually quite old.
Here’s where a New York–specific obsession with painting collides with an international fascination with “rediscoveries,” or artists who have thus far failed to achieve canonization and are now being given a second chance, whether in their late-career period or posthumously. A cynic might say these current shows in New York are a money-motivated attempt to cash in, while an optimist would suggest that dealers’ interest in the under-recognized of art history reflects a welcome global interest in widening the canon. Because commerce and canonization are so deeply intertwined in this city, both viewpoints are probably true.
Whether the current abstraction moment will last will depend on whether dealers can make hay from it. Who knows, given the way the economy is trending. But for now, at least, the abstraction entering New York’s galleries right now does feel fresh, exciting, and worthy of attention. Here are three shows of abstract painting in New York that merit a visit.
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Oliver Lee Jackson at Andrew Kreps Gallery
Image Credit: Photo Kunning Huang/Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Need some proof that figuration is slowly fading away? Consider shows like Oliver Lee Jackson’s at Andrew Kreps in Tribeca, where people melt away into dense agglomerations of wobbling paint strokes. To say that Jackson is disinterested in the figure is not quite true—his paintings are being shown alongside beguiling sculptures of body parts, including one in which two carefully chiseled eyes emerge from a rough slab of marble. Yet in his paintings, Jackson allows his figures to nearly go invisible before allowing them to come back into view once more.
This isn’t pure abstraction to be clear as his paintings develop in time, revealing their secrets gradually. That effect is most pronounced in Painting (1.5.88), 1988, in which a row of flowers cascades through a dark void. Only through extended viewing does one realize that within all that blackness are areas of deep blue, reddish brown, and mucky grey. Look even longer, and one discovers that each of those areas corresponds to a faceless person. Paintings like this one shows that the eye sees what it wants to see, selectively cutting through visual overload and ignoring a lot in the process.
Jackson has only recently emerged on the blue-chip circuit, showing with Andrew Kreps, Blum, and Lisson within the past few years. There can be no doubt that New York centrism played a role in his continued exclusion in the upper echelons of the art market. He worked during the 1960s in St. Louis, where he was within the orbit of members of the Black Artists Group, and then, during the 1970s, he moved to California, where he has been based ever since. Better late than never, though. The Kreps show makes a good case continuing to keep a watch on him.
At 22 Cortlandt Alley, through April 12.
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Cynthia Hawkins at Paula Cooper Gallery
Image Credit: ©Cynthia Hawkins/Photo Steven Probert/Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and STARS, Los Angeles During the 1970s and ’80s, Just Above Midtown, the short-lived New York gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, fostered the careers of so many artists that curators and dealers are only just now beginning to take stock of them all. (You can thank T. Jean Lax’s effervescent Museum of Modern Art show about the gallery for helping spur on a renewed interest in that space.) At Paula Cooper Gallery, 47 years after first showing at Just Above Midtown, Cynthia Hawkins has officially entered the spotlight once more with a captivating group of new canvases that make the eye go dizzy.
The basis of these new works was Hawkins’s stroll from her apartment on West 83rd Street to a nearby subway station—a route that she then traced and tilted, so that her map was on a 45-degree angle. Presumably in reference to the interlaced streets of the Upper West Side, grids recur across her recent paintings, where they appear to shoot through planes of yellow and red. But Hawkins’s maps quickly come apart amid brushy expanses of color, lemon-hued orbs, and oil stick scrawls. In that way, her paintings resemble those of Julie Mehretu, who uses plans, maps, and diagrams as the basis for her abstractions before allowing their elements to dissemble and recombine.
Hawkins’s new works are part of a series called “Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D,” a title hinting at a desire to depict the fourth dimension via a medium with a rich history of two-dimensional representation. At the end of the day, Hawkins’s paintings don’t necessarily rupture the space-time continuum, but it’s hard to fault such an imaginative painter for trying. My favorite of her new works, Chapter 3: Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D #1 (2024), features a blue grid with hard edges that transforms itself into a warping, elastic one, a net that can’t contain the chaotic matter all around. Hawkins has run green and black oil stick across her grids, creating what looks either like a spark or a fracture that threatens to upend it all.
At 534 West 21st Street, through May 3.
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Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori at Karma
Image Credit: Courtesy Karma The Kaiadilt artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori was born in 1924 in Mirdidingki, on Bentinck Island, in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, and didn’t start painting until she was in her 80s, decades after she and the rest of her community were removed from that tiny island by Presbyterian missionaries. The title of My Country (2007), one of her early paintings, suggests an attempt to reclaim her homeland. Yet with its blazing swatches of unmixed acrylic paint, the work never quite coheres to form a detailed view of Mirdidingki. Instead, like a distant memory, it is blurry around the edges.
Crafting My Country was no dour exercise for Gabori, however. She sang while producing her paintings on a worktable at the Mornington Island Art Centre, “keeping us connected to our home on Bentinck Island,” as her granddaughter Tori once put it. For Gabori, creating her art was thus a joyous activity, and that much is obvious based on Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater (2005), in which a purplish line pulses to create exuberantly hued ripples of scarlet and azure. Named for the ancestor that created Bentinck’s Dibirdibi Country, Gabori’s painting is animated by a desire to find visual pleasure amid so much loss.
Gabori has had retrospectives in Queensland and Paris, but her Karma show is billed as her first in New York. Seeking to gain an audience in the city, the gallery has awkwardly contextualized her within a long lineage of New York painters, name-dropping Clyfford Still and Amy Sillman in its press release while also noting that Gabori’s practice was “developed autonomously from Western art history.” I suppose one could look at her 2009 painting My Country (a title she repeatedly used) and see in its large magenta mass a parallel with Mark Rothko’s fields of red. Yet Rothko was a formalist who found innovative ways of making color appear heavy, and Gabori was something else entirely: an Aboriginal woman who used painting to tell her people’s story. Her color fields are appropriately muddied with white strokes, successfully unsettling the purity of Rothko’s format, whether she meant to or not.
At 549 West 24th Street, through April 12.
