Piotr’s picks: 3 gallery shows to check out in NYC this October

With fall here, there is an overwhelming number of shows to visit throughout all five boroughs. However, for the October edition, I’m focusing on galleries in NoHo and Tribeca with shows featuring art that defies traditional categorization. Not sure which are worth a visit? Here are three exciting gallery shows to check out in Lower Manhattan.

Show: Wyatt Kahn

Gallery: Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Duration: Sept. 7^th through Oct. 20^th

Hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm; Sunday, 12pm to 6pm; or by appointment.

Address: 39 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

For fans of art that is neither a painting nor a sculpture but something in between, the new Wyatt Kahn exhibition is a must-see. Hosted at New York City- and Zurich-based Galerie Eva Presenhuber in NoHo, it is the fourth solo exhibition for the artist with this gallery. Much of the work featured in the show is neither strictly sculpture nor painting but an amalgam of both. Many small painted canvases are assembled in interesting configurations, fitting together like a puzzle. According to the gallery’s press release, these objects – comprised of sheets of lead, oil stick, and shaped canvases – represent people in the artist’s circle.

Kahn’s works in the exhibition vary, ranging from the shaped canvas painting/sculptures to framed drawings of similar abstracted geometric forms. This lends an aesthetic continuity to the body of work. Some of the art has pristinely painted surfaces, seeming to eliminate the hand of the artist, while others have rougher applications of paint or oil sticks. These art objects follow in the footsteps of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, while simultaneously evoking the exploration of materiality and process central to postminimalists like Eva Hesse. The exhibition is split into sections, with one on the ground floor’s white cube space and the other in a downstairs room with a concrete floor, changing the viewer’s experience with the works. Read more about the Wyatt Kahn show here.

Show: Juan Antonio Olivares, Naufragios

Gallery: Bortolami

Duration: Sept. 6^th through Oct. 19^th

Hours: Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm or by appointment.

Address: 55 Walker Street, New York, NY

The next show I recommend continues with the theme of artwork that defies strict characterization of its medium. His first New York show following a 2018 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Juan Antonio Olivares’ Naufragios at Bortolami in Tribeca does not disappoint. It consists of a mix of a 24-channel sound-sculpture as part of the artist’s Fermi Paradox series and graphite drawings. The series is a response to Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, and his work on attempting to explain the paradox of how the human race has yet to make contact with extraterrestrial life.

The sound sculptural work, Fermi Paradox III, is made up of speakers suspended from the ceiling with hidden surface-transducers. These speakers are hidden within various seashells, sponges, and urchins, and embedded within the wall. Each plays different pieces of audio as the viewer weaves through the installation. These clips, which comprise a 13-minute loop, range from Stephen Hawking talking about the possibility of extraterrestrials, to George Harrison demos, and recited poetry. Taken together, the work creates an immersive and dynamic arrangement of sound as the viewer wanders and explores the space. Olivares chose shells for the series because of their otherworldly yet distinctly terrestrial appearance. The piece as a whole simultaneously invokes a feeling of loneliness in the viewer as well as the tangible hope of yearning for contact with the unknown.

In addition to the sound sculpture, Olivares included graphite drawings based on scanned electron microscope images of sperm and egg. These works render visible what is normally invisible, while also beginning to abstract the representational source content. Read more about the Juan Antonio Olivares show here.

Show: Diana Cooper, Sightings

Gallery: Postmasters Gallery

Duration: Sept. 7^th through Oct. 12^th

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm, Thursday hours extended 11am – 8pm

Address: 54 Franklin Street, New York, NY

Like the other two shows, Brooklyn-based artist Diana Cooper’s new show at Postmasters Gallery fits with the category-defying artistic theme. In Sightings, the artist ruminates on technological and information systems through multimedia works that are also not quite sculpture or painting. These works, all hung on the wall as if paintings, extend into the space with their various elements, very much becoming sculptures. This is evident in works such as Astral Life (2018-2019), which incorporates an inkjet print, corrugated plastic, foam, metal hardware, and a mini plastic traffic cone, among other materials. According to the gallery, the piece was inspired by an elevator ride the artist took in Shanghai and explores the duality of the elevator, as a space both claustrophobic and full of opportunity.

Like sculptures, some of the works’ materials jut off of the wall and out into the space, adding a third dimension to normally wall-bound two-dimensional canvases. Other works, such as Family Safe (2019), are an assemblage of individual items consisting of PVC, paper, glitter, and felt, which take up space on the gallery floor, not just the walls. See the show soon before it closes on October 12^th! Read more about the Diana Cooper show here.

 Piotr Pillardy is an arts writer for the Red Hook Star-Revue. He received a B.A. in History of Art and History from Cornell University, lives in Manhattan, and plays live regularly with the band Bad Weird.