New York Art Round-Up Autumn 2025: The magnificent and newly renovated Frick Collection debuted Flora Yukhnovich’s site-specific mural in the Cabinet Gallery. Inspired by Francois Boucher’s “Four Seasons”, the four panels were initially created for Madame Pompadour in 1775. Depicting romantic couples posed in bucolic settings, Boucher used seasonal themes to celebrate sensual seduction.
Yukhnovich’s four-panelled mural cloth piece is also divided into seasons and manages to reference Rococo abundance with fresh, expressive energy. Her colour-infused panorama reflects an engagement with traditional Western painting, featuring delicate pastel fantastical blooms atop impossibly delicate stems or swathes of voluptuous colour. The Winter panel features a palette rich in depth, flowing from the luminous colours of Spring and Summer.
Leaping from figuration to colour-infused abstraction, the London-born artist presents a provocative dialogue with the digital age in the Gilded Age mansion.
And not to be missed is the breathtaking “The Porcelain Garden “by Vladimir Kanevsky, a treasure trove of porcelain flora, from a breathtaking Lemon Tree in the Garden Court to Peony Bouquets in the West Gallery. The Ukrainian-born artist combines porcelain with metal, creating factual masterpieces that add a new layer of splendour to the Frick.
Willie Birch Up On the Roof Fort Gansevoort Nov 8
“All art is abstract… an interpretation of the real,” Willie Birch muses at the press opening of his powerful monochromatic show. For the past twenty years, Birch has worked in a chiaroscuro palette that pays homage to his native city, New Orleans. References leap from jazz and blues to the African Diaspora, from Birch’s well-tended backyard garden to Sun Rah and Rembrandt. Birch’s realism is rooted in emotion and history; his lines are always beguiling and beautiful.
“Procession for Kidd Jordan,” a monumental twelve-piece work, commands the second floor. Created for the beloved jazz saxophonist, educator, and Birch’s close friend, the piece portrays the uniquely New Orleans tradition of a jazz funeral procession, featuring a brass band followed by friends and family. As the day was drenched by rain, Birch’s shorthand of a deluge is brilliant… random grey orbs capturing the torrential energy.
“Melting Snow’ is Birch’s garden after a historic snowstorm, “the second time in my life I saw snow in New Orleans.” The still-pristine snow blankets the yard, while a trellis-like construction could be mistaken for barren branches, with tufts of grass rising above the frozen ground.
Amber Wellman Darkling Hauser and Wirth! 000 Emotions Company Oct 25
Haunting narratives bond Ambera Wellman’s double gallery shows. Lush humanoids, flowers, animals, fish, and skeletons have a weightless presence in fantastical scenarios. At the formidable mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth, the large-scale oil on linen paintings possess an amorphous majesty, from the simple “Greener than Grass and Almost Dead,” which depicts a gracefully splayed creature, to the monumental “Death Masks Eternity.” A masked procession recalls James Ensor’s 1889, “Christ’s Entry into Brussels”, but this carnival mob is set against a wintry scene that manages to be both bucolic and menacing. The seven large paintings command the pristine gallery space with an unsettling immediacy.
A more intimate experience at Company has Wellmann working directly on the walls, sprawling charcoal creatures crowned by skeletal skulls, twin figures, barefoot, bareassed, carrying flags crowned with profiled masks and taped photos frame “Mother,” with a figure staring at a phone and nestled in a cocoon of bared flesh, an AI figurine and a face echoing primal emotion. Or the humorously erotic “Banshee” displays splayed genitals balanced by a benign face that could have been plucked from the moon itself.
Sana Musama: Raised Earth at Eric Firestone Oct 18
More than forty years of work reflect the potent power of Sana Musama’s ceramic mastery. Works from the 1970s are both prescient and haunting. Her “House” series, from 1983 to the present, reflects the artist’s time in Cambodia, West Africa and the American West. Glazed earthenware detailed with sgraffito lines or randomly pierced and laced surfaces may reference Vietnamese rice paddies, all-seeing eyes, textile weavings, and nature. Initially inspired by West African adobe houses, the small glazed stoneware pieces are perfect urban altars. Pillar pieces share a bold and intricate glazework. Dogon #3 from 1983 is an elegantly proportioned vessel with a striped palette that recalls Egypt, yet feels absolutely fresh and contemporary.
Activist as well as artist, the world traveller and native New Yorker has spent two decades working with Cambodian victims of sex trafficking. Musama has developed a craft project for the girls, working with beading and textiles. Texture, tradition and history enrich her work, with embellishments that reference both feminist and political consciousness. Musama’s expansive vision and attention to exquisite detail remind us that clay is universal, primal and possesses memory.
Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum until Jan 17 (Top Photo Nancy Graves)
More than 100 artists are featured in this sprawling and exciting exhibition. Early works by artists who are still alive include fabulous pieces by David Hammons, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Judy Chicago, Ming Smith, Nancy Grossman, Robert Crumb, Peter Saul, and now-gone luminaries like Benny Andrew, Paul Thek, Jasper Johns, Hannah Wilke, Romare Bearden, Andy Warhol, and Marisol. This was art made during a time of radical political unrest, as liberation movements ignited female, Black, Latino, Native American and gay communities. It was a time of psychedelia, not mind-numbing pharmaceuticals. The work feels passionate, innovative, and optimistic. Art made before power lists, mega galleries, and globalisation. Covering the years 1958-1972, the show is loosely structured around themes, and treasures abound on every wall. Paul Thek’s eerily prescient “Untitled” from a 1963 “TV Analyzations” predicts our media-obsessed world. An early Benny Andrews piece, “No More Games,” packs a political punch and pioneering use of collaged fabric. Glazed ceramics from 1965 by Robert Ameson look absolutely contemporary, depicting a dial telephone and SLR camera.
This is a fabulous show, from a more innocent moment when you feel the excitement and pleasure that art can offer to both artist and viewer. There are little-known treasures to explore, like my old friend Deborah Remington’s painting “Haddonfield “from 1965 or H.C. Westerman’s wooden sculptures.
Shooting from the Heart
June Leaf 1929-2024 Grey Art Museum
June Leaf, the legendary artist and wife of photographer Robert Frank, were my neighbour. They were often seen on the street, in their eighth decade and full of energy. Robert and June hung outside their loft on Bleecker Street, watching the neighbourhood, which was bustling with old-timers, hipsters, and NYU kids. I was fortunate enough to meet June during the COVID-19 pandemic, introduced by poet Bob Holman. Together, we spent time on a bench outside the Hole gallery, where my husband, Luigi Cazzaniga, had work on display in the previously shuttered window. During a time of masks and social isolation, we all enjoyed the “safe” social interaction in cold, fresh air.
A quiet legend, Leaf’s first New York City show in 1968 was met with great acclaim. For the next fifty years, Leaf continued her multidisciplinary practice, with museum shows, gallery shows, and an under-the-radar career, and was considered a significant and underrated artist. This travelling show, originally debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, includes 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, and assemblages. Leaf collaborated with this magnificent retrospective, which highlights her unique and prescient vision.
It’s an opportunity to see her original, exquisite drawings, which are then translated to canvas or three-dimensional pieces. As much an engineer as an artist, Leaf often drew inspiration from women’s traditional tools, including gears, kitchen utensils, and even the foot-powered sewing machine treadle. Thus, what begins as a beautiful drawing transforms into a kinetic sculpture or a poetic painting. The Zen-like simplicity of the sculpture “Two Women On a Jack”, inspired by an actual car jack, can be seen as both a gorgeous drawing and an exquisitely balanced mobile sculpture.
Intuitive and adventurous, June Leaf’s extraordinary career is steeped in power, playfulness, and poetry. Like the Whitney’s “Sixties Surreal”, June Leaf represents radical optimism at a time when that possibility has never been more necessary.