Art Gallery Shows to See in February

· Entertainment · By ReportWire
Art Gallery Shows to See in February

Upper East Side

Through March 3. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), 50 East 78th Street, Manhattan; 646-799-9697, islaa.org.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) consistently gives us exhibitions modest in size — they might get lost in the crowd of a big museum — but weighty in names and ideas. Its current show is a prime example of the type. The four artists featured are among the leading Latin American Conceptualists of the 1960s and ’70s. And they each approach an elastic theme — in this case, mapmaking — in distinctively imaginative ways.

For the Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger, traditional cartography was an instrument of colonialist consumption. In a 1978 photographic piece, she cuts the shapes of Brazil and South America out of slices of bread and eats them. Margarita Paksa (1933-2020) evokes political violence in her homeland, Argentina, in a meticulously drawn 1975 map fragment pinpointing sites of revolutionary activity, overlaying the image with the bannerlike phrase “Libres o Muertos” (Free or Dead).

In 1969, the French-Argentine artist Lea Lublin (1929-1999) took topography in a different liberatory direction in a blueprint sketch (seen at ISLAA in facsimile) for a mazelike immersive installation called “Fluvio Subtunal” (Subtunnel Flow) that led participants through a series of sensuously stimulating environments. By contrast, the geography that interested the Mexican artist Magali Lara is an inward one: a landscape of personal histories and emotions, animated by 1970s feminism that she navigates in delicate, color-coded abstract watercolors.

The ideas of all four artists can be explored in a takeaway brochure (ingeniously designed by Ramón Tejada) with a probing essay by the curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. Altogether, some kind of perfect package. HOLLAND COTTER

Midtown

Through Feb. 25. Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, Manhattan; 212-977-7160; mariangoodman.com.

Andrea Fraser is a pioneer in the institutional critique movement, whose artists question the art-world institutions they are part of.

Fraser’s first show at Goodman surveys her approach. In a 1991 video, Fraser hosts a fictional docent’s tour around the Wadsworth Atheneum, targeting the Connecticut museum’s elite origins. A video from 1998 pokes at the São Paulo biennial and its roots in colonialism.

But the show’s highlight is a new video installation, “This meeting is being recorded,” that leaves the art world behind. After inviting six other white women to join her in discussions about racial privilege, Fraser turned transcripts of the conversations into a bravura performance in which she plays all seven women. Alone onscreen for 99 minutes, she manages to recreate each speaker’s gestures and mannerisms; we realize that, since she participated in the discussions, sometimes she must be “playing” herself.

Here’s a typical passage from the script: “I was doing some work with a, [cross arms at shoulders] with a [gesture to camera/D] psychoanalyst, who’s a Black woman, and she helped me identify my terrifying maternal superego [raise eyebrows, nodding] that I project onto Black women.”

There’s no obvious “critique” on view. We just witness some real-world conversation. But for all the apparent accuracy of Fraser’s depiction, we know a creator’s eye lurks behind it — and it’s the eye of a white artist who is looking at herself as much as at others.

Impersonation, however straight-faced, always hints at satire; here, as often, Fraser’s work gains power from a light, almost comic touch. BLAKE GOPNIK

Chinatown

Through March 5. Marc Straus, 299 Grand Street, Manhattan; 212-510-7646, marcstraus.com.

In “If 6 Was 9,” Jimi Hendrix sings, “Now if a 6 turned out to be 9 / I don’t mind … / ’Cause I got my own world to live through / And I ain’t going to copy you.” The artist Renée Stout refers to this song in her 2018 painting “When 6 IS 9 (for Jimi Hendrix)” — aptly so, since those lyrics describe her practice well. The painting depicts objects that appear set up for some kind of ceremony, with a human brain floating above. The work suggests that the world has turned upside down, but Stout continues to forge her way through.

For decades, Stout has immersed herself in hoodoo, voodoo and other African diasporic spiritual traditions. She’s taken on the guises of alter egos who heal and tell fortunes, sculpted objects that double as occult devices, and painted meticulous renderings of herbs, roots, and ingredient lists for spells. Her work is figurative, often photorealistic yet hermetic, knowing but mysterious, authentic while embracing the pleasures of artifice.

In her current show, “Navigating the Abyss,” Stout takes up the idea of a parallel universe to which she’s plotting her escape. Some paintings are more abstract, with fiery reds and star-speckled expanses of black representing the inchoate imagery of a cosmic crisis. In the titular piece, from 2022, she overlays a rusty, almost bloody-looking landscape with numbers and dashboard instruments. Although not readily deciphered, the painting is, like all her work, a guide — an invitation to take up her tools or find our own. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Chelsea

Through Feb. 18. Marianne Boesky, 507 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9889, marianneboeskygallery.com.

From the 1970s until her death in 2022, Jennifer Bartlett melded the expressive tics of painting with the rigid grids of Conceptual Art. Whether slotting daubs of paint between the lines or sweeping color across them, the grid both confines and energizes simple subjects like mountains or trees, and intensifies elemental studies of form and color. Bartlett’s encyclopedic and wandering “Rhapsody,” from 1976, covers hundreds of square enameled panels printed with quarter-inch grids.

This show presents 77 of the artist’s early, obscure serial drawings on graph paper made from 1970 to 1973. They bare the systemic underpinnings of her more polished work. In one grouping, she experiments with iterative ways of filling the squares, or shading a given area with stripes and stipples. Another prismatic series arrays little swatches of colored pencil on fields of metallic silver paint. You can sense Bartlett’s restlessness in the way she colors outside the lines and allows mistakes to edge in.

A third series on view explores her favorite motif, the iconic house: a box with a triangle on top, inset with window and door. The sky is blue and the lawn is green. The progression of house drawings starts simply, plugging the component shapes dutifully into the grid. Then, several drawings in, Bartlett begins labeling the parts longhand, sometimes in ways that contradict the program — the word “sky” on a green triangle. The tangle of language at the top of one page trails off into a sparse gradient. In the rhythm of the plan’s unwinding comes pleasure in constraint. TRAVIS DIEHL

TriBeCa

Through Feb. 11. Theta. 184 Franklin Street, Manhattan; 917-262-0037, theta.nyc.

The enigmatic acrylic rods, pucks and cards on view here are not art, strictly speaking. Promoted as “healing instruments” by the Gentle Wind Project, which espouses a vague New Age spirituality and is maybe a cult, these spooky gizmos lift liberally from Chinese medicine and chromotherapy. Ecstatically vibrant with a mesmeric graphic style, they take color theory to its implausible extreme, like a Josef Albers exercise on psilocybin.

Their promises, prescribed in their names — “Trauma Card 2 + Combat Fatigue Ver 17.0” (2006); “Soft Sleep Ver 8.2” (2008) — join them to the raft of homeopathic cures aimed at psychic ailments. These are outré versions — better judgment suggests that communing with a laminated Day-Glo Fibonacci spiral will not realign your body’s electromagnetic field — but not so different from the stuff marketed under the $450 billion “wellness” industry. The organization’s current incarnation, after a fraud investigation, as I Ching Systems and Artworks, invites contemplation as an aesthetic practice, even as its intent is less art world aspiration than eliding F.D.A. scrutiny.

We’re awash in bad actors, opportunists who would exploit our suffering for profit. A grifter blows into town and another buys the film rights. But the exhibition, organized by Nick Irvin, resists indulging in sordidness or levying a value judgment, a pose that can feel admirably openhearted or frustratingly oblique. It becomes its own study in obsession (books by Gentle Wind true believers l are available to reference, complete with Irvin’s extensive marginalia), an attempt to make sense of faith, which of course can’t be explained, or perhaps restore it. MAX LAKIN

Holland Cotter, Blake Gopnik, Jillian Steinhauer, Travis Diehl and Max Lakin

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