Satiating your hunger for abstraction will take you all over New York this fall, from the Upper East Side to Chelsea to Tribeca. The works on view in the city’s galleries range from decades-old works to fresh interventions into ongoing series. Each show offers one artist’s singular approach to a never-ending investigation into how to create and derive meaning from non-representational painting and sculpture. By visiting these shows, you’ll see how artists from different generations have employed gesture, mark making, color, and form in different ways—all of which are feasts for the eyes.
For even more abstraction, be sure to check out MoMA PS1’s “Hard Art” exhibition, which looks at the legacy of abstract art by Black artists. The show includes work by three of the artists highlighted below— Mildred Thompson, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Virginia Jaramillo—all of whom have gallery shows on view this month.
Virginia Jaramillo at Hales
Image Credit: Courtesy Hales
For the past seven decades, Virginia Jaramillo’s practice has been concerned with the simplicity of the line. “As simple as they were, they were the most complex because it’s hard to get to simplicity right away,” she once told ARTnews about her line drawings. For her latest solo show, titled “Pause in Time,” Jaramillo will present new entries into two longstanding bodies of works: her “Curvilinear” series, in which two bending lines stretch across a monochrome canvas, and linen-fiber works, rough-hewn collages of cut and torn fragments of a medium of Jaramillo’s own making (water, linen-fiber pulp, and hand-ground earth pigments). Both are stylistic approaches that she has revisited again and again in her practice, adding a new level of understanding between her well-known highly formal works and the materiality of her collage pieces.
547 West 20th Street, November 12–December 18
Mildred Thompson at Galerie Lelong
Image Credit: ©The Mildred Thompson Estate/Courtesy Galerie Lelong
“Cosmos Calling” presents four 1996 paintings from Mildred Thompson’s “Music of the Spheres” series alongside three from her “Heliocentric Series,” made a few years earlier. In the earlier works, we see Thompson approaching the organization of the solar system, via spinning lines that mark planetary movements, in vertical canvases. When she homes in on individual planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter here— the canvases are turned horizontally, and her use of color becomes kinetic and eye-popping. “I seek to portray some of the profound meanings and influences indicated by the invisible dimensions and realities around us,” Thompson once said of these works. In doing so, she makes tangible the intangible, revealing forces just beyond our physical and intellectual grasp.
528 West 26th Street, through December 19
Norman Lewis at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Image Credit: ©Estate of Norman Lewis/Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York
For its seventh exhibition of the late and great Norman Lewis, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has on view “Jumping Jive,” which looks at the influence of music, from jazz to classical to reggae, across the artist’s four-decade career. Surprisingly, the exhibition includes two of Lewis’s early figurative works, Jumping Jive (1942) and Musicians (1943). Chronologically, the next work, an untitled canvas from ca. 1945, shows how Lewis began to translate the sonic into paint, taking inspiration from the intuitive and improvisational nature of jazz. As the 1940s progress into the ’50s and ’60s, we see how Lewis’s work became even more abstracted, often suspending various marks across deep color fields. The paintings on view are complemented by several works on paper that give further insight into the artist’s way of working. The back of the gallery also includes a DJ booth, displaying Lewis’s record collection. Each Saturday, from 2–5 p.m., DJ Adrian will spin these vinyls; a recording of the session will play in the gallery for the following week.
100 11th Avenue, through November 14
Mary Lovelace O’Neal at Boesky Gallery
Image Credit: ©Mary Lovelace O’Neal/Courtesy Boesky Gallery
The first solo exhibition since Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s death in May, “Requiem” will present historical works by the artist. Made between the 1980s and ’90s, the paintings on view in this show look at the period immediately following Lovelace O’Neal’s relocation to the Bay Area in the late ’70s. Her formalist Minimal paintings of that decade give way to a much more expressive use of mark-making and a vibrant color palette. In the works on view, limbs and other familiar forms and figures seem to emerge from the depths of the built-up paint, part of the artist’s subversion of the typical rules of abstraction. The titles she gives to these works—Juke Joint, Panthers with Socks, or What’s time to a pig, for example—further complicate their readings.
507 West 24th Street, through December 19
Dia al-Azzawi at Richard Saltoun Gallery
Image Credit: ©Dia Al-Azzawi/Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome, and New York
Following an exhibition this spring at Richard Saltoun Gallery’s homebase in London, Dia al-Azzawi will have his first-ever gallery solo show in New York and the first since his memorable inclusions in “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1 (2019–20) and “Taking Shape: Abstraction from The Arab World, 1950s–1980s” at the Grey Art Gallery (2020). Born in Baghdad in 1939 and based in London since 1976, al-Azzawi is known for his abstract works that typically make use of Arabic script in their compositions. Titled “Tell Us a Tale to Break the Waking Night,” the exhibition brings together works from across his career, ranging from Arabic Letters (1970) to Man in Yellow Field (2020–21).
19 East 66th Street, through December 19
Alejandro Corujeira at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary
Image Credit: Courtesy Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary
For his second solo show with Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, Alejandro Corujeira is showing 11 paintings made over the last three years. Of his way of working, he has said, “I am not slow. I am delayed.” With a muted color palette of turquoises, coppers, and yellows, Corujeira continues his investigations into the properties of light and how to make them visible, as indicated by the exhibition’s title “La Sonora Luz de lo Invisible” (Sounding Light of the Unseen). The works’ titles give a clue to these ponderings, too: La levedad de la luz (The lightness of light) or El viento en la luz (The wind of the light). Lines and blobs vibrate until fuzzy, achieved via a mix of colored pencil and acrylic on linen.
47 East 64th Street, through January 30
Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Gallery
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
The only sculptor included in the mix, Nairy Baghramian will show a range of recent works at Marian Goodman Gallery, including examples from her “nameless” series, made of neon tubes, glass, aluminum, and silicon, that debuted last year in her solo show at WIELS in Belgium. These will be paired with works from her “oreiller” series, nearly translucent sculptures made of epoxy resin, wood, and metal, and her “selves” series, abstract works made from applying layers of pigmented wax onto oiled maple. Taken together, the works on view present various ways of thinking about paradoxes, a hallmark of Baghramian’s work: What does it mean to name something “nameless”? Can a self-portrait be a relief of built-up pigment? As Baghramian has said, “What draws me to neon is its tendency to flicker, as though its eternal promise were already showing signs of fatigue.”
385 Broadway, November 11–January 16