GIVE ME TWO
Anton Kern Gallery
January 14\u2013February 21, 2026
New York<\/p>\n
I know it\u2019ll take a little more than art and words to heal our national fabric, but here\u2019s a January group show for folks in need of a shot of collective optimism.\u00a0GIVE ME TWO, curated by Marcus Jahmal and Giorgia Alliata, takes on the group show itself as its thematic conceit, placing twelve living artists across three generations in space together. The intended effect is musical, like a streaming playlist that leapfrogs from Chuck Berry to Nettspend and back again. The result is closer to the productive radical chaos of a one-day festival, where rhythm and melody ultimately foreground communal action and splendor, making way for new modes of free association that couldn\u2019t have existed if not for the pairings at hand. The press release, written by Jahmal and Alliata, calls it \u201cdeliberate adjacency.\u201d With respect to both, the word on my mind is \u201csolidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n
GIVE ME TWO opens mere feet away from Anton Kern\u2019s doors with a steel Donation Box (2025) from Isaiah Davis, fresh off a stunning solo show at King\u2019s Leap. Mounted on the wall behind it are two sculptures from Alix Vernet, both crafted from scrap copper and aluminum AC condensers, each inscribed in gothic font with warnings: \u201cHIGH VOLTAGE\u201d and \u201cUNDER THE.\u201d Across from both lies In June Park\u2019s Overloaded (2025), the back end of a Cybertruck on the verge of causing a serious accident, depicted in woozy, sun-lit acrylic. In front-loading these statements from young talent, Jahmal and Alliata\u2019s generation-spanning ambitions are immediately realized. Where this block transcends is in the deft introduction of GIVE ME TWO\u2019s broader visual language of appropriation (interpolation) and found materials (sampling), connecting an emergent thread in Zoomer-Millennial style with the uniquely American compulsion to endlessly re-create and re-contextualize in search of new meaning.<\/p>\n
The end of the gallery\u2019s first floor underscores this, with an uproarious, five-foot Katherine Bernhardt monotype from 2023 featuring Animal from The Muppets, placed in conversation with Dana Schutz\u2019s warbly bronze gremlin Juggler (2019). I spent a long time with the latter\u2014just a silly little guy, a kind of sideshow character to regale us between musical sets. Of the sets, two stand out: Eric N. Mack\u2019s two delicate hanging forms of satin polyester, silk, and acrylic fabric that cast thin shadows on the walls, and Elzie Williams\u2019s three acrylic-and-ink Popeye sendups, on grids of restaurant napkins. Williams\u2019s works feel like direct attacks on the practitioners and dealers of \u201cred-chip\u201d cartoon art, using their luxury branding and\u2014in the case of Monk by the Sea (2025)\u2014Hulu promotional event scraps to convey a uniquely helpless feeling.<\/p>\n
Kayode Ojo\u2019s Comfort (2023) dominates the second floor: a colossal dangling New Orleans chandelier that sheaths its smaller, shiftier cousin Overdressed (Emerald in the Sky) (2026). Overdressed is an assemblage that\u2019s so of its time, it may well be beyond its time, with a material description that includes a chromed-out music stand, a faux-fur coat, and a \u201cCivil War Era M1851 Engraved Nonfiring Silver Revolver w. Faux Pearl Grips\u201d attached to a set of toy handcuffs. Together, and against a wall of reflective glass windows, the effect is hypnotic, almost seductive. Tucked into a corner beside the two, and positioned in such a way that one must turn their back to the rest of the room, is Kenny Rivero\u2019s For Melissa Joseph (Huxley) (2024), an 8-by-8 oil-on-linen of a cat at rest. It\u2019s a testament to Jahmal and Alliata that these statements, at incredibly disparate volumes, are both perfectly legible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GIVE ME TWOAnton Kern GalleryJanuary 14\u2013February 21, 2026New York I know it\u2019ll take a little more than art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-129806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}