1.) Bruce Nauman at Sperone Westwater.

An exhibition of new works by Bruce Nauman always offered a unique and exhilarating experience if you allow yourself to be taken in by its idiosyncratic, immersive thrall. Currently on view, Bruce Nauman: Begin Again, is a particularly poignant presentation. It contains motifs and themes that the Indiana-born, New Mexico-based artist has been exploring for years, including sculptures featuring life-size, polyurethane forms of flayed foxes, video studies of the artist’s studio, and bifurcated self-portraits in video loops. Seventeen sculptures of skinned foxes—perhaps the spoils of overzealous hunters—are suspended from the ceiling with industrial wire, crowding the lower gallery. Visitors move through the space as if it were a surrealist butcher’s meat locker, with pairs and groupings of animals dangling or gracefully intertwined in ways that suggested movement, as if they might still be alive and on the run. The sculptures corresponded to a series of gestural sketches of dead foxes on view in an upper-level gallery.

Continuously projected in a rear gallery, a new 3-D film (3-D glasses provided), Untitled (Turning, Swinging and Striking), Dedicated to Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle (2024) is a hypnotic loop shot in Nauman’s studio, in which a hammer, and a hammer head wired to the ceiling, periodically bang into the sides of two bronze life-size human heads lying on the floor. These lyrically orchestrated, yet intentionally jarringly clanging sounds became even more unsettling as they serve to amplify the daily violence, clashes and conflicts rife in the real world. Today, especially, Nauman’s works—filled with fractured imagery and implied acts of violence—are stunningly apropos of our divisive times.

Bruce Nauman: Begin Again is on view at Sperone Westwater through January 18, 2025.   

2.) Richard Hunt at White Cube.

Once dubbed the Vulcan of Chicago, Richard Hunt (1935–2023) was renowned for his virtuosic skills as a welder and the refined craftsmanship of his sinuous abstract sculptures. Hunt was a young prodigy and, at age 35, gained national attention for his work, including a survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1971. This year, a revelatory exhibition Richard Hunt Early Masterworks, the first posthumous show of Hunt’s work in New York, focuses on the years 1955–1969. It includes numerous arresting sculptures featured in the MoMA show that established his reputation. Inspired by the work of Julio González and David Smith, Hunt invented his own distinctive visual vocabulary—a merger of geometric and organic forms—often referencing the shapes of ancient African weapons and farm tools.

Hero’s Head (1956) was created in response to the death of Emmett Till. As a teenager, Hunt witnessed the open-casket funeral of the young Black Chicagoan whose racially motivated murder in 1955 became a symbol of the nascent Civil Rights movement. Later, Hunt explored racial themes and concepts of societal struggles by means of elaborate abstract constructions often made of welded found metal culled from Chicago scrap metal yards. Among the outstanding examples here, Linear Sequence (1962) conveys a vivid sense of lateral movement as well suggests an energetic drive toward some undefined yet quantifiable idealistic goal.    

Richard Hunt: Early Masterworks was on view at White Cube New York, March 13–April 13, 2024.

3.) Thomas Houseago at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey, the English-born, California-based artist’s first New York solo show in over a decade, had a disquietingly epic quality that was equally engaging and exhilarating. Known for his adventurous explorations of the human figure, the show featured several monumental sculptures in bronze that stood as uncanny sentinels leading the viewer through Houseago’s metaphorical and metaphysical journey. Some of Houseago’s works have an expressionist feel, related to works by German artists like Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Houseago, though, is clearly engrossed in a rather rarified and personal mythology of his own.

A hulking presence near the gallery entrance, Giant Minotaur (for DS)—a dark-patinated bronze over ten feet tall—uncannily has the rough-hewn look of carved and burnt wood. It resembles a sacred cult figure from some forgotten civilization. Several smaller works also evoke cult idols, including carved Redwood sculptures of 2024, such as Madness Devouring Our Children, with its gnarled standing figure, and Owl Guide (for Dying), an emblematic symbol of wisdom. The evocative power of these objects is further enhanced by the site-specific murals that provide a backdrop for them in several installations, of day- and nighttime skyscapes, inviting a specialized kind of cosmic reverie.  

Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey was on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, September 9-October 19, 2024.

4.) Nan Goldin at Gagosian.

In Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong, the ever-controversial artist and activist presented two new films (or moving-image works, as she prefers to call them) and a series of recent large-scale photos permeated with a romantic and wistful tone. One of the most poignant of the moving-image works by Goldin I have seen, Stendhal Syndrome (2024, 26 min.) was shown in a large, rotunda-like screening room in the middle of the gallery. Guards stationed at the entrance placed block-out stickers on each viewer’s camera or mobile phone lens to prevent appropriation. It is understandable that Goldin would want to preserve and protect this work from piracy as long as possible. Still, there was an irony to that decision since most of the images in the film are appropriated from museum collections or the artist’s earlier photos.

Nevertheless, Stendhal Syndrome, whose title refers to a form of psychosis instigated by an overwhelming aesthetic experience, is itself an almost overwhelming aesthetic experience. Narrated by the artist, the film consists of a sequence of images of artworks Goldin has gathered over the past twenty years from visits to museums such as the Louvre, the Prado, the Galleria Borghese, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These images relate to compositions or themes from her own works, resulting in a handsomely crafted cinematic merger—a retrospective of sorts that highlights her work alongside the art-historical precedents that have inspired it. Similarly, the photographs on view, such as Joey with Hermaphrodite (2024), pair Goldin’s recent images with well-known paintings and sculptures from art history. In a unique way, Goldin creates a lofty historical context within which she situates her work.

Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong was on view at Gagosian New York, September 12–October 19, 2024.

5.) Mary Course at Pace Gallery.

The shifting light and ultra-reflective bands of color in Mary Corse’s paintings are achieved by means of industrial glass microspheres, the same material often used for street signs and highway dividing lines. The elusive nature of the pigment has a mesmerizing effect on the viewer. This exhibition was an exemplary presentation by the Los Angeles artist who has been regarded as a central figure of the Light and Space movement since the 1960s.

The series of imposing, reductive, diamond-shape compositions featured in the show cannot be regarded as truly monochromatic, as the reflective microspheres create tonal shifts that prevent any clear identification of a specific hue. Shades of blue, gold, white, and black shimmer within the individual works, their intensity subtly shifting depending on the gallery’s lighting—natural or artificial—and the viewer’s position in the space. Just as intriguing in these deceptively simple images, a narrow vertical band in an analogous color bifurcates each painting, suggesting a heavenward bid toward transcendence. Amplifying this edifying ambition to her art, a large, cube-shaped enclosure in the center of the gallery, covered inside and out with shimmering black-gray microspheres offered viewers a calming, meditative place within the cacophonous Chelsea art world.            

Mary Corse: Presence in Light was on view at Pace Gallery New York, September 13–October 26, 2024.  

6.) Frank Stella at Yares Art; Mnuchin; and Jeffrey Deitch.

There can hardly be a more influential American artist than Frank Stella (1936–2024), who took the precepts of modernism to a new level in the postwar era and continued pushing boundaries well into the twenty-first century. In 2024, New York art audiences were treated to two major gallery exhibitions of Stella’s recent works—which turned out to be late works—at Yares Art and Jeffrey Deitch galleries. Currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, An Homage to Frank Stella is an elegantly curated career survey, that underscores this artist’s importance. Yares Art’s Frank Stella: From the Studio offered a glimpse into the artist’s prolific studio practice, showcasing small-scale works in a wide variety of mediums that are intimate and intricate. Some of the most striking pieces featured are star-shape sculptures—a play upon his own name. Merging sculpture with painting through wall-hung relief compositions and freestanding works, the show demonstrated Stella’s feverishly inventive mind.

At Jeffrey Deitch, Frank Stella: Recent Sculpture featured the artist’s last monumental works: vivid, baroque forms made of fiberglass and aluminum, designed with the help of computer programs and 3-D fabricators. Assembled at gravity-defying, tremendous scales, the works are incongruously portable since they are mounted on movable plinths. Is this the future of sculpture? Stella always posed this question.  

An Homage to Frank Stella traces the evolution of Stella’s work from the austere reductive monochromatic compositions of the late 1950s and ’60s, closely associated with the advent of Minimalism, to the elaborate and ornate compositions inspired by a sun hat the artist found on a beach in Brazil. Collectively, these three exhibitions offered a concise and vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and his unique achievement in the history of art.     

Frank Stella: From the Studio was on view at Yares Art, May 6–July 28, 2024 / Frank Stella: Recent Sculpture was on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, March 8-May 24, 2024 / An Homage to Frank Stella is on view at Mnuchin Gallery through January 25, 2025.  

7.) Audrey Flack at Hollis Taggart.

A playful and exuberant show, Audrey Flack: With Darkness Comes Stars was full of wit and sarcastic humor—much like the artist herself, whom I was fortunate to know in her later years. An Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Audrey Flack (1931–2024) gained renown as a pioneer of Photorealism, creating Precisionist airbrushed paintings that explored socio-political concerns and feminist issues in complex compositions of meticulously assembled tableaux. Often, her works were simply seductive and sumptuous still lifes. After a creative block in the 1980s, Flack moved away from photo-based processes and returned to handmade paintings, drawings, and sculptures, often adopting a meticulous
Neo-classical style. 

The recent works featured in Audrey Flack: With Darkness Comes Stars—the last show held during her lifetime—reflect a style she dubbed Post-Pop Baroque. These pieces encompass a wide range of Biblical, pop culture, and art-historical references—but each with an irreverent twist, and frequently include self-portraits. Coinciding with the publication of her autobiography With Darkness Came Stars, the exhibition encompassed mashups of cartoon imagery and religious subjects, along with recent 3-D works, such as Holofernes. The sculpture draws inspiration from the biblical story of Holofernes, who was undone by his assassin Judith, a favorite subject of Renaissance and Baroque artists. The exhibition was a fine denouement to the long career of an inimitable artist.

Audrey Flack: With Darkness Comes Stars was on view at Hollis Taggart March 23–April 20, 2024.

8.) Sarah Peters at Nathalie Karg.

One of the first exhibitions I saw in 2024 was Sarah Peters: Devotions, featuring recent bronzes and drawings that demonstrated this artist’s historical approach to artmaking, with a decidedly Surrealist bent. At first, her works appear to reference the art of the ancient Near East. The highly stylized heads and figures might have been objects of veneration excavated from an Assyrian archeological site. The distortions in each piece, however, are unmistakably connected to modernism—the cool lines of geometric abstraction, for instance, and the sleek architectural forms of Art Deco. 

Hollowed out eyes and emotionless expressions seem to allude to sculptures of ancient Greece, and the perfectionist rendering of hair likewise evokes the ideals of Classicism. For Peters, however, these 3-D forms and works on paper constitute an exploration of power—”power used by the State, Religion and Aristocracy,” as noted in a press release. In this way, the works pose the question of who wields such power today. These graceful and refined objects and images therefore suddenly harbor subtle provocations of the moment rather than evocations of the distant past.

Sarah Peters: Devotions was on view at Nathalie Karg, October 24, 2023–January 13, 2024.  

9.) Elena Sisto at Bookstein Projects.

Elena Sisto: Trickster Makes This World (For Lewis Hyde) featured some two dozen recent works by the New York-based artist that are of intimate scale but epic content. They suggest complex myths or origin stories told with an economy of detail, gesture, and a bit of humor. The highly stylized figures and exaggerated contours of the landscapes and architectural details would seem to have their basis in cartooning and certain forms of post-Pop art. Sisto’s New York Studio School background (emphasizing traditional painting and sculpture techniques), is evident, however, in the refined brushwork, layering and palimpsest-like surfaces. The images generally center on mythological themes, especially the elusive Hermes, one of the principal subjects of Lewis Hyde’s 2010 book, whose title the exhibition pays homage to. Often the protagonists are female, although most of the figures are androgynous, as was the ideal in antiquity.

Mostly grisaille, with touches of silver or red-orange, Sisto’s compositions are sometimes nearly abstract, as in Athena (2019–24), in which the goddess of wisdom is impossibly—and comically—stretched to a stick figure. Her limbs reach to the corners of the ornate background made of irregular squares of gray, black, and orange. A foot-square composition, Hyppolyta II (2019–23) could work just as well at mural scale. Here, Sisto delivers a sense of awe and majesty of a mythic saga with the intimate reserve of a whispered tale.  

Elena Sisto: Trickster Makes This World (For Lewis Hyde) was on view at Bookstein Projects, September 12–October 25, 2024.

10.) Carmen Cicero at June Kelly Gallery.

In his mid-90s, musician and artist Carmen Cicero continues to produce vibrant, technically astute paintings and works on paper that often suggest complex narratives with embedded social critiques. This exhibition constitutes a career-spanning survey of works on paper created over seven decades—ranging from the abstract ink compositions he created in the 1950s—admired by the likes of Joan Miró, and acquired by MoMA—to more recent works that embrace an idiosyncratic form of visual storytelling.  

After his New Jersey home and studio burnt to the ground in 1972, Cicero relocated to New York City and abruptly abandoned abstraction, turning to an eccentric figuration marked by bright colors and exaggerated forms. While What the Nightingale Saw (1993), with a colorful effervescent figure shooting through the night sky like a bolt of lightning, could be expletive of his flamboyant style, in contrast, Hunters and Gatherers (2023) shows a dense arrangement of cartoonish figures made with unbroken lines, suggesting complex social interactions.

Carmen Cicero: Drawings and Watercolors is on view at June Kelly Gallery through January 14, 2025.