What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in January

This week in Newly Reviewed, Jillian Steinhauer covers Emily Janowick’s obelisks, Leroy Johnson’s tiny houses and Jorge Camacho’s biomorphic forms.

Chinatown

Emily Janowick

Through Feb. 8. Parent Company, 154 East Broadway, Manhattan; 929-324-6615, parentcompany.net.

Two giant obelisks are currently wedged into Parent Company’s basement space for a show called “Wet Blanket.” They’re crossed in a tidy X, as if they’d fallen perfectly — one between two structural columns and the other on top. A pointed obelisk tip juts into the gallery’s doorway, a bit menacing, but its sharpness is allayed by the sounds of rolling and crashing waves.

Emily Janowick makes sculptures and site-specific installations that try to bridge the built and natural environments. A more accurate word for her work may be “interventions” — as when, in 2022, she filled a gallery with a staircase so big that you could only either climb it (and see the vines growing at the top) or walk beneath it.

In this exhibition, the wood obelisks, which Janowick constructed on site, restrict your movement. You can walk around, under or over them, but you can’t avoid them. The sculptures have transducers inside that play simultaneous audio recordings of the oceans on two coasts: Janowick recorded in Malibu, Calif., and her friend James Chrzan recorded in Kure Beach, N.C.

The installation is an astute conceptual gesture: two fallen monuments marking the turmoil of the country that stretches from sea to shining sea. But for me, at least, the show’s greater power is in its visceral effect. If you touch the obelisks, you can feel their vibrations. I laid down on one (with permission) and closed my eyes, and for a moment I could picture the crumbling of empires, replaced by the replenishment of the earth.

Tribeca

Leroy Johnson

Through Feb. 8. Margot Samel, 295 Church Street, Manhattan; 212-597-2747, margotsamel.com.

Leroy Johnson (1937-2022) lived and worked in Philadelphia his whole life. While employed as a social worker, educator and at other jobs, Johnson, who was largely self-taught, made paintings, sculptures, collages and photographs. He exhibited his art, and learned from and mentored other artists. And though he called himself an outsider, in his hometown he was also an insider — or, as one curator said, “a constant heartbeat” within the local scene.

The heartbeat of Black, urban Philadelphia was the subject of much of Johnson’s work, including the 16 sculptures gathered here for his first exhibition in New York. They are miniature houses of a kind — not one measures more than two feet in any direction — but calling them that feels too tidy. They are patchwork structures made from wood, ceramic, cardboard, plastic and more — maquettes for buildings that seem designed less to house life than to manifest it.

The sculptures are intricate and surprising: Images lurk inside hard-to-see internal rooms; pink feathers and photographic pigeons adorn a roof (“Crosswalk,” circa 2000-5); an entire back wall is a ceramic cast of a face (“Heart of Darkness,” circa 1995-2000). Textual and visual references to Black society abound, including historical figures, everyday people, weathered facades and funerals.

Johnson collected material from the streets of Philadelphia and used it to render the emotional reality of those streets. His works are dynamic and complex puzzles; the pieces seem like they shouldn’t fit together, but improbably and intuitively, they do.

Lower East Side

Jorge Camacho

Through Feb. 15. François Ghebaly, 391 Grand Street, Manhattan; 646-559-9400, ghebaly.com.

The Cuban artist and poet Jorge Camacho (1934-2011) had professional success during his lifetime, exhibiting in galleries, at the 1967 Salón de Mayo in Havana and at the 1986 Venice Biennale. However, his work hasn’t been seen much in the United States. This exhibition, “Five Paintings at Dusk,” offers a fascinating introduction.

Camacho was a late Surrealist who first encountered the movement as a teenager in postwar Cuba. He was studying law but gave it up to become a painter. In 1959, he got a scholarship from his country’s new revolutionary government to go to Paris, where he met André Breton, Surrealism’s ringleader. Breton took an interest in Camacho, who ended up staying in Paris until he died.

Camacho’s art has some of the hallmarks of traditional Surrealism, namely biomorphic forms filling nebulous landscapes. But his compositions feel more classical, centered on vertical and horizontal axes that are marked by pillars and poles — albeit shot through with bones and body parts.

Suggestions of violence abound, not least in the spikes and fire, which are likely references to political repression in Cuba. The biggest work, “The Scissors” (1973), looks like it could be an abstracted medieval torture tableau; the others evoke occult rituals and societies.

Perhaps what’s most striking is Camacho’s palette. As the “dusk” in the show’s title suggests, the works, all made between 1969 and 1974, are suffused with glowing and fleshy pinks, muted and earthy greens: a soft counterpoint to the brutal imagery. The paintings are visions of a world in twilight, both literally and as a more existential knell.

Last Chance

Upper East Side

Jack Goldstein

Through Jan. 18. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan; 212-328-7885, galeriebuchholz.de.

Jack Goldstein (1945-2003) was one of the leading lights of the so-called Pictures Generation, the first group of North American artists to grow up with television, and whose work was informed by the impact of mass media and consumerism. In the 1980s, he made large paintings that featured cosmic and military spectacles, which in turn resembled special-effects light shows. Before that, though, he tried his hand at conceptual art.

Just inside the entrance at Buchholz is “Untitled” (1970), a large stack of wood blocks that nods to rigorous, geometrically abstract minimalism. Photos of Goldstein taken by James Welling in New York and Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978 show him looking like a low-key glam rock star — not incidental in the years when Cindy Sherman and David Lamelas turned performing for the camera into a fine-art form.

The rear gallery highlights artworks made with typewriters and early computers, like concrete poetry, as well as Goldstein’s complete audio works on vinyl, which feature sounds like “The Burning Forest” (1976), “The Tornado” (1976) or “Two Wrestling Cats” (1976).

These pieces also allude to Hollywood and its arsenal of technical and psychological effects. Goldstein would use Hollywood effects in his short films, like “Shane” (1975) and “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” (1975), which showed a famous dog and lion, respectively, barking and growling on repeat. The films, which presaged newer media like GIFs and memes, are not here. That’s probably a good thing, though, since this show offers a quieter side of Goldstein and many works most viewers will not have seen before. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

More to See

Upper East Side

Forrest Bess

Through Jan. 31. Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 19 East 66th Street, Manhattan; 212-246-5360, franklinparrasch.com.

Two abstract painters flirted extra closely with Carl Jung’s belief that we can gain access to an ancient unconscious through legible symbols. One, Jackson Pollock, made 83 drawings as part of treatment with his analyst, who later sold them, leading to their exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Forrest Bess was the other Jungian, and now Franklin Parrasch Gallery sidesteps a similar ethical betrayal by exhibiting 11 of his paintings from the estate of the psychiatrist Dr. Jack Weinberg, who treated Bess but purchased these paintings outside the medical context.

A designer of camouflage during World War II whose waking visions and obsession with ancient hermaphroditism overtook his life and practice, Bess (1911-77) lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where he caught shrimp for a living. Eventually he also caught the interest of Pollock’s dealer in New York, Betty Parsons.

The pictures on view in this show, “Jack Was My First Collector,” all from 1946, catch him at a transitional moment in the years before showing with Parsons. Several postcard-size, densely textured harbor scenes and still lifes recall a hastier Arthur Dove. Bess hadn’t yet found the semaphoric, sexually charged symbolism for which he is better known, two examples of which are in the Museum of Modern Art’s group show “Vital Signs.”

Two larger abstractions are primed with coats of black. Bess cut shapes into the wet surface, as a cave man might jab clay. One canvas holds a central cluster of round forms, surrounded by a grid of falling C’s, a zigzag bolt, a stick stacked with planks. These ghost lines come to life with flecks of color: blue in the rain, reddened lightning, the signpost in indigo.

Consciousness? Weather? It’s hard to know, but Bess seems to be excavating some message from the sleep of history. More studious than Cy Twombly’s work and more earnest than Basquiat’s, Bess’s experiments tease us with a suspicion that formal abstraction tried to shoo off: Markings want to explain their makers. WALKER MIMMS

Nolita

Carroll Cloar

Through Feb. 15. Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-206-9723, edlingallery.com.

A warm New York welcome to Carroll Cloar (1913-93), the Arkansas lithographer who, discovering color in 1940s Mexico, settled in Memphis to conjure the American South in muted and mystical pointillist paintings.

Long a trophy of regional collections, and an off-view secret in those of New York, where he spent some of the 1930s, Cloar has had no solo show here for 35 years. These six paintings on Masonite and eight pencil studies flaunt his poetic devotion to landscape. In “Sunday Morning” (1969), dry-scraped grasses and dotted weeds line the dirt road like aerosol droplets. An angular red okra plant and a wall of stippled foliage dominate “Charlie Mae Looking for Little Eddie” (1969).

The environment is as finely detailed as the protagonists who seem to accept their roles within it: the parishioners filing down that weedy lane toward church, the girl coaxing a stray goat from those bushes.

The result is a secondhand, jury-rigged sort of realism, not the social kind we more readily attribute to Eldzier Cortor, or other contemporaries who dealt plainly with the cotton fields and Black provinciality of Southern oral history. Cloar worked from photo albums and childhood memory, and he painted what it feels like to recall being told a story.

One well-chosen pair of works indicates Cloar was doing his memory thing in conscious opposition to Surrealism. His autobiographical “Mama, Papa is Blessed” (1960) satirizes the French painter Yves Tanguy’s “Mama, Papa is Wounded,” while Cloar’s “Pale Hose, Pale Writer” (1960), named to play on Katherine Anne Porter’s novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” expresses a painterly absurdism: The White Sox batter at the center of Cloar’s panel, his cheek bulging with chew, turns it into a trolling pun about America’s favorite sport. WALKER MIMMS

Tribeca

Alex Hutton

Through Jan. 25. Shrine, 368 Broadway, Manhattan; 212-381-1395, shrine.nyc/nyc.

Alex Hutton, born in 1992, is one of a host of painters whose return to figuration feels more like re-creation than recycling. His six paintings at Shrine depict close-ups of roller coaster tracks and water park slides, but I figure he could have found the same joy in garbage dumps.

In a muddy copper-colored picture called “Bowl,” two bends in the track leap up to the top right corner of the picture, while their structural scaffolding flushes steeply back down into the center. Hutton has done the mazes of buttressing in concentric lattices, the many beams overlapping so that the decreasing intervals between his stripes convey the painting’s vertiginous appearance of depth. The brushstrokes themselves stay glassy and flat, no matter how close you squint.

Hutton paints on linen (of a finer weave than canvas) with very diluted oils and soft watercolor brushes, and this means the pigment travels in trails so wet that you can watch them deplete from start to finish. The byproduct is a built-in sense of shadow and highlight that seems, like improvised music, impossible to have planned.

Up close on “Peak,” a denim-colored wall of railings cradling a dip in the track, none of the beams join up in any actual detail. Just wet streaks in the right sequence, with cognac and violet sneaking variance into the overall realism.

Hutton is fastidious. And fast. He gives only one session to a picture. But he’s delightfully unkempt. In these acrobatic and intuitive little anarchies, Hutton comes across as a high formalist concerned as much with our pleasure as with his own rigorous technique.
WALKER MIMMS

Upper East Side

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Through Jan. 25. Craig Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, Manhattan; 212-570-1739, craigstarr.com.

Pop Art and Minimalism emerged in the 1960s with a common focus. Deadpan and literal, these movements rejected the exuberant expression and mythological references of previous generations of artists.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s photorealistic paintings of rulers, measuring tapes, gridded paper and floor tiles in “Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84” at Craig Starr are about as banal and literal as it gets. And yet, there is a subtle humor in the seriousness and virtuosic precision of how she approached these seemingly absurd tasks.

“Painted Graph Paper” (1975) is exactly that: an exact rendering of gridded paper, a favorite medium of artists working in what the art historian Benjamin Buchloh famously called the “aesthetics of administration” reflecting bureaucracy and institutions in post-World War II society. “Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor” (1975) is an acrylic-on-canvas painting that faithfully depicts industrial beige floor tiles and masking tape surrounding them. “A September Passage” (1984) seems to break from the office or factory world, featuring a clump of trees in a meadow. Even here, however, there is a postcard brightness to the scene, rather than, say, a landscape lit to induce romantic reverie.

In recent years, Mangold has applied her literalist logic to painting the same maple tree outside her studio in Orange County, N.Y., over and over again. Like the earlier works in this show, though, the canvases featuring that tree are never exactly the same. In an age of distraction and overwhelming information, her close, precise vision — and the implied humor about her approach — serve as calibrating beacons. Tapes, rulers and trees never looked so good, or meditative. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Tribeca

Pippa Garner

Through Jan. 25. Matthew Brown, 390 Broadway, Manhattan; 646-410-2595, matthewbrowngallery.com.

The term “auto body,” applied to car-repair shops and the vehicles that move people throughout the world, takes on a different meaning with Pippa Garner, a trans artist who died on Dec. 30. Garner’s many jobs included car-magazine illustrator and industrial designer, and in the Whitney Biennial last year she showed a sprawling piece about her gender transition in the midst of consumerist culture, including the idea that the body is, she once said, “just another product.”

The free-flowing nature of designing and redesigning cars and human bodies underlies this survey of works at Matthew Brown. On view is a large-scale photograph of the Blaster Bra, which Garner showed off on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1982: a brassiere with round speakers connected to a sound system in order to create a kind of personalized “human Muzak.” Other gadgets drawn expertly in pencil on paper include a subcutaneous airbag, a “Brat Rod” for spoiled children and a device for texting on the phone with your tongue while driving.

Southern California, where Garner lived for decades, is home to a long tradition of custom cars. And for her, there didn’t seem to be a huge distance between these sorts of modifications and other ones. “I was working with consumer appliances and products, and I thought, Hey, I’m a product too,” she once said. That view makes Garner’s work particularly prescient in a moment when the terms “auto” and “body” are in flux. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

See the December gallery shows here.