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Solo Shows

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s lost country

Contributed by Theodora Bocanegra Lang / Nearly half the paintings included in Kaiadilt artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s first solo show in New York, at Karma in Chelsea, are titled My Country. A few more are called My Father’s Country, and a few others Dibirdibi Country. Though her works are firmly abstract, it is impossible not to think of landscapes and location when viewing them. The artist, whose name is sometimes shortened to Sally Gabori, was born in 1924 on Bentinck Island in Australia, the ancestral homeland of the Kaiadilt people. In 1948, missionaries forcibly displaced Gabori and her people to nearby Mornington Island, where she lived for the rest of her life. She began painting in 2005, when she was about 81, and died a decade later in 2015. While she had not lived on Bentinck Island for nearly 60 years, her work reflects sharp yearning for, and irreparable separation from, her home.

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Solo Shows

Medrie MacPhee: Upcycling

Contributed by Adam Simon / The five abstract paintings in Medrie MacPhee’s “The Repair,” at Tibor de Nagy, have just enough indications of figure/ground and observed reality to evoke landscape, interior space, aerial view, blueprint. What also connects these paintings to the physical world, as we perceive it, are minor shifts of line, contour, or color that activate the surface and keep the paintings from being flat. While the paintings are large, all but one measuring 64 x 84 inches, somehow the small gallery doesn’t feel crowded.

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Museum Exhibitions

The mysterious Gertrude Abercrombie

Contributed by David Carrier / Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) was a Chicago-based painter. Basically self-taught, she was inspired by Rene Magritte or perhaps Paul Delvaux to create small, highly distinctive Surrealist paintings. She was a great friend of jazz musicians and much written about by Chicago writers. She had real success in the local art market. Though gone for almost 50 years now, she has recently gained wider attention. In a deft exercise in revisionist taste, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art has mounted a substantial and intriguing display of her work. 

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Artist's Notebook

Inside Peter Dudek’s studio

We’re up in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The floor of Dudek’s studio is covered wall-to-wall with objects. One can ascertain individual sculptures, or perhaps parts of sculptures that might become sculptures one day. I ask if this is how it always is.

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Solo Shows

Merlin James and the thinking of painting

Contributed by Sharon Horvath / Prominent critics have written extensively about the paintings of Merlin James, and James himself is an erudite art writer. Still, I am compelled to explore how it is that his painterly magic works on my mind. As I walked through the two rooms of his current show “Hobby Horse” at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, the paintings struck a chord, bringing up half remembered lines of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, plucked out of context.

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Biennial Museum Exhibitions

Hope and heaviness at the Havana Biennial

Contributed by Katarina Wong / The recent 15th Havana Biennial, organized around the aspirational theme of “Shared Horizons,” unfolded across the city in November 2024 and ran through February 2025. It involved about 400 artists, curators, and art historians among 80 listed venues throughout Havana, several discussed here. Like its predecessors, the exhibition showcased art from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East – art of the global majority often not seen in American or European galleries or museums. 

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Solo Shows

Nancy Evans: Cosmic absorption

Contributed by Mary Jones / One of many pleasures in “Mashups,” Nancy Evans’s show at Sargent’s Daughters, is the sensation of immersive color. Eight abstract paintings, all 26 x 20 inches, reverberate softly with veils of translucent gradients and undulating organic form. The work is grounded in American Modernism, and a baseline of particular influences come to mind: Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Burchfield, and, as a watercolorist, Helen Frankenthaler. But Evans finds her own domain through a mediated technical process that generates luminous depth.

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Solo Shows

Gerri Rachins’ raptorial abstractions

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / While some art pulls you in gently, Gerri Rachins’ paintings, now on display at The Painting Center, grab you like a raptor. Though unequivocally abstract, their affect, as it were, is prehensile. They seem to guard the walls, flexing with taut line and pulsing color, at once opaque and fluid.

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Solo Shows

Ross Knight: Sculpting in the material world

Contributed by Millree Hughes / With precisely targeted color, texture, and feel, Ross Knight’s sculptures in his solo show “Continuous Squeeze” at Off Paradise get at what physical artifacts mean in terms of our fears, fantasies, and daily struggles. Color is critical in Knight’s work. He keeps the palette small and specific, the colors he chooses leaning towards youthful nostalgia: the baby-blue of 1960s cars in Coupled Prop, a buoy yellow with custard drips in another Coupled Prop, the creamy hue of a rawhide dog chew-toy in Device. The band in Adjusted resembles an old, spent balloon, once yellow-orange but turned raw sienna with time. Does anyone ever get over a popped balloon? It’s a toddler’s tragedy. The fleshy knots, like umbilical cord buttons, are rendered useless.

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Art Fairs

Outsider Art Fair 2025: Between visionary and marketable

Contributed by Jac Lahav / What does “outsider art” mean when the work so labeled is framed in a glossy finish and sold for six figures? When Sanford L. Smith founded the Outsider Art Fair in 1993, he meant it to promote true outsider artists and showcase their work. In 2013, New York art dealer Andrew Edlin bought the fair and it has since become one of New York’s most beloved art events. But it now presents something of a paradox: a space dedicated to self-taught, visionary, and unconventional artists, yet increasingly colonized by prominent galleries and high-end collectors.

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Solo Shows

Barbara Friedman’s exquisite grotesquery

Contributed by Adam Simon / The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds.

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Solo Shows

Daisy Sheff: The anatomy of fairy tales

Contributed by Jason Andrew / Daisy Sheff’s exhibition “Begun in the Dazzling Sunshine” at Parker Gallery’s new space on Melrose in Los Angeles, intertwines reality with the fantastical. Her paintings employ leaping animals, fussy architectures, and bright flora to explain narratives that tease the peculiar logic of fairy tales. Their uneven surfaces, cleverly devised characters, and woolly layered scenes are busy and unwieldy. To interpret them is like piecing together the plot of a really great dream.

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, March 2025

After several years during which galleries have focused relentlessly on narrative and figurative work, I feel a vibe shift in the air. Is it wishful thinking or is abstract painting roaring back? I recommend checking out RJ Messineo’s show at CANADA, James Miller at Nichelle Beauchene, Nicolas Bermeo at King’s Leap, and Franklin Evans, who has moved from site-specific wall installations onto canvas in his show at Miles McEnery. I’m looking forward to Moira Dryer’s solo show at Magenta Plains, too. Known for a witty strain of post-minimal abstraction in the 1990s, she was a hero to painters of my generation who were then living in the long shadow of video, photography, and installation work.

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Gallery Guides Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: March 2025

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The Hudson Valley is finally thawing out after a cold, icy February. At the same time, a number of art spaces are opening again after a winter break. There are a lot of openings this month, starting March 1 with Michael Fortenberry at Headstone and a group show of monoprints at The Lockwood Gallery on March 2, both in Kingston. On March 8, Kino Saito in Verplanck…

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