Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
Taking over the museum's transformed school building starting April 16, the cross-borough survey will celebrate MoMA PS1's 50th anniversary with a bevy of site-specific installations, new commissions, and rarely seen work by 53 artists and collectives living and working across New York City. A complete list of participants is included at the end of this article. This year, Greater New York will coincide with the Whitney Biennial for the first time in the show's history.
First in a Chinatown mall beneath the Manhattan Bridge and then in a nondescript third-floor room nearby, Francis Irv exhibited a heady, multigenerational mix of artists from the United States and Europe, variously established, obscure, and on the rise. Megan Marrin showed alluring paintings of 1960s celebrities (replicas of photo souvenirs shaped like clothes hangars) last fall. Win McCarthy placed bricks, plastic takeout containers, and bedding on the floor in a charged, melancholic 2024 exhibition.