Spring has sprung and it’s leaking all over the place. A true spring gets plenty of leaves and flowers only after torrential rains. But a little torrent never stopped the artfully intrepid. Here are a few recommended exhibitions for them. Lower East BITFORMS 131 Allen Street: Auriea Harvey | April 4 to May 25 Noho MARINARO, 678 Broadway, 3rd Floor: Cait Porter | ends May 4 Tribeca 47 CANAL Michael Marman | ends April 27 Tribeca KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND 87 Franklin Street: Joy Curtis + Nancy Brooks Brody | April 5 to May 11 **Highly Recommended** Upper East SPANIERMAN MODERN 958 Madison Avenue ..read more

NOLAN PREECE The photographs of Nolan Preece are unlike any others that normally come under the name. They possess a strong quality of material accomplishment, show evidence of specific formal mastery and technical virtuosity in a manner both consistent and intense. They are for the most part abstract, although Preece can achieve narratives in his process, and has been able to achieve a mutability that anchors itself in the genre of landscape imagery. Overall, his process diverges from the mainstream methods and critical approaches to creativity that have come to be associated with photograp ..read more

FIRST CONTACT, 2023 [#374]. Acrylic latex and spray paint on wood panel 32 x 48 inches The photographer can discover a wealth of detail through his pictures, but only what’s on the surface. The painter can look deeper into reality because appearances are less constrictive to someone who creates the world with every stroke of their brush. Such has become the purview, in very certain terms, of Steve Simpson, a painter whose working life as a photographer left huge gaps in the world to fill. Simpson expresses the hidden structures that underlay reality. His new solo exhibition “Maximum Microbia ..read more

Gregory de la Haba, In The Know Mural, 2023 Appropriation is an instinct rather than a discipline, though it can be developed like one. It involves a consideration of objects, images, and experiences in a range of circumstances that is intellectual and sensible yet issues from a desire to manifest new ways of thinking about art. The term itself didn’t come into popular use until the 1980’s, when artists like Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, and many others were manifesting separate models of the movement called Neo-Geo. Yet the standard by which these artists gleaned their attitudes had been surf ..read more

It wasn’t until I started this Substack in January 2021 that I realized what is meant by the question “Who is your ideal reader?” I want to take this opportunity to thank all my previous and new subscribers. You are my audience. I am very happy to keep sending you posts on sources of inspiration and the life of the mind. I am beginning three new sections. ART MOMENTS takes me back through a lifetime of looking at art, from galleries, to art fairs, to studios. The point of them is that the experience of art, from a critical standpoint, is inherently personal, and not just a function of the bus ..read more

What I like about art fairs when they are good, is how they can act as an incubator for myriad new encounters with artists and galleries never before glimpsed. I had this experience on several occasions that day, and seeing Nicole Wilson’s work at Photofairs with Praise Shadows Gallery from Brookline, Massachusetts left a lasting impression. The work on view was called ÖTZI, and it comprised a series of 15 framed photographs upon chest high metal shelves, each showing an unremarkable area of the artist’s own body upon which were displayed little red marks that resembled runes. These marks w ..read more

When I first read My Father’s Work Shed: Paintings and Poems, I was subject to a wild ride of inspiration, and the result was equal parts euphoria and confusion. I felt compelled by the tension between two very different forms of expression, and my own working habits in responding to each of them, which have occupied different parts of my mind, and my world view, for some years preceding. The impetus to express one’s self in either images or words is not merely a matter of choice, but a mark of temperament. Some people do both well, and this is to O’Reilly’s credit. My Homesickness Forgets T ..read more

Twenty one years ago was about the time, more or less, when West Chelsea began as a newly minted arts district, following on the heels of the dissipation of the long stalwart Soho scene in New York. At the beginning of the Fall season in 2002, accompanied by a throng of fellow gallery goers, was when I first saw the sculptures of Scott Richter. This exhibition was unique. Richter presented a half dozen of his tabletop palette paintings, freestanding works that were essentially meant to take the artist’s palette and expand it into a full-fledged artwork, piling layer upon layer of heavy p ..read more

How we perceive the world means everything to us. Perception drives belief. Belief gives us our habits, and our rituals. Creativity is nothing without perception, for even in its ability to invent new perceptual procedures, leading to critical métiers, it relies upon the recognition of the real. Certain artists have made transforming reality their specific mark. In her exploration of 3-D Experimental Virtual Reality, Rebecca Hackemann presents a rigorous critique of the history preceding, and issues surrounding its relationship to contemporary art practices. Hackemann brings together an arr ..read more

“Erica 2” (2023). Video still from “Earthlings” Jeanne Wilkinson comes to film from abstract painting, as inspired by Abstract Expressionist and Color Field movements, that first energized her identity as an artist. Yet she pivoted away from mere painting, and added its imagery to a mixture that utilized film, photography, and digital media. There’s a democratic quality to the images culled from her last two film series: Earthlings and Elsa in the Cloud Tunnel, that derive from the gestural incidents suggested by random collusion between a set-piece orchestrated by Wilkinson herself—crossing ..read more