This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Nick Angelo’s obsessive diagrams, Keiko Narahashi’s hopeful ceramics and Sheida Soleimani’s ciphers and symbols.
Tribeca: Nick Angelo
Through Aug. 15. Sebastian Gladstone, 36 White Street; 917-605-3581, sebastiangladstone.com.
Some of the most notable and idiosyncratic artists of the 20th century, like Hilma af Klint, Mark Lombardi and Matt Mullican, have used diagrams to structure their images and ideas.
Nick Angelo, an artist who lives in Los Angeles, adopts this technique in his show at Sebastian Gladstone, using photographic images and lines and arrows printed on vinyl to map what he describes in a pamphlet accompanying the show as “the bastardization of rave and festival culture.”
Images of famous clubs like Berghain in Berlin and Detroit techno nightspots, and events like Woodstock, appear alongside mega-monstrosities like Coachella, modern-day Burning Man and the Electric Daisy Carnival, the largest electronic music festival in North America. Hippies and early ravers are eclipsed by revelers who, in one photo, are stamped with the corporate “Getty Images” logo.
While music and dance festivals are the subject here, the implications are broader. Many clubs and festivals that originated as utopian, countercultural affairs, welcoming L.G.B.T. die-hard music fans alongside other marginalized groups, have become corporatized spectacles, fueled by social media and hyper-capitalism.
This sort of diagraming shows up elsewhere in the art world, too. In an essay titled “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” from 2024, the artist Andrea Fraser used the format to argue that the art world is really a number of “autonomous subfields,” ranging from the art market to the academy.
But where Fraser’s work is almost always about institutions, Angelo tracks the history of people trying desperately to create culture outside institutions. The rage and tragedy driving his diagram project is how they became ensnared anyway. MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Brooklyn: Keiko Narahashi
Through Aug. 10. Tappeto Volante, 126 13th Street, Brooklyn; 347-599-1466, tappetovolantegallery.com.
Rainbows and clay don’t have much in common: Rainbows are ephemeral phenomena whereas ceramics, given their durability, constitute some of the oldest human artifacts. This is part of what makes Keiko Narahashi’s exhibition at Tappeto Volante, which includes an installation of ceramic rainbows, simultaneously playful and poignant.
The simply wrought rainbows — arcs of clay installed on humble bases — are mounted on a platform with a light grid drawn on it. One stark yellow work is titled “Rainbow on Mars” (2025) while the “Rainbow Shadow” series (all 2025) raise interesting questions of what we’re seeing when we witness these types of fleeting, there-and-not-there occurrences.
In a separate gallery are earlier abstract ceramic works by Narahashi that are like intermediaries between sculpture and painting. Those “Color Planes” are thin slabs of clay held upright by their own support fired onto them. Simple and minimal, these are beautiful and calming works.
But the injection of a rainbow into her practice turns Narahashi’s work in a new and more interesting direction. Long a subject in children’s art — or relegated to the land of kitsch — the rainbow is also used to celebrate a range of gender identity and serves here as a quiet bolt of hope in dark times. Mildly goofy and sweet, it’s also subversive and staunchly spiritual. MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Lower East Side: Sheida Soleimani
Through Sept. 28. ICP (International Center of Photography), 84 Ludlow Street; 212-857-0000, icp.org.
The photographer Sheida Soleimani was born in Indianapolis, but her current exhibition of staged photographs at ICP, or International Center of Photography, illustrates in vivid fashion her parents’ dramatic emigration from Iran and the long shadow that has cast over all of their lives.
Soleimani’s father was in trouble for resisting the rule of the shah and the ayatollah. Her parents made their way separately out of the country in the 1980s, each carrying a single suitcase with significant items, including seeds for fruit trees they later planted in Ohio.
Ciphers and symbols linked to this history and to those lives in Iran fill Soleimani’s carefully composed photographs that suggest collages — or even Persian carpets. “Safehouse” (2024) has chess pieces and “What a Revolutionary Must Know” (2022) features tulips, a symbol of martyrdom, but also the emblem of the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Birds and snake skins represent something more current in Soleimani’s life and her parents’: She runs a Rhode Island bird clinic called “Congress of the Birds” (she is an art professor at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator), and her mother collects molted snake skins. Both, of course, are powerful metaphors for migration and the shedding of earlier lives.
Soleimani fits nicely in a generation that treats photography like painting. Light, shadows, color and composition are key elements, but you also sense the long arm of history painting in which artistic images can become repositories for cultural narrative. Soleimani’s works artfully spin a traumatic history and personal losses into a kind of visual poetry that’s thoughtful, mysterious and captivating. And they are odes to her parents as well, in a body of work that celebrates rather than criticizes the family that shaped her. MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Tribeca: Nancy Dwyer
Through Aug. 1. Ortuzar, 5 White Street; 212-257-0033, ortuzar.com.
Most people don’t think too long about what they say or the words they use to say it. Nancy Dwyer, by contrast, thinks about words until they inflate to the size of furniture.
Take, for example, the base of an imperious mahogany desk of the C-suite variety, which spells out “ENVY,” as if shouting the quiet part out loud. It’s from 1988, the go-go ’80s of Reaganomic excess, deregulation and other assorted sins for which we continue to pay. By contrast, “RELAX” (2025) dissects that word into cushions squeezed into a steel cage, a piece of hostile architecture that takes comfort hostage. It looks the way being told to relax feels: useless, infuriating.
Those pieces, along with a selection of paintings and sculptures, form this four-decade survey of Dwyer’s deadpan conceptual art, which yanks language from the cognitive realm into the physical one. Dwyer is part of the cohort, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, who met as students at Buffalo State University and emerged in the late 1970s as the Pictures Generation, artists who found something sour in the deluge of mass media and hijacked its vocabulary to prove it.
Dwyer’s art, which seizes upon advertising’s playbook specifically, displays both a healthy skepticism of and deep affection for linguistic elasticity. Unlike most of her peers, Dwyer worked unusually closely to the media she critiques, with a brief stint as a commercial sign painter, and she has the mistrust of a whistle-blower.
These are serious jokes. By transmuting words into droll one-liners, she engages with the structure of meaning itself. She gives words literal weight, lets you walk around them, and proves they’re no more stable for it.
Among a selection of painted panel works sprouting from the kind of articulating arms used to mount television sets, a profanely titled work from 2024 is the most elegantly rhetorical. Its query is at once incredulous and expansive, a response commensurate to the multivalent horrors coming at us in high definition. It’s a channel that never changes. MAX LAKIN
Chinatown: Small Format Painting
Through Aug. 1. 56 Henry, 105 Henry Street; 646-858-0800, 56henry.nyc.
In the New York art world, the summer group show is a low-lift proposition — a gallery’s chance to kick the tires on its roster, a show perhaps tethered to a loose, inoffensive theme (flowers, swimming), if it bothers with one at all. It’s an easy pleasure, the equivalent of the movie flipped on during the last week of school: an acknowledgment that everyone’s attention has checked out until September.
This show isn’t much more taxing. Curated by the artist Josh Smith and Leo Fitzpatrick, whose too-short-lived gallery Public Access last occupied a storefront down the block, it features 35 paintings by a rich mélange of art stars, skaters, graffitists and other assorted members of the slippery downtown scene, who were supplied with an 8-inch-by-10-inch canvas. No prompt, no conceptual thesis, just the freedom of not being told what to do, which, really, is the whole point of summer.
Most of the work is slight — dashed-off sketches or a familiar motif from an artist’s bag that can feel like a study for a larger painting that may never exist. There’s a smeary, downbeat comic strip populated by Nicole Eisenman’s angsty stick figures. Joe Bradley shows a fuzzy amoeba, while Alberto Casais renders an elegant fender bender. The skater Mark Gonzales conjures impressive pathos with a few wobbly lines depicting a failed trick. KT Hickman’s simple yet enticing piece suggests a little revenge.
The real thrill comes from collision — blue-chip artists of international renown rubbing with those whose celebrity tops out at the neighborhood level, all given equal space. It’s likely, for instance, that this is the one chance to see Jeanette Mundt, whose work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, share real estate with the tagger Neckface, whose gurning cartoon demons haunt the metal pull-down gates that protect stores throughout New York. It’s a small miracle of temporary democracy, which lately can feel hard to come by. MAX LAKIN
East Village: Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King
Through Sept. 9. Swiss Institute, 38 St. Marks Place; 212-925-2035, swissinstitute.net.
This show greets you with a wave: a wooden hand in a display case. The sculpture, “Bartlett’s Left Hand” by Elizabeth King, is a coy introduction to an exhibition of the artist’s intricate human maquettes, and a skeletal preview of the other work in the show, by Louise Bonnet, whose focus here is paintings of fleshy and even corpulent nudes.
It’s a dynamic pairing. King’s precisely carved and hinged wood and brass anatomical models strike vaudeville poses in their vitrines, offering a mechanical contrast to Bonnet’s nearly abstract, curvaceous figures rendered in warbling impasto. The models are pinned in place, while the nudes seem to tumble.
At its most obvious, the show is a study of the human figure, but it’s also a study of how armatures, frames and props can lend bodies emotive power. The maquettes owe their expressive postures to the care with which every joint, has been organically calibrated. King has given these slender prosthetic digits intense study, as seen in a stop-motion animation in which a puppet seems awed by its ability to wiggle and clasp. In the same room, two wooden arms and hands in a spotlighted glass case cast swanlike shadows on the wall.
The fact that these figures are inanimate doesn’t limit their range. Instead it gives them some frisson, as their apparent litheness clashes with their inertia. In one airy example, “Untitled Articulated Figure,” 1974-78, a doll’s head has hair, eyes, painted lips, and the face of middle age; but the body is a realistic human skeleton. It’s macabre, and also funny, playing with our expectations of what’s under a puppet’s clothes.
The longer you linger with the work, the more you notice how the show revels in visual echoes and illusions. Each glass case reflects and filters the room, from a nearby painting, “Pants,” 2025, of a bulbous backside and vase to the people passing outside the building’s windows.
The upstairs gallery strips back the skin of King’s process, displaying maquette parts, such as an untitled collection of glass eyes on rods. “How to make a thumb,” 2008, is a sequence of wooden plugs, carved to increasing degrees, illustrating the evolution of raw wood into lifelike artifice. Here, with subtler competition, Bonnet’s paintings dominate. A pattern emerges: Each painting has a contorted white nude in counterpoint with a household object, the face out of frame, almost always truncated by a dark shape.
In “Bra 1” (2025), the figure clasps its breasts against its chest with one forearm, while a studded milk-glass vase of daisies echoes their anatomy. “Shoe” (2025) features a similarly creamy female figure, doubled over in a collision of fingers and toes, with a trapezoidal black screen across her face. In the background, two lemons on a branch evoke breasts, but also eyes gawking at this impossibly folded model. Bonnet’s paintings are experiments in redaction and compression. TRAVIS DIEHL
Queens: Julien Ceccaldi
Through Aug. 25. MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens; 718-784-2086, momaps1.org.
Julien Ceccaldi is a latter-day pop artist. Just as Roy Lichtenstein turned midcentury pulp fiction into polka dot canvases, Ceccaldi metabolizes the erotic, often queer tension of manga and digital culture. Lichtenstein’s blond bombshell stubbornly drowns in the sea; Ceccaldi’s balding horndog goes cruising in the bathhouse.
Ceccaldi’s show at MoMA PS1 gathers paintings and animations made between 2013 and 2025. His cast of recurring characters — including a scrawny aesthete, a hunk with a buzz cut, and a cartoon thumb with a human face — move through the work as if posing in the frames of a graphic novel.
The newest piece on view, a hotly hued mural titled “A Collection of Little Memories,” has a handful of figures (painted roughly life-size) climbing up a metal staircase to visit the gargantuan head and fingers of a doe-eyed reclining giant, as if paying tribute. One slender dandy kisses the giant’s fingernail. Factories spew in the red distance.
Ceccaldi has honed an almost courtly art of kinetic lust. A single stylized composition can convey a perverse mix of classicism and pop — what used to be called high and low culture. “Pompeii Bathhouse,” from 2017, depicts a dripping interior of tiled columns and pools, populated by balding ectomorphs and orange beefcakes. It’s a modern take on voyeuristic 19th-century paintings of bathhouses.
In a screening room showing Ceccaldi’s animated shorts, the seat of one bench bears “Sext Messages,” a green-skinned male nude stretched out in a coffin, a cloth wavering over his crotch in a way vaguely reminiscent of depictions of Christ. Except, this figure is basically alive, enraptured by their cellphone.
These paintings fit the walls and furniture as if filling panels in a graphic novel. In “Curious Girlfriends,” 2025, two women in tight skirts, painted on plexiglass, cattily lean around a wall to observe the mural “Little Memories.”
The show also includes sketches and studies, some with mottled lines and whited-out corrections that disappear in the printing process. Just as some of Ceccaldi’s characters yearn for connection, the work feels desperate for your affection. The show is confident, like a come-on but also awkward, raw, terrified of rejection. But don’t be shy. The encounter is mutually satisfying. TRAVIS DIEHL
