Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty. With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart[.....]

In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is[.....]

Painting has been around for a while, haven’t you heard? So it’s no surprise when a new show can set off a flurry of historical associations and still appear to be of its own time. Jon Pestoni’s exhibition of recent abstract paintings at Shane Campbell gallery does just that. Pestoni’s paintings bare a superficial resemblance to work by Gehard Richter. The vertical and horizontal movement[.....]

The leering white faces watch from the walls. They follow you from room to room, vacant eyes staring out from behind their grotesque masks. Though the lower part of their jaws are missing—unhinged—their slit-like eyes and upturned mouths indicate that the figures are consumed with mirth. We see the same white mask over and over, but from various angles: on its side, in three-quarter profile,[.....]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[.....]

It may take a second to see the sex. Ty Ennis’s show at Nationale this month consists of petite paintings featuring prominent textile patterns, done with the gentlest touch. Look a second longer and you notice the erotic: porn dvds, romance novels, a vaginal oyster. The paintings are mostly still lifes, and even though there’s sex, they’re not sexy (and not meant to be). They’re[.....]

Madame Oktopus is both the name of Maryna Baranovska’s solo exhibition at AJL Art in Berlin and her folk-alter-ego.  The title painting looms large over the exhibition space on Potsdamerstr. and alludes to the entire show’s genesis; a collection of paintings birthed with thick impasto confidence.  Like a lot of Baranovska’s works, Madame Oktopus, occupies the strange and cool split between narrative construction and painterly[.....]