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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Whitney Museum
“Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other
Fables”
This retrospective of the Iowan painter fasci-
nates as a plunge into certain deliriums of the
United States in the nineteen-thirties, notably
a culture war between cosmopolitan and nativ-
ist sensibilities. But any notion that Wood—
who died in 1942, of pancreatic cancer, on the
day before his ifty-irst birthday—is an un-
derrated artist izzles. “American Gothic” is,
by a very wide margin, his most efective pic-
ture (although “Dinner for Threshers,” from
1934, a long, low, cutaway view of a farmhouse
at harvesttime, might be his best). Wood was
a strange man who made occasionally impres-
sive, predominantly weird, sometimes god-
awful art in thrall to a programmatic sense of
mission: to exalt rural America in a manner
adapted from Flemish Old Masters. “Amer-
ican Gothic”—starchy couple, triune pitch-
fork, churchy house, bubbly trees—succeeded,
deserving the inevitable term “iconic” for its
punch and tickling ambiguity. The work made
Wood, at the onset of his maturity as an artist,
a national celebrity, and the attendant pres-
sures pretty well wrecked him. Why Wood
now? A political factor might seem to be in
play. Although the show was planned before
the election of Donald Trump, it feels right on
time, given the worries of urban liberals about
the insurgent conservative truculence in what
is often dismissed—with a disdain duly noted
by citizens of the respective states—as lyover
country. Through June 10.
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GALLERIES—UPTOWN
Math Bass
The Los Angeles painter’s rebuslike canvases
use familiar forms—a pylon, a zigzag, a thought
bubble, an alligator’s gaping jaws—to construct
crisp abstractions. Precisely executed in vel-
vety gouache, the paintings have a lat, graph-
ical quality that recalls signage (and also the
American modernist Stuart Davis), but slight
shifts in scale and arrangement alter the picto-
rial space just enough to imply a story. The nar-
rative mood is heightened by sound: speakers
are positioned throughout the show, emitting
a lyrical litany of the names Bass has assigned
to her characters. Through July 27. (Boone, 745
Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 212-752-2929.)
Paul Bonet
The most surprising show in town gathers
whisperingly subtle abstract design-drawings
by a little-known French bookbinder, who died
in 1971 and specialized in small editions of
books by authors from Balzac and Baudelaire
to Valéry and Malraux. Bonet subordinated
text to complex geometric or biomorphic linear
networks that feel less limned than breathed
onto paper. His style can suggest unravelled
Art Nouveau verging on understated Art Deco.
But, really, it’s sui generis, expressing a sen-
sitive, searching, and irst-rate visual intelli-
gence, quietly audacious and hauntingly ine.
Through June 16. (Galerie Buchholz, 17 E. 82nd
St. 646-964-4276.)
Dan Colen
The latest expedients of an artist who is always
keen to impress include one realistic sculpture,
of a lissome blonde playing with a stufed rab-
bit. But the main event is three series of big
paintings: silk-screened images of deluxe gar-
ments or fabrics, seen piled or draped; branches
of dead trees painted in purple against discon-
solately blue skies, collectively titled “Mother,”
for some creepy reason; and oils of dense purple
clouds with light rays behind them, which share
the title “Purgatory,” while suggesting grape
pudding. Colen’s ambition—vaguely naughty,
aggressively grand—churns on. Through June- (Lévy Gorvy, 909 Madison Ave., at 73rd St.
212-772-2004.)
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GALLERIES—CHELSEA
Doug Aitken
Forty-ive years ago, the American engineer
Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk in midtown
Manhattan and made the irst public call on a
cell phone. Today, according to a U.N. study,
more people own mobile phones than they do
toilets. For his mesmerizing video installation
“New Era,” Aitken ilmed Cooper, who is now
eighty-nine, reminiscing about his invention in
a piece that inds the sweet spot between rumi-
nation and spectacle. Aitken has constructed a
mirrored, hexagonal room housing three pro-
jections from the same eleven-minute loop.
The moving images aren’t in synch, and the
efect is disorienting, with viewers shifting
position to take it all in. The result is a crowd
of people glued to the screens, at once hyp-
notized and acting out the A.D.H.D. of the
digital age. Through May 25. (303 Gallery, 555
W. 21st St. 212-255-1121.)
Tony Cokes
The syncopated rifs of the post-punk band
Gang of Four greet visitors as they step of
the elevator and into this show by the vet-
eran video artist, a media-studies professor at
Brown. L.E.D. panels lash text in a palette of
red, white, and blue, but don’t let the patriotic
color scheme fool you—Cokes is an inveter-
ate antiestablishmentarian. “Evil 35: Carlin/
Owners” transcribes a tirade by the comedian
George Carlin; another work pairs quotes by
Trump—about sex and power—with a song by
the Pet Shop Boys. The artist’s signature colli-
sions of televisual aesthetics, pop music, and
language are striking for their lessons in the
restrained use of imagery to comment on cul-
tural invisibility. Through June 9. (Greene Naf-
tali, 508 W. 26th St. 212-463-7770.)
Charles Gaines
In a cumulative, grid-based process, as pains-
taking as needlepoint, Gaines layers colorful,
pixelated silhouettes of a dozen famous think-
ers about identity—Aristotle, Karl Marx, bell
hooks—to form a kaleidoscopic, composite por-
trait. “Faces 1: Identity Politics,” as the new se-
ries is titled, echoes Gaines’s works from as long
ago as the nineteen-seventies, when the inluen-
tial Conceptualist began to use arbitrary rules
to make abstract photographs, casting doubt on
the logic of representation. In an adjacent room,
Gaines treats his subjects more coyly, translating
an essay by James Baldwin and a speech by Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr., into musical scores, seen as
graphite renderings of sheet music and heard in
a recording of a spare piano performance, which
may frustrate visitors hoping to glean a trace of
the works’ radical origins. Through June 9. (Coo-
per, 521 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105.)
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GALLERIES—DOWNTOWNSarah Peters
A dozen charming talismanic bronzes—of sa-
tyrs, shadow puppets, and female igurines—
by the New York sculptor line the entrance to
her show and ofer a taste of her cross-cultural
remixing. But her tantalizingly synthetic vision
really hits home in the six large, brass-colored
bronzes in the main room, which compress mil-
lennia of sculptural modes, from ancient Egyp-
tian to Greco-Roman to Constantin Brancusi.
Stylized heads sport cascades of wavy hair and
full beards, which double as their own pedes-
tals. Note the inely modelled curls of “Char-
ioteer,” a female bust with empty eye sockets;
they assume the role of coifure on the top of
her head, but suggest wheels at the sculpture’s
base. Through June 2. (Van Doren Waxter, 195
Chrystie St. 212-982-1930.)
Borna Sammak
Few artists are tracking the Internet’s erosion
of our sense of reality with more verve than
this young Brooklyn artist, who works, accord-
ing to his C.V., “between the Food Bazaar on
Manhattan Avenue and the Western Beef on
Metropolitan.” Whether it’s a contorted sofa,
inspired by a digital rendering of a more con-
ventional design, or an eight-foot-tall pair of
lip-lops, made of vinyl and canvas, Sammak’s
objects suggest that the permeable membrane
between real and virtual is less cause for con-
cern than fodder for funny. Two paintings,
made by applying hundreds of T-shirt decals
to canvas—especially the dense blue composi-
tion of overlapping marlins, trout, and corny
mottoes—prove that image overload can be
beautiful, too. Through June 17. (JTT, 191 Chrys-
tie St. 212-574-8152.)
Josh Smith
Were Smith an Olympic diver, his event would
be the belly-lop: degree of diiculty negli-
gible, but style points of the chart for am-
plitude of splash. Here, twenty-six paintings
of a sliced watermelon, all three feet high by
four feet wide, deploy a miscellany of col-
oristic and tactile means to perfectly dippy
ends—huge blue seeds on red, for instance,
or tiny ones in brown on pink, applied thickly
or thinly, with decorative borders. Can Smith
be serious? He can! You need only value lat-
out, downright, inexcusable painterly plea-
sure. Through June 17. (Presenhuber, 39 Great
Jones St. 212-931-0711.)
“The Earth Is Flat”
This judicious mix of archival material and
works by seven artists investigates the seduc-
tive appeal of falsehoods. The Argentinean art-
ist Horacio Zabala’s heartbreaking 1972 draw-
ing “Apariciones/desapariciones” uses maps of
the earth with selected continents removed to
stand in for people “disappeared” by the Perón
regime. A bright-yellow polyester cast of a
Lourdes Madonna statue by Katharina Fritsch
and four shiny golden monochrome paint-
ings by Henry Codax question the nature of
value and authenticity, while a framed series
of Russian-produced Facebook ads from the
depths of the 2016 election, including a sup-
posed photograph of Hillary Clinton shaking
hands with Osama bin Laden, are a sobering
reminder that fake news has very real conse-
quences. Through May 27. (Carriage Trade, 277
Grand St. 646-863-3874.)ART