THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 13
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK / LOS ANGELES; PHOTOGRAPH BY GENEVIEVE HANSON
Just as a crescent moon can be either waxing or waning, the phenomenal
installation “Crescent (Timekeeper),” by the American artist Sarah Sze,
seems to be both coming together and falling apart—a remembrance
and a forgetting. It’s the centerpiece of the artist’s new show at the
Tanya Bonakdar gallery (through Oct. 19), a towering yet delicate metal
scaffold of small moving images, in which real-time observation and
prerecorded documentation blur (thanks, in part, to an ingenious use
of water). Larger images float by on the surrounding walls, reinforcing
the fugacious mood. Sze (who represented the U.S. at the 2013 Venice
Biennale) has taken over the entire gallery, including the building’s
exterior. Her increasingly ambitious approach—a proposition that
drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture are all just as time-based
as film—recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s maxim about art and life: “I try
to act in the gap between the two.” In several works here, fragmentary
pictures of Sze’s sleeping husband and daughters recur—dreamers in an
unfinished, ungraspable, beautiful world.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
three, or four—wild views of the evening sky,
electric over the water.—J.F. (Through Nov. 2.)
Xylor Jane/Sahar Khoury
Canada
DOWNTOWN The gallery inaugurates its new Tri-
beca space auspiciously with a pair of enchanting
solo shows. Jane’s shimmering new paintings are
ultra-precise, combining an idiosyncratic Poin-
tillism with a poetic, even romantic, engagement
with math. Prime numbers, palindromic numer-
als, and binary codes are rendered in grids with
an undulating optical effect. “The Goodnight
Kiss” is a colorful, quiltlike composition, in
which zeros and ones interlock in what the Mas-
sachusetts-based painter describes as a “lullaby
of sameness.” Khoury’s sculptures, in the smaller
gallery, are similarly playful, suggesting manic
improvisation with a riot of glazed-ceramic and
papier-mâché elements, accessorized or bundled
together with assorted belts. One particularly
riculum on Puerto Rican history and culture,
his answer was to open a community museum,
El Museo del Barrio, in a Harlem public-school
classroom. This fiftieth-anniversary exhibition
celebrates the institution and its innovative
curatorial approach with a detailed, wall-span-
ning time line, punctuated with photos of El
Museo’s landmark shows and acquisitions. It’s
accompanied by a sprawling, non-chronolog-
ical survey of works in the museum’s collec-
tion, from pre-Hispanic Taino artifacts and
modernist abstractions to documentation of
performances and a diverse array of prints, all
arranged into three sections: “Roots,” “Resis-
tance,” and “Resilience.” Although not every-
thing on view is explicitly activist, a picture
emerges of El Museo’s ever-evolving mission
to represent indigenous, Latin-American, and
Latinx cultures. The Mexican artist Ana de la
Cueva’s piece “Maquila” is as relevant now as
it was in 2007, when she created it: a map of
the Americas, outlined in tan thread on
unbleached linen, hangs near a video of an
embroidery machine violently stamping the
U.S.-Mexico border on the fabric in blood-red
thread.—Johanna Fateman (Through Sept. 29.)
Mrinalini Mukherjee
Met Breuer
Vegetal, sexual, exquisite, and strange, the fibre
sculptures by this Indian artist, now casting
their spell on the museum’s third floor, are so
emphatically haptic that, in their presence, you
might stop thinking and just feel what you see.
At once fluid and rough, and often taller than
a tall human being, the densely knotted works
are made from hemp or jute ropes, a laborious
process that yielded just a few pieces a year
through the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
(The artist’s later ceramics and bronzes are
also on view.) Dyed jungle greens, gloaming
blues, marigold yellows, and a frankly erotic
array of pinks, they suggest newly discovered
objects of worship from some fecund alternate
world. Mukherjee—who died in 2015, at the
age of sixty-five, days after opening her first
major retrospective at home, at the National
Gallery of Modern Art, in New Delhi—makes
her overdue U.S. museum début.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through Sept. 29.)
Roy DeCarava
Zwirner
CHELSEA The tremendous shows of DeCarava’s
black-and-white work currently on view at
two locations—“Light Break,” on West Nine-
teenth Street, and “the sound i saw,” on East
Sixty-ninth Street—are the first large-scale
exhibitions of his photographs to be mounted in
New York since a 1996 retrospective at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art, and the timing couldn’t
be more ideal. It’s wonderful, during this age
of agitprop and questions about who gets to
speak for whom, to be reminded of the delicacy
that one can find in art, a fineness of sensibility
that eludes a blatantly political reading. Not
that DeCarava, who died in 2009, will escape
those readings entirely; the majority of his
subjects are black, like the artist, which means
that much of the response to his images will be,
de facto, sociological, addressing the so-called
marginalization of the people depicted. But
there is no such thing as the marginal in De-
Carava’s photographs. Women, musicians, veg-
etation, Harlem: all of it is alive with the expe-
rience of being.—Hilton Als (Through Oct. 26.)
TM Davy
Van Doren Waxter
UPTOWN Dozens of new sketchbook-size works
on paper by this Brooklyn artist ring the gal-
lery, arranged with only the slightest of gaps
between them. As a result, the plein-air studies,
which capture a season in the Fire Island Pines,
seem to draw a continuous, bittersweet line
marking summer’s end. The intimate pastel-
and-gouache works portray friends walking
into the waves, lounging on the beach, and
floating in turquoise swimming pools. Davy
renders likenesses faithfully and fast, with
punched-up color and squiggly lines—a ca-
sual but doting, even sexy, approach that also
extends to his treatment of landscapes. The
vibrant band of images alternates portraits with
sunsets. The latter appear in sequences of two,
