Thursday, February 9, 6-8 pm: Pat Steir | Monotypes at Pace Pzrints

Pat Steir’s five-decade career as a painter has also included extensive explorations and innovative work in various printmaking mediums. Her iconic style, referencing waterfalls, resulted from her in-depth analysis of the application of pigments, s pecifically their relation to gravity, color layering, and density. 

Many of these monoprints combine a base of screen-printed layers, onto which Steir applied oil paint and other mediums to the previously silkscreened layers. In this exhibition of her monoprints, Steir has utilized the screen printing process to create work in a large scale, directly applying the energy of her mark and the flow of her palette. For her, it is a performance of painting and color.

These images exhibit an unbounded chromatic range and extend her signature motif of the waterfall, creating immersive fields of light and movement. The aesthetic of many of the images in this exhibition resonate with Steir’s recent  exhibition of paintings, Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls, at Hauser & Wirth’s Chelsea Gallery.

Pace Prints, 536 West 22^nd street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, February 9, 6-8 pm:

Anita Kunz | Wit & Wisdom at Philippe Labaune

On view are a series of large-scale paintings from her art book debut, Another History of Art, presented alongside a carefully curated selection of Anit Kunz’s  original illustrations made for several covers of The New Yorker.  Kunz relays an expert understanding of art history with her mordant sense of humor through subversive, feminist-minded recreations of iconic works by white, European-based male artists of the Western tradition. Contemporary aesthetics are juxtaposed onto art from the past through the point of view of "a secular female," breathing new life into works by Old Masters as if painted by women of the modern era.

Kunz's magazine cover illustrations demonstrate her ingenious use of spoof and parody as tools mirroring culture in unconventional ways. In No Photos, Please! a disgruntled Mona Lisa adorns the cover of The New Yorker hidden behind a raised hand in objection to being photographed, disputing notions of celebrity and society's fascination with the concept.

Philppe Labaune Gallery, 536 West 24^th Street, New York, NY Info

Saturday, February 11, 6:3-9:30 pm: Skin Deep | Life Drawing with Arcadia at El Barrio's PS109

Monthly life drawing with Arcadia is back! Celebrate the beauty of women of color in all shapes and sizes, with professional models nude or in costume. Bring your own drawing or painting supplies. Beginners welcome. Free snacks/beverages for sale. Register

El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, 215 East 99^th Street, New York, NY 

Tuesday, February 14, 5:30-7:30pm: Ukranian Art Now! 

Join Ukrainian artists Oleksiy Sai, Nikita Kadan, filmmaker Tetiana Khodakivska, curator Ksenia Malykh, with exhibition artist Lesia Khomenko and art historian colleagues Dr. Ksenia Nouril, James Gallery curator Katherine Carl, and Inga Lce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, for an evening of cultural conversation. 

After a tour of the exhibition, the participants will discuss artmaking during this time of the ongoing Russian war of aggression and the art historical lineage of nonconformist art practices and social commentary that questioned imperialistic reality and actively created a new reality from the late 1980s to the present.

This exhibition brings the presence of 51 artworks by 40 Ukrainian artists (late 1980s–2022) to New York audiences through projections, an array of anti-war posters made in the past several months, and a concise selection of key historical works on paper. Info

The James Gallery/The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 

Thursday, February 16, 6:00-8:00 pm: Robert Kushner | Then and Now at DC Moore

This exhibition brings together Robert Kushner’s fabric paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, many on view in the United States for the first time in forty years, alongside recent paintings on canvas. The artwork pairings in the exhibition invite the viewer to find resonances, or even discord, between the recent paintings and the early works. 

Throughout his career, several aspects of Kushner’s practice have remained constant: his use of color harmonies, pattern, an interest in expansive flatness, and the activation of surface texture, along with his continuous study of Henri Matisse. Looking at Visions Beyond the Pearly Curtain (1975) and For Betty (2022, above) together, for instance, the curving patterns painted on draped fabric accentuate the sinuous lines of the objects in the still life.

In his new paintings, textiles remain a cornerstone, with patterned kimonos and suzani fabrics composing the layered backgrounds of the still-lifes, anchoring Kushner’s current practice to his early Pattern & Decoration roots. Kushner explains, “For me at this stage in my studio life, my own big picture is about pulling in as much as possible of my life experience. How wide a net, how big a panorama can I include in the works I am making now? … I am taking all my heroes and heroines and mentors and trying to pull them all together into a raucous colloquium.”

DC Moore, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

Sunday, February 18, 1:00-4:00pm: Meet the Winter Workspace Artists at Wave Hill

Come see what the artists in Session 1 of the Wave Hill Winter Workspace residency have been working on for the past six weeks. The artists in this cohort include Carlos W. Encarnación, SaraNoa Mark, Tomo Mori, Iviva Olenick, Sarah K Williams and Tanika Williams. Learn about the artists' practice, sources and materials. Visit artist studios, see work in process inspired by Wave Hill and created onsite, and meet other art-lovers. Above: Artist Sarah K. Williams in her studio

The Winter Workspace takes place over two, eight-week sessions and provides artists with free studio space, a financial stipend and access to Wave Hill’s living collection. Since 2010, the Winter Workspace has supported more than 140 artists. During their sessions, artists have access to the greenhouses and to horticultural and curatorial staff. Experimentation is encouraged while artists expand their practices at Wave Hill. See the calendar for further listings. 

Wave Hill, 4900 Independence Avenue, Riverdale, The Bronx, NY Info

Continuing through February 25: Leonor Fini | Metamorphosis at Kasmin.

Argentine-Italian artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) explores themes of transformation, masquerade, and performance through paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. Fini’s deeply personal practice melds coded autobiographical references to her childhood in Trieste, Italy, with those spanning Shakespeare, Greek mythology, Egyptian and medieval history, and opera. 

The exhibition focuses on figurative depictions of subjects from drama and works realized by Fini in preparation for the set or costume design of theatrical events, which are paired in the exhibition with those that include reference to the theatre and its metamorphic potentials. Masks, which recur throughout Fini’s paintings and works on paper as a potent metaphorical motif, are also represented in the form of sculptures produced by the artist for her personal use at masquerade parties in Paris in the 1930s and ’40s.

Ben Davis, writing in ArtNet News, says, “Fini is a Surrealist great, and also one of those figures who has been greatly under-appreciated. I mean, just a few years ago, it took New York’s Museum of Sex to give her a first big American retrospective.”

Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27^th Street, New York, NY Info