Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures

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"Renowned for her depictions of female stereotypes" says the PR.

"From the first lightning bolts of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, the artworld continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit. Which whose artistic doubling, or performance of, is the critique. ... And despite the critical intention's now obvious powerlessness to successfully confront or diminish such roles - as evidenced by its 40 years of continuous updating and still ringing true - Sherman et al. enjoy success in the market, press, and critical etceteras."

Critical etceteras amounting to mostly, "haha women are constructed."

Art needs to contend with the fact that - if its cultural critique was successful - it would outmode itself to that culture, make itself irrelevant. So what is 40 years of Sherman's critique? That not only is Sherman still successfully mocking the mores of "woman" but also the  re-regurgitations of Sherman-esque in younger careers. That, maybe, there is no critique at all, maybe culture just enjoys the befuddlment of women.

See too: Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro,

“Faktura (For A Nervous Spirit)” at kim? Contemporary Art Centre

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Gotta admit, it's a pretty funny image. In Carpenter's own words "I never thought people would actually paint on the canvases [...] we couldn't in the end very easily stop them." Which now, a cage against a painting.

See too: Merlin Carpenter "Paint it Yourself" at Reena Spaulings

Past: Danh Vo

"allows legend to become perfume, an adornment mystifying its objects. Like an unironic Jason Rhoades, exhibitions become spaces for the process of mythification. Whereas for Rhoades it was a comic process of figurative trash becoming hokey possibility for art, for Vo the pre-christened becomes involved in the permutations of further embedding it in objects. ... The aura of art, of objects, is somehow smeltable, is made able to be repoured into new objects.... Vo is a factory for this witchcraft, for the production of belief in these ghosts. ... that somehow (through conceptual art) we've equated the aura of art with the mythologizing of objects with a narrative, a press release. Replaced something's raison d'être with any reason for being whatsoever."

Read full: Venice 2019, Danh Vo, & at kurimanzutto, 

Pieter Slagboom at Bridget Donahue

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Like, whereas outlines illustrate, designates (instructs), the contour line caresses, warms its figure with all its touch, not so much states its figure as rubs it. Probably why these look closer to surrealist frottage than drawing: the whole thing must be touched to make it appear. This is a metaphor. Humans aren't so much plumbing and cartoons as little haptic nubs that touch and feel and bone. "...your fingers developed small wounds from the pressure exerted on the pencil." "PS: I was disappointed because I could not feel the pencil anymore. The tenderness disappeared. [...]when I press down every day for a whole week.  Between the skin and the bone, finger padding begins to vanish, and the pencil makes contact with the bone, which is very very painful." You do not think the subject, but physical touch to manifest it. We get sick, a pandemic exists, and proximity feels like physical air, no meniscus, no barrier at all, everyone sharing each others heat. Spirituality seems to emerge as an any-alternative-to-this, escapes the restrictive cookie outline of "the normal" cartoon. And which, see here figuration too jettison the general cartoon delineation, drawing's outline becomes instead its Red Studio absentia, line its ghost.

See too: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

 Past: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

"..brooding tinctures in the hieroglyphs of a new puzzle form of painting, the explicit clarity of subjects, revealed flatly, become illustrations of a mysterioized subject withheld. The more overt the “subject,” the harder we fall into its promise of illustrating something, meaning..."

Read full: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

 Past: Gedi Sibony

"It had been exciting then, its barely-thereness, so slight, that "unfinished too soon" look we all at that point had craved, the provisional existence we felt stood in for life ... There was something so charming about its lack of artistry, the almost not art that it now just sorta looks like."

"The small pleasure of Sibony's found paintings is their modernist uncanny within vernacular abstraction. That those uncaring, underpaid to blot out corporate logos for truck's resale, might - through dumb luck or undiscovered brilliance - have painted something fine. ...  That brushstrokes without art intention always look best, and these just made to cover, to stop beer from selling itself, so painting could."

Read full: Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali, Venice: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale

Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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The Matthew Barney libidinal excess launched it into the limitless - into the psychic space, the virtual as fantasy stage. A closer representation of fantasy in etherous technology. The virtual space is both new and the same - it the blank canvas or the chunk of marble - mere projection screens, space to manifest, desire. It is art itself that is the realm that allows for this, our fantasy mmorpg; and it is the gallery that is the true virtual space, both everywhere and nowhere, excess in its ascetics. The gallery provides the fantasy of fantasy, that this is all somehow new, or even progress, that we're actually inventing something, simply because it exists. But objects are not invention. Even in virtual fantasy. The pathos of Satterwhite is that it is old. 

See too: Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel