Ed Ruscha, Hardscrabble (2020)
© Ed Ruscha. Photo: Paul Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian.
Ed Ruscha: Paintings
Until 23 January at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, Manhattan
The gallery is debuting eight new paintings by Ed Ruscha, one of America’s most significant living painters. Six of the canvases are two feet high and eight feet long, and each expands upon elements of the artist’s lexicon that have, over the nearly six decades and counting of his career, become cornerstones of the zeitgeist. There are three iconographic landmarks explored in this show: flags, tires, and mountains. They are on occasion remixed, such as in the painting Hardscrabble (2020) which features a mountainscape at sunset, above which a massive tire tread floats in the sky. This single painting almost serves as a map to the cardinal points of Ruscha’s mastery: the sunset becomes a vehicle in which the seasoned painter can show off his trademark gradients, which he has revelled since at least the 1970s; the mountainscape allows him to display a technical prowess that is, though as efficient as they come, still full of life and joy and uniquely his; and the massive floating tire tread, along with the title, offers a glimpse at the oblique humour that Ruscha has sustained all these years. —Wallace Ludel
Daniel Crooks: the Subtle Knife
Until 31 January in Times Square, Manhattan
As the residual dystopia of 2020 persists even with the turn of the new year, the Melbourne-based digital artist Daniel Crooks, who is best known for his works that distort perception and temporal experience, has produced a hypnotising video work that aims to transport viewers to a “place where the world is less concrete”, the artist says, and where the “models we have in our heads of what is real becomes slightly less fixed”. Shown across 72 synchronised electronic billboards above mostly shuttered retail spaces in New York’s Times Square—which has become an ominous space since the onset of the pandemic left it desolate—the work is reminiscent of a time-lapse video on loop, where train tracks and receding doorways lead the viewer to vaguely familiar but fleeting parallel worlds. The work is being presented by Times Square Arts in partnership with the Asia Society Museum and the inaugural Asia Society Triennial, titled We Do Not Dream Alone and on view in multiple venues until 7 February. The work is part of Times Square’s Midnight Moment, a year-long programme of digital exhibitions that are shown monthly from 11:57 to midnight. —Gabriella Angeleti
This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20
Until 14 March at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens
Around the time lockdown restrictions went into effect in New York last year, the three artists selected for The Studio Museum in Harlem’s second annual artist-in-residency programme, which is organised in collaboration with MoMA PS1, commenced bodies of work that reflect on ideas around “longing”, a subject with new pertinence amid the pandemic. With works spanning painting, performance and other media, the artists Elliot Reed, E. Jane and Naudline Pierre imagine a “future-perfect that prompts us to recognise what worlds we’ve wasted with all our wanting”, the curator, Legacy Russell, writes in her curatorial essay. Reed presents works that reference the often “malicious, ill-intentioned” ways we receive information from social media and news channels, the artist says; E. Jane has produced a series of intimate and poignant three-dimensional lightboxes, integrated into a larger installation photographs shot during lockdown; and Pierre presents a series of large-scale paintings populated by winged beings that appear to inhabit an alternate universe, or a subliminal space between the material and immaterial worlds. —Gabriella Angeleti
