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Looking at the month ahead, Something Curated highlights six of the most exciting art exhibitions taking place in New York this August.


Rotating Objects, at The Noguchi Museum || Gabriel Orozco (Until 11 Aug 2019)  

Created in Tokyo in 2015, Orozco’s works provide a contemporary parallel to Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa’s efforts to create modern art that developed Japan’s traditional craft cultures. The Roto Shaku are made from a standard length of lumber that the artist has wrapped in a range of colored tapes. Employing his signature geometries, Orozco establishes a counterpoint between multiple traditions of abstraction and seeming abstraction: decorative patterning, practical mark making (as for measurement), and the theories of signs, symbols, and structures that underlie much of modern Western painting.


Shadow Bathing, at Marlborough || Tony Cox (9 Aug 2019)

For his exhibition Shadow Bathing, multidisciplinary artist Tony Cox presents a series of new, large-scale, hand-embroidered abstractions on acrylic-coated canvas. Combining gender and sexual politics with the post-minimal concerns of material and process, these works occupy a space between painting and sculpture. Following a late-stage Lyme disease diagnosis which led to the paralysis of the artist’s hands for some time, Cox’s longstanding interest in Jungian philosophy became the backbone of his inquiries and each of the works in this exhibition reference the archetypes and concepts central to Jungian psychology.


Vessel Orchestra, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art || Oliver Beer (Until 11 Aug 2019)

Concluding this month at The Met Breuer, this installation consists of vessels chosen by British artist Oliver Beer for their innate sound frequencies. Beer’s work explores relationships between sound and form, and in the past has featured personal objects and household possessions, as well as historical vessels from various collections. However, Vessel Orchestra marks the first time Beer has engaged with objects from a collection as vast and varied as The Met’s, and the first time he has created an assembly of vessels that can be ‘played’ by musicians in a series of live performances.


Plastic Garden, at Asya Geisberg Gallery || Madeleine Bialke, Jennifer Coates, Sharona Eliassaf, Adrienne Elise Tarver & More (Until 16 Aug 2019)

Asya Geisberg Gallery presents Plastic Garden, curated by Katrina Slavik, an exhibition of seven painters depicting landscape and flora through a synthetic lens. The artists included in the show are Madeleine Bialke, Jennifer Coates, Sharona Eliassaf, Adrienne Elise Tarver, Emma Webster, and Brian Willmont. The works seek a spiritual connection to nature not thorough awe-inspiring vistas, but with toxic colours, moody surrealism, and industrial surfaces.


Work From Underneath, at New Museum || Lubaina Himid (Until 6 Oct 2019)

A pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and ’90s, Lubaina Himid has long championed marginalised histories. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and textile works critique the consequences of colonialism and question the invisibility of people of colour in art and the media. While larger historical narratives are often the driving force behind her images and installations, Himid’s works beckon viewers by attending to the unmonumental details of daily life. Bright, graphic, and rich in colour and symbolic referents, her images recall history paintings and eighteenth-century British satirical cartoons.


“Defacement”: The Untold Story, at Guggenheim Museum|| Jean-Michel Basquiat (Until 6 Nov 2019)

This focused, thematic exhibition of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, supplemented with work by others of his generation, explores a formative chapter in the artist’s career through the lens of his identity and the role of cultural activism in New York City during the early 1980s. The exhibition takes as its starting point the painting The Death of Michael Stewart, informally known as Defacement, created by Basquiat in 1983 to commemorate the fate of the young, black artist Michael Stewart at the hands of New York City transit police after allegedly tagging a wall in an East Village subway station.


Feature image: Lubaina Himid, Le Rodeur: The Captain and the Mate, 2017–18. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Andy Keate.

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