October in New York, Part Two: Art Galleries אוקטובר בניו יורק: חלק שני, גלריות האמנות

Hi everyone ✨

Yesterday I went to Chelsea for a gallery round, to feel a little of the New York fall and see what's new in the city.

It is especially fun to wander around New York right now and watch it start dressing up for Halloween 🎃

I visited seven galleries, and from them I chose three very special exhibitions that are worth seeing this coming weekend or by the end of the month: all within a short walk of one another.

Our first stop is Petzel Gallery, where Transit of Venus, a solo exhibition by the artist Emily Mae Smith, is on view.

Smith was born in 1979 in Austin, Texas, and today lives and works in upstate New York. This is her second solo exhibition at the gallery, and it comes after a comprehensive exhibition shown in 2024 at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, where her paintings were shown alongside Magritte's works.

I would very much have liked to see that exhibition, because Magritte's influence on Smith's work is clearly visible. But unlike Magritte, in whose work the strangeness remains an open riddle with no interpretation, Smith turns Surrealism toward a sharp feminist claim: behind the light color and the graphic grace of her paintings lie power, sexuality and violence, and her humor is witty and disturbing at once, which in my view is what makes her unique.

Smith is deeply connected to art history, not only through the influences she cites, but also through figures she returns to again and again, a kind of personal mythology that she builds over the years.

The broom is one of the figures most identified with her, and it is taken from Disney's “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” It is a household work tool whose use has traditionally been tied to women, and its shape resembles a paintbrush, so it can be read as representing both the working woman and the woman artist.

There is also a class and material aspect here. Broom fibers are a simple, cheap material, but in Smith's hands it becomes a figure with presence, personality and a story.

In one of the works in the exhibition appears a woman's foot that is half human and half made of broom fibers. It stretches toward a match that is about to burn it and consume it. There is something very disturbing in this image: the female body becomes a work tool, and at the same time also something vulnerable, exposed and single-use.

What is astonishing about Smith's works is the tension between the surreal, amusing images and their exceptional level of execution. She works in the traditional technique of glazes, thin, transparent layers of paint built one on top of another.

This is a classic technique in art history, which makes it possible to create a very naturalistic feeling and to give the light a sense that it comes from within the painting itself. The closer you get, the more you can see the layers, the time and the amount of work invested in every surface.

The exhibition also includes a work that looks like a modern still life, but is very close to the idea of memento mori, Latin for “remember that you will die,” which was central to European painting of the 17th century, especially in the vanitas genre. In still life paintings like these you see flowers at the peak of their bloom that are already beginning to wilt, and fruit so ripe that in a moment it will begin to rot. Even at the height of life, death is around the corner.

Smith creates a contemporary version of this idea from a collection of objects and materials from the world of painting: against the background of a tomb-like structure are depicted an egg yolk used to make tempera paint, nuts from which oil for oil paints is extracted, and animals whose fur is used to make paintbrushes and brushes. In this way the work deals at once with life, death and the materiality of art itself, and reminds us that a painting too is made of materials that were once alive, changes over time and in the end ages and wears away.

Another work that caught me especially is a cluster of grapes full of eyes. Smith uses here a familiar image from art, grapes, which symbolize abundance, nature and materiality, and connects eyes to it, which are today identified with gaze, surveillance and exposure in the digital world.

One can read here a critique of the way screens and social networks scatter our attention. We are flooded with images and information without pause, and precisely because of that we struggle to truly focus on one thing. One can also read it in the opposite direction: we do not only look, we are also being watched.

This is what I love about Emily Mae Smith's works: they look colorful, funny and even playful, but beneath the surface they deal with heavy questions, such as work, gender, class, power, vulnerability and identity, and the way we try to hold on in a world that becomes more complex and more threatening.

She takes images that look almost innocent and turns them into something that keeps disturbing even after you step away from the painting.

This is a very special exhibition, and in my view it is worth catching it before it comes down from the walls.

Emily Mae Smith | Transit of Venus | Petzel Gallery
📅 Through October 31

Our next stop is Lisson Gallery, where Unnatural Habitat, a solo exhibition by Hiroshi Sugimoto, is on view.

Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Tokyo and moved to New York more than fifty years ago. Today he divides his time between the two cities.

This is his third solo exhibition at the gallery, and it goes back to the very beginning: to the Diorama series, the first body of work Sugimoto made as an artist.

The story begins in the mid 1970s. Shortly after moving to New York, Sugimoto visited the American Museum of Natural History and was enchanted by the dioramas: stuffed animals placed in convincing poses against painted skies.

He began to photograph them, and the camera completed the illusion. When he looked at the dioramas with one eye, the perspective disappeared and they looked real, and so he understood that the camera sees the world the same way. A stuffed polar bear against a painted Arctic backdrop suddenly looked completely real.

That photograph, Polar Bear, is also on view in the current exhibition, and it is the first image Sugimoto made as an artist. Since then he has returned to this series again and again.

In 2025, fifty years after the first visit, Sugimoto returned to the museum and photographed there again. The exhibition shows works from all periods, from lions and condors to the Rocky Mountains.

There is also something new in the exhibition: four of the photographs are printed in color, something very rare for Sugimoto. They are printed on Japanese washi paper and shown on byobu, traditional folding screens made by craftsmen in Kyoto. They stand in the space almost like sculptures, and their folds echo the curved, painted backdrops of the dioramas themselves.

The title of the exhibition frames the paradox at its center: these animals died a long time ago. The landscapes are painted. The sky is lit by museum lamps. And still, the pictures sometimes feel more alive than nature photographs. This is the question Sugimoto returns to throughout his career: how much of what we call “real” is actually a convincing construction? Does the camera reveal the truth or invent it?

He asked this question already in the 1970s, and in an age of filters, AI generated images and images whose origin is hard to know, it has become more relevant than ever.

Beneath all of this lies the subject Sugimoto returns to again and again: time.

Each of these photographs holds several moments at once: a photograph taken a year ago of a diorama built generations ago, featuring an animal that died long before that. A museum diorama is already an attempt to stop the clock. Sugimoto stops it once more.

And when you see fifty years of photographs together, they become a record of an artist who returned again and again to the same spaces throughout his life, and found in them animals that hardly aged, while everything beyond the glass changed.

📍 Lisson Gallery
📅 Through October 24

Our third stop is Gladstone Gallery, where waterfall, an exhibition by Ugo Rondinone, is on view.

As the name hints, the sculptures in the exhibition draw inspiration from waterfalls, a phenomenon that interests Rondinone because it is in constant motion and never looks exactly the same twice.

Twelve sculptures stand in the gallery, each rising to a height of between 11 and 20 feet. These are semi-transparent columns that seem to glow from within.

There is something simply pleasant and joyful about walking among Rondinone's sculptures. They look like gummy worms or giant candies. But of course they are not candies; each sculpture is made of three components: a body of clear synthetic resin; color made from pigments ground from gemstones, stones that took millions of years to form; and, integrated into each sculpture, ash from the artist's hair and fingernails.

In this way each sculpture becomes a trace of a human life, held within a much deeper time.

There is something very beautiful in this connection between a material formed over millions of years and a small, personal remnant of the artist's body, and between a waterfall that is in constant motion and an attempt to capture a moment, material and time inside a single object.

📍 Gladstone Gallery
📅 Through October 31