Today I want to recommend a visit to two galleries in SoHo 🎨

Our first stop is Nino Mier Gallery, where José Lerma's new exhibition is on view: THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA.

Lerma creates large, highly expressive portraits, which he sometimes manages to make with a very small number of brushstrokes. He paints on coarse burlap, works in impasto, a technique defined by thick layers of dense paint, and sometimes even uses a broom to create the broad, dramatic gestures that characterize his work.

The exhibition deals with the 128 year relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, through portraits of Puerto Rican politicians, athletes and cultural figures.

Puerto Rico passed from Spanish rule to American rule in 1898, following the Spanish American War. Since then it has remained a territory of the United States: its residents have American citizenship and a local government, but it is not one of the 50 states, nor is it an independent country, and the US Congress retains broad authority over its status.

This background matters for understanding the exhibition, and above all the way Lerma uses color to convey ideas about identity, representation and gaps in power.

He paints the Puerto Rican figures in a pale palette of blue grays, cool pinks and faded pastel tones. By contrast, in the group he calls “immigrant paintings,” depicting people from the US who have moved to Puerto Rico to live and enjoy island life, the color suddenly becomes intense and highly saturated.

Color becomes a kind of visual manifesto here, about two very different experiences of the same place, and about the question of who holds power, and who gets to decide how the place and the people who live there are represented.

From there we continue, about a 7 minute walk, to Hauser & Wirth. It is one of my favorite galleries in the city and one of the significant names in the contemporary art world, with spaces around the world and an exhibition program that is always worth following.

On view there right now is The Chemical Alphabet by Rita Ackermann.

Ackermann, born in Hungary and living and working in New York since the early 1990s, makes works in which the process of painting itself is a central part of the piece.

She works in chalk, pastel and acrylic: she draws, erases, washes the surface and draws again. In this way, every painting holds within it the layers, the erasures and the traces of what was there before.

The exhibition includes 14 paintings, and each one begins from a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Ackermann has said that she actually taught herself the alphabet by painting the letters, and so far she has reached the 14th letter.

The letter serves as the anchor on which the composition is built, and it stays present even after all the layers of painting, erasing and washing; sometimes it can be clearly recognized and sometimes it is almost swallowed up inside the work. In some of the paintings you can also see, beneath the new layers, images from her earlier works. These feel almost like memories, or ghosts of the past that go on living inside the new painting.

With Ackermann, the image never truly settles: figures and forms appear, come apart, disappear and float back up out of the layers. Her paintings live constantly in the in between, between figurative and abstract, between what was there and what remains of it. In this sense, what we see is not only the final result, but almost a record of the painting as it is built and taken apart at one and the same time.

And this connects closely to the way Ackermann herself talks about her work: she is in no hurry to explain or define it, and prefers to leave room for chance, for intuition, and for the direct encounter between the viewer and the painting.

And after the two galleries, lunch at Manuela.
Beyond being a restaurant with a great atmosphere and really delicious food, the place is full of art, which is not very surprising, given that the restaurant belongs to the same ownership group as Hauser & Wirth.
And if you're already there, I really recommend the Lima Beans dish. To me it was especially delicious.

In short: two galleries, a short walk between them, and then lunch surrounded by art.
Enjoy 🤍