COURTESY HERALD ST, LONDON
Opening: Chung Sang-Hwa at Dominique Lévy Gallery and Greene Naftali
These two shows focus on Chung Sang-Hwa, a Korean painter best known for being a part of the Dansaekhwa movement during the ’70s. Chung’s paintings are mostly monochromatic and appear at first to be gridded, with paint arranged in little squares. Look closer, however, and various lines and chipped pieces reveal themselves. These works require contemplation for full impact—they reveal themselves over time. At the Dominique Lévy show, 15 large-scale works provide a brief survey of Chung’s career, showing how he moved from grids to more freeform patterns. Meanwhile, in Chelsea, Greene Naftali will be showing newer work that Chung painted between 2007 and 2015.
Dominique Lévy, 909 Madison Avenue, 6–8 p.m.; Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Nicole Wermers at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
At Nicole Wermers’s solo show at London’s Herald Street gallery last year, most of the works were modernist chairs with fur jackets slung over them. This seems, at first, to be a lame gesture, but as a commentary on the way industrialization has caused humans and their objects to merge, it won over many critics. It even earned Wermers a Turner Prize nomination. (She lost to the architecture collective Assemble.) According to Wermers, they show how public and private spheres are now one and the same, but whether you see it or not in her work, these sculptures have a haunting effect—they portray a strange sense of absence, as if no human ever touched them. No press release is available for Wermers’s newest show at this time of writing, but you can expect more sculptures that bring together manmade forms with natural materials. —Alex Greenberger
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Itziar Barrio at Participant Inc.
Itziar Barrio’s project “The Perils of Obedience” is based on the controversial obedience experiments of social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Conceived in Bilbao in 2010, the project has experienced various iterations on a film set within a theater, and after three videotaped rehearsals at Participant Inc., on May 25, 28, and 29, “the scripted environment of the set will become the site for an exhibition of multiple sculptural elements that reveal underlying structures of display—sculptures as bodies, hooks, pedestals, and ubiquitous manufactured objects,” according to a press release.
Participant Inc., 253 East Houston Street # 1, 7–9 p.m.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MURRAY GUY
Opening: Rosalind Nashashibi at Murray Guy
Liverpool-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s past work has mostly been films about daily rituals, so this show, titled “Two Tribes,” is something very different for her. On view will be a film called Electrical Gaza (2015), which focuses, as its title indicates, on the politically charged conflict in the Gaza Strip. “The implication is that you cannot live permanently in that ‘electrical’ air without becoming damaged and exhausted,” Nashashibi has said of the film. Alongside the film will be a group of large-scale abstract paintings, perhaps in reference to how the situation in Gaza has moved into a politicized abstraction.
Murray Guy, 453 West 17th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Screening: Oliver Laric’s Versions and Seth Price’s Redistribution at Met Breuer
Unlike the other films in Thomas Beard’s “The Unfinished Film” series, Oliver Laric’s Versions (2009) and Seth Price’s Redistribution (2007) are designed to be open-ended. Both works are about images and art on the Internet, and the way that once a picture gets put online, it continues to undergo various revisions, gradually becoming more and more different from the original file. Laric’s 2009 video belongs to a larger series, also called “Versions,” that juxtaposes various images that have circulated around the Internet—it brings up how this is all part of a larger crisis about the authenticity that exists through art history. Meanwhile, Price’s work is about pictures get moved around the Internet as a form of information, and how they’re always subject to being remixed and reworked. Ed Halter, a coeditor of the New Museum’s book Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century, will introduce the screening. —Alex Greenberger
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, 6:30 p.m.
THURSDAY, JUNE 2
Performance: Macha Colón at the New Museum
Macha Colón is the alter-ego of artist Gisela Rosario Ramos, inspired by the actor and drag queen Divine. Colón will perform with her band Macha Colón y los Okapi, which has amassed a cult following in Puerto Rico and beyond. Their ethos may be summed up by a slogan on one of the band’s posters: “In this classist, racist, heterosexist, patriarchal country, trying to be happy is in itself revolutionary work.”
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $15/10
FRIDAY, JUNE 3
Screening: Carrie at Metrograph
As part of Metrograph’s current Brian de Palma retrospective, the cinema will host a screening of iconic ’70s horror movie Carrie, which stars Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, and John Travolta. Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the story follows school outcast Carrie White, who is abused by her Christian fundamentalist mother at home. Carrie, unbeknownst to everyone and also herself, possesses telekinetic powers, and when the popular kids at school plot to throw pigs’ blood on her at the prom, Carrie exacts her revenge.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 10:30 p.m. Tickets $15
Talk: Tauba Auerbach at the Rubin Museum
In honor of the Rubin Museum’s show “Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything,” curator Beth Citron will moderate a talk by Tauba Auerbach in which the artist will converse about Breyer P-Orridge’s work and her own. Auerbach, primarily a painter, also uses mediums such as weaving, glass, photography, 3-D printing, bookmaking, and musical instrument design to explore the patterns and holes in principles of topology, semiotics, and logic.
Rubin Museum, 150 West 17th Street, 7 p.m. Free.
COURTESY MIRAMAX
Screening: Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer at Film Forum
As part of “Genre Is a Woman” festival, Film Forum will screen Cindy Sherman’s first movie as a director, titled Office Killer. The photographer will be there to introduce the movie, along with Dahlia Schweitzer, who wrote Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster. Starring Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Barbara Sukowa, the movie tells the story of a copy editor who accidentally electrocutes a writer and then continues to murder other coworkers.
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, 2:20 p.m. Tickets $14/8