COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23
COURTESY THE ESTATE OF SARAH CHARLESWORTH AND MACCARONE
Opening: Sarah Charlesworth at Maccarone
The Pictures Generation photographer’s “Natural Magic” series will be on view in this show, which focuses on Sarah Charlesworth’s use of trickery in her work. When the artist died in 2013, she left behind a body of work that explored how photographs function and how we see them. This series finds her exploring such subjects as card games, levitation, and genie lamps. Among the works on view will be Red Veils (1993), which alludes to René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928) by placing two people wrapped in red fabric against a black background.
Maccarone, 98 Morton Street, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22
Opening: Ed Fornieles at Arsenal Contemporary
With a new location in New York, Arsenal, the Montreal-based foundation devoted to showing work by young artists, will host an exhibition by Ed Fornieles, a London-based artist who is known for tackling the way that information, images, and emotions circulate on the internet. His new show leans toward the intellectual: It’s called “The Finiliar,” in reference to an obscure word that means, according to a press release, a “digital entity feeding off data sets produced by companies, currencies, and other large institutions, using a cute facial interface to elicit a sense of emotional attachment within the viewer.” Here, Fornieles will track projections for the British pound, the Canadian dollar, and a cryptocurrency known as Ethereum through inkjet prints, LED pieces, sculptures, and an animated video.
Arsenal Contemporary, 214 Bowery, 6–9 p.m.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETZEL, NEW YORK
Sarah Morris continues using abstraction as a way to ponder power systems, architecture, and structures with a new show titled “Finite and Infinite Games.” Working in the vein of Peter Halley’s “conceptual abstraction,” Morris has for the past few decades borrowed the language of modernist painting and put it toward subtly political goals. For this show, she will rely on the aesthetics of architecture she saw in the United Arab Emirates. The paintings are derived from two films she’s made—Abu Dhabi and Finite and Infinite Games.
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Monica Bonvicini at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
It’s been ten years since Monica Bonvicini had a show in New York. This week, she’ll return with “RE pleasure RUN,” her first solo show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The centerpiece will be Structural Psychodramas #2, which, in typical form for the Berlin-based artist, tends toward the dryly funny—it will lend the gallery temporary walls that are tilted inward, so that murano glass sculptures can hang from them. Alongside that installation will be a neon sculpture that reads “NO MORE MASTURBATION” and a black-and-white photograph of a house burning down. For the artist, all this work is about production and who gets to be participate as a worker in society.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Nicolás Guagnini at Bortolami
Last time Nicolás Guagnini showed at Bortolami gallery, he debuted a series of sculptures called “Dickfaces,” which were busts that quite literally had dicks on their faces. This new show, titled “Bibelots,” won’t be nearly so provocative, but it will be similarly humorous and academic at the same time. The Argentina-born artist will continue exploring the relationship between labor and craft with a new series of glazed canvases. Some quote the French critic Guy Debord—”NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS” (or “NEVER WORK“). Others feature abstract patterns that resemble the speckles on ceramic objects, bridging the gap between “high” and “low” art forms.
Bortolami, 520 West 20th Street, 6–8 p.m.
©2017 LUIS CAMNITZER, ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK
Opening: Luis Camnitzer at Alexander Gray Associates
As scholars continue to discover and rediscover ’70s avant-garde movements outside America, Luis Camnitzer is beginning to seem like one of the world’s most preeminent conceptualists. The German-born Uruguayan artist may be known mainly for his text works and his photographs, which meditate on the passage of time and the act of seeing, but here, he will debut a new video installation—The Time Project (2017), a long take of a river accompanied by clocks. In a show titled “Short Stories,” he’ll also debut new works from his “Improbabilities” series, in which dice are assembled into squares in various patterns, as well as his “Timelanguage” prints, a group of works that ponder the possibilities of text.
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Vik Muniz at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Vik Muniz may be better known for his socially engaged work that restages famous pictures and images using recycled objects, but this exhibition shows the Brazilian artist in a more abstract mode. His new series “Handmade” draws on the legacy of such modernists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica to create pictures that appear to have depth but often do not. One work will feature rhombi that have been folded and left hanging, so as to reveal a blue background under the picture’s white surface; another features torn multicolor strips. For Muniz, these works look like photographs of themselves—flat yet three-dimensional at the same time. “In a time when everything’s reproducible,” he has said, “the difference between the artwork and its image is all but nonexistent.”
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.
©JULIA WACHTEL/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ELIZABETH DEE NEW YORK/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK, PURCHASE, WITH FUNDS FROM THE PAINTING AND SCULPTURE COMMITTEE
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24
PRINTING: PEPE CORONADO STUDIO/COURTESY PARTICIPANT INC
Talk: “Fast Forward: A Salon” at Whitney Museum
With a craze for ’80s nostalgia continuing on, the Whitney has turned its attention to painting from that decade with a show called “Fast Forward.” To celebrate, the museum has invited critics and artists to discuss the legacy of the work in the show and what it meant to be a painter in the ’80s. Among the speakers at this event will be artist and critic Walter Robinson, who will talk about Meyer Vaisman’s paintings, and Wendy White, who will reflect on Julia Wachtel’s Pop-inspired canvases.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 6:30–8 p.m. Tickets $8/$10
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26
Opening: Baseera Khan at Participant Inc
Baseera Khan’s work has the unfortunate fate of being more timely than ever, now that immigration, travel bans, and religious discrimination are common topics of discussion. Her actions and videos look at the effects of emigration and the movement of people around the world. For a 2014 called Arrival, she had participants chant lyrics from “Somewhere Out There” as tourists boarded the ferry to go see the Statue of Liberty, highlighting the separation many migrants feel as they leave their homes. Though this is Khan’s first show with Participant Inc, she helped do research for the gallery’s acclaimed Greer Lankton show.
Participant Inc, 253 East Houston Street, 12–7 p.m.