The Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist has transformed the three main floors of the New Museum into immersive dreamlike environments in a show titled Pixel Forest (until 15 January 2017). The 30-year survey marks the most comprehensive presentation of her work in New York, comprising 24 videos, installations and projections, from the experimental analogue videos Rist made in the 1980s (which largely focused on the objectification of the female body in popular culture) to massive new installations. A two-channel video and music work created specifically for the exhibition, titled 4th Floor to Mildness (2016), shows underwater footage shot on a lake in Switzerland that is projected on screens on a gallery ceiling. Visitors are invited to view the work from single and double beds, giving the impression of looking up at these scenes from the bottom of the lake. G.Ai.
Mnuchin Gallery has organised the first explicit conversation between the welded steel sculptures of John Chamberlain and the bold canvases of Willem de Kooning in the exhibition Chamberlain/de Kooning (until 22 December). Twelve of Chamberlain’s sculptures from two periods in his career—1958-64, when he began working with welded steel, and the mid-1970s—are positioned beside seven of de Kooning’s paintings, including abstract landscapes from the 1970s and late works from the 1980s. The two-level exhibition has enough breathing room to enjoy the leap from De Kooning’s painterly strokes into the crumpled and colourful three-dimensional world of Chamberlain. V.S.B.
Hauser & Wirth made a daring and timely inauguration of its temporary gallery space in Dia:Chelsea’s former home this week with the solo exhibition Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 and 1975 (until 14 January 2017). The show is an impressive display of around 180 satirical sketches of President Richard Nixon, along with three oil paintings, organised by the artist’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and Sally Radic of the Guston Foundation. The drawings—the majority of which have never been exhibited before—are both amusing and seething, with Nixon’s nose and jowls sometimes transformed into a phallus and scrotum. There is also a cast of repeat characters, including secretary of state Henry Kissinger represented as a pair of thick spectacles. V.S.B.