Engender
Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
until 13 January 2018
Before Kohn had fully installed its exhibition of paintings that address the fluidity of gender, collectors had already bought 70% of its contents. Of the 17 artists in the show, buyers came hungry for the names Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Tschabalala Self, Jansson Stegner, Emily Mae Smith and Christina Quarles. Probably benefiting from the buzz around the New Museum’s current exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (until 21 January 2018), which features some of the same artists, Engender shows how contemporary painters are complicating identity and the body with a range of abstract and figurative strategies. Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s collaged figures, for example, oscillate between celebration and melancholy. Prices range from $5,000 to $65,000.
1968 General Idea #1 (1986) © The Estate of General Idea, courtesy of The Estate of General Idea and Mitchell-Innes & Nash
The Estate of General Idea: Ziggurat
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
until 13 January 2018
The gallery’s first show with the estate of General Idea (the Toronto-born conceptual art collaborative founded by A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in the late 1960s) pivots on the prominence of the ziggurat form in the group’s witty and politically suggestive work. In the show’s catalogue, Bronson—the group’s only surviving member—describes the stepped image as an emblem of progress and its illusions “of power or even male power”. The puzzle-like, fluorescent acrylic canvases pop with candy colours and an almost abrasive anonymity. Prices range from $15,000 to $250,000.
Andrea Grützner’s Untitled (hotel room) (2016) © Andrea Grützner, courtesy Julie Saul Gallery
New Vision/New Generation
Julie Saul Gallery, New York
until 3 February 2018
This group show pairs two contemporary photographers, Andrea Grützner and Alejandra Laviada, with two giants of photography who informed their work: Luigi Ghirri and László Moholy-Nagy. Building on the legacy of Ghirri’s formal irony, Grützner transforms banal architecture—building façades, doors, staircases—into luminous displays of line, shape, and colour. Her photographs are intricate weaves of geometries, with every element snapping logically into place. Laviada produces prismatic Kandinskian circles and three-dimensional shapes that float in black space, referencing Moholy-Nagy’s photograms. Prices for Laviada’s and Grützner’s works range from $1,700 to $6,000.