Weekend Gallery Recap 2/1/25

I keep saying “This isn’t the kind of route I usually do!” but that’s especially true this week, since I almost never walk from Chelsea to downtown. It made sense this week though because I included White Columns on my route, and it’s far enough Southeast that walking all the way back to 8th Ave to wait for the train takes about as much time as just walking. I also bumped into a friend who told me they were going to the George Condo show that had just opened at Hauser & Wirth’s SoHo location, and I figured I would work that in too since I was more or less walking that direction.

I actually managed to follow through on my ambitions to hit the lower half of Chelsea, a handful of newly opened shows in Tribeca, and most of the rest of the Lower East Side that I hadn’t made it to yet! I know, you’re probably looking at the map and telling me that this was a super inefficient route and…you’d be right. I probably should have hit the little cluster of galleries in NoHo on my way south rather than going back that far north up Bowery, but I sort of have all of the neighborhood clusters routed separately and actually didn’t realize how close those galleries in NoHo are to Hauser & Wirth’s SoHo location. List of what I saw is linked here, and map / route is linked above!

Best show: Camille Henrot: A Number Of Things at Hauser & Wirth. Y’all know I tend not to focus on shows at the mega-galleries (which is not to say that I don’t go), but this is a really good one! I stand by the fact that Henrot’s films are her best work, and there are no films here, but Henrot nevertheless proves herself to be one of the more inventive artists working across a wide range of mediums, by tackling things as large as “how we categorize information” with a very French sense of play. It’s a rare gallery show that amounts to more than a sum of its parts and becomes something of an immersive environment with a floor intervention by Charlap Hyman & Herrero, yet stops short of becoming pure spectacle.

A runner up mention for Shelf Show at Kate Werble Gallery. I’ve been calling this season in the galleries “wildcard winter” because it’s really the only time of year that the offerings in galleries are a totally mixed bag — it’s either safe and boring, or it’s kind of a wacky group show, with little in between. The general conceit of the show is that all of the artists brought their work the night of the opening, and put it on a shelf. It’s sort of unclear what’s actually art, as books, knick knacks and other various objects also occupy shelf space, and the checklist was incomplete (they were still cataloguing everything and assembling it, the friendly front desk person told me). There’s also no artist list, and I only sort of knew about the show from people I follow on Instagram posting about being in it. It’s kind of a silly concept but also nice to see galleries taking a swing and doing something a bit unconventional — I look forward to visiting again when the checklist is complete!

Also worth seeing: Looking Back: The 15th White Columns Annual, Kevin Cobb: Ekstasis at 81 Leonard, Susan Fortang: The Spaces In Between at Eric Firestone, Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings, Dirt Plug group exhibition at David Peter Francis.

Geography brief (new spaces, relocations, etc.):
A couple of interesting developments on this front — first, Proxyco announced that it is moving to 88 Eldridge Street in a shared space with Instituto De Vision. I have so many questions and thoughts about these “collaborative” gallery space moves that are being packaged as expansions and space upgrades when in reality they’re downsizings. It’s worth noting that this was actually already a shared space between Instituto De Vision and Revolver, so I’m curious what this means for Revolver’s future as well. I think this is definitely not the last of these kinds of moves that we’ll see over the next few months, and I’ll be interested to know how they play out for galleries in terms of sales and maintaining a sustainable business.

Second, the artist-run itinerant space Pop Gun is setting up shop in the Financial District at 64 Fulton Street. Unclear to me if they’re taking over the Dunkunsthalle space or another storefront in that building, and what might be going on with Dunkunsthalle…

Gripes and grievances: I strongly prefer a physical takeaway press release and checklist, but a laminated one is fine, and I’ll even accept a QR code (though I could go on for a long time about why I think they’re ableist and bad) but if your group show includes *none* of those things (I looked extensively), I’m very annoyed. I won’t name and shame the gallery that I stopped into over the weekend that was guilty of this, but pleaseeee just give me something to orient myself to the work…

This week’s Substack / podcast rec:
For those of you who follow me on Instagram, I put out a request earlier this week for podcast and Substack recommendations, and got a ton of good responses! I consume a really ridiculous amount of media every week, only a small fraction of which is actually art related, and I’m going to start sharing *something* every week that I think is worth reading / listening to.

If it hasn’t crossed your radar yet, give a listen to Ezra Klein’s essay “Don’t Believe Him,” which responds to the Trump administration’s first couple of weeks of action and the subsequent disinformation and sense of panic. I’ve heard this same sentiment echoed on many, many podcast episodes from the past couple of weeks, but this is the most articulate and concise version of it which felt like a necessary reality check. (This is technically a YouTube link and some of the visuals are useful but there is an audio-only podcast version as well).