Tuesday, July 25
Opening: Isaac Aden: The Numinous Sublime
David Richard Gallery, 526 West 25th Street
This show debuts big new paintings by Isaac Aden, the first of a two-part show that finishes in the fall at the same location. These works are monumental in scale and depict a sunset, which is well-trod territory, especially this time of year, but always pleasant to see multiplied across the wall. The show’s press materials say that Aden took his inspiration here from The Rothko Chapel, which is a pretty good place to start.
Artist Reception and Opening: Nicasio Fernandez
Half Gallery, 235 E 4th St, 6 to 8 p.m.
While visiting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see Philip Guston Now last July, Nicasio Fernandez was taken with a largely-forgotten 17th-century Flemish artist Michaelina Wautier. The new show seeks to merge those diverse influences, among the artist’s others. “I feel something that has an ongoing presence in the work is the usage of a certain type of violence,” he says in the release. “This derives from my interest and growing up on Chuck Jones, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera cartoons and later finding out about Peter Saul.”
Thursday, July 27
Opening: Elise Ansel, Sea Change
Miles McEnery Gallery, 525 West 23rd St. 6 to 8 p.m.
Elise Ansel “creates by gently ransacking the artistic tradition,” with improvisational gestures that show a clear influence of Abstract Expressionism, though she cites her influences as stretching further into the past, to the Renaissance or Old Master paintings. “For a scholar of early modern culture like me,” Patricia Akhimie writes in the catalogue essay, “this reverent irreverence is a delight because it scrapes away at the familiarly masculinist, exclusionary, and dogmatic strain that runs through so much of the artistic outpouring of the ‘Renaissance’ and reveals something volatile, appealingly rich and strange.”
Talk: Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 3 to 3:30 p.m.
Join John Guy, Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia, Department of Asian Art, as he takes you through the museum’s newly opened major exhibition, Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE. That show explores the origins of Buddhist art with loans from India, the U.K. and Europe so this should serve as a great entry point to an important exhibition for anyone unfamiliar with art from the region.
Friday, July 28
Screening: Irma Vep
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St, 4 p.m.
Assayas’ movie is more than just the basis for his astounding HBO show of last year. It’s a profound and personal commentary on everything from performance and attraction to the film industry. It’s amazing to think that someone was fed up with superhero movies back in 1996. As a remake of a remake of a remake, the show may have even been better than the original movie, but “with the antic mayhem of a surrealist comedy and the knowing charms of René Clair and Francois Truffaut, Olivier Assayas celebrates a lost era of moviemaking while also flouting its genre conventions.”
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