Casey Kaplan
The 15 New York Gallery Shows You Need to See This September
September 1, 2016
By the Artsy Editors
For the New York art world, the first sign of fall isn’t turning leaves or freshly sharpened pencils, but rather an evening of gallery-goers overflowing onto Chelsea sidewalks, hopping from opening to opening. In advance of a promising new season of gallery shows—including fresh young artists, rich art-historical narratives, and smart fusions of art and technology—we’ve parsed through the deluge of new shows opening this month to share the 15 we’re itching to see the most.
A year after Gardner’s paintings made buzzy appearances at LISTE and Art Basel in Miami Beach, the New York-based artist rings in his New York solo debut with a grouping of large-scale canvases. Building on his breakout body of stylized, just-left-of-surrealist tableaus, he fills his new work with elegant hodgepodges of traditional Modernist devices—supine nudes, fractured space, and tromp l’oeil details among them. But there’s a contemporary twist. The edges of each form are so smooth that they recall Photoshop concoctions. And house plants make witty reference to our current obsession with perfectly-potted succulents, while clothing and walls adorned with angular patterns look as though they’ve been lifted from your coolest friend’s Instagram feed. All this is to say, Gardner’s paintings carry more than the associations conjured by the reclining nude. They also embody—and question—today’s penchant for personal curation.