Benjamin Klein

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  New Museum Triennial: ” Soft Water Hard Stone”

  “Soft Water Hard Stone” is the fifth edition of the Triennial at the New Museum in the Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan. This exhibition has always been known for showcasing a variety of talented emerging and early mid-career artists, and this current version has held to that practice.

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  The Occidental Hotel by John Bentley Mays

  And although it touches on many ideas and things, and is deeply pleasurable to read because of the masterful quality of Mays’s gifted language, it is finally and fundamentally a critique and satire of Western white supremacy and the attending wickedness and lunacy of that historical and current force.

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  Sarah Anne Johnson

  It is a social and cultural idea, one of our most beautiful and hopeful, on one hand, and also sometimes hackneyed, on the other. “Woodland,”Sarah Anne Johnson’s first solo show at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, takes on the challenge of this theme, unapologetically.

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  Jon Pylypchuk

  Jon Pylypchuk’s “Waiting for the Next Nirvana” at the Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, debuted a significant new body of work in painting and sculpture. It was titled after the Generation X article of faith that the last great rock band was Seattle’s Nirvana.

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  Wayne Thiebaud

  Accompanied by a small group of drawings, “Mountains 1965–2019” was a show of landscape paintings by Wayne Thiebaud, ranging across the titular span, at Acquavella Galleries in Manhattan, in November and December of 2019.

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  Matthew Wong

  Matthew Wong’s superb exhibition “Blue” opened at both KARMA gallery spaces in New York City in November 2019. The gallery showed framed gouaches on paper in the smaller space and oils on canvas in the larger.

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  Dana Schutz

  “Imagine Me and You,” the title of Dana Schutz’s recent solo exhibition at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, is in itself a strange and suggestive aspect of the artwork in the show. It’s apparently a line borrowed from a 1960s pop tune by the Turtles (as in “so happy together!”). But its placement here turns the idea inside out and asks us to do a number of imaginatively multivalent things at once, like in one of Schutz’s impossible multi-tasking paintings from several years back.

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  “Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy”

  “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy” was a powerful and troubling show at the Met Breuer in New York, which ran from September 2018 to January 2019. It advertised itself as the first major exhibition to directly tackle conspiracy theory and related themes as its main subject. Whether or not that claim was exactly true, it is certainly the case that the 30 artists whose works made up the show were a highly impressive and broad-ranging selection.

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