Alice neel

Until October 16. David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-517-8677; davidzwirner.com.

This year’s huge Alice Neel show at the Met deserved to be acclaimed. But he understood such a wealth of mature portraits of Neel – human figures often surrounded by blue lines – that it was hard not to see his earlier work as a phase of transition.

The canvases of “Alice Neel: The Early Years”, at David Zwirner’s, curated by Ginny Neel, the artist’s daughter-in-law, with Bellatrix Hubert, are a remedy. Spanning more than three decades (1927-1959), they are organized, very loosely, in order of size and weight as well as chronology, as if to guide the viewer to a transcendent encounter with the adult sons of the ‘artist. Captured, with the singular magic of Neel, seated royally, “Richard” (1959) and “Hartley” (1957) are thrilling, slippery and alive, both present and opaque.

Until you get there, however, the series emphasizes the eerie and grimy landscapes, dreamlike landscapes, and 1930s and 40s caricatures of Neel. Although her fabulous eye for emotional detail is already there – notice the impatient bohemian raising his eyebrows in “Village Party” (1933) – in many ways she is still learning to paint. A remote street in “Under the Brooklyn Bridge” (1932), for example, looks more like a clay hill, and most of the compositions are distinctly clumsy. But this awkwardness and idiosyncrasy, given its own space, is also a robust way of depicting an intense and mysterious world. Look at these red and yellow buildings under the Brooklyn Bridge, crammed side by side and smashed onto the street: you will hear the sound of trains above you and feel the energy of a chaotic metropolis. Consider the overwhelming green fence behind his village fair – you’ll also feel locked in and claustrophobic.

HEINRICH

Diane simpson

Until November 13. JTT, 191 Chrystie Street, Manhattan. 212-574-8152; jttnyc.com.

At first glance, I thought Diane Simpson’s “Point of View” exhibition looked like the setting for an absurd room. On the left, a window frame on the wall; on the right, a transom without a door. In the middle, a piece of ramp and two shapes that are difficult to categorize. The works seemed polished but handmade, whole but distorted. They could have been custom architectural toys enlarged on a human scale.

For decades, Simpson, who is based in Chicago and continues to make art at the age of 86, has drawn inspiration from building blocks: parts of outfits or clothing, pieces of buildings, pieces of furniture. These are the starting points of the objects that she imagines and draws using an axonometric projection, which means that they are presented at an angle to the surface of the page, making it easier to understand their shape. Simpson then transforms the drawings into sculptures made mostly of hard and humble materials like fiberboard: three-dimensional to two and back to three, with abstractions and distortions incorporated along the way.

This process helps to explain why Simpson’s works seem to exist in a liminal state between recognizability and strangeness. The more autonomous ones in particular, like “Two Point Enclosure” (2020), confuse your point of view as you walk around them, trying to reconcile conflicting points of view. Their strangeness and whimsy are offset by the meticulousness of their construction, from perfectly fitting joints to neat pencil lines on “Grained Chimney” (2019). Simpson’s art suggests an unwavering commitment to what is often seen as whimsical – the details of the world that many of us need to be prompted to see.

JILLIAN STEINHAUER

“Convergent developments: the consciousness of bodily work”

Until October 23. Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, Manhattan. 212-421-3292; pacegallery.com

Give up the opaque title and description of this show and embark on the work, which explores the idea that while some people claim space (physical, digital, even imaginative) on their own terms, others claim it. claim – objectified on the basis of gender, race or other markers of difference. The show’s 17 artists, both veterans and newcomers, visualize their subjects in a way that, paradoxically, keeps them out of the view of the viewer.

Take the opening pair: “Panorama” by Lucas Samaras, a 1983 assemblage of stacked Polaroids offering a 360-degree view of his studio (including him standing inside) and Caitlin Cherry’s “Quaternion” (2021) , a painting mounted on a swivel metal frame that looks like an Imax screen. In both cases, the artists refer to technologies believed to improve our eyesight while frustrating our ability to see: Samaras’ body is too fragmented; the black sex workers and other Instagram stars in Cherry’s painting are too covered in iridescent moire patterns.

The bodies are everywhere and nowhere. A female figure moon the viewer in “Untitled III (Upside-Down Body With Beads)” by Kiki Smith, 1993, but our access is blocked by thousands of pearls arranged on the ground. The fuzzy canvases of men painted in oil and acrylic by Chibuike Uzoma are installed in an inaccessible corner, visible only through the windows. The bodies are abstract, as in the untitled oil painting by Marina Perez Simão which oscillates between the landscape and a laparoscopic vision of the interior of the body, or presented via substitutes, as in the body paintings of Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola composed of hundreds of durags. By complicating the viewer’s visual apprehension of other people’s bodies, these artists make us hyper-aware of our own visibility.

ARUNA D’SOUZA