This week’s artists hone and reinterpret techniques in order to explore the landscapes around them.
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1. Simon Hantaï: Blancs highlights the artist’s groundbreaking series of multi-colored paintings from 1973-1974. His signature method of the pliage technique involved folding the unstretched canvas, painting the exterior and then unfolding the canvas, resulted in a composition imbued with both painterly control and serendipity at Paul Kasmin Gallery
2. Laura McPhee’s The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta presents images that are less an overview of this city of 15 million than a glimps into its complex, often conflicted soul. The photographs gauge both the history of personal spaces and impart a sense of intimacy and calm that often belies the maelstrom that can be found in the external world at Benrubi Gallery
3. Teresita Fernández’s newest body of work continues her exploration and interest in scale as an elastic concept, and the correlation between the immense and the intimate; the vast and the miniature; the macro and the micro. Shrinking the viewpoint in order to amplify what we see, Fernández worked with malachite mineral rocks, using imaging techniques to look at their interiors. What initiated Fernández’s interest in exploring the inside of these heavy, earth-bound materials was their uncanny likeness to the actual full-sized landscape of the Viñales Valley, an iconic and surreal landscape in rural Cuba at Lehmann Maupin
4. Ryan Mrozowski’s Open, Other, End duplicates, repeats, and inverts the most commonplace of imagery (oranges, polka dots, birds, flowers, grass) in endless variations. These items, broken into their constituent parts and stripped of specific or personal context, reveal the uncanny and absurd appearance of a world subject to excessive cataloguing and archivingat On Stellar Rays
5. In this new and intertwined bodies of work on view, Meghann Riepenhoff continues to explore themes of landscape, time, and impermanence and subjects of rain, ocean, and shoreline at SF Camerawork
6. Ryan McGinley’s Winter photographs portray his nude figures in frozen landscapes at Team (gallery, inc.)
