Art Shows You Need To Visit In The Month of April

Olisa Jr. breaks down 11 artists that you should check out this month, based in New York City.

Words by Olisa Jr.

Natalie Terenzini, Mouse Trap, Thierry Goldberg Gallery

Opening in the first week of April, this amazing show by New York artist, Natalie Terenzini, puts on display the young artist’s incredibly vivid female retrospective, capturing the female body in a beautifully unfiltered, raw, and self-accepting essence. From vibrant tones to the glimpses of her subject’s face, from the peaking gaze to the slight details, Natalie’s work is truly wonderful in all rights. 

Mouse Trap is on view from April 7 – May 27

Mahesh Baliga, Drawn to Remember, David Zwirner Gallery

In his first exhibition outside of India, the budding artist explores “the intricacies of life in western India, instilling quotidian and often overlooked moments with emotional resonance.” Fascinated by the relationship between a painting’s formal construction and its psychological effect, the artist slips seamlessly between the real and the imagined, developing surreal visual interventions that convey the poignant and strange nature of memories, personal loss, and the passage of time.

Drawn to Remember is on view from April 12—May 28, 2022

Dorothea Tanning, Doesn’t The Paint Say It All?, Kasmin Gallery

Bringing together canvases and works on paper drawn from the artist’s remarkable oeuvre, the latest exhibition at Kasmin Gallery presents the most comprehensive solo presentation of her work for US audiences in decades, as her pioneering explorations into the space between abstraction and figuration continue to influence vital painters today.

Doesn’t The Paint Say It All? is on view till April 16, 2022.

Felix R. Cid, Heroes Del Canpo, Allouche Gallery

The exhibition features fifteen new works exemplifying Cid’s known use of geometric elements, human expression and imagined structures merged to create portraits of personal projections. Cid’s exploration of creative accidents and destruction in his canvases advances his notion of the physical world and his psyche. The resulting mixed media abstract paintings encapsulate the artist’s response to his modern obsession with the individual and character development.

Heroes Del Canpo is on view till April 17, 2022

Mònica Subidé, Good Morning, Nino Mier Gallery

Composed of both works on canvas and on paper, good morning offers stylistic parallels between portraiture and still life painting presented within Subidé’s peacefully desaturated, shallow interiors. Subidé’s compositional approach favours painterly surfaces over verisimilitude, using collage as a tool to represent the collapsed depth of dreams. 

Good Morning is on view till April 16, 2022

Latifa Echakhch, Night Time, Pace Gallery

Informed by the ways in which everyday objects and imagery can be transfigured into signifiers of identity, history, and mythology, Latifa Echakhch’s practice takes the form of painting, installation, sculpture, and sound. Describing her work as “a question of power and postures”, Echakhch states she has “no other goals but questioning the world around me”. Throughout her career, Echakhch has constructed a visual vocabulary of signs, systems, and references that are rooted in her impulse to convey the experience of a feeling to transcend that which is easily defined and arrive at the intangible.

Night Time is on view till May 4, 2022

Annabel Faustin, Contemplations, Gallery Zberro

In this trio exhibition, the French artist Annabel Faustin displays some of the most surreal works of hers to date. For French painter Annabel Faustin, her dreamlike paintings served as a form of therapeutic expression, originating from her early work which conveyed subjects of sleeping characters, expressing her own tiredness at the time. Through deep-toned palettes, tender landscapes of the moon and stars, the subtle serenity in her subject’s gaze, and the portrayal of timeless solace, Annabel’s paintings became a cathartic vessel to explore her intimate feelings and connections to the world. Her work holds an unparalleled level of seraphic essence in all aspects of its presentation, establishing a pure form of equilibrium between its visual and conceptual meanings. 

Contemplations is on view from April 2 – 13th, 2022

Jarrett Key, from the ground, up, 1969 Gallery

Inspired by Black American folktales and oral stories from Key’s childhood in Alabama, these oil works on panel, frescos and monotypes weave together to reimagine Black freedom and liberation. In Key’s works, Black people are so free, gravity cannot even keep them down. Black love, leisure and joy fill these imagined natural landscapes, as members of Key’s biological and chosen family are caught witnessing these moments of flight. Even rabbits, who seem to follow these figures from scene to scene, are forced to look up, as figures rise into the haint blue. 

from the ground, up on view till April 23, 2022

Grace Mattingly, Yellow Horses, Taymour Grahne Projects

Grace Mattingly’s paintings explore a world of sunny landscapes that shimmer just behind the eyes. Figures frolick, pet, and ride animals alongside fantastical morphologies: a snake that merges with a shoe and a cat with human hair. In this world, the fantastical is just as likely as the real. In the ‘Yellow Landscape’ series, colour becomes a misty, spacious light. Yellow, in particular, is explored as “the most light-giving of all hues” and “a denser, material white,” in the words of Bauhaus artist and educator Johannes Itten in his seminal 1961 text, ‘Elements of Color’. Itten claimed, “to say that someone is ‘bright’ is to credit [them] with intelligence. So yellow, the brightest and lightest colour, pertains symbolically to understanding and knowledge.”

Yellow Horses up on view from April 2 – April 30, 2022

Souls and Spirits, Voltz Clarke Gallery

In SOULS AND SPIRITS, curated by Brooklyn Native Paul Conliffe,  Voltz Clarke celebrates the diversity of emerging artists based in Africa. The works centralize around cultural and personal identity, vibrancy, and innovative use of material. The chosen figurative artists establish various layers of Black excellence, and display evidence of a uniquely rich cultural heritage. The figurative paintings battle stereotypes regarding the concept of Blackness withinnuendos of hope, resiliency, and strength.

SOULS AND SPIRITS up on view from April 6 – May 12, 2022

Katherine Bernhardt, New Works on Paper, Frank Fluegel Gallery

On view will be several unique and edition works on papery by Katherine Bernhardt. Katherine Bernhardt 캐서린 베른하르트 (born 1975 in Clayton, Missouri) is an US-american artist. First gaining attention in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels, taken directly from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade that followed, she began painting sample paintings featuring an ever-growing list of everyday subjects. Tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader and the Pink Panther form unlikely visual combinations in expansive fields of exuberant color. She delights in variety and fully explores each of her obsessions before moving on to another.

New Works on Paper on view from April 1 – June 28, 2022

Check out the GUAP Arts & Culture section, to discover new art, film, and creative individuals.