Max Hooper Schneider
High Art // October 22–November 28
Slithering along the line between radiant and radioactive, Hooper Schneider’s glowing sculptures suggest an overhanging menace here, buoys swimming in total darkness. Held together in alternating slick vitrines and ready-made containers (a slot machine, an aquarium), the queasy arrangements contain a tangle of organic matter and artificial injections. Dense plant appendages are cut with skinny perpendicular rods of fuchsia and violet neon, while inside a top-loading dishwasher nearby, a pile of translucent dishes takes on a sickly glow, the water nightmarishly infested with inky little fish.
Isabelle Cornaro
Galerie Balice Hertling // October 23–December 5
These moody works, imposing in scale and visual weight, offer respite and frailty in their sophisticated details. Three black triangular hanging sculptures are decorated with objects—vases, bowls, knives— then cast in charcoal plaster. These arrowheads point assuredly toward a sheet of metal on the floor, crumpled to resemble the canvas
of a rejected painting, whose snaking line holds a color gradient ranging from indigo to red. The intense matte appearance of these surfaces necessitates a close look to reveal Cornaro’s tactile influence and its resulting value.
Yui Usui, Monica Majoli, & Michael Zahn
Shanaynay // October 22–November 19
This show threads together ephemera with dark, dreamy notions of Pre- Raphaelite erotica. Works reference tragic mistresses. The pastel-colored glass in Usui’s Empty
Names, 2013, a constellation of empty vintage bottles of Guerlain’s perfume Mitsouko; the murky planes of Majoli’s low-contrast wall works; and Zahn’s fragile, light-absorbing, velvety Naked at the Y, 2015, reflect both the beaming sparks of love’s glow and the resentful entrapment bound in an affair’s hidden affections.
Modern Painters, January 2016