Pace gallery is celebrating two anniversaries with Richard Pousette-Dart: the Centennial (until 15 October): 75 years since his first gallery show (at Artists’ Gallery in New York) and 100 years since his birth. The show explores the evolution of his work from the 1940s to the 1980s through 18 paintings that reveal varying approaches to colour and texture, from the stormy-hued Blue Image (1950) to the wide expanse of White Silence (1974), patterned like shagreen. The show is at the gallery's East 57th Street location—the very space that once housed the Willard Gallery, where Pousette-Dart had an exhibition in 1943.
Step into a strange and otherworldly universe that provokes an odd sense of déjà-vu at an exhibition of paintings by Mehdi Farhadian, who represented his home country, Iran, in the 2015 Venice Biennale. Sanctums of Decision at the Richard Taittinger Gallery (until 2 October) includes figurative works that depict delicately-rendered, dreamlike interiors and exteriors that take their cue from 19th-century European painting and Iranian history. Farhadian's varied techniques—from runny lines to small areas of indented impasto on flat surfaces—must be seen up close to be appreciated.
The veteran multi-media artist Bruce Nauman takes his 1968 work Walk with Contrapposto to a whole new level in a series of unique, large-scale video-and-sound works opening at Sperone Westwater gallery on Saturday. Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (10 September-29 October) are seven projections showing the artist walking across his studio, shifting his hips side to side in the style of the classical sculptural pose. The works progress from a straightforward view in the main gallery to a room of split-screens where the artist’s top and bottom halves move independently, building to an installation in the third floor gallery where seven disjointed figures appear in seven stacked layers. Nauman’s feet scraping and scratching across the studio floor create an equally layered soundtrack. Meanwhile a maquette on the second floor serves as a “preview of coming attractions”, says the gallery co-owner, Angela Westwater, offering a peek, in miniature, of a complementary exhibition opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (18 September-8 January 2017).
