Chelsea Exhibition Reviews: Rosebud Contemporary, Paula Cooper, Fredericks & Freiser, Berry Campbell and more

Mary Ann Unger (American, 1945 - 1998), Installation view of Across the Bering Strait, 1992 - 1994,  hydrocal over steel with cheesecloth and pigment. 

By LIAM OTERO May 29, 2025

1. Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait at Berry Campbell (April 17 - May 17, 2025)

Monumental sculpture exhibitions are always a huge deal - now multiply that by tenfold when the sculptor in question is an “unabashed feminist” who produced enormous works endowed with a cornucopia of thematic layers. Enter the late, great Mary Ann Unger (American, 1945 - 1998). 

Across the Bering Strait was epic on both a physical and thematic level. Berry Campbell partnered with the Mary Ann Unger Estate to conceptualize a re-engagement with Unger’s titular magnum opus of sculptural installations that had first been exhibited at the Trans Hudson Gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1994. 

Mary Ann Unger (American, 1945 - 1998), Basket Piece, 1997 - 1998, hydrocal over steel with pigment.

Many of the sculptures on view resemble enlarged versions of natural elements and parts of the human body, from colorful pebbles to bones, respectively. The Across the Bering Strait installation in the back gallery features a grouping of multiple hydrocal over steel sculptures whose horizontal arrangements at first seem to resemble cannons. However, a prolonged period of looking and perambulation amongst these works felt like these could have been the fossilized remains of a prehistoric creature appearing as they would deep in the soil. It felt very humbling, as if to say that my own human existence is small and insignificant in comparison to that of a gargantuan creature of millennia-past.

Though Across the Bering Strait was the centerpiece, the exhibition brought together a well-rounded body of small, medium, and large-scale sculptures from Unger’s career, specifically works from the 1970s through her death in 1998. Basket Piece (1997 - 1998) is a really excellent evocation of Unger’s background - beyond art - in anthropology and ethnography as the ribbed form she chose for this sculptural basket seems like an homage to the material culture of an indigenous society such as the time-honored basket-weaving traditions of Indigenous tribes in the Southwestern United States. 

 Mary Ann Unger (American, 1945 - 1998), Installation view of the exhibition Across the Bering Strait

As a bonus, watercolor and graphite on paper works were also included to visually explain the sophistication and extensive planning that went into the preparation of Unger’s complex sculptures. 

Though the exhibition has since ended, it is never too late for one to experience Unger's sculptures as an accompanying exhibition catalogue was published featuring scholarly essays by Independent Curator Glenn Adamson and Independent Curator Jess Wilcox. 

2. En Route: Rifka Milder, Meg Hitchcock, and Ketta Ioannidou at Rosebud Contemporary (April 10 - May 22, 2025)

Rifka Milder, Roots, 2019, oil on canvas. 

The life of an artist is a perpetual journey of self-discovery, self-evolution, and self-awareness. En Route, Rosebud Contemporary’s recent exhibition, beautifully explored this concept through the works of three distinguished abstract painters. The Cambridge definition of the term “en route” states that it involves being “on the way to or from somewhere.” Rifka Milder, Meg Hitchcock, and Ketta Ioannidou each bring their own histories and perspectives into the aesthetics of abstract painting, which is itself a visual metaphor for the artist’s journey “en route” to expanding their creative horizons. 

Rifka Milder, Sojourn, 2020, oil on canvas.

For much of her career, Milder’s corpus has been comprised of landscapes directly inspired by her surroundings and places encountered in her travels, from the dappled lighting on the pool of the conservatory at the New York Botanical Gardens to layered rice terraces in the Philippines. These kinds of images usually began with a photograph or drawing as an initial referent before Milder conceived a painterly interpretation. However, this methodology has changed upon seeing her latest work at En Route as she strives to distance herself away from external, physical references in preference for expressing herself in an entirely abstract manner. 

Window-like squares and circles of a predominantly warm palette are overlaid among a vibrating plane of pebble-shaped forms. Elsewhere, lacy strings of color wrap around these thrumming, loosely geometric chains. The sense of movement that naturally emerges is not coincidental as Milder explained how music comprises an important facet of her art - all the more fitting for her transition into abstraction as music has been one of the companions for a great many abstract painters, from Wassily Kandinsky to Piet Mondrian, to Mark Rothko, and now, Milder. As the daughter of two accomplished painters, Jay Milder and Sheila Schwid, Milder considered how engaging with their work from early on manifested into painting becoming “my first language growing up”, which inevitably led to her pursuit of communicating in purely abstract terms.

 Meg Hitchcock, You Are the Vanishing Point, 2023, acrylic on paper. 

Meg Hitchcock, a recipient of the 2024 Pollock Krasner Grant and 2023 Gottlieb Foundation Grant, engages with abstraction as it relates to spiritualism and divinity. Though she is non-religious, Hitchcock expresses a profound admiration for the jewel-toned, shimmering gold aesthetics of Medieval Byzantine icon paintings of biblical narratives. Though Hitchcock’s paintings here are not direct portraits nor depictions of a specific subject and are open to interpretation, one can discern the connections between abstraction and spirituality in Hitchcock’s style.

The stacked geometric blocks whose sides are of varying shades and hues recall the precarity of the Tower of Babel. In You Are the Vanishing Point, the blotted section of blue paint over a slightly oblique top of a cube looks like an eye, which reinforces the suggestive head-shaped composition; returning to the divine associations, this framework reminded me of Greek Orthodox portraits of Jesus Christ. Alternatively, the negative space in the four corners of the work also endows the rest of the subject with an implied cruciform appearance. Much like faith itself, Hitchcock’s geometric paintings compel a multiplicity of perspectives - formal and narrative. 

Ketta Ioannidou, Into the Crypt of Rays, 2023, oil on canvas.

Ketta Ioannidou utilizes a veiling effect in her paintings in which natural subjects, particularly flowers and other plants, are covered in a thinly transparent veneer of cool blues and greens. You can just make out the petals of blossomed flowers and possibly blades of grass surrounding them, but just ever so slightly. The light obfuscation evokes a pleasantly calm feeling as though you were looking out at a garden scene through an opaque window on a rainy day.

Coincidentally, I just so happened to observe Ioannidou’s paintings on one of those May afternoons when a torrential downpour was pounding the nearby gallery windows! The vibrancy of roses appears to glow in the midst of smears of blue washes of paint, which gives such works an Impressionistic quality for the emphasis on light and color over formal solidity. Ioannidou, who is originally from Cyprus, chose floral subjects that were familiar to her Mediterranean roots and combined them with her astute command of creating a moving, painterly atmosphere.

Rosebud Contemporary wisely selected a phenomenal coterie of abstract painters who each demonstrate an ongoing affinity for fresh, invigorating, and experimental approaches to the terrain of abstract painting, be it the segue from figuration to pure abstraction or the allusory yet concealed references to the physical world. 

3. Hiragana Split: Haruka Papashi & Jake Michael Singer at Leonovich Gallery (on view through May 29, 2025)

Haruka Papashi painting, c. 2025
 

I have tremendous respect for galleries that take a risk on an exhibition concept. Leonovich Gallery - founded and run by a truly remarkable Renaissance woman by the name of Katya Leonovich (gallerist, artist, and fashion designer extraordinaire from Russia) - is exhibiting the paintings of a completely unknown Japanese artist by the name of Haruka Papashi. 14 vertical stretched acrylic on canvas paintings, predominantly in a cool color scheme, are stapled directly onto the walls around the spacious gallery.

Just how unknown is Papashi? For starters, Leonovich told me that the artist is deceased, but no one knows exactly when she died. Moreover, Papashi never publicly exhibited her works in her lifetime and maintained a private existence in the village of Onomichi; I even attempted to look up the origins of the “Papashi” surname as it is an unusual spelling for a Japanese family name and could not locate any reputable sources. Papashi truly was and remains an enigma!
 

Installation view of Hiragana Split 
 

Papashi’s paintings entered Leonovich’s collection via her godmother who lived and worked in Japan. Not one to kowtow to mainstream Art World trends, Leonovich found extraordinary potential in publicly exhibiting the paintings of a Japanese artist whose personal and professional histories are shrouded in total mystery. I had the great privilege of speaking with Leonovich about specifically what it was that attracted her to Papashi’s art. Since she is first and foremost an artist, Leonovich went into great detail about how Papashi’s fluid, swirling, and cascading strokes of color and semi-figurative elements are an energetic amalgam of harmony, chaos, and dreaminess.

If only I recorded Leonovich’s commentary as she made such fabulous painterly gestures when theorizing Papashi’s working methods. All of this wound up leading to both Leonovich and myself dancing in front of one of the acrylic paintings as she exuberantly remarked upon the musicality behind Papashi’s pulsating forms! During another visit to the gallery, a contemporary artist from Berlin, Susanne Weber-Lehrfeld, conversed with me about the vitality of Papashi’s colors and her admiration for the rawness of approach - right down to the fact that these paintings are stapled onto the walls as opposed to being encased in a frame.
 

Jake Michael Singer, Fresh Murmur, 2025

I do not want to neglect the fact that this exhibition also features two sculptures by the Cape Town and Istanbul-based artist, Jake Michael Singer. These semi-abstracted / semi-figurative metallic sculptures each resemble either a magnificent bird in flight or an angel thrusting its wings. The bluish-green coloring of Fresh Murmur and the purple Heart Murmur are the perfect coloristic and physical complements to Papashi’s paintings. Leonovich mentioned that there is a dichotomy or yin-and-yang dialogue that naturally emanates between the artists: woman and man, painting and sculpture, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, etc. 

It is quite common for one to attend an exhibition on an up-and-coming artist who has some kind of background to be read about, but it is quite another to visit the show of a deceased artist whose life is in near-complete obscurity and it is literally their art that speaks for their existence. An absolutely smashing, rare, one-of-a-kind exhibition that does not come around very often! 

4. Lucas Foglia: Constant Bloom at Fredericks & Freiser (on view through May 31, 2025)

Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983), (left) Parsa and Arda at Polarhagen Farm, Norway, 2023, pigment print in walnut frame, and (right) Painted Lady Butterfly on Lavender, France, 2023, pigment print in walnut frame

“A breath of fresh air” is an expression I automatically ascribe to the photographer Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983), whose current show at Fredericks & Freiser is a poetically moving journey across geographies. This exhibition is the result of a well-deserved Guggenheim Fellowship that Foglia received in 2024. Nature, still life, and genre scenes are all brought together in an inviting atmosphere in which we, the viewers, are led on a transnational voyage based on the migratory patterns of the painted lady butterflies. According to the Canadian-based non-profit Monarch Butterflies, this species of butterfly is a symbol of “the marvels of nature and the interconnectedness of all living beings.”

Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983), Painted Lady Butterfly in a Camel Skull, Jordan, 2022, pigment print in walnut frame.
 

There is an optimistic tone to the exhibition with many of the photographs as one will find images of the painted lady butterfly going about its business in the most gorgeous locales: a lavender field in France, the desert plateaus of Morocco, or a glacier in Switzerland. Of course, the show’s theme creates a balance in giving equal attention to tragedy. One of Foglia’s photographs is a ground-level view of a pot of wilting flowers before multiple caskets - a memorial to refugees who lost their lives while attempting to start a new beginning in Italy. The tragedy of the natural world is also addressed as seen in a photo of a painted lady butterfly resting on the skull of a camel on the sands of Jordan. 

Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983), (left) Painted Lady Butterfly on a Pincushion, Spain, 2021, pigment print in walnut frame, and (right) Sara Eating Breakfast, Italy, 2021, pigment print in walnut frame.

Hope is an overt theme that makes itself crystal clear in Foglia’s photography. For even in the midst of pain and suffering, there is a sense of community, the comfort of nature, and an unwavering spirit. Foglia’s breathtaking photographs made me wish that Sir David Attenborough could be in the room providing a documentary-style narration of the symbiotic relationship between the enduring human spirit and the gentle tenacity of our fluttering insect friends. 

5. Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama at Paula Cooper Gallery (on view through June 14, 2025)

Atsuko Tanaka (Japanese, 1932 - 2005), 2001-F, 2001, acrylic lacquer on canvas.

Run, don’t walk to Paula Cooper Gallery because Japanese art lovers are in for a special exhibition: a joint show on Atsuko Tanaka (1932 - 2005) and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), two powerhouse female artists of Japan’s postwar generation. Furthermore, this exhibition is a reengagement with the artists who were each shown in earlier solo exhibitions at Paula Cooper: Yayoi Kusama: The 1950s and 1960s, Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Papers in 1996 and Atsuko Tanaka: Paintings and Drawings, 1980 - 2002 in 2004.

  Peter Moore (British, 1932 - 1993), Yayoi Kusama Installation, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1966, gelatin silver print.

Now viewers have the opportunity to discover remarkable parallels between the Matsumoto-born Kusama and Osaka-native Tanaka. A careful selection of early, mid, and late-career paintings by the artists are used to guide one in ascertaining how Kusama and Tanaka - who never collaborated - each forged similar yet distinct abstract styles and accomplished careers.

Before even getting to the paintings, a wall of photographs by the entrance demonstrate how these artists were heavily preoccupied with performance: Tanaka’s Electric Dress (Denkifuku) in which she dons a heavily-layered costume of several hundred tube lights and light bulbs from 1956, and Kusama in an early iteration of her Infinity Mirror Room from the 1960s. The Tanaka images were especially revelatory as her Electric Dress predated the performative fashion of Yoko Ono and her Cut Piece demonstration (1964). Additionally, Tanaka was a member of the experimental Gutai Art Association while Kusama was a fixture of Fluxus and the Happenings in New York.
 

Kiyoji Otsuji (Japanese, 1923 - 2001), Atsuko Tanaka wearing Electric Dress, 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, 1956 - 1957, gelatin silver print.

The main focus of the exhibition are the abstract paintings of Kusama and Tanaka - the former with her seas of dots and strokes, and the latter’s preoccupation with circles linked by an intricate system of lines. Kusama’s art is inextricably tied to her mental health struggles, hallucinations, and obsessiveness. Tanaka’s are bound up in an infatuation with technology, particularly that of electricity, which explains why her paintings recall an electrical grid system comprised of wires and bulbs. Subsequently, repetition is a key commonality - perhaps, the most important one - that is underscored between the artists’ stylistic and thematic predilections. 

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929), Accretions II, 1967, oil on canvas.

Though Tanaka remained in Osaka and did not move abroad like Kusama, Paula Cooper cleverly showcased the international reach Tanaka exerted in the Art World comparable to her contemporary. Three small-scale watercolor paintings on rice paper are included as these works were gifts she created for the American artist Sam Francis (1923 - 1994), one of the central figures of the highly influential California modern art scene. 

Industrialization undergirded the visual and materialistic motivations behind Tanaka’s works, from her pictorial references to electricity to her adoption of glossy vinyl paint in the 1970s. Though one does not typically associate Kusama with industrialization, the all-over accretion of dots, strokes, and phalluses can be read in a similar light on contextual grounds. Kusama’s use of repetition in her works of the 1950s & 1960s coincided with the post-World War II economic boom that swept Japan and the United States - two countries that subsequently underwent rapid industrialization. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Kusama’s additive process of applying strokes or cut-outs can be thought of in terms of the consumer-driven, high-tech, commercial economies that arose in the East and the West, which is akin to Tanaka’s electrical references and switch to a commercially-based paint. 

 Installation view of Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama at Paula Cooper Gallery, Chelsea

I feel that this is the perfect example of an exhibition whose curatorial methodology matches that of a Venn Diagram in articulating the commonalities among two unique yet equally fascinating figures of Postwar Japanese art.  WM