Lothar Osterburg at Pamela Salisbury and 'Spillover' and 'Promenade' at Hessel Museum of Art.

Lothar Osterburg: A Celebration of the Small, at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, N.Y., through June 9, 24.

 Installation view of Lothar Osterburg: A Celebration of the Small, with The Tower of Babel (2023). Photo courtesy Pamela Salisbury Gallery. 

This impressive show, Lothar Osterburg: A Celebration of the Small, is actually a very big exhibition filling the Warren Street spaces and all four floors of the sprawling Carriage House annex of the Pamela Salisbury Gallery. Constituting a retrospective of works by the German-born, upstate New York resident, who teaches printmaking at Bard College, the show features dozens of sculptures, dioramas, photo works, films, prints, and a wide ranging series of black-and-white photogravure pieces with images that have an antique feel. He prefers low-tech constructions, although a series of works made of rows of books whose pages are carved out and replaced with dollhouse-like miniature interiors viewed though a glass oculus, are precisionist to say the least. No figures appear in the work, and each piece conjures a rather melancholy and ethereal atmosphere redolent of the past.

“My work is about memory,” Osterburg explained in a recent artist presentation at TSL in Hudson. Born in 1961, and raised inland in northern Germany, the artist’s first glimpse of the ocean was the North Sea, which made an indelible impression on the budding young artist that has stayed with him  throughout his career. Old ships sailing upon roiling seas appear in many works, and he has created a  series of small 3-D boats in a variety of found materials. Towering architectural structures, such as his monumental sculpture made of paper and wood, The Tower of Babel, constructed on site inside the elevator shaft in the Carriage House, resemble at once archeological ruins and fantastical, futuristic structures—albeit in some state of decay. While the works on view here are clearly very personal to Osterburg, he proposes on some level a sense of a universal past—one without reference to specific incidents or singular moments in time. — David Ebony

Spillover and Promenade at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, through May 26, ‘24.

Spillover, Installation view, Lőrinc Borsos, Tron in Landscape, 2022-23, part of Narnia is a Lie, Hessel Museum, 2024. Photo David Ebony

These two effervescent group exhibitions, Spillover and Promenade, at the Hessel Museum of Art, offer a memorable engagement with the trendiest of contemporary art trends. Spillover is an exceptionally fine presentation of eleven curatorial projects by 2024 graduates of the Center for Curatorial Studies, with oversight by program director and chief curator Lauren Cornell, and CCS executive director Tom Eccles. Each project is a coherent exhibition unto itself, featuring some pieces by well-known artists garnered from the Hessel Museum’s collection of over 3,000 contemporary works, plus outside loans, and some produced in direct collaboration with the artists. Among the highlights, Carboniferous Love, curated by Clara von Turkovich, has a taut environmental theme, with a graphite work, Map (2024) by artist and theorist Mira Dayal near the show’s entrance, covering the floor in slippery, silvery black. Narnia is a Lie, organized by Lili Rebeka Tóth and presented in darkened galleries, introduces to the U.S. the electronics-centered work of Hungarian duo Lőrinc Borsos. A glittering ruby high heel shoe spinning on a circular platform is just one of numerous furtive pieces here.  

 Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Installation view, 2024, showing works by Zohra Opoku, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Kihinde Wileyand Deana Lawson. Photo: David Ebony. 

Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection handsomely highlights works in the collection heralding the arrival of Spring, with major examples by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Kehinde Wiley, and Samuel Fosso, appropriately featuring floral motifs of some kind. Curated by Lucas Ondak and Luke Whittaker, this exhibition is especially notable as the museum debut of some of the Hessel’s latest acquisitions. Particularly outstanding here are photo collages with 24-karat passages, by Lina Iris Viktor, and Zohra Opoku, with a particularly striking sculptural work of a bronze face mask and hand resting on a linen pillow suspended by wires from the gallery ceiling. — David Ebony