SEPTEMBER ART

Also Worth Chelsea · 4 Stops · 2-3 hours · 2 Closing

03 The City Seen From Above

Yvonne Jacquette spent fifty years chartering planes to paint New York from the air — a posthumous solo at Karma on what the city looks like when you remove the ground. A focused Chelsea afternoon on elevated perspective as a design problem.

Yvonne Jacquette From the Air
Anchor · Yvonne Jacquette From the Air · Karma

Yvonne Jacquette died in 2023, and this posthumous Karma solo is the right occasion to look hard at what she actually did. From 1969 onward she chartered flights, claimed empty offices in the World Trade Center and Empire State Building, and spent decades painting cities from above — not the omniscient God’s-eye view of a satellite image, but the disorienting low-altitude oblique of a window seat, nose pressed to the glass, city tilted below at an angle that makes the grid legible and personal at once. Her composite technique — sketching from multiple passes over the same city and then combining the perspectives into a single canvas — means every painting is already an argument that the city can’t be seen from one fixed point, that truth requires contradiction and overlap. That is an architectural argument before it’s a painterly one. The city as a system only apprehensible through multiple sections, multiple datum lines, multiple moments of looking. Stand in front of a Jacquette nocturne and notice how she handles light: the city below as pure illuminated pattern, the grid dissolved into color and mark, the architecture reduced to its luminous signal. It’s the section drawing at night, the city diagrammed by its own light. A focused solo show doesn’t need a loop — it needs an hour of sustained looking. The satellites here (Public Pool, Oiwa) are lighter fare; let the Jacquette be the reason you go.

Chelsea · 4 Stops · South to North
  1. 01Built to LastKathryn Markel Fine Arts · 529 W 20th StreetCloses Sat Sep 19
  2. 02Oscar OiwaGOCA by Garde · 515W 23rd StreetCloses Oct 3
  3. 03Yvonne Jacquette From the AirKarma · 549 West 26th StreetCloses Oct 31
  4. 04ShorelinesHirschl & Adler · 41 East 57th StreetCloses Tue Sep 8
The Route · 4 Shows
01 / Karma

Yvonne Jacquette From the Air

Yvonne Jacquette From the Air · Karma
549 West 26th Street Gallery site → Walk to here →
Yvonne Jacquette From the Air
02 / Hirschl & Adler

Shorelines

Shorelines: Views from the Edge · Hirschl & Adler
41 East 57th Street Closes Tue Sep 8 Gallery site → Walk to here →
Shorelines: Views from the Edge
03 / Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

Built to Last

Built to Last: Fifty Years of Kathryn Markel Fine Arts · Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
529 W 20th Street, Ste. 6W Tue – Fri 10am – 6pm Sat 11am – 6pm Sun & Mon closed Closes Sat Sep 19 Gallery site → Walk to here →
Built to Last: Fifty Years of Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
04 / GOCA by Garde

Oscar Oiwa

Oscar Oiwa: The Supplemental Sublime · GOCA by Garde
Oscar Oiwa: The Supplemental Sublime
Walk the Route