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 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.
- 01Built to LastKathryn Markel Fine Arts · 529 W 20th StreetCloses Sat Sep 19
- 02Oscar OiwaGOCA by Garde · 515W 23rd StreetCloses Oct 3
- 03Yvonne Jacquette From the AirKarma · 549 West 26th StreetCloses Oct 31
- 04ShorelinesHirschl & Adler · 41 East 57th StreetCloses Tue Sep 8
Yvonne Jacquette From the Air
Shorelines
Built to Last
Oscar Oiwa