This year got off to a tough start in the art world. A not-insignificant number of people got trapped in the Caribbean after the Maduro extraction created a cascade of missed flights, leaving some industry swells stuck in paradise a bit longer than planned. The inconvenience should have been little cause for panic—after all, the art world always takes a while to get back up and running in January—but with a round of openings late last week, there is now a surprising amount of art to see around town, including the debut at White Cube of surrealist-inspired French artist Marguerite Humeau; a show of the late work of fellow abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace; a show of William Eggleston’s dye transfer prints at David Zwirner; as well as a great installation of Dan Flavin’s beautiful light sculptures, or “grids.” These are just a handful of an entire menu of options to entertain yourself here in New York, should the president make good on his saber-rattling over Greenland and shut down the airspace over the Atlantic.

My first encounter with Humeau’s work—and the enthusiasm for it among the collecting class—occurred more than a year ago, when I visited Howard Rachofsky, the influential Dallas collector. Last year, Rachofsky featured a “room-filling installation” of one of Humeau’s “mythological ecosystems,” which had drawn attention at the Venice Biennale in 2022. At White Cube, the 40-year-old artist has taken the single-themed installation conceit one step further by treating the entire two-story exhibition space as a single expression of the work she made in response to a trip to West Papua in New Guinea. There, she explored a cave filled with stalactites, stalagmites, and translucent fauna thriving far from the light, as well as bats.

Humeau’s art takes a story or experience—a trip to a bat cave in the South Pacific, for instance—and turns it into both a fictional world and a metaphor for our own experiences. She’s a contemporary surrealist in the sense that she is interested in emotions and ideas that cannot be reached through reasoning. She’s also willing to imagine a parallel dreamworld filled with fictional creatures inspired by real ones. You don’t have to be a psychologist to read the dark cave as a metaphor for the human psyche, but what makes Humeau’s work appealing is that her trip through the unconscious isn’t filled with terrors.

Marguerite Humeau, scintille at White Cube, New York. Photo: Frankie Tyska/Courtesy of White Cube

The show begins on the ground floor with several sculptures that recall stalactites, the stone centurions guarding the inner chambers of the cave, surrounded by dark charcoal works on paper in archlike frames. The message is that we’re plunged into darkness with only these hulking sculptures to orient us. Then, upstairs, a more colorful and luminescent world opens up as Humeau creates more works on paper depicting the translucent creatures that inhabit the underwater level of her dark cave. Mounted on small plinths all throughout the upper gallery are sculptures inspired by the bats of the West Papua cave and made from “color-shifting casta glass,” which, the artist said, changes color with different levels of moisture. Offhandedly explaining that bats are “great pollinators,” Humeau postulates through her bat sculptures the idea that “the purest act of love is to become what you pollinate.” Thus, many of her bat forms merge with imagined fruits, tapping into a fundamental surrealist trope of transformation.

Emerging from Humeau’s cave, I made my way across Central Park and down the West Side to see Pace’s show of Richard Pousette-Dart’s late work. Perhaps Humeau’s surrealism was too much on my mind, but as I walked through the exhibition I was reminded that some of the paintings on display in Richard Pousette-Dart: Geometry of Summer were reminiscent of works by Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s great surrealism centennial show, Dreamworld. This was especially true of Golden Door, a work from 1989-90 that is, in many ways, the star of the show. (I toured the show with an art advisor who quickly inquired about the work’s asking price but was told it was already on reserve at more than $700,000.) Alpha Forming, from 1992, and Illumination Square, from 1983, were filled with similar shapes and patterns.

Richard Pousette-Dart, Golden Door (1989-90). Photo: The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation/ARS

Pousette-Dart was a contemporary of the abstract expressionists, but he was not really one of them. First of all, he didn’t drink, which left him out of much of the brawling and contentiousness. Secondly, although Pollock, Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others from that period had wrestled with surrealism throughout the ’30s and ’40s, Pousette-Dart came from another tradition. His father had been an artist, and his intellectual interests were more homegrown than the European yearning of the ab-ex guys. Pousette-Dart was more of a transcendentalist, explained Charles Duncan, who runs the artist’s foundation. His daughter, Joanna, an artist in her own right, and his son, Jon, who led the 1970s Pousette-Dart Band, were on hand for the press preview. Pousette-Dart’s abstract work doesn’t really need a deep intellectual framework to be appealing.

Pace has been representing the artist’s estate for a dozen years. In 2022, the gallery showed work from the 1950s—layered, impastoed canvases that are as intricate as Persian carpets. Much of that detail is muted in these works, which can be too easily described as simply depictions of circles, squares, and ovals that the artist called “stadia.” But the layers remain, resulting in art that is far more engaging than its surface simplicity might initially suggest.

A few blocks south, David Zwirner’s complex of Chelsea galleries is showing works by photographer William Eggleston and minimalist pioneer Dan Flavin. The Eggleston show’s title, The Last Dyes, refers to a series of dye transfer color prints made from Eggleston’s photographs by a master printer using some of the last existing materials made for the process. Dye transfer printing was once a mainstay of commercial work, creating vivid color images for magazines and newspapers. But the technology waned in relevance and became an esoteric option for photographers. Once Kodak started phasing it out in the 1990s, master printers Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli began stockpiling the dyes, paper, and matrix film used in the process. (They walk you through it in this video.)

Dozens of people showed up for a gallery talk that preceded last Thursday’s opening. Most were young enough to have never seen or experienced the dense saturation of dye transfer printing. Eggleston’s photography, which did so much to make color photography an art form, reaches its apogee in these prints. Subtle, moody images glow with a range of colors—look here, here, and here—while others heighten the implicit narrative drama of these photographs. But as impressive as the results of the dye transfer process are, Eggleston’s arresting images are still what makes this work so appealing. He even makes a cameo in the reflection of a car’s bumper.

Color also plays a pivotal role in the Flavin show, a block away. This series of works, which employs Flavin’s signature fluorescent lamps, began in 1976 and grew out of his cornered squares. The grids feature equal numbers of horizontal fixtures facing the viewer, with vertical lamps shining into the corners to create two layers of light. Then there’s the interaction of color: Flavin variously uses pink, yellow, green, blue, and red in these light sculptures. The works come in different sizes and are mounted at different heights within the corners. Like Pousette-Dart’s, Flavin’s works appear quite straightforward, even soothing at first—a tonic from the chaos and stresses of everyday life—but they are also arresting in the intensity and unfamiliarity of the color bath they create.

I plan to go back to the Flavin show anytime I’m in the neighborhood over the next few weeks. It feels like a refuge to me, and with Trump ratcheting up his “end of days” scenarios to avoid the consequences of his own behavior, I’m thinking we’re all going to need as much peace of mind as we can possibly get.

That will have to do for today. I’ll be back tomorrow in the Inner Circle with the Hot 50 for 2025, based on data from ARTDAI. If you’re not already a member, now would be a good time to upgrade.

M