Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now

Through April 7. The Ukrainian Museum, 222 East Sixth Street, Manhattan; 212-228-0110, theukrainianmuseum.org.

If you know the name Maria Prymachenko, it might be because in February 2022, Russian forces attacked a Ukrainian museum that housed 14 of her paintings. People saved her art from the blaze, and Prymachenko — a cultural icon in Ukraine — became an international symbol of a nation’s resilience.

In a way, this is fitting, since her exuberant art is allegorical and filled with allusions to folk tales. But it has also perhaps flattened her. If before she “was regarded as a benign, cheery folk artist,” as one critic put it, lately she’s been seen as an antiwar beacon of hope.

The show “Maria Prymachenko: Glory to Ukraine” suggests a more complex reality. The largest exhibition of her work outside of Europe, it features over 100 paintings, embroideries, ceramics and wooden plates. Prymachenko mostly painted flora and fauna, real and imagined, from proud peacocks to flowers with eyes and multiheaded beasts. Her style is cartoonish; her works patterned and repetitive, almost psychedelic.

Prymachenko, who was born in 1909 in Bolotnya, a village near Kyiv, survived a lot: polio, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the deaths of her husband and brother in World War II, and Russification. You wouldn’t immediately know this from her art, which vibrates with playful energy. But there’s mania, too, in the surrealism of her images and the way her landscapes’ almost eruptive states of bloom. More pointed works, such as “War Is Horrible” (1968) — which shows a beast filled with the heads of other animals — seem like the flip side to national paeans like “A Ukrainian Palianytsia” (1984), which depicts a couple holding up the titular loaf of bread. Prymachenko died in her hometown in 1997.

“Glory” is an apt word here — not in the patriotic sense of the show’s title, but in tribute to Prymachenko, whose talents demonstrate that she was weirder and more worldly than she gets credit for.

Khadim Ali

Through April 6. Aicon, 35 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 212-725-6092, aicon.art.

Like Prymachenko, Khadim Ali also imagines creatures, although from a different time and place. The artist, who grew up in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border, comes from a family of Hazaras, a group persecuted by the Taliban. As a child, he was enchanted by his grandfather reciting verses from the “Shahnameh,” an illustrated Persian epic poem. As a teenager, Ali worked on propaganda murals in Iran, before returning to Pakistan and studying miniature painting. Eventually he moved to Australia.

You can see these poetic and political influences at play in “Birth of Demons,” his exhibition of paintings and tapestries. A series of delicate gouaches features a character with horns, wings and sagging belly. He represents the vilification of the Hazaras and other refugees, and is named after Rostam, a hero of the “Shahnameh.” Set sometimes against a blood-red background, he seems to be stuck waiting, more pensive than gallant or menacing.

Ali’s tapestries, collaborations with Afghan artisans, steal the show. In these big, dynamic scenes, the traditions of miniature and mural painting combine beautifully via embroidered silk. Two tapestries feature cartoonish jumbles of demons fighting in clouds. The third, “Birth of Demons 7” (2024), depicts a clown leading a procession of angels that carries a soldier-god. Ali’s mythical world mirrors our own: glorified violence is as constant as the weather and there are no heroes coming to save us.

Through March 22. Open Source Gallery, 257 17th Street, Brooklyn, 810-676-8723, open-source-gallery.org.

If our society is sick, then Jody Wood proposes a partial treatment. Her project “Social Pharmacy,” from 2021 onward, invites people to exchange remedies for physical and mental ailments. It takes the form of a small, mobile structure with red walls and wooden shelves, which hold items like herbs, fruits and vegetables. A tag on each explains what it’s for and how it’s used.

Some recommendations are straightforward — ginger tea to ward off colds — while others are delightfully abstract, like a cinnamon stick prescribed “for overthinking.” The pharmacy is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via Wood’s exhibition “Collecting Health,” which also includes photographs, sculptures and video. Visitors are invited to take something and in turn, fill out a questionnaire describing a remedy of their own. Gallery staff then stock it.

Wood works in a lineage of social practice artists trying to reimagine how we relate to one another and by extension, the systems that govern those relations. “Social Pharmacy” elegantly emphasizes that illness is not just a solitary matter, but also bound up with the health of others — a hard lesson of the coronavirus pandemic. By privileging community knowledge, Wood looks for solutions beyond institutions — itself a double-edged remedy. She started the project in New Brunswick, N.J., a city with many hospitals and low vaccination rates. Her video “Against Medical Advice” (2021) features impoverished residents at a food pantry discussing their distrust of the medical establishment. In the face of systemic inequality, community care is empowering, but limited.