What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in July

This week in Newly Reviewed, it’s Walker Mimms on Andrew Wyeth, Zoë Hopkins on Truong Cong Tung and Arthur Lubow on Kyle Dunn.

Tribeca

Enter Andrew Wyeth

Through Aug. 9. Schoelkopf Gallery, 390 Broadway, Manhattan; 212-879-8815; schoelkopfgallery.com.

Before becoming America’s revivalist in the matte tones of egg tempera, Andrew Wyeth debuted at the Macbeth Gallery in 1937, age 20, with watercolor landscapes. Watercolor is cheap and portable, but in pigments that thin each stroke means commitment. Less is more, instinct reigns. Wyeth knew it, and the four early watercolors that kick off Schoelkopf’s mini retrospective — 20 works on paper and canvas — reveal an economy of brush strokes verging on chaos.

His riverbank “Maplejuice Cove” (1942) is a wash of umber diluted almost to off-white. Two swaths of black suggest a near and a far shore, but a few confetti-like details in dry-brush are what turn the empty space into depth. Machine-gun blasts of blue make river stones in a shallow end. Three stiff, grassy strokes convert a patch of blank space into a puddle. Up top, stabs of green and brown become birds in flight once he’s dragged their reflections down into the surface of the river with a speed of hand that seems to match theirs.

Beside fireworks like those, even the mature Wyeth of austere realism looks like a daredevil. In 1972, when he hits a crease in the page during a pencil portrait — one of four in this show — he scrapes his pencil along it to pronounce a wayward strand of the sitter’s hair, the way you’d take a rubbing from a coin. “Left Hook” (1984) is a bleak winter landscape, but blank patches in the dead log at center capture the glare from a sun he has kept out of frame. In the field just beyond the log, Wyeth scrapes a pen nib or other such sharp thing to rake up fresh white pulp from his paper: light glinting off grass.

You’re as old as you feel, and in the deep range of this small show Wyeth’s decades of dry precision owe much to his youthful baptism by water. WALKER MIMMS

Soho

Truong Cong Tung

Through July 27. Canal Projects, 351 Canal Street; canalprojects.org.

The first image that springs to mind at Truong Cong Tung’s small but mighty exhibition, “Trail Dust,” is the human circulatory system. Thin plastic tubes form a web of coils on the gallery floor, evoking veins and capillaries. Though their circuit carries water, not blood, the tubes connect and nourish three small islands of soil-filled platforms filled with sand, gourds and plants.

This installation, titled “The state of absence — Voices from outside” (2020-ongoing), is Tung’s chef d’oeuvre. The work — a homage to the artist’s native Vietnam, its land and its environmental evolution during and after French colonialism and the war with the United States. It entrances the senses with the quiet buzz of life in organic motion: the rush of the silt-brown water, the pungent scent of decomposing plants, the slow scuttle of little insects crawling in the sand. But it is plastic that binds all this, alluding to imbrications between the natural and the manufactured in colonial and post-colonial Vietnam.

Most remarkable in “The state of absence” installation are the dozens of lacquer-coated dried gourds, sourced from Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where Tung grew up and where elders often use gourds for storage, drinking, and music-making. Here, they are laid in the sand, plump with a mixture of seeds from Vietnam and the United States.

Tung flexes his finely tuned painterly muscles in four lacquer paintings, all titled “Shadows in the garden #3,” lustrous scenes of flora and fauna rendered in brown, red and gold.

A video projected on the gallery’s back wall, “The Lost Landscape #1 (2021),” continues to haunt me. Shot at the National Museum of Natural History in France — whose collection includes plants and animals from Vietnam — the video threads together eerie close-ups of the glass eyes of taxidermy animals. Each lifeless gaze suggests the violent subordination and extraction of natural life that attended modern colonialism. “Trail Dust” itself flickers with Tung’s metaphorical gaze, an honest and solicitous regard for the reality of a land, bruised beauty and all. ZOË HOPKINS

Hartford

Kyle Dunn

Through Sept. 1. Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main Street, Hartford; 860-278-2670, thewadsworth.org.

Decaying fruit is a venerable subject for artists, but in Kyle Dunn’s up-to-date version, pears bear supermarket stickers alongside brown spots. Equally of-the-moment: Many of the recent paintings in Dunn’s first museum show cast a tender gaze on an idealized boyfriend in tableaus of queer domesticity.

A young New York-based painter who shows at PPOW, where six of 11 works in this exhibition were on view last year, Dunn harks back to a previous generation of gay artists, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker, who themselves looked to the Italian Renaissance to find inspiration for their glorified renderings of the male body.

Dunn’s field of reference is broad, ranging from “The Legend of Zelda” video games to Pieter Bruegel the Elder (whose “Hunters in the Snow” is quoted here in the 2022 painting “The Hunt”). He takes infectious, virtuosic pleasure in capturing the way light refracts in a cocktail glass or glows from an iPhone.

This hyper-realistic style lends itself to Surrealism. In “Sea Bell” (2024), a framed painting of a heron devouring a small fish, which hangs on a wall, resonates with a frog chasing a moth over the torso of a naked, sleeping young man. The view is through a door frame (over which a giant moth is resting) and behind it, a window frames the red orb of a sun in a sky that appears awfully dark for sunset. An empty frame outside the doorway supports a chained bell. Frame upon frame upon frame. Life is but a dream. ARTHUR LUBOW

Last Chance

Chelsea

‘Tabula Rasa’

Through July 26. Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st St., Manhattan; 212–255–1105, paulacoopergallery.com.

This arch and playful show gathers 23 contemporary artists for whom photography isn’t a medium so much as a method. The title work, “Tabula Rasa,” a pivotal 1981 piece by the photo-based conceptualist Sarah Charlesworth, is a cream silk-screen print on white paper that reproduces one of the earliest photographs ever made: a blotchy image of a table setting by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce from 1829. The piece announces a way of appropriating and rephotographing — a chain of references and riffs — which the network of teachers and collaborators here all followed.

The photograph, by its nature, is a translation of its subject, and these artists take that logic as a conceptual method. A photo collage by Sara VanDerBeek, titled “Tabula Rasa II,” includes a postcard of “Tabula Rasa” from a 1997 Charlesworth retrospective. Deana Lawson studied with Charlesworth at the School of Visual Art — in her portrait of a resting woman and baby, the beige den, the snake-patterned fleece blanket and a microsuede couch seem like a setting for the rose-gold pop of the infant’s puffy onesie.

Christopher Williams, who shared Charlesworth’s mentor, Douglas Huebler, is especially meticulous in selecting his subjects. His photograph of a wooden bin of spent pucks of espresso displays an almost fragrant tonal richness to the print — the minute gradations between browns and grays and golds, the shocking highlight of the drawer’s metal handle. Three photographs of still lifes by Luciano Perna (another Huebler student) hang nearby; six scattered lemons and four plants in pots, shot against a velvet black backdrop, waft a sort of reverence for photography itself — whatever profundity resides in these objects for the artist, the intensity of their craft conveys it.

Chelsea

Malcolm Morley

Through Aug. 2. Petzel, 520 West 25th St., Manhattan; 212–680–9467, petzel.com.

Malcolm Morley, a lauded British-born painter sporting photorealist chops, has his first survey in two decades at a Chelsea gallery. With the benefit of loans from major museums, the show traces the arc of his career: from towering 1960s Superrealist paintings of ships and crowds, rendered with nigh photographic fidelity, to energetic 2000s sports scenes (an NFL collision, a fiery motocross stunt) that mimic a camera’s knack for shallow focus and crisp action. In the intervening years, Morley (1931–2018) swung a neo-expressionist eye to sea and sky, portraying blobby mobs of beachgoers and wavy wooden sailboats, sails wagging, that look as though they could wreck on shoals of impasto.

Morley’s fascination with modern transport seems cheerful, but is haunted by models of machines from the world wars. He has a sense for the breathtaking oddness of progress — for example, in “SS Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam,” 1966, a postcard-perfect vision of an ocean liner dwarfs a town.

The sweet spot is the 1970s, when Morley loosened up his strokes, just a little, but stuck to his way of meticulously mapping photographs onto the canvas surface using a grid, square by square. He also started depicting arrangements of toys and pictures — within the pictures. A deliciously blunt rendering of a phone book, decorated with an autumnal river scene, wears a skein of white paint that could either be a faithful depiction of a dirty phone book, or a dirty painting. The soldiers “At a First Aid Center in Vietnam,” from 1971, swim in moss, mud and bruise hues; the mottled off-white border of the painting, and the line down the center, tell you it’s a magazine, painted from life and death.

Chelsea

‘Material World’

Through July 26. Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th St., Manhattan; 212–680–9889, marianneboeskygallery.com.

In advance of her solo show this fall, the painter Gina Beavers has curated a selection of her inspirations. Beavers is known for turning superficial imagery, like Instagram food porn and makeup tutorials, into paintings so thick they threaten to crumble. Likewise, “Material World” dwells in the tension between our visual access to the outside of things and what they’re made of.

Josh Kline’s grid of doughnuts on the wall, with a pair of handcuffs latched through one of their holes, turns out to be cast from pulverized bricks: a transubstantiation of the stereotypical “cop snack” into a rioter’s weapon. Other works slide along the thin edge between goofy prop and mendacious illusion. A pair of grisly sculptures by Andrew Roberts displays severed silicone human limbs, lined with real tattoos. The ink is really in there, not just laid on top, and the effect is visceral.

On the brighter side, a pastel drawing by Sarah Meyohas titled “Still Life With Left Hands” beams with crystalline lightness. The composition features a hand picking up one of two pale copies of itself in front of a forested backdrop — a meditation on, well, hands and the marks they make — except that the…