@artforum "Uncanny Interiors," a group exhibition at Nicola Vassell, tackles a genre essential to the evolution of Western painting and the contemporary self. Despite its “traditional" subject matter, the show foregrounds a critical voice: that of Black individuals, for whom the issue of space and interiority has not only been central, but whose avant-gardism in destabilizing space as form is the unsung bedrock of modernism. Taking cues from bell hooks’s 1990 essay "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance," the presentation reveals homemaking as an act of color, shape, sound, feeling, and ultimately beauty, in spite of the wariness and violence that infringes upon its labor... "Works by Henri Matisse and David Hockney highlight the former’s Fauvist sense of color and rejection of realist mimetics, as well as the latter’s celebrated succession to such modernist renderings of life. We are, however, reminded that Matisse’s formal innovations, which Hockney utilized and expanded upon, were the result of the immense influence of Black aesthetics... "Uncanny Interiors" opens the door to various types of insides—physical, psychic, spiritual—which stir as places that exist at the nexus between cultural restoration and reimagination. - @bentleybrown___ Read more in Critic’s Picks of Artforum - Henri Matisse in Uncanny Interiors On view through August 19, 2022 Intérieur, porte ouverte, circa 1920-21 oil on canvas signed henri matisse on the lower right 20 3/4 x 22 7/8 in 52.7 x 58.1 cm 📸: Luis Corzo #henrimatisse @nicolavassellgallery #nicolavassellgallery