Hyperallergic

This month, we recommend shows by several artists who provide singular, visionary, and radical ways of viewing the world — and imagining new ones. Madam X’s enigmatic diagrams on view at the Philosophical Research Society draw on myriad spiritual traditions to wrestle with the weight of existence, while Ramekon O’Arwisters’s tangled and knotted constructions reflect the complexities of his lived experience as a queer Black man in America. Carole Caroompas reworks a beloved 19th-century novel as an exuberantly subversive series of paintings. A show of seminal work from Robert Irwin captures the moment he turned away from object-making in favor of the perceptual and experiential. Finally, a Robert Colescott show curated by Umar Rashid sets up a dialogue between the two artists who, in their own ways, reconfigure dense webs of historical and cultural sources in service of alternate versions of reality.

March 30, 2025