Eleanor Cayre’s Yours Truly: Art advisor Eleanor Cayre has opened her third annual Summer show at Nahmad Contemporary on Madison Avenue: Yours Truly, featuring recent self-portraits from 50 artists, most of them created in the last two years, although Wade Guyton’s untitled 2015 work was something Cayre had seen in a French museum and had to track down. “As an art advisor, I work mostly with galleries and collectors,” she told me by phone. “This gives me a chance to work with artists I have a relationship with and ones I want to get to know.”
This is Cayre’s first time flying solo at the Nahmad gallery, where she previously curated two shows, including The Painter’s New Tools—which explored how artists work with new media, like CGI and video—alongside author Dean Kissick. “That show was probably closest to my own taste,” she told me.
The self-portraits that Cayre has assembled are anything but obvious. Take Nate Lowman’s painting of a can of Neutrogena spray-on sunscreen. It’s titled Recalled Sunscreen (Tormented Self Portrait for A.B.), with A.B. standing for Ashley Bickerton, the mixed-media artist who died in November 2022, the year the painting was made. It’s not every day an artist invokes another artist so enigmatically in a self-portrait. Another atypical self-portrait is Stuart Middleton’s Personal effects and things that are biographical in amongst material that might be understood as generic without clear separation under compression (Kebab) from 2024, which is a bar mounted horizontally on the wall with a number of objects impaled upon it like, well, a kebab. Other artists represented include Salman Toor, Henry Taylor, Jordan Wolfson, Issy Wood, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Jonas Wood, Sasha Gordon, Isa Genzken, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Danielle Mckinney, Irene Mamiye, and too many other worthy names to cram in here.