Kindly Bent to Ease Us

“Kindly Bent to Ease Us,” an exhibition of paintings by Leidy Churchman, is at Mary Boone Gallery through July 28. Churchman envisioned these works as a comment on “what’s lost and found in the process of translation”; they borrow from images in print and online, altering and reframing them. “If I choose an image and use it to make a painting, people already know that image or something like it and have a relationship with it,” he wrote in Spike in 2015. “We can then study the image together. You’ve seen it but you might not have really been able to get closer, because the devices we use separate our bodies from all these pictures … For me, to paint a thing is really to consume it, to eat it.”