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

The poetic stillness with which C'naan Hamburger renders her streetscapes might seem foreign to any New Yorker who has had the displeasure of experiencing scaffolding going up. Yet that's the mood of "14 Stations," meticulous pen-on-paper drawings unfurling that process, a riff on the narrative painting conventions that portray the crucifixion. Hamburger's version is just as devotional, rendering a quotidian element of street life in exacting detail.

That reverence continues across six small egg tempera paintings that depict the minutiae of maintenance the city undergoes daily, largely unnoticed - the superficial touch-ups of caution lines on subway steps, the indeterminate electrical repair that erupts in crosswalks. Hamburger's pictures are less about the veneration of labor - no one is ever working too hard - than our delusive attempts at resisting nature's course. Deterioration is guaranteed, death is inescapable. Like the warped skull haunting Holbein's "The Ambassadors," Hamburger's heap of construction barriers are an allegory that's invisible until it isn't.

Hamburger has a delicate touch, and her compositions float together airily, bringing to mind the romantic landscapes of the Hudson River School, as if Asher B. Durand had painted ConEd trucks. Just as romantic is her decision to grind material scraped from her sites into pigment, charging her paintings with a talismanic power (most punkishly in "Wall Power" (2024), which samples a wall of the Breuer Building). It's a choice that both hastens the disintegration of her subjects, however imperceptibly, and heartbreakingly underscores their vulnerability.