ArtSeen
LUC TUYMANS
By Greg LindquistLuc Tuymans (b. 1958) is best known for his captivatingly blurry, washed-out, and bleached representational paintings with latent yet powerfully evocative conceptual agendas. His traveling retrospective, which I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, its second destination, is an ambitious exhibition that asks crucial questions across the development of Tuymans’s oeuvre: Where do formal and conceptual shifts occur in his career and how does one affect the other?
FRANCIE SHAW Weights and Measures
By Craig OlsonWith Weights and Measures, Francie Shaw continues her evolution into a remarkably poignant interpreter of images. This collection of 36 drawings uses black ink and brush on white paper as the only tools for her malleable, sparse drawings.
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL Not a Solitary Sign or Inscription to Even Suggest an Ending
By Natalie HaddadSince his graduation from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005, Tris Vonna-Michell has traveled to the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and various other locations to seek out histories based on personal, and often autobiographical, inquiries.
DUNCAN CAMPBELL Make It New John
By Sophie LandresStainless steel body panels, aluminum V6 engine, leather interior, and gull-wing doors that lift like an eagle taking flight, the ill-fated DeLorean DMC-12 achieves a mythological presence in Make it new John, Duncan Campbell’s recent film and corresponding installation at Artists Space.
REFLECTIONS ON THE WARRIOR ARTIST
By Robert C. MorganUtagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 –1861) is a major printmaker who worked during the late Edo period in early 19th century Japan. He is associated with the movement known as Ukiyo-e or “floating world,” which produced woodcut prints for the common class.
AND ONE MORE THING: DAVID HAMMONS, MELVIN WAY, WALTER SIPSER, ANDREW CASTRUCCI
By Geoffrey Cruickshank-HagenbuckleLooking like some mongrel mix of Lettrisme recalling Raymond Lull, more formal than abnormal, Walter Sipser’s pen and soft lead opaque icons pose convincingly as prints but are instead hand drawn. Before apprenticing himself to encryption, did he plan to lay siege to the city of Richmond?
DAWN CLEMENTS
By Thomas MicchelliDawn Clements burrows into her drawings with an alarming relentlessness. The indelibility of her ink strokes, scraping out every detail she can catch, mirrors the fatalism of her conceptual path: once she starts, there is no turning back.
BROOKLYN DISPATCHES: Dog Years
By James KalmOne of the attractions of art is its ability to present truth, and speak it to the face of power. Likewise, the pill who points out that the emperor has no clothes wins kudos from classmates, but now that we’re out of school, cultural institutions and the art market are our classrooms.
TATIANA TROUVÉ
By Kara L. RooneyEntering Trouvé’s modular, multi-room installation is like delving into four dimensions simultaneously: Superman’s arctically isolating Fortress of Solitude; the acid-gothic sculptural machinations of Banks Violette; Albrecht Dürer’s perspectivally tweaked reality; and the post-WWII asylum—all dashed with narrative overlays of Jorge Luis Borges and Jungian psychoanalysis.
TEN YEARS HUNTING [PART I]
By Charles SchultzIt’s not for nothing that psychologists refer to the first four or five years of childhood as the formative years. In tandem with the development of motor skills and the ability to use language, a child cultivates a sense of self—the nascent stage of forming a personal identity. The same might be said for an art gallery.
LIL PICARD AND COUNTERCULTURE NEW YORK
By Valery OisteanuLil Picard was an unusual hybrid of the European and American avant-garde, combining the urban sophistication of a Berlin intellectual of the 1920s and 30s with the American bohemianism of the 1950s and the rising feminist art of the 60s.
SI YEON KIM Barricade
By Patricia MilderSeoul-based artist Si Yeon Kim places everyday objects into symbolic arrangements so that they become personally poignant melodramas with heavy cultural connotations.
JOAN JONAS Mirage
By Cora FisherWhen Jonas performs on video, her force of consciousness bubbles to the surface of the medium. Against the will of the censor, she pries open its logic with her own concatenations.
SHARING THE LIGHT: ALAN UGLOW’S GENEROUS ECONOMY OF BEAUTY
By Joan WaltemathTwo museum exhibitions in Germany give an in-depth look at the work of a New York painter, Alan Uglow.
