ArtSeen
Christian Marclay
By Amanda GluibizziAppearing simultaneously at the 2019 edition of the Venice Biennale and this fall at Paula Cooper Gallery, Christian Marclay’s 48 War Movies (2019) and an accompanying series of woodblock prints called “Screams” (all 2018 or 2019) testify to the strangely complex relationship we have with war and its imagery.
Ed Clark
By Louis BlockFor the past half-century or so, Ed Clark has been making plastic paintings that live up to the name.
Doron Langberg: Likeness
By Osman Can YerebakanThe possibility of a queer visuality unfettered by ideas of representation is at the forefront of Doron Langberg’s debut exhibition, Likeness, at Yossi Milo Gallery.
Sky Hopinka at the Poor Farm
By Frani O'TooleSoon they’ll be salting the roads to Little Wolf, Wisconsin,
Josiah McElheny: Observations at Night
By Charles SchultzThe evening of September 11th I sat on the smooth concrete floor of James Cohan’s new gallery in Tribeca to take in a performance by Hamid Al-Saadi and Amir ElSaffar.
Yasmin Kaytmaz: Hippocrene Runs Dry
By William CorwinLike a trail of breadcrumbs, Yasmin Kaytmaz leaves a succession of faux fragments
Morehshin Allahyari: She Who Sees the Unknown
By Joel KuennenRadical empathy has emerged as a strategy to reorient a culture of systemic disaffection created by the alienation of capitalism.
Allan Sekula: Labor’s Persistence
By Brett WallaceInside Allan Sekula’s exhibition, Labor’s Persistence at Marian Goodman Gallery, the five major works were unified by the artist’s exploration of working-class labor and ideology through descriptive photographic and textual accounts intended to open political dialogue.
The Aerodrome
By William DavieBefore Ikon Galley’s exhibition The Aerodrome—An exhibition dedicated to the memory of Michael Stanley, Stanley’s contributions to the British arts scene were often spoken of in contemplative tones as a result of his suicide at the age of 37.
Kyle Breitenbach: When the Leaves Come Down
By Nicholas HeskesThe mystery of alchemy is more appealing than its promise of truth.
Keith Tyson: Life Still
By Daniel PatemanThe still life painting—that most quotidian of art genres—is given a modern makeover in Hauser & Wirth’s latest exhibition
At Baselitz Academy
By Richard ShiffTwo years ago, speaking from his studio, Georg Baselitz said that he felt “no more aggression” and had “nothing to prove.”
Stephen Milner: A Spiritual Good Time
By J CStephen Milner’s appropriated images culled from surf and gay porn magazines pre-dating 1990 re-code the concept of boys club from frat house basement to queer-inclusive activity meet-up.
About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging
By Lisa E. BloomWorking with the constraints of limited space and resources, two Berkeley professors, Lauren Kroiz and Leigh Raiford and their graduate students began with the challenge: what if the museum could be viewed “as a space of care” rather than as an institutional setting that typically excludes and marginalizes Black art or relegates it to temporary exhibitions designed to “correct” the historical failure of the Black survey exhibition.
Devin Kenny: rootkits rootwork
By W TaoInterdisciplinary artist Devin Kenny uses art as a unique language to articulate systemic structures: invisible logic and motives that dictate power relations as well as recognized narratives.
Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces
By Dan CameronA product of the 1990s upheaval that transformed video art into video installation, Rottenberg’s videos are the focal point of an intricately linked material universe in which architectural elements and room transformations function as added liminal spaces by which one arrives at the screen.
Amy Bennett: Nuclear Family
By Robert R. ShaneAlthough not the central theme in the exhibition, the complexity of motherhood, often eclipsed in the history of art by idealized images of maternity, is one of Bennett’s most important contributions in Nuclear Family, as she illustrates the changing roles mothers play within the “nuclear family” since the term entered popular parlance in the last century.
John Armleder: Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash
By David RhodesJohn Armleder’s second exhibition at David Kordansky is an enveloping experience, and whilst it is true to say that questions are asked of painting’s art historical legacy, the effects of chance and playfulness guarantee an altogether immediate, and pleasurable, involvement for the viewer.
William Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor
By Alfred Mac AdamIn a marginal note, William Hogarth (1697–1764) summarizes his artistic program: “to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer, my picture was my stage.”
Malcolm Morley, Richard Artschwager, and Made in Vermont
By Phong BuiDespite the differences in Morley’s and Artschwager’s stylistic and material approaches, their treatment of plastic representation, case by case explores issues of the phenomenology of perception, memory and displacement, birth and death, manmade and natural environments, the news, consumptive culture, and above all anxiety, destruction and violence. Each carved out a unique synthesis of image and object: both relentlessly and restlessly interrupted the conventions of art—be it subject matter or how an artwork should look according to its surrounding space and the times.
The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement
By Osman Can YerebakanThe Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, a 75-artist exhibition about the history, state, and future of migration thrives through its intricate groupings of artists, juxtaposed to integrate mediums, genres, undertones, and geographies, reasserting the capability of thematic group shows to narrate the evolving yet repetitious fate of human experience.
Joan Jonas: Moving Off The Land II
By Barry SchwabskyJonas became a pioneer of video installation as a genre, not necessarily intending it, but by responding to changes in technology and the circumstances of exhibition-marking as they’ve shifted over the decades—and to her own developing sense of space.
Jannis Kounellis
By Toby KampsLike the poems of another Greek exile, Constantine Cavafy, Kounellis’s works are spare and direct with no fancifying inflections of materials or handling.
Venice 2019: A Few Reflections
By Barbara LondonLast May, I traveled to Italy for the opening of the 2019 Venice Biennial, ready to catch up with colleagues and experience the latest artwork from around the world. Eager to check the pulse of art and technology, I knew to anticipate works in the evolving fields of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America
By Mark BlochT.C. (Tommy Wayne) Cannon painted Native American portraits outside against skies with potato-shaped clouds and in interiors against “magical circle” wallpaper patterns with unlikely color combinations. He transformed the garments and neckwear of his subjects to bring out the gravitas from their faces and posture, creating jolting, psychedelic yet monumental tributes, political in their mere existence and as solid and American as Mount Rushmore.
Monique Mouton: Scene
By David RhodesThis particular group of works presenting a constellation of relations as if staged for the duration of this particular presentation.
Leonardo da Vinci's Saint Jerome
By Brandt JunceauThe panel is more than precious; it is a relic, not of the saint, but the artist. The installation presumes that we will understand it to be a masterpiece, one of only six securely attributed to Leonardo’s hand.
Bel Canto: Contemporary Artists Explore Opera
By Kathy BrewBel Canto: Contemporary Artists Explore Opera features eight contemporary artists in a range of interdisciplinary work who explore ideas within the tradition and aesthetics of the opera.
Ralston Crawford: Torn Signs
By Louis BlockThe exhibition foregrounds Crawford’s projects in other media (photography, printmaking, and film) alongside the larger scale oil paintings for which he is known.
Daria Martin: Tonight the World
By tamara suarez porrasDaria Martin’s exhibition at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Tonight the World, presents a journey through the dreams of her maternal grandmother, Susi Stiassni (1923–2005). Stiassni ventured into Jungian psychoanalysis in the 1970s, recounting and transcribing over 40,000 dreams in a daily writing practice. Amounting to over 20,000 pages of writing over the course of 37 years, these “dream diaries” became Martin’s source material for the exhibition.
Alicja Kwade: ParaPivot
By Ann C. CollinsIn two large-scale sculptures, ParaPivot I (2019) and ParaPivot II (2019), she erects a series of black powder-coated steel frames ranging from 8 to 12 feet high, which intersect at their bases and fan out in different directions, forming an array of geometric shapes that shift and change with an almost kinetic quality as viewers wander between and around them.
Yun Hyong-Keun: A Retrospective
By Robert C. MorganUpon entering the ground floor of the fabulous Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, visitors encounter a series of sparsely hung “portals”—a term the artist used to identify paintings with spatial openings structured between various mixtures of burnt umber and ultramarine blue. For Yun, these colors symbolically represent the earth and sky.
Jay DeFeo: Depicting with Abandon
By Clifford RossDeFeo was an artist who consistently explored her fascination with the real world—its lines, shapes, colors, and atmospheres, its organization—with an unmitigated desire to express her feelings about it.
