Angela Dela Cruz Art Plastic Wrapped
—Reviews
by Herb Shellenberger
After the virtual screenings and drive-ins of its 2020 edition, this year's New York Film Festival (NYFF) once again rolled through Lincoln Center: a program of screenings, talks, parties, and red carpets that—with the exception of vaccine checks and masks—would not have felt out of place pre-pandemic. Situated as a ... Read more →
Film at Lincoln Center, New York
September 24–October 10, 2021
A horizon line of celestial bodies runs around the first room of Lorna Simpson's solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. In each of these collages, the figure of a woman has been cut away from a printed photographic image and placed over another of a night sky, revealing, ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Los Angeles
September 14, 2021–January 9, 2022
—Reviews
by Jared Quinton
Last month, a strike by over 60,000 members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) was narrowly averted by last-minute negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers; the union will vote to ratify its new contract on Friday. This felt like a fitting backdrop for ... Read more →
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge
October 22, 2021–January 9, 2022
The first painting you see on entering Thomas Dane's white-cube gallery—one of the two Duke Street spaces devoted to Hurvin Anderson's "Reverb"—is called Skylarking (all works 2021). In a two-meter tall canvas, three small figures stand in the lower foreground. A woman, to the left, looks away from the viewer. ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
October 12–December 4, 2021
The central character in Diane Severin Nguyen's video IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), which comprises her institutional debut at Sculpture Center alongside four color photographs, is a Vietnamese girl named Weroníka who literally washes up on the shores of Poland. In the opening sequence, a male voice addresses her ... Read more →
SculptureCenter, New York
September 16–December 13, 2021
—Reviews
by Xenia Benivolski
The seventeenth edition of MOMENTA seeks to map out alternate ways of sensing the natural world and, in return, to allow nature to respond in ways imagined, projected, and real. Curated by Stefanie Hessler with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson, and Himali Singh Soin, the biennale comprises fifteen exhibitions scattered throughout ... Read more →
Darling Foundry, Montréal / Galerie B-312, Montreal / VOX centre de l'image contemporaine, Montréal / Galerie de l'UQAM, Montréal / PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal
September 8–October 24, 2021
A large installation of T-shirts stretched across metal wall studs anchors MoMA PS1's 2021 iteration of "Greater New York." The T-shirts—by the collective Shanzhai Lyric—are the bearers of mistranslations ("Revoltig/No!/Save the Queen"), misspellings ("La Vieen Rose"), juxtapositions that make little to no sense ("LV/Louis Vuitton/Challenger Races for the Americas Cop/For ... Read more →
MoMA PS1, New York
October 7, 2021–April 18, 2022
The word "dreamsickle," like the word "chaos," conjures numerous associations. Referring to the defunct brand of ice pop, it might invoke an orange gleam, a vanilla coat, the state of being frozen; more broadly, a "dreamsickle" suggests a tool used to harvest imaginative content, such as montage or color. In ... Read more →
47 Canal, New York
September 10–October 23, 2021
I am standing in front of two full-length portraits, each just over 200 centimeters tall. The one on the left is a gray-scale screen print; in it, a man in a billowy shirt with a popped collar, jeans, and cowboy boots has emerged from the void to draw a revolver ... Read more →
Gropius Bau, Berlin
September 24, 2021–January 9, 2022
—Reviews
by Valentin Diaconov
Arseny Zhilyaev's "The Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer"—an installation of more than a hundred untitled paintings, wall-texts, neon sculptures, collages, and other works arranged according to a series of speculative concepts that comprises his exhibition at Moscow Museum of Modern Art—seems to have been thought out while stoned. "Imagine TENET," ... Read more →
Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA)
June 25–September 19, 2021
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
Having moved to "the capital of Europe" just last August, I approached the 14th edition of Brussels Gallery Weekend (BGW) aiming not to reckon with changes in the city's cultural landscape, or discern the features of a much-touted "new normal," but to focus on the present. I started with "Generation ... Read more →
Galeria Jacqueline Martins, Brussels / Mendes Wood DM, Brussels / Xavier Hufkens, Brussels / Bernier/Eliades, Brussels
September 9–12, 2021
—Reviews
by Marwa Arsanios
How can one write about Shuruq Harb's work when the work itself is already a wonderful text about the potential of writing? At first glance, one could be fooled into thinking that the artist's questioning of a dominant visual culture tackles its subject straightforwardly, through images, only to be surprised ... Read more →
Beirut Art Center, Beirut
April 12–September 17, 2021
Early in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1941), we are told to get out: "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." Part of Eliot's poem makes up a small fraction of the voiceover narration to Sara Cwynar's six-channel video installation Glass Life (2021), a ... Read more →
Foxy Production, New York
September 1–October 23, 2021
—Reviews
by Oliver Basciano
Over a hundred pairs of inky-black eyes stare out of their glass vitrines. These are Conceição Freitas da Silva's "bugres": the diminutive figures that for over two decades until her death in 1984 the Brazilian artist carved from tree trunks and branches. The short smiles of some disarm, the longer ... Read more →
MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo
May 14, 2021–January 30, 2022
—Reviews
by Felipe Molitor
In recent years, the common description of Brazil as a "polarized" country has shaped a national identity forged in resentment, which only fuels the fantasy that two equally radical factions are in dispute and that one must be annihilated. The 34th Bienal de São Paulo marks an attempt to avert ... Read more →
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo
September 4–December 5, 2021
—Reviews
by Noah Simblist
"The South got something to say!" declared André 3000 at the 1995 Source Awards, after Outkast were awarded Best New Artist to boos from the audience. Goodie Mob, another Atlanta-based hip-hop group, released a track called "Dirty South" that same year. Both these events are cited by curator Valerie Cassel ... Read more →
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia
May 22–September 9, 2021
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Whether measured by visitors, tourist revenue, and column inches, or in the more nebulous terms of intellectual, spiritual, and social understanding, it's worth asking: is growth an inherently good thing for a biennial? Each of these developmental metrics can be applied to the Autostrada Biennale, now in its third iteration, ... Read more →
Autostrada Biennale
July 1–September 11, 2021
—Reviews
by Xenia Benivolski
The slippery narratives in "If Need Be" by Pejvak, an artist collective formed of Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari, blend fact and fiction. Working as intermediaries, Pejvak channel a larger collective—of artists, writers, authors, playwrights, composers, miniaturists, calligraphers, and translators both imaginary and real, dead and alive—with whom they appear ... Read more →
Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt
June 12–August 22, 2021
There's always been a pioneering, even contrarian spirit to the Every Woman Biennial (EWB). Formerly known as the Whitney Houston Biennial, the inaugural exhibition opened in March 2014—in the same week as that year's Whitney Biennial—as a scrappy one-day exhibition in a Brooklyn artist's studio. With works by women artists ... Read more →
Superchief Gallery, New York
June 24–July 3, 2021
—Reviews
by Rachael Rakes
Early on in the preview for sonsbeek20→24, I started thinking about art historian James Elkins's Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (2001). Among the book's touching elements is a seriously brooding table of contents: "Crying at the Empty Sea of Faith," "Crying ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
Naeem Mohaiemen's new film, which lends its title to this solo exhibition of his work at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, opens with an image of a beautiful young woman. Sufiya, played by Kheya Chattopadhyay, is standing with her eyes closed, her head caught between two old-fashioned surgery lights covered in ... Read more →
Bildmuseet, Umeå
February 20–September 5, 2021
—Reviews
by Emily McDermott
Sister Francesca Stanislava Šimuniová gave a speech at the opening of "Ora et lege" ("pray and read"). I can only speculate about what the nun said—she was speaking in Czech—but her presence, along with that of Sister Lucia Wagner, reflected this exhibition's point of departure: It is not critical of ... Read more →
Broumov Monastery, Broumov
July 19–September 30, 2021
At the center of artist and musician Omar Velázquez's first solo museum presentation is a sequence of four landscape paintings. Evocative of eerie, enlarged postcards, they depict disquieting Puerto Rican pastoral scenes. In Baracutey (2020), the slender neck of a white heron is throttled by a loop of metal wire. ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
December 22, 2020–July 18, 2021
Tursic & Mille's Blue Monday (January) (all works 2021), an oil painting on a wood panel, depicts a young woman in a gingham dress sitting at a table. She is staring with confused disgust at her fingers, covered in the blue paint that lies, in a viscous blob, on the ... Read more →
Galerie Max Hetzler, London
June 22–August 7, 2021
—Reviews
by Aaina Bhargava
Hong Kong's art history has traditionally been overshadowed by its status as a trading post for galleries and institutions showcasing internationally established artists. "Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys," an exhibition organized by Asia Art Archive (AAA), brings different stories to light by exploring what archives are and can be. Claire Hsu ... Read more →
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
April 23–August 1, 2021
Summer, muggy and punishing. In another city we might rely on our bodies to index its various accumulations: sunlight, sweat, melanin. Here, we use our cars. Steering wheels and leather seats that scald palms and thighs and—I had forgotten until I found myself hurtling down the highway unable to see—windows ... Read more →
Grey Noise, Dubai
May 31–July 31, 2021
—Reviews
by Oliver Basciano
In early 2020 I attended a protest outside the police headquarters in downtown São Paulo. The small crowd had come to hear from the relatives of nine young people, all Black, who had been killed in a stampede when police fired rubber bullets indiscriminately across a packed baile, a dance ... Read more →
Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo
May 8–July 25, 2021
—Reviews
by Rosanna Mclaughlin
On my way to Tramway in Glasgow's Southside I spot the artist Jenkin van Zyl walking past the McDonald's on Pollokshaws Road. I know it's van Zyl because I watched an online video about his make-up routine. He's wearing prosthetic horns, hooks for hands, and nothing much on the bottom ... Read more →
Celine, Glasgow / Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Glasgow / Glasgow Sculpture Studios / The Modern Institute, Glasgow / The Common Guild, Glasgow / Tramway, Glasgow
June 11–27, 2021
—Reviews
by Lukas Brasiskis
When "Bodies of Water," the 13th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, opened in November last year, it adopted a fluid approach to programming in response to the pandemic. In place of the traditional biennale format was a multi-platform "in crescendo" project comprising three "phases" and lasting a total of eight ... Read more →
Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai
April 17–July 25, 2021
The editors of this publication keep a list of words and phrases that writers are to be strongly discouraged from using. On it are examples of curatorial bluster and authorial overreach ("In these times"), individually blameless words against which one editor maintains a personal vendetta ("oeuvre"), and a selection of ... Read more →
Public Tobacco Factory, Athens
June 11–December 31, 2021
Since the advent of the US's "War on Drugs," popular media representations from Breaking Bad to Intervention to Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew have mirrored the political consensus on drug addiction, reducing it from a deeply political phenomenon driven by markets—both the pharmaceutical industry and underground economies—to a dialectic of ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
April 27–June 12, 2021
I cannot stop thinking about the quality of Maysha Mohamedi's facture. There are a number of different styles of brushstroke—or, perhaps more accurately, applications of paint—deployed in Mohamedi's first solo show at Parrasch Heijnen, but, in particular, there is one type of line, thin and febrile, that struck me as ... Read more →
Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles
May 11–June 11, 2021
—Reviews
by Ewa Borysiewicz
Piotr Łakomy's work reconsiders the classical idea of the human figure as model of good proportion. Recent events have proved beyond any lingering doubt that man is in fact not the measure of all things, and the Polish artist's latest exhibition focuses on feedback loops between human and nonhuman agents ... Read more →
Galeria Stereo, Warsaw
May 8–June 12, 2021
Cameron Rowland's artworks sometimes feel as if they are meant to serve as illustrations for a text or historical thesis. I don't say this as a criticism. His breakout 2016 exhibition "91020000" at Artists Space in New York City contained previously manufactured items—to use the term "readymade" would already begin ... Read more →
Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York
May 1–June 19, 2021
—Reviews
by Frances Whorrall-Campbell
The title for the latest Liverpool Biennial, "The Stomach & The Port," makes direct reference to the tangled threads of global trade and disease transmission, plumbing the history of a city that has, over the last three centuries, found itself at the center of both. The curatorial "entry-points" for the ... Read more →
Bluecoat / FACT, Liverpool / Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
May 20–June 27, 2021
—Reviews
by John Douglas Millar
"Backstage" is the third solo exhibition of Peter Hujar's work to be presented at Maureen Paley's London space since 2008, when the gallery took responsibility for the artist's estate in the UK. The work is presented across two rooms; a larger space that almost exclusively shows portraits of artists from ... Read more →
Maureen Paley, London
May 15–June 13, 2021
The six watercolors that greet the viewer when they enter "loose change," Monika Baer's second exhibition at Greene Naftali, offer a pared-down introduction to the artist's habit of combining heterogeneous elements within the space of a single picture. In one sense, these modestly sized paintings are straightforward: splotchy pools of ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
April 28–June 5, 2021
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
The title of Kamrooz Aram and Iman Issa's "Lives of Forms," and the work included in it, is not inspired by French art historian Henri Focillon's 1934 study Vie des formes, as far as I know. Yet after exploring this kempt trove of paintings, sculptures, and displays, installed in separate ... Read more →
Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt
May 1–August 1, 2021
When an atomic mushroom cloud is reduced to an image, it is more likely to inspire awe than terror. This is the paradox that haunts Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser's the bomb (2021), an immersive adaptation of a 2016 film that transmutes violence into spectacle in an attempt to teach ... Read more →
Pioneer Works, New York
March 19–May 23, 2021
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
Hanni Kamaly's lanky sculptures remind me of something an earth scientist in N. K. Jemisin's 2015 SF novel The Fifth Season said about a mountainous life form: "They are an arcane thing, you understand, an alchemical thing […] Obviously they possess some sort of kinship with humanity, which they choose ... Read more →
Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
April 30–June 20, 2021
—Reviews
by Cora Gilroy-Ware
Viral videos, especially those featuring animals, rarely make a lasting impression. Part of their charm is their innate forgettability. But every now and then there is an exception. In April I came across a video online that has haunted me ever since. Shot by drone from directly above, this 49-second ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, London
April 13–June 5, 2021
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
I still do not really know what color the fitted carpet is that runs through the three floors of 8762 Holloway Drive in West Hollywood. Some shade of sage green, I'd guess, but it could be more lime, maybe more grass, maybe more gold. I do not know because Shahryar ... Read more →
This show of 47 works by 36 artists—41 drawn from Julia Stoschek's collection, augmented by six loans—explores the effects of violence, physical and psychological, on the body and the body politic. The earliest work on display is Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach's Capri (1911), an oil painting showing a sunset burning out ... Read more →
Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin
February 6–December 12, 2021
—Reviews
by Christina Catherine Martinez
It was an emergency. A young brown girl had Tik Tok'd misinformation about the origins of punk. A podcast was assembled. A white expert was brought in. He used to skateboard. He said the girl was "probably a good person" but she didn't know what she was talking about. A ... Read more →
Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
March 13–April 24, 2021
We knew that the onslaught of pandemic art was coming. In Monika Grabuschnigg's "Razed in Isolation," it arrives by way of parable. Here, the cataclysmic disaster is the most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded: Mount Tambora, Indonesia, 1815. Volcanic ash blocks the sun, changing the weather and affecting crops on ... Read more →
Carbon 12, Dubai
March 22–May 10, 2021
—Reviews
by Francesco Tenaglia
Kasper Bosmans has turned the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro outside in. On entering his solo exhibition, the visitor is presented with a reproduction of a stylized city: painted onto the walls in shades of red are two ajar doors; assorted memorabilia can be glimpsed through a window display; a mural resembles ... Read more →
Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan
February 17–June 18, 2021
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
At the entrance to Joachim Bandau's Basel exhibition stands Großes weißes Tor [Large White Gate] (1969/1970), a trio of tall, shiny white columns, each sprouting buffed shoulders and arms that conjoin with its neighbors. Born in Cologne in 1936, Bandau's childhood was marked by World War Two. He determined to ... Read more →
Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
March 2–June 6, 2021
Seung-Min Lee's satirical video installation challenges all claims to virtue, especially those that depend on reductive notions of identity. With four looping videos and their intermingling soundtracks, Lee transforms this subterranean gallery into a bunker where the air is thick with bad vibes. In these works, the artist—who was born ... Read more →
International Waters, New York
February 13–April 4, 2021
The group show "OTRXS MUNDXS," at Museo Tamayo, is a watershed moment: it's the first standalone exhibition in the museum's recent history to focus on young, local artists, all of whom work in Mexico City. Since the museum was founded in 1981, it has largely dedicated its spaces to ... Read more →
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
November 28, 2020–April 18, 2021
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Aesthetic objects of art and design have unruly lives beyond their official business—they exist in homes, imaginations, shopping malls, state politics, and world histories in ways that are promiscuous and difficult to control. Over the last decade, Lucy McKenzie has depicted this pollination between forms in a captivating practice which ... Read more →
Galerie Buchholz, New York
March 5–April 24, 2021
"Have you ever wanted to be… savage… wild… free?" asks a nylon banner in New Red Order's Recruitment Station (2020–21). Mimicking the pat visual grammar of military recruiting tables, the multimedia booth—modelled on a portable trade show exhibit—solicits volunteer "informants" to join the self-styled "public secret society." With plentiful wit, ... Read more →
EFA Project Space, New York
January 30–March 6, 2021
—Reviews
by Christine Han
"PEACE PROSPERITY AND FRIENDSHIP WITH ALL NATIONS," declares a wall piece mounted beside the entrance to Heman Chong's solo show at Singapore's STPI. Written in an all-caps, dripping black font reminiscent of leaking bodily fluids and suggesting violence, the arresting phrase—which lends the exhibition its title—is lifted from a British ... Read more →
STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore
February 20–April 18, 2021
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Much of the material labor that drives the western world—rubbish collection, farming land, fulfilling Amazon Prime orders—is invisible. Or, in its most exploitative forms, has been made invisible, disappeared for consumers' benefit in fortress-like fulfillment centers or unsafe garment factories in the Global South. Yet in Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir's exhibition, ... Read more →
Reykjavík Art Museum, Reykjavík
February 4–May 9, 2021
—Reviews
by Jared Quinton
One Sergei Eisenstein quote I've always remembered: "montage is conflict." It's the ultimate expression of how art can be politically relevant—not by representing or calling for struggle, but by manifesting it formally. Eisenstein argued that while conventional film merely directs emotions, montage directs the entire thought process. A century later, ... Read more →
The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, Chicago
February 6–March 21, 2021
—Reviews
by Nadine Khalil
The second time I visit Hiwa K's retrospective at Dubai's Jameel Arts Centre it's still daylight. In the outside sculpture park is the wood, cement, and metal sculpture One Room Apartment (2008-17), shown at Documenta 14 in Athens. A single staircase leads to a worn mattress on a morbid metal ... Read more →
Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
December 16, 2020–July 24, 2021
Sitting at my desk in London in front of my MacBook, I join a Zoom meeting where I look at four chunky, gray mid-2000s computers arranged on a table in an exhibition space in Berlin. The old computers, grouped in a way that brings to mind an internet café, are ... Read more →
January 28–March 28, 2021
I learned about the life and quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins (the pseudonym of Effie Mae Howard) from my mother. She was an art teacher—my art teacher—and would routinely give short presentations about local artists, usually women, to teach her students about art made in Northern California. I knew that ... Read more →
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco
January 15–February 19, 2021
—Reviews
by Forrest Muelrath
What would it take to simulate the sensorium of a single person on any given day and channel it into my own nervous system? Something like the SimStim technology in William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, or the apparatuses that simulate the sensory experience of other people inhabiting other worlds in ... Read more →
bitforms gallery, New York
January 8–February 20, 2021
—Reviews
by Tal Sterngast
Memory, noted Marguerite Duras, is an attempt to escape the "horror of forgetting." It is also, she argued, a failure: "You know you've forgotten, that's what memory is." The memory of the things we forget we call the unconscious. A group show at Tel Aviv's Dvir Gallery, conceived in homage ... Read more →
Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
December 20, 2020–March 13, 2021
As I left Liu Shiyuan's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, I kept tripping over lines from a Robert Hass poem, "Meditation at Lagunitas": "because there is in this world no one thing/ to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,/ a word is elegy to what it signifies./ […] After ... Read more →
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles
November 14, 2020–January 30, 2021
The propaganda photographs of Chairman Mao, miners, dancers, rallies, and flowers reproduced in Thomas Ruff's "tableaux chinois" look magnificent. Their colors are warm and bright: the grass is the greenest of green, skies blue beyond belief, the Chairman radiates kind-heartedness. Propaganda might at first seem an odd motif for an ... Read more →
David Zwirner, Paris
January 14–March 6, 2021
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
Here's a platitude: all's fair in love and war. This, one could argue, is what Jeffrey Gibson's solo exhibition "It Can Be Said of Them" is all about: the love being queer love, the war being that waged against queer bodies of color who cannot voice their desires without anticipating, ... Read more →
Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
January 9–February 20, 2021
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
A short clip functions as the backdrop for Sable Elyse Smith's multimedia project in three issues—"FEAR TOUCH POLICE"—commissioned by the Swiss Institute and exhibited on a dedicated website. It is roughly 18 seconds of footage showing a solitary car parked by the side of a road at night engulfed in ... Read more →
Swiss Institute, New York
October 26, 2020–January 14, 2022
—Reviews
by Ewa Borysiewicz
In another interminable lockdown, the gentle winter colors are the clearest indications of time passing in Switzerland's Engadin valley. But a show at Monica de Cardenas in Zuoz, a nearly monochrome town surrounded by the silent Alps, offers a very different atmosphere to the world outside: a vivid and humorous ... Read more →
Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz
December 9, 2020–April 3, 2021
—Reviews
by Caleb Azumah Nelson
In the foyer outside Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's exhibition, a question is written on the wall. "What sounds can you hear when you look at the paintings?" Music spills from a hidden speaker; Miles plays. I can hear the way he held his horn, so closely attuned to the spaces he could ... Read more →
Tate Britain, London
December 2, 2020–May 9, 2021
In 2019, two years after completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art and shortly after returning to her native Johannesburg, artist and curator Chloë Reid initiated gallery, gallery as a platform to encourage collaboration among arts practitioners. To date Reid has produced six exhibitions in cooperation with a ... Read more →
the gallery, Johannesburg
November 27, 2020–January 31, 2021
In SoiL (formerly Torey) Thornton's 2019 solo show at London's Modern Art, a Macon, Georgia-area number was spray-painted across one corner of the gallery. In their current show at Essex Street, New York, the same number repeats on a crenellated Formica tear-off flyer, titled Dematerialize now but as self portrait ... Read more →
Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York
November 20, 2020–January 9, 2021
—Reviews
by Oliver Basciano
I've been on the search for a new swimming pool in São Paulo since my regular haunt, Estádio do Pacaembu, was first closed to house a Covid-19 field hospital on the adjoining football pitch. And while cases have eased, the pool remains drained and shuttered as it undergoes refurbishment. The ... Read more →
Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo
November 21–December 5, 2020
How do personal memories become fragments of a political narrative? How can images guide us back through the past? A double-exposed print-out of private and political histories, Aykan Safoğlu's installation Revolving Dreams (Athens/Istanbul, May 4-7, 2006) (all works 2020) features a series of images suspended from invisible threads. Pages from ... Read more →
Kıraathane, Istanbul
November 13–December 4, 2020
—Reviews
by Jessica Caroline
Ambera Wellmann's roses are not sick. They are not exactly well, either. The paintings in "Nosegay Tornado" stage fantasy landscapes in which bodies topple out of other bodies, depersonalized and pliable, genitalia effaced, often surrounded by enormous flowers. Her arrangements call to mind the doomed visions of Georges Bataille or ... Read more →
Company Gallery, New York
November 18, 2020–January 9, 2021
Nine months since the pandemic first hit New York, it is hard not to be moved by Salman Toor's tender and luminous paintings, fifteen of which make up "How Will I Know," his first solo show in a museum. In them young queer men gather inside and outside bars, dance ... Read more →
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
November 13, 2020–April 4, 2021
It is impossible to separate my experience of Yara El-Sherbini's "Forms of Regulation and Control" from the circumstances surrounding the viewing: the end of a balmy November day, awash with the jubilation of Donald Trump's electoral defeat. The first US solo exhibition for British-born, Santa Barbara–based El-Sherbini, curated by Naeem ... Read more →
Cue Art Foundation, New York
November 7–December 15, 2020
The posters advertising "Made in L.A. 2020: a version" show a painting of a tear-filled eye. It belongs to President Obama, a detail from Political Tears Obama by Fulton Leroy Washington, aka Mr. Wash. The work dates from 2008, suggesting that while the rises of Trump and the virus have ... Read more →
Made in L.A., Los Angeles
Bojan Šarčević's aloof, unyielding mixed-media sculptures skirt the boundary between glacial reserve and slushy poignancy. In his first exhibition at Paris's Frank Elbaz, he delivers frostiness and emotion in a single blow. Three works in the first room, all titled Homo Sentimentalis (all works 2020), involve immense, magnificently polished marble ... Read more →
Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris
October 22, 2020–February 27, 2021
Let us begin with the grid: flat, rational, anti-mimetic, static. The grid, writes Rosalind E. Krauss, "announces […] modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, narrative, discourse." If the grid can be said to represent anything, Krauss argues, it is the two-dimensional surface of the canvas itself. Nine ... Read more →
Derek Eller Gallery, New York
October 15–November 14, 2020
Even before you enter Tate Modern's Bruce Nauman retrospective, you are put on edge. Approaching the galleries, you hear a man and woman shout "I hate, you hate, we hate!" from the screens of Good Boy Bad Boy (1985). As you queue at the exhibition's entrance, Setting a Good Corner ... Read more →
Tate Modern, London
October 7, 2020–February 21, 2021
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
I vowed to quit smoking (again) in March. Then March happened and discipline of any kind seemed naïve in the face of global chaos that has undermined the assumption that we can control our own fate. Now it is October and we are in the middle of a second (third, ... Read more →
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm
October 1–November 7, 2020
A screen at the entrance to Chto Delat's first solo exhibition in Athens shows four members of the Russian collective on a Zoom call. Each of them sways, swoons, or sighs along to Maya Kristalinskaya's interpretation of the 1965 torch song Nezhnost' [Tenderness] as overlaid script tells the group's history ... Read more →
State of Concept, Athens
September 25–November 14, 2020
—Reviews
by Ewa Borysiewicz
In "Wages for Housework," Paulina Ołowska takes up the ongoing task of writing women back into art history. Foksal Gallery Foundation's exhibition of the Polish artist's work—alongside paintings and sculptures by Agata Słowak and Natalia Załuska—reflects on the foundations of modern art, emphasizing the interdependency of gender and capital, by ... Read more →
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
October 1–November 21, 2020
When the United Arab Emirates began its slip-and-slide towards fully automated luxury neoliberalism in the 1970s and '80s, artists responded in one of two ways. Some, like Hassan Sharif, addressed the twinned specters of rapid urbanization and hyperconsumerism by taking the influx of plasticky junk as raw materials for maximalist ... Read more →
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai
September 19–November 12, 2020
The eleven compact paintings in Jennifer J. Lee's "Wallflowers," all dating from 2020, hang heavily on the white walls of Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Each work is around A4 in size and plays with layers of texture and detail, transferring source images of intricate scenes—stonework, crocodile skins, flowers, and ... Read more →
Château Shatto, Los Angeles
September 12–November 7, 2020
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
The feeling that physical detention is only one aspect of a grander system of constraint haunts "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration." Curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Amy Rosenblum-Martín, Jocelyn Miller, and Josephine Graf, and based on Fleetwood's book of the same name published earlier this year, ... Read more →
MoMA PS1, New York
September 17, 2020–April 4, 2021
—Reviews
by Anna Mirzayan
Machines have eyes. Calculating, extractive, synesthetic, they collect faces, monitor behaviors and habits, capture your fingerprints, eyes, and voice. So what exactly do these machines see, and how? These questions are explored in "Mirror with a Memory" at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a multi-format endeavor encompassing a collection of ... Read more →
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
September 4, 2020–March 14, 2021
"Morgen ist die Frage"—tomorrow is the question—reads the banner by Rirkrit Tiravanija which swathes the top floor of Berghain's façade. The statement seems antithetical to the philosophy of the most famous techno club in the world. Before lockdown began and ravers were forced to find their fun at illegal parties ... Read more →
Berghain, Berlin
September 9–October 30, 2020
—Reviews
by Chloe Carroll
Helen Cammock's 19-minute video They Call It Idlewild (all works 2020) presents, in no particular order, the static framing of: a brick wall, a statue, a frayed cobweb, grasses dipping in the breeze. The result of a pre-lockdown residency at Wysing Arts Centre, it's the first piece encountered by visitors ... Read more →
Kate MacGarry, London
September 10–October 17, 2020
How are stories told? Who is remembered, who forgotten, and why? Which narratives last and what histories remain unaccounted for? These are questions of the moment, when representation is crucial to political struggle and debates on decolonial knowledge gain mainstream traction. Tavares Strachan's exhibition at Marian Goodman suggests that what ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
September 8–October 24, 2020
"Here, the concept of ownership is abstracted until it disappears." This is the official slogan of ExRotaprint: a former print-press factory collectively run as a mix of art studios, workshops, and community initiatives in Wedding, north Berlin, and one of four venues for the 11th Berlin Biennale. For about a ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
September 5–November 1, 2020
If you can't beat it, as the saying goes, incorporate it into your curatorial concept. After initially postponing the second edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), the curatorial team led by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel elected to embrace Covid-19, acknowledging the virus as a "significant author" of the ... Read more →
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art , Riga
August 20–September 13, 2020
In his 1964 essay "Rhetoric of the Image," Roland Barthes made a key distinction between photography and film: while film produces an awareness of the "being-there" of a thing, photography generates a consciousness of its "having-been-there." Photography is thus "the return of the dead," a "flat death," as Barthes wrote ... Read more →
Les Moulins de Paillard, Poncé sur le Loir
June 1–November 22, 2020
—Reviews
by Koichiro Osaka
Masked commuters emerging blinking from quarantine and into Yokohama's bayside district might think that the Museum of Art has disappeared. In place of its 180-metre-wide modernist façade is a dark, striated screen that—in fitting with the subtitle of the seventh edition of the Yokohama Triennale—resembles an analogue television screen patterned ... Read more →
Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama
July 17–October 11, 2020
As a real chilanga, born and raised in Mexico City, Paloma Contreras Lomas is familiar with the ultra-centralized bent in Mexican culture: how the images and discourse produced in the capital solidify into countrywide narratives through their reproduction in the media and popular culture. Her awareness of her own position ... Read more →
Pequod Co., Mexico City
June 18–September 5, 2020
A 2001 paperback edition of The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James's study of the dialectical relationship between the Haitian and French revolutions, rests on a plinth in Hannah Black's exhibition "Ruin/Rien" at Arcadia Missa (Ruin II, all works 2020). Its cover features a detail of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's romanticist ... Read more →
Arcadia Missa, London
February 29–July 28, 2020
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
"A Language for Intimacy" is an online group exhibition, curated by Amanda Contrada and Terence Trouillot, addressed to the notion of intimacy. The project is set up as a dialogue between nine artists and nine writers. Each page centers images of an artwork at the top, with an interpretative meditation ... Read more →
Abrons Arts Center of Henry Street Settlement, New York / Boston Center for the Arts, Boston
June 29–August 30, 2020
—Reviews
by Pedro Neves Marques
The influence of translations of Taoist texts, including the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching, on early twentieth-century ecology in the West and its post-war cybernetic revival is well-known. According to the teachings of Lao Tzu and centuries of Taoist tradition, the Way is found in the encounter of ... Read more →
Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon
June 18–August 29, 2020
—Reviews
by Cora Gilroy-Ware
As clichéd as it seems today, the association of pink and blue with girls and boys is a relatively recent notion. In both style and color, infants' clothing was largely gender-neutral as recently as the early twentieth century, and it was not until the 1980s that the pink/blue code was ... Read more →
Cabinet Gallery, London
February 29–August 1, 2020
—Reviews
by Francesco Tenaglia
Contrary to the press materials for Trisha Baga's "the eye, the eye and the ear," which liken the presentation to that of a natural history museum, the New York-based artist's first institutional exhibition in Italy recalls the Egyptian Theater fad of golden-age Hollywood. A procession of "Hypothetical Artifacts" (2015–20), a ... Read more →
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
February 20, 2020–January 10, 2021
The Garden of Six Seasons, which lends its name to this "precursor" to the forthcoming Kathmandu Triennale, was designed by the architect Kishore Narshingh in 1920 for Kaiser Sumsher Rana's palatial home in the capital of Nepal. The group show, held across two sites in Hong Kong, takes the entangled ... Read more →
Kathmandu Triennale
May 16–August 30, 2020
—Reviews
by Martin Herbert
Since the mid-1990s, Erica Baum has been coaxing a fragmented poetry from the unlikeliest places, quarantining found snippets of text that never aspired to great significance and dilating both their scale and their associative potential. Early on, the New York-based artist moved her camera close to half-erased classroom chalkboards ("Blackboards," ... Read more →
Klemm's, Berlin
March 6–June 13, 2020
We are all aware of the circumstances that have led to the glut of reviews of online shows, as opposed to the usual fare of objects under bricks-and-mortar, and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) has responded to them by creating Sala 10, a virtual exhibition space on its ... Read more →
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
June 1–14, 2020
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
At 15°53'N 78°38'W in the Caribbean Sea lies the remote Bajo Nuevo Bank. Population: zero. Formerly claimed by Jamaica and Honduras, this reef and islet cluster is administered by Colombia, though Nicaragua and the US both insist that it belongs to them. Devoid of citizenry, the island is defined ... Read more →
The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles
April 24, 2020–ongoing
—Reviews
by Anthony Hawley
It might be a stretch to call an online screening program of gallery artists a "film festival," just as it might be a leap to describe an online viewing room as an "exhibition." But "Metro Pictures Online Film Festival" offer its viewers something that resonates in our infinitely streamable world: ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
April 3–June 21, 2020
The axiom that history is always written by the victors can be rejected by observing how different versions of it meet, merge, and are retold in shifting accounts that tell us as much about the present as the past. Sharif Waked's work mediates between such versions. It does not explain ... Read more →
Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
February 18–June 20, 2020
—Reviews
by Rachael Rakes
"Can't I accept the reality," photographer Claudia Andujar wrote in her notebook during a 1976 trip to the Yanomami territories of the Brazilian Amazon, "of the poorly resolved contact of the Indians with the 'Whites'…? Do I want to delude myself? Do I now want to prove that here I ... Read more →
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris
January 30–May 10, 2020
—Reviews
by Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange
Nirin—a word found in the language of the Wiradjuri people, an Aboriginal nation in New South Wales—can be translated as "edge." The 22nd Biennale of Sydney's artistic director, Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew, explains how this concept animates the exhibition: "Nirin is a world of endless interconnected centers; a space to ... Read more →
Biennale of Sydney
March 14–June 8, 2020
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
Two weeks into my home confinement, the New York City health department advised that, during the Covid-19 outbreak, "you are your safest sex partner." A few days later, the New York Times ran a feature on nonagenarian sex educator and artist Betty Dodson, author of Sex for One: The Joy ... Read more →
Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam
March 21–August 29, 2020
"Zugzwang" describes the situation in turn-based games, such as chess, when the compulsion to move puts a player at a disadvantage. In Sung Tieu's solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst, this becomes a metaphor to describe the asylum process, which compels applicants to provide authorities with information that may later ... Read more →
Haus der Kunst, Munich
January 31–June 21, 2020
Days before New York's galleries shuttered in mid-March, I saw exhibitions of figurative paintings by Jutta Koether and Jana Euler that read to me like biological weapons threatening the patriarchal history of art. Worried that I may have become an invisible conduit for viral contagion, my heightened bodily self-consciousness found ... Read more →
Lévy Gorvy, New York / Artists Space, New York
February 27/21—April 18/19, 2020
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
How much is too much, when it comes to the art of Peter Saul? How about: The big high box of the New Museum's fourth-floor gallery stacked two-deep with more than two dozen large paintings in fluorescent hues? How about: Every gallery on the floor below packed with at least ... Read more →
New Museum, New York
February 11–May 31, 2020
The second time I visited Lydia Ourahmane's exhibition I was alone save for the young student-docent sitting at the front desk wearing earphones. Standing in the cavernous, quasi-industrial space—most of the internal walls had been removed—it felt appropriate that the last show I expected to see in a long time ... Read more →
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
February 6–March 28, 2020
Gabriel Kuri's focus on the everyday exchanges that structure our social lives has, in the context of mass confinement, taken on a melancholy aspect. Insulated from the outside world by a PVC strip curtain, a spiral staircase leads visitors down to the Douglas Hyde's cavernous lower gallery, its volume halved ... Read more →
The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin
January 31–March 28, 2020
Individualistic societies are driven by the belief that happiness is to be found by accessing our "best" and most "authentic" selves, and that this can be achieved by spending money. Therapeutic practices ranging from the seemingly benign to the dangerously experimental enforce the psychological norms that uphold that system. But ... Read more →
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
March 3–April 2, 2020
Ever since the 1960s, groups of idealistic South Africans have periodically banded together to stage ambitious group exhibitions informed by the prevailing zeitgeist and framed by a promise of regular return. Yet if there is a common thread to defunct biennial and triennial expositions like Art South Africa Today (1963–75), ... Read more →
Stellenbosch Triennale, Cape Town
February 11–April 30, 2020
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Finding space for exhibitions within the sprawling architecture of a major film festival is a tricky affair. Berlinale's packed schedule and multiple sidebars do not easily accommodate excursions to far-flung locations to see an assemblage of works of different lengths and modes of reception. Trickier still is the act of ... Read more →
Berlinale, Berlin
February 20–March 13, 2020
A thread linking Stan Douglas's work across various media—installation, film, television—is the creation of what he has called "speculative histories." Take "Scenes from the Blackout" (2017), a series of large photographs on display downstairs at Victoria Miro's north London outpost. One photograph (Skyline) shows a blacked-out Manhattan skyline; another (Jewels) ... Read more →
Victoria Miro, London
January 31–March 14, 2020
In its afterlife, an exhibition assumes different shapes. Once a show has come to an end—its artworks assessed, wrapped, and shipped, walls repainted, and artists, curators, and assistants moved on to a new project—what remains is a complex patchwork of individual and collective memories, embodied by a single object, a ... Read more →
Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris
January 23–April 5, 2020
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
The logic of contagion rests on an "us vs them" binary—healthy/sick, in/out, loved/feared—and this exhibition of nine mostly UK-based Latin American artists has the feeling of a diverse group banding together for support. Instigated and curated by the Venezuelan painter Jaime Gili, it foregrounds the importance of collegiality and self-organization ... Read more →
Cecilia Brunson Projects, London
January 17–March 6, 2020
—Reviews
by Ksenia M. Soboleva
Hannah Levy's sculptures can make you shudder. Working between sculpture and design, she extracts commonplace objects from domestic contexts and defamiliarizes them through her use of unexpected materials, distortion of scale, and exaggeration of their formal properties: their curves and bends. The sculptures in "Pendulous Picnic," her first solo exhibition ... Read more →
Casey Kaplan, New York
January 23–February 29, 2020
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
As is often the case in public institutions, the provision for small children at this show is minimal. An activity table in the middle of the spartan gallery draws attention to the bare floor surrounding it. In Camille Blatrix's latest test of how spare an exhibition can be, the large, ... Read more →
Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
January 17–March 15, 2020
—Reviews
by Monica Westin
I learned from Being (2019)—an artificial intelligence that Rashaad Newsome has trained with texts from theorists and cultural critics including bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault—that slaves and robots have one foundational thing in common: "They are both intended to obey orders." Being is nestled in a small dark ... Read more →
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco / San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco
January 10–February 23, 2020
—Reviews
by Saim Demircan
The ambiguity of Jason Hirata's exhibition title speaks to his ambidexterity as artist and videographer, two roles that fold into one another in this show. Hirata produces videos for artists, as well as documenting live events and providing technical assistance, and this exhibition presents six videos he has worked on. ... Read more →
80WSE Gallery at New York University, New York
December 3, 2019–February 23, 2020
As I sit to organize my thoughts on Pauline Boudry and Renata Lorenz's installation Moving Backwards, currently on show in Los Angeles project space JOAN, breaking news alerts slide anxiously across my screen like ephemeral disaster poetry: Russia closes China land border to prevent ... Read more →
JOAN, Los Angeles
December 7, 2019–February 16, 2020
The "vegetal turn" in contemporary art has begun to explore the possibility that plants are sentient, and are thus in constant, contiguous, and contingent interaction with the world. Reflecting this growing trend, the exhibition "Plant Revolution!," curated by Margarida Mendes, introduces parallels between plant consciousness, advances in genetic and cybernetic ... Read more →
José de Guimarães International Arts Centre (CIAJG), Guimarães
October 19, 2019–February 16, 2020
Even before it opened, "Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011" had attracted critical attention. A string of scandals highlighted once again just how embedded museums like MoMA, and its affiliate PS1, are in the military and prison industrial complexes responsible for so much of the devastation on display in ... Read more →
MoMA PS1, New York
November 3, 2019–March 1, 2020
Terry Allen was born in 1943 in Lubbock, Texas. His parents represent two archetypes of American mythology: a baseball-playing father and a jazz-pianist mother, kicked out of college for playing "devil's music." As a teen, Allen was enamored with the beatnik scene when it appeared in Lubbock—everyone started wearing sunglasses ... Read more →
Nina Johnson, Miami
December 2, 2019–March 28, 2020
The world has experienced immense changes since the turn of the millennium, including the spread of neo-fascism, a deepening of the climate crisis, and advances in digital technologies. Yet one situation has remained consistent throughout that time: infernal war across the Middle East. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, ... Read more →
Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
January 9–February 22, 2020
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
The work of the American artist Bruce Conner—dime-store assemblagist, quick-splice cineaste—is too little seen in the UK, and so we should be grateful to Thomas Dane Gallery for their recent periodic exhibitions of his work, each focused on a single film. Following CROSSROADS (1976) in 2015 and A MOVIE (1958) ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
November 26, 2019–February 22, 2020
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Pattern and Decoration (P&D), a tendency which crystallized into a movement in New York in the mid-1970s, is one of the few movements of modern art to have self-designated, rather than been identified either by critical champions (think of Germano Celant and Arte Povera) or by sneering skeptics (Finish Fetish, ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
October 27, 2019–May 11, 2020
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
I was wrong. I walked into "Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s-1980s)" thinking the exhibition would be about "her" and "them," and the past, only to realize that it is about "me" and "us," right now. About sexism, silencing, inequality, discrimination, patriarchal oppression, rebellion, ... Read more →
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
September 24, 2019–March 23, 2020
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
Naomi Rincón Gallardo's solo exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck, "MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY," is a maze of monitor screens and video projections. Rincón Gallardo's aesthetics are mesmerizing: silver-faced goddesses; crimson electronic nipple extensions that blink playfully; elaborate handmade costumes in red and gold shot against deep-green cabbage fields and ... Read more →
Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck
December 7, 2019–February 1, 2020
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
The Taranaki region on the west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the Maori name for the North Island of Aotearoa, or New Zealand) meets the Tasman Sea on three sides and rises at its center to the peaks of Mount Taranaki, a volcano that has been active for around 130,000 years. ... Read more →
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
December 7, 2019–March 22, 2020
We dream in the dark. Repressed memories, daily conflicts, ghosts, and other spirits surge while, unconscious, we sleep, eyes closed. Dreams haunt our waking lives too, though usually with faint traces. Most people remember little of their dreams, and share even less with others. Likewise, audiences have grown accustomed to ... Read more →
The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
June 27, 2019–February 23, 2020
—Reviews
by Jamie Sutcliffe
Writing in the late 1930s, the Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga emphasized the generative importance of play to human cultures by delineating its fundamentally nested nature. The rules-bound locales of playgrounds, card tables, or board games all provided what Huizinga termed "worlds within worlds," magic circles inside which a suspension of ... Read more →
Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
October 26, 2019–January 26, 2020
Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda's enigmatic installation Maria! Por Qué?! [Maria! Why?!] (2019) is an unexpected thrill in this otherwise unsurprising Drawing Triennial. A large china cabinet filled with kitsch figurines is positioned diagonally across a small room. Hidden behind it is the lid of a casket, strewn with withered roses. Every ... Read more →
The Drawing Triennial , Oslo
November 9, 2019–January 19, 2020
The two acts for which VALIE EXPORT is most famous are naming herself off a pack of cigarettes and a performance that involved wearing a pair of trousers with the crotch cut out, exposing her vulva. The Austrian artist, so associated with this bold punk aesthetic, represented her nation at ... Read more →
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London
November 28, 2019–January 25, 2020
—Reviews
by Frida Sandström
"If I don't find what I want on the first page, I'll usually just give up," stated the American interface designer Aza Raskin in 2006. He later came to be known as the inventor of the infinite scroll—for which he recently publicly announced his regret. While Raskin's interface dominates ... Read more →
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
October 12, 2019–January 12, 2020
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
Kate Newby's sculptures, which can take the form of wind chimes, rocks, puddles, tiles, shells, bricks, and textiles, emerge from observations of her everyday surroundings. For her 2018 installation at Kunsthalle Wien, I can't nail the days down, Newby covered the gallery's floor with bricks embedded with coins, bottle caps, ... Read more →
Fine Arts, Sydney
November 14–December 21, 2019
—Reviews
by Chris Sharratt
An ever-spiraling conflict, a splintered diasporic identity, the subjectivity of experience, the psychology of displacement: in the work of the Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif this heavy load is unpacked and sifted, as history and geography are questioned and clichés resisted. In her attempts to challenge didactic accounts of history and ... Read more →
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
November 2–December 15, 2019
The crunch of seashells breaking underfoot heightens my awareness as I navigate a labyrinth of narrow passages connecting a series of 12 elegant pavilions of varying size. These tall structures, constructed from slim wooden beams, create transparency at one moment and evoke entrapment the next. Sometimes the shells form paths; ... Read more →
CBK Zuidoost, Amsterdam
October 25–December 13, 2019
Lari Pittman's resonant retrospective at the Hammer in Los Angeles impresses first with the filigreed intricacy of his paintings, second with their special monotony. Three decades of work spills forth in the bold colors of commercial signage, splashed with decorative motifs—Victorian cameos, arrows, tipping pots, teardrops of various fluids, and ... Read more →
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
September 29, 2019–January 5, 2020
What do the gray-white, snow-laden forests of Scandinavia have in common with the dry red sands of the Atacama Desert in Chile? Both, in the words of Silvia Federici, are "sacrifice zones" of capitalism: places that contain riches extracted by multinational mining corporations with little care to the destruction they ... Read more →
Arts Catalyst, London
September 26–December 14, 2019
In these necessary times of dismantling and revisionism, there is a case to be made for the explanatory wall text as one of the least rehabilitated pieces of museum orthodoxy. Can diagnostic writing reproduce the subtlety, particularity, and even obliquity of literature and still retain a radical function? It is ... Read more →
The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria
September 24, 2019–April 30, 2020
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
The first Sharjah Architecture Triennial brings to the dusty city an art and architecture crowd with varying expectations. Architecture is conceived here in its wider sense—urban studies, environmental sustainability, design—and curator Adrian Lahoud, the dean of the architectural school at the Royal College of Art in London, has widened it ... Read more →
Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah
November 9, 2019–February 8, 2020
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
"Let me tell you about my mother" is a famous line from Blade Runner (1982), the iconic movie that wonders about the violent intersections of life and technology and what really makes us human. A little over a decade later, at a time when technology's coloring of the human experience ... Read more →
Pioneer Works, New York
October 4–November 24, 2019
—Reviews
by Monica Westin
In 1945, Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian modernist architect and pioneer of sustainable design, was tasked with relocating 7000 residents from the village of Gourna, on the West Bank of the Nile, to a new site several miles away. The original town of Gourna was built on top of a tomb ... Read more →
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco
August 31, 2019–January 5, 2020
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
In the video documentation of Burial Pyramid (1974), Ana Mendieta's body looks like it is lodged in the aftermath of a landslide. Lying on the ground, everything but her face covered with muddy rocks, the late artist seems trapped under the stones' weight. She starts to breathe great heaving breaths ... Read more →
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York
September 18–November 16, 2019
We create our own artworks. Regardless of their maker or mark, we push ourselves through the objects and images that deign to confront us and, as such, shape ourselves and our newfound companions into something other than we were before. It could be said that when we interact with art ... Read more →
South London Gallery, London / Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
September 19–November 24 and September 18–November 1, 2019
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Emma Kunz never called herself an artist. Whether she designated herself in any way is unknown, but her principal activity was research and healing using a pendulum and natural remedies, a practice in which drawings played an integral part. A solo exhibition at Muzeum Susch presents more than 60 of ... Read more →
Muzeum Susch, Susch
July 27–November 24, 2019
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
According to the data provided by an online carbon footprint calculator, by taking a return flight from London to Moscow, I was responsible for the emission of 0.43 tons of CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent. I was flying to attend the opening of "The Coming World: Ecology as the New ... Read more →
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow
June 28–December 1, 2019
—Reviews
by Koichiro Osaka & Jaime Marie Davis
It's hard not to acknowledge the ongoing tension surrounding the Aichi Triennale when writing about contemporary art in Japan at the moment. The recent announcement that the government's Agency for Cultural Affairs has pulled the Triennale's funding following a controversy over censorship, sparked protest calling into question the validity of ... Read more →
Okayama Art Summit
September 27–November 24, 2019
From Siegfried Kracauer to Roland Barthes, a photograph of a maternal figure in her youth has prompted some of the most important critical reflections on photography, and specifically its relationship to memory and death. For these authors, the photograph, despite its veracious claims, remains hopelessly inadequate, at odds with lived ... Read more →
Grey Noise, Dubai
September 18–November 2, 2019
—Reviews
by Frida Sandström
"When I was nine years old, the world was as old as me […] As I turned ten, all of a sudden it aged ten million billion years." The Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009) engaged with time and language as constructs. In her prose poem "Part of the Labyrinth," she ... Read more →
Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Gothenburg
September 7–November 17, 2019
Each time Moyra Davey speaks in her new film i confess (2019)—spinning a narrative that's at once autobiographical, political, essayistic—she's preceded briefly by a faint ghost-voice, anticipatory echo. It's the sound of the artist's own voice, prerecorded and playing off her iPhone as in-ear prompt, while she paces her New ... Read more →
greengrassi, London
September 5–October 26, 2019
Cristina Tufiño's "Dancing at the End of the World" presents a grouping of drawings and sculptures that probe the violent effects of digital convenience and the gig industry. With pastel-glazed ceramic sculptures that feature anthropomorphized objects, feminine body parts, and cast-off keyboards, Tufiño adopts sex work as a metonym for ... Read more →
Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City
August 31–October 19, 2019
"Overcome the limits of immortality," reads the catchphrase of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Xiaoyu Weng with the overall theme of "Immortality." It's a tricky one. I try to untangle it as I visit the vast labyrinth at the fourth floor of the Ural Optical ... Read more →
Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg
September 12–December 1, 2019
The figures in Paul Chan's work have frequently been subject to powerful outside forces. In the large-scale animated video Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization ( After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier) (1999–2003), which helped garner Chan initial acclaim, a group of prepubescent girls with origins in Darger's writings are ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
September 12–October 19, 2019
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
The postindustrial exhibition site is a cliché of contemporary biennales, but Lyon's Fagor factory has an engaging history. Founded in 1956, Spanish appliance manufacturer Fagor was for decades the largest industrial worker-owned cooperative in the world. When the company acquired Brandt, the new French subsidiary Fagor Brandt commanded a significant ... Read more →
Biennale de Lyon
September 18, 2019–January 5, 2020
—Reviews
by Kylie Gilchrist
The "Grand Hotel Abyss" is home to a cast of strange and varied characters, each sheltering from the raging incoherence of today's world. Whether this lavish destination is a plush cover for paralysis or a temporary abode that opens to glimpses of something new is the knife-edged tension that the ... Read more →
Steirischer Herbst, Graz
September 19–October 13, 2019
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
In one of my earliest memories, I'm swimming alone in fins and goggles across a bay in the Adriatic Sea. Everything is illuminated: emerald seaweeds, milky pink actinias, chromed silver fish, and my legs shining like a mermaid's tail. Which is magic: on terra firma, ichthyosis (from ichthys, Ancient Greek ... Read more →
Ocean Space, Venice
March 24–September 29, 2019
The other day I learned the word flygskam (Swedish for flight shame), which feels like a necessary term for living today. I wrote and deleted several versions of this introduction, which all revolved around the unanswerable question of how to account for travel today, when it feels like a professional ... Read more →
Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo / STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo / Noplace, Oslo / Munch Museet, Oslo / Akershus Kunstsenter, Oslo
—Reviews
by Rachael Rakes
I am trying not to be cynical, I remind myself repeatedly, humming the words in a little song as I tour the exhibitions of the third edition of Bergen Assembly (BA). I am here to evaluate: the scanning and searching of that state makes this instinctual mental cold critique harder ... Read more →
Bergen Assembly, Bergen
September 5–November 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Fitting its island context, the 2019 Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) takes the intertidal zone as its inspiration, though, for the life of me, I had no idea what the intertidal zone was. After a quick dive into oceanographic terms, I learned that it is the area of land that ... Read more →
LIAF, Lofoten
August 30–September 29, 2019
A psychiatrist friend once told me that most psychotic patients believe that they will see the apocalypse. If this argument is valid, nowadays either everyone is psychotic or the end of the world is really nigh. As a pessimist, I think both are possible. The 16th iteration of the Istanbul ... Read more →
Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
September 14–November 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Crystal Bennes
"Man has no power of altering the absolute conditions of life; he cannot change the climate of any country […] It is an error to speak of man 'tampering with nature' and causing variability." Charles Darwin wrote those words in 1868, nine years after the publication of On the Origin ... Read more →
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough
June 29–September 26, 2019
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
The relationship of sculpture to industry and its processes is a long one, and heroic—think of all those bronze figures emerging from armory foundries, of Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi wandering jealously through the 1912 Paris Aviation Show, of Richard Serra rolling steel at a Baltimore shipyard—but seldom is it ... Read more →
Tate Britain, London
March 18–October 6, 2019
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
In Octavia Butler's classic sci-fi trilogy Xenogenesis (1987–89), the ooloi are a third-gender alien species of the Oankali. Notorious shape-shifters, they are the bioengineers of their kind and are able to gather genetic material from others and build that of their offspring, therefore embodying the complexity of queer kinship theories ... Read more →
Triangle France, Marseille
June 30–September 29, 2019
Not long before visiting Laurie Parsons's exhibition at Mönchengladbach's Museum Abteiberg, I had learned that the word "scrutiny" means "sorting garbage." I was pretty pleased with the etymological alignment of the idea of critical examination with the condition of trashiness. To scrutinize is to look closely at that which otherwise ... Read more →
Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
April 15–September 8, 2019
—Reviews
by Lauren Houlton
Dineo Seshee Bopape's installation Sedibeng, it comes with the rain (2016), the one work on show in her exhibition at Eastbourne's Towner Art Gallery, darts between person and place before gesturing upward. Sedibeng, a Sesotho word meaning "the place of the pool," can be a person's given name and ... Read more →
Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
June 16–September 8, 2019
—Reviews
by Sohrab Mohebbi
Just when certain worn-out frameworks of exhibition making appear to finally become obsolete, they are repackaged and mounted once again. The exhibition "City Prince/sses: Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City and Tehran" seems like a throwback to 1990s curatorial expansionism, if not straight up nineteenth-century colonialism. Preliminary questions such as why ... Read more →
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
June 21–September 8, 2019
—Reviews
by Jeanne Gerrity
Pio Abad's solo exhibition begins, paradoxically, with a work by another artist: The Bridge (To Sonny Rollins), a hard-edge painting from 1981 by Leo Valledor. This prologue to the main act serves a number of purposes. It connects the show to its site through a local artist (Valledor spent much ... Read more →
KADIST, San Francisco
June 5–August 10, 2019
Rather than the Belgian town of Spa, where, starting in the sixteenth century, the diseased and melancholic would drink chalybeate and engage in other watery therapies, I was in Detroit, sitting in SAUNA SHELF by Nicolas Lobo (all works 2019). The one-person octagonal sauna was encased in pink waterproof fabric, ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit
May 10–August 14, 2019
—Reviews
by Chris Fite-Wassilak
Welcome to a review of the latest blockbuster exhibition at the world's largest museum of decorative and applied arts, focusing on the simple matter of food. As a precise, expansive look into the future of food, the exhibition includes a smorgasbord of over 70 artists, designers, and producers. I'll be ... Read more →
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
May 18–October 20, 2019
Question: How do hedgehogs have sex? Answer: very carefully. Animals are represented at every turn across the 10 venues of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. In the main building, the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), vitrines contain back issues of Slovenian satirical magazine Pavliha, its pages overflowing with lions ... Read more →
Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana
June 7–September 29, 2019
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
Double bill aside, the current exhibition at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is less a two-person show than a series of tentacular, prismatic relations and encounters that produce more relations, encounters, and situations, per the show's title. Wrong Solo is an ongoing collaboration between Agatha Gothe-Snape (the ostensible solo ... Read more →
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
June 29–August 31, 2019
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Psychoanalytical theory might have fallen out of favor in the visual arts, but the fields still share a number of core concerns. Both create conditions in which the unconscious can materialize through processes of language, translation, metaphor, and interpretation. With these common terrains as a starting point, Dana Birksted-Breen, editor-in-chief ... Read more →
The Freud Museum, London
June 6–August 4, 2019
I'm leaving New York in a month. The other night I told that to an acquaintance who asked if I had read Goodbye to All That (2013), a collection of writing about "loving and leaving New York." I've only read the 1967 Joan Didion essay that gave the book its ... Read more →
Condo, New York
June 27–July 26, 2019
—Reviews
by Monica Westin
The dominant form of Suzanne Lacy's work is dialogue. Deeply collaborative and painstakingly structured without being scripted, the conversations she produces combine formal elements of happenings (Allan Kaprow was one of her mentors) with politically focused content that is often activist in approach and always attuned to power as it ... Read more →
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco / Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco
April 20–August 4, 2019
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and ... Read more →
Oslo Biennial, Oslo
May 25, 2019–May 25, 2024
—Reviews
by Christina Catherine Martinez
When I took a fiction workshop in community college, the professor had a rather solemn habit of handing everyone's manuscripts back to them with a gnomic phrase of critique or encouragement. He'd stop at your desk, plop the thing down, and say something like "you're not delivering the goods" or ... Read more →
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
May 11–June 22, 2019
In recent years, the route from India to Qatar has been heavily and not uncontroversially travelled by hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Almost a quarter of Qatar's estimated 2.6 million population is Indian; there are more newspapers printed in Malayalam (the principal language of the South Indian state of ... Read more →
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
March 21–July 31, 2019
The title of Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda's exhibition, "The Auratic Narrative," alludes to the kind of stories collectively told and repeated by art professionals to frame artists or their works in a way that contributes to their aura, or their presentation as unique and authentic, while creating "fictional ... Read more →
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
April 12–June 23, 2019
—Reviews
by Mahan Moalemi
The inaugural exhibition at the nonprofit Ishara Art Foundation—the newest addition to Dubai's Alserkal Avenue, an art and culture hub housed in a former industrial compound—is built around an intergenerational dialogue between two Indian artists, Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) and Zarina (b. 1937). Curated by artistic director Nada Raza, the ... Read more →
Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai
March 18–July 13, 2019
For her first exhibition at Berlin gallery ChertLüdde, Sol Calero transformed the typical German altbau into a luminous and colorful family home inspired by the artist's grandmother's farmhouse in Los Llanos, Venezuela, a grassland plain south of Caracas, where Calero and her cousins spent the summer months. In Jesús Martín-Barbero's seminal ... Read more →
ChertLüdde, Berlin
April 26–June 15, 2019
—Reviews
by Terence Trouillot
I was required to make a choice upon entering Rufino Tamayo's famed museum in Chapultepec park in Mexico City. Wait up to an hour (or more) in line to crawl through Decision Tubes (2019), an interconnected web of mesh tunnels suspended in the sundrenched atrium that leads to different areas ... Read more →
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
March 29–June 30, 2019
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
The "unfinished return" in the title of New York–based artist Cici Wu's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong refers to a legendary incident in the city's recent history. In August 2000, Yu Man Hon, a 15-year-old autistic boy, was separated from his mother in an MTR metro station in Kowloon. ... Read more →
Empty Gallery, Hong Kong
March 26–June 6, 2019
—Reviews
by Bruno Marchand
David Hammons has long been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the so-called art world. While his professed admiration for Marcel Duchamp appears to have brought him a clear sense of the symbolic and transformational power that contexts confer to objects, it has offered an even sharper awareness of how the ... Read more →
Lumiar Cité, Lisbon
March 16–May 26, 2019
—Reviews
by Raimar Stange
Puppet theater is something you don't see often in an art exhibition, and here the characters are four historical figures who were important in times of transition in diverse ways: John Chavafambria, known as the "Black Hamlet" of psychoanalysis; Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company; violinist Julia Schucht, the ... Read more →
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
March 22–June 9, 2019
Remember when America was hard to see? Boy, is it obvious now. The Whitney Biennial 2019, curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, has a marked interest in the alter-local, doing some overdue national soul-searching, as well as catching up to artists who have been doing this kind of reparative ... Read more →
Whitney Biennial, New York
May 17–September 22, 2019
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
"After Nature," the latest exhibition by Australian artist Janet Laurence, calls on its viewers to become aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of the natural world at a time when the pernicious impact of humans on nature is evident. To create this recognition, the Sydney-based artist refers in several of ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
March 1–June 10, 2019
I was late to the Hamilton sensation, but it felt opportune to have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda's incandescent musical a few weeks apart from the North American premiere of The Lehman Trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, Stefano Massini's delirious play that charts an equally distinct American narrative of immigration, capital, ... Read more →
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Frieze New York, New York / Whitney Museum of American Art, New York / Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Asia Art Archive in America, Brooklyn
—Reviews
by Kylie Gilchrist
In one gruelingly unedited scene of Allan Sekula's three-hour film essay Lottery of the Sea (2006), a figure suited head-to-toe in white Tyvek hauls a gluey black lump across a slate-gray jetty. Steely waves wash up pebbles of oil, which she collects by rolling or smashing the lump upon them. ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
March 14–May 18, 2019
—Reviews
by Daisy Hildyard
Marianna Simnett's videos, currently on show at FACT Liverpool, are played on a continuous loop, so you can't tell how they begin. The same blonde girl is sent on hallucinatory adventures in The Udder (2014) and Blood (2015): inside a cow's udder, around an Albanian mountain, through agricultural machinery, and ... Read more →
 Marianna Simnett, The Udder, 2014. Installation view at FACT ©Rob Battersby 5.jpg,490x290,c)
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool
March 29–June 16, 2019
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
"Habit is like a cotton blanket. It covers up all the sharp edges, and it dampens all noises," Vilém Flusser mused in his 1984 essay "Exile and Creativity." Comfortable and self-affirming, the familiar is "a mud bath where it is nice to wallow." There's a sensation of wading into that ... Read more →
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The Met Breuer, New York
February 20–June 2, 2019
—Reviews
by Vincent van Velsen
Encompassing both surrounding environment and exhibition, tactile transitions define Hana Miletić's solo show at LambdaLambdaLambda gallery. The first work in the exhibition, taken from a series collectively titled "Softwares" (2018–19) and displayed in the gallery's entrance, is made from varieties of gray thread. This "pictorial weaving"—the term Anni Albers used ... Read more →
LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina
March 1–May 4, 2019
Situated at the intersection of science, new materialist philosophy, film, and contemporary art, New Mineral Collective are an artist duo formed in 2012 by Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. Their work questions geography, landscape, ecology, and human relations with nature. It comes as no surprise that their exhibition, "Erotics of ... Read more →
Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø
January 18–April 28, 2019
—Reviews
by Stefanie Hessler
Who was Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1965 and 1994? The Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles, a city just southwest of Madrid, is showing "First Person Plural," focusing on three decades of Hershman Leeson's oeuvre. The exhibition pivots on questions of identity, technology, and the female, or ... Read more →
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid
February 15–July 7, 2019
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's first major solo show in the UK is a surprisingly understated affair. Comprising two new and two existing works across two galleries, the show's modesty is not only quantitative, but also aesthetic. Best known for his appealing curtains of colored aluminum mesh, which have occupied gallery spaces ... Read more →
Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
February 16–May 6, 2019
—Reviews
by Ksenia M. Soboleva
A series of slide projectors are supported by stacks of books and pieces of wooden furniture. The space is darkened, only illuminated by streams of light exuding from the projectors, as well as the images they produce: a range of abstract squares and rectangles in various shades of white that ... Read more →
Hales Gallery, New York
March 5–April 20, 2019
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
Sophia Al-Maria's exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery—in which two films are separated by a thick PVC industrial strip curtain, one screened in a room painted black, the other white, one rooted in the future, the other the past—is the culmination of her position as the gallery's writer in residence. Over the ... Read more →
Whitechapel Gallery, London
January 15–April 28, 2019
A gaze without a frame might be a form of direct perception, or, in the digital age, unprocessed information. Frames are always accompanied by categories, which in turn bring their histories and memories along with them. In this sense, a gaze is only as powerful as the frames and categories, ... Read more →
Team (gallery, inc.), New York
March 7–April 13, 2019
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
"Slightly shattered shards of substance thrown within the grasp of the current of a river / Ligeramente dañados pedazos de sustancia arrojados a la merced de la corriente de un río": you read Lawrence Weiner's writing in English and Spanish splattered across a wall as the flow of humans drags ... Read more →
ARCOmadrid, Madrid / Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid / La Casa Encendida, Madrid
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
A "gross internalization of the game at its most spartan" is how Cady Noland described the mechanism of psychopathy in her urtext "Towards a Metalanguage of Evil." It's one description of several in that cold read of power dynamics in 1980s America, that (it has been frequently noted) also apply ... Read more →
MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt am Main
October 27, 2018–May 26, 2019
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
Suzanne Jackson was drawing two lines by 1968: One she traced over and over in watercolors and oils and strange new acrylics, of wingspans and the receding landscapes of her adolescence; the other was a limit, drawing a boundary against a relentless decade and the demands of her contemporaries. Her lines ... Read more →
O-Town House, Los Angeles
February 9–April 1, 2019
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
In her 1988 essay "The Fisherman's Daughter," Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on how women writers have long supported one another: "there is a heroic aspect to the practice of art; it is lonely, risky, merciless work, and every artist needs some kind of moral support or sense of solidarity ... Read more →
Camden Art Centre, London
January 18, 2010–March 31, 2019
Arthur Jafa's newest video The White Album (2018) is an open-ended work. At its premiere at the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, where the work is being screened on a continuous loop, Jafa went so far as to imply that a newer cut might be ready later ... Read more →
Matrix 272 at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
December 12, 2018–March 24, 2019
—Reviews
by Frida Sandström
In the totalitarian America of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), books are outlawed and routinely burned. Resisting the destruction of literature and defending the existence of dissenting ideas, characters in the novel return to oral traditions and learn books by heart. Mette Edvardsen's project Time Has Fallen Asleep ... Read more →
Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
January 26–March 17, 2019
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
What was reading life like before the "echo chamber," the term for the bubble in which one's own biases are rehearsed and confirmed by other like-minded people? It was not as dominated by single subjects, probably a bit calmer, more demanding in terms of homework and criticality, and with the ... Read more →
Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah
March 7–June 10, 2019
Axis is a signifier in sculpture, and South African artist Bronwyn Katz has a history of making resolutely vertical sculptural pieces. Installed in the main gallery of her phonetically engaged exhibition "/ // ! ǂ" at Blank Projects are two dozen slender columns made of steel wool and cardboard, their ... Read more →
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Blank Projects, Cape Town
February 9–March 16, 2019
—Reviews
by Chris Fite-Wassilak
Let's put it all up front: this exhibition is made up of 73 small collages, created between 2007 and 2019, each featuring one or two human bodies, accumulatively displaying 23 nipples (four of which have a more apparently male owner), four pudenda, and one (erect) penis. Some of these people ... Read more →
Modern Art, London
February 1–March 16, 2019
—Reviews
by Anders Kreuger
In the age of belated terrestrial awareness and multiple other opportunities and threats foisting themselves upon us daily, the joint solo exhibition by Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje may not appear immediately "urgent" (a much-overused term in contemporary art) or "topical" (another term ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, Skopje
November 11, 2018–March 15, 2019
In 2009, the film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky resolved to expand DAU—a biopic of Soviet physicist Lev Landau, which he had been working on since the release of his feature film 4 (2004)—into a vast multimedia project. With the support of businessman Sergei Adon'ev's Phenomen Trust, alongside a number of ... Read more →
Centre Pompidou / Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris / Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
January 24, 2017–February 17, 2019
—Reviews
by Izabella Scott
Farley Aguilar's cartoonish Bat Boy (2018) is hanging in the first room of "We are the people. Who are you?" at Edel Assanti, an unsettling group show featuring 11 artists that examines mass-media and the rise of populism. As the painting's title suggests, it depicts Bat Boy, a fiendish mutant ... Read more →
Edel Assanti, London
January 18–March 9, 2019
The first lines of the song "I See a Darkness" (1999) by Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy, go like this: "Well you're my friend / That's what you told me." Dan Nadel, curator of "SAMARITANS" at Eva Presenhuber, suggests viewers read the lyrics while visiting the exhibition: they are ... Read more →
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York
January 12–March 3, 2019
A cloud of stale smoke still hangs in the air the day after the opening of Daniel Pflumm's exhibition at Galerie Neu, a throwback to another time—15 years ago, perhaps, when Pflumm had his last show at his hometown gallery and smoking indoors was still the norm. This new exhibition ... Read more →
Galerie Neu, Berlin
February 1–March 2, 2019
Without wanting to yuck someone else's yum (as the saying goes), the breathless list of perversities on view in "Golden Shower"—Wong Ping's first solo exhibition at a major institution—is enough to make an adult film star blush. There's the elderly man who gets off on the smell of his pregnant ... Read more →
Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
January 18–May 5, 2019
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
On a recent episode of The Astrology Podcast, astrologer Chris Brennan and his guests reflected on the United Astrology Conference, held in Chicago in 2018, and noted a pronounced generational shift. "The Pluto-in-Scorpio generation has landed," remarked occultist and astrologer Austin Coppock, referring to the surge of conference attendees born ... Read more →
1646, The Hague
January 25–February 24, 2019
Living beings leave traces in the fabric of the world. In "Pieces of You Are Here," Lorna Macintyre's solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), some of these traces are material; others can only be imagined. One starting point is a fragment of terracotta tile dating from the Roman occupation ... Read more →
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee
December 8, 2018–February 24, 2019
Who was here first—Nancy Spero, or Hernán Cortés? It may be too much to call Spero (or anyone) a "universal" artist but her work certainly speaks to the weird postcolonial hybrids that survive as culture in the twenty-first century. Especially in this retrospective at the Museo Tamayo, a Brutalist building ... Read more →
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
October 6, 2018–February 17, 2019
—Reviews
by Stefanie Hessler
Driving along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, one traverses the former Confederate capital from the wealthy West End to the central Fan district near the newly opened Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). Originally conceived in 1890 as tree-lined home to the memorial for Robert E. Lee, the ... Read more →
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
October 17, 2018–July 14, 2019
—Reviews
by Chris Sharratt
In the world of self-regarding architect Amos, there's really only one thing that matters—Amos. There he is, sensibly chic in a black roll-neck sweater and neat gray trousers: "I want to build something important. I want to change the world. I want to express myself." Amos is Cécile B. Evans's ... Read more →
Tramway, Glasgow
December 6, 2018–March 17, 2019
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
A thick layer of breadcrumbs covers the floor of the upstairs room at Galerie de la Scep in Marseille. Early in the evening of the opening, there are only a handful of footsteps that show the passage of other viewers through the space. No one has yet tracked baguette particles—sourced ... Read more →
Galerie de la Scep, Marseille
January 11–March 22, 2019
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Raphaela Vogel turns her chaotic, insistent, and reflexive gaze on religion in her video installation "Son of a Witch," presented at the Berlinische Galerie as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Videoart at Midnight Festival. After walking through a portal delicately molded from white plastic and featuring dragons ... Read more →
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
November 30, 2018–March 11, 2019
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Long ago, before the euro and the internet, I was a young backpacker on my first trip to Greece. Beaches were broad and unpeopled. I traveled on boats to islands large and small, always noticing the tiniest ones jutting from the Aegean like beacons or sculptures. In the midst of ... Read more →
Athens Municipality Arts Centre, Athens
November 10, 2018–February 3, 2019
A city with an institution like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)—Berlin's House of World Cultures, a cantilevered cockle shell sitting on the Spree River beside the chancellery buildings that fund it—is a happy city indeed, for it can boast a progressive intellectual hub, a cultural engine spitting with ... Read more →
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
January 10–13, 2019
—Reviews
by Monica Uszerowicz
When C. Austin Miles wrote "In the Garden," a 1912 gospel hymn that speaks of quiet joy and equally silent pain, he was in a basement, no garden in sight, entranced by a vision of the meeting of Jesus and Mary. "I seemed to be standing at the entrance of ... Read more →
November 9, 2018–May 5, 2019
Continuously reappearing throughout the French version of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le Mépris [Contempt], Georges Delerue's melody Thème de Camille is the epitome of contained tragedy. Composed for a string orchestra, it has a regular, continuous motif traversed by arpeggios in counterpoint. This combination creates an immensely pleasurable (and sad) ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
November 30, 2018–February 16, 2019
"Solar and logical / decadent and symmetrical / angels are mathematical." Lyrics from Coil's song "Fire of the Mind" (2005) come to me while I look at Emma Kunz's gorgeous large-scale drawings. Kunz was a Swiss healer who began making these works in 1938, when she was 46. She had ... Read more →
Lenbachhaus Munich, Munich
November 6, 2018–March 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Tess Edmonson
What will come after what we know to be the twilight years of a livable earth? Though this question is implied in the title of "Post-Nature," this edition of the Taipei Biennial, curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, the exhibition itself offers impressions of natural life in the present, ... Read more →
Taipei Biennial, Taipei
November 17, 2018–March 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Balamohan Shingade
In August 2018, four months before the fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened, Kerala was hit by a catastrophic monsoon. It resulted in the worst flooding in the region for over a century: more than 300 people died and an estimated 220,000 were left homeless. The devastation of the floods brings the ... Read more →
Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi
December 12, 2018–March 29, 2019
At once named and unnamable, Dineo Seshee Bopape's installation 〰️ gathers myriad references (astrology, classical sculpture, Afrodiasporic spiritual practices, the Anthropocene) and materials (soil and rocks, satin and spices, glass and plastic, charcoal, jute, feathers, clay). It weaves them together thrillingly, with gold wire, cotton thread, and lines scraped into ... Read more →
Collective, Edinburgh
November 24, 2018–February 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Bruno Marchand
Seclusion, misanthropy, and asceticism came to my mind when I first saw the title of curator Samuel Leuenberger's group show at Galeria Vera Cortês, featuring the work of four international artists. Contrary to my initial belief, however, the hermit crab does not get its name from being a loner but ... Read more →
Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon
November 15, 2018–January 19, 2019
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
By the time I knew her in 2009, before her death in 2012, at only 37, Amal Kenawy seemed to gleam with elite art world prestige, the kind that one assumes would protect against forgetting. The Egyptian artist's darkly eerie, fungible, genre-defying productions were shown in major exhibitions and biennials ... Read more →
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
November 3, 2018–January 19, 2019
—Reviews
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
Two pairs of hands play a game of cat's cradle, forming a star from a loop of string; viewers may imagine one person pulling the string while the other interprets their instructions. This photograph, which appears on the cover of the booklet accompanying the group exhibition "Te toca a tí" ... Read more →
Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló (EACC), Castellón de la Plana
October 26, 2018–February 17, 2019
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
The Minimalism nurtured in SoHo and Marfa produced industrial cubes, steel beams, and gleaming planes until it was fortified and impenetrable, refracting metaphor or intimacy. Exposing rather than building up, its economical materiality favored the truly elemental, ruling out the human, or even the organic, as frill. So what to ... Read more →
Grey Noise, Dubai
November 12, 2018–January 8, 2019
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
It's fitting that "The Everted Capital," the opening salvo of the second and third seasons of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni's sweeping, unwieldy, and often exquisite magnum opus "The Unmanned"—a three-season series of films, sculptures, and performances—debuts at an end of the earth: the Museum of Old and New Art ... Read more →
Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Berriedale
November 4, 2018–February 4, 2019
It's so easy to ignore what's directly in front of you when it seems more sullied than that which is imagined to be just beyond a particular moment or place. Digital technologies seek to eradicate this gap by making a better or more convenient life, via an image or purchase, ... Read more →
Bridget Donahue, New York
November 11, 2018–January 13, 2019
Five large, freestanding LED panels fill the spaces of the Serpentine. Despite their technological nature, they look like temporary plaster walls and give the rooms a stripped appearance. Images scroll onscreen at high speed. In the darkened exhibition space, they have peculiar light and colors, cold and clear tones. Sounds ... Read more →
Serpentine, London
October 3–February 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Rose-Anne Gush
Flatness, surface, posture, and the notion of cycles animate Donna Huanca's "Piedra Quemada" [Scorched Stone]. The exhibition, displayed across Vienna's Lower Belvedere museum, is a Gesamtkunstwerk consisting of 33 works including paintings, mixed-media sculptures, and live models whose bodies, painted by the artist with bright colors, move slowly throughout the ... Read more →
Lower Belvedere, Vienna
September 28, 2018–January 6, 2019
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
The show is called "November"; I write as the month draws to a close. It's cold and slightly damp, albeit not enough to offset the long, dry summer and autumn. But the apples sold at the market are still crisp, the Raebeliechtliumzug—an annual walk through the dark, originating in harvest ... Read more →
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
On the night of July 16, 2006, Mazen Kerbaj stood on a balcony in Beirut as Israeli Air Force bombs fell in the distance. He picked up his trumpet and played along to the ominous pops, some louder than others. Starry Night (2006), the composition that resulted, asks the unanswerable ... Read more →
Fridman Gallery, New York
November 7–December 14, 2018
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
It was strange to visit the sixth edition of the Athens Biennale weeks after its kick-off and at times nearly alone. Writers covering megaexhibitions usually move in herds, but this time there was no press conference to provide me with pithy quotes to explain the title, "ANTI," and no ... Read more →
Athens Biennale, Athens
October 26–December 9, 2018
As of this writing in mid-November, "American MONUMENT" by lauren woods has been "paused" (not withdrawn) by the artist. It is a gesture meant to protest the firing of Kimberli Meyer, director of the University Art Museum at California State University in Long Beach and an instrumental collaborator in woods's ... Read more →
University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach (CSULB), Long Beach
September 17–December 9, 2018
—Reviews
by Tianyuan Deng
While exhibitions that question the modernist promise of progress are hardly new, a biennale that takes stock of the current state of regress raises high hopes. Historical regression is proceeding on several fronts. One is the collapse of the neoliberal faith in the end-of-history narrative—that liberal democracy and free trade ... Read more →
Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai
November 10, 2018–March 10, 2019
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
Lawrence Abu Hamdan's latest project emerged from his involvement with an extensive—and emotionally harrowing—2016 investigation by Forensic Architecture into Saydnaya Prison in Syria, commissioned by Amnesty International. (The investigation was presented in Forensic Architecture's exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier this year, for which they were nominated for ... Read more →
Chisenhale Gallery, London
September 21–December 9, 2018
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
At the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, André Breton referred to a series of paintings by then-obscure artists Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff as being the "best and most truly Surrealist" of all the English contributions. Pailthorpe, a surgeon and trained psychoanalyst, and Mednikoff, an artist 23 years her ... Read more →
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
The press schedule for the opening days of the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement (BIM) included a special visit to CERN's "Antimatter Factory." Our guide was a cheerful Chinese-American engineer who laughed at my astonishment when he explained that our knowledge of the universe—stars, planets, galaxies—amounts to its visible 4 ... Read more →
Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement / Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva
November 8, 2018–February 3, 2019
If there ever was an ars poetica for house music, it might be the one articulated by Chuck Roberts that Larry Heard incorporated into a 1988 remix of his own groundbreaking single "Can You Feel It" (1986). Roberts's proclamation is a nearly two-minute-long origin story delivered in sermonic fashion featuring ... Read more →
Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
October 18–November 21, 2018
The dedication of the guidebook accompanying "Long March Project: Building Code Violations III – Special Economic Zone" reads: "To the freezone imagineers." A portmanteau combining "imagination" and "engineering," "imagineering" was first coined by the Alcoa Corporation during World War II, and later popularized—and trademarked—by the Walt Disney Company during the ... Read more →
Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou
September 15–November 11, 2018
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
In January 2018, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy took over as director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, replacing Defne Ayas who, like me, started working in the Dutch "second city" in 2012. Witte de With's directors are initially hired for three years and their contract can be renewed ... Read more →
Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam
September 9, 2018–January 6, 2019
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
In his press release for "A Void," a group exhibition at 601Artspace, curator and artist Paul Ramírez Jonas provides an epigraphic clue to the relationship he sees between various forms of displacement that result in a void: "When books burn, people burn." The phrase, according to the press release, is ... Read more →
601Artspace, New York
September 22–November 18, 2018
—Reviews
by Monica Westin
The source material for The Night Journey (2018), Haroon Mirza's sound-based multimedia installation, is a miniature painting from the collection of the Asian Art Museum that is conspicuously absent from the final exhibition. The original painting, The night journey of the prophet Muhammad on the heavenly creature Buraq, created in ... Read more →
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
September 7–December 9, 2018
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
The summer of 2018 was grifter season. Starting sometime in May, a strange coterie of glittering personages came coasting along: hustling socialites, scurrilous aventuriers, faux–Saudi princes. The hoax has always had a special place in American mythology, from a newspaper editor convincing his readers there were unicorns on the moon ... Read more →
Transfer Gallery pop up #ONCANAL, New York
October 4–November 8, 2018
What is art's role when geopolitical tensions run high and technology makes it difficult—perhaps even irresponsible—to tune out of the perpetual state-of-emergency news cycle that promises, and often delivers, news that impacts the daily lives of people near and far. That's a reasonable question on many curators' minds when they ... Read more →
Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
September 7–November 11, 2018
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Trisha Baga's third exhibition at Greene Naftali is also her most ambitious. "Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor," like its cosmically hilarious and dizzyingly psychedelic predecessors, features a dazzling and untidy collection of found, handmade, and moving-image works: from doctored lenticular posters of human anatomy to idiosyncratic ceramic representations of everyday ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
September 14–October 20, 2018
—Reviews
by Alenka Gregorič
"[A]re humans able to resist together with plants and animals?" With this question, Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piškur invite viewers to consider the possibility that all living things can coexist—and co-resist. Most animals are so dependent on human actions and choices for their survival: they likely do not ponder ways ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
Please consider this a compliment: Camille Blatrix's solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig is so spartan it teeters on the razor's edge of not enough. Its vibe is expectant and hungry, and it leaves viewers feeling the same. The artworks, too, are cold, hard morsels. Their most prominent quality is ... Read more →
Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig
September 8–November 18, 2018
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Although I forgot who was fighting, I clearly recall a statement made by former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman while providing ringside commentary. After weathering a devastating hit, a seemingly unfazed boxer smiled back at his opponent as if to show he could take it; Foreman, on the other hand, ... Read more →
Steirischer Herbst, Graz
September 20–October 14, 2018
On the eve of Gallery Weekend 2017, at 11 a.m., sirens blared and a city of 22 million dutifully marched outside, allowing emergency team leaders to check and count them. Mexico holds an earthquake drill yearly on September 19, both a preparedness measure and a memorial to the 1985 earthquake ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend CDMX, Mexico City
September 20–23, 2018
On arriving in Japan in 1933, the German architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) declared: "When modern architecture first came into being around the 1920s, it was the simple and entirely free Japanese living room, with its large windows, wall cupboards, and the purity of its design that provided the strongest impetus ... Read more →
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
August 4–October 8, 2018
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Shucking oysters, turning wheels and levers, sitting in a rammed plastic warehouse while staring at a mobile phone—to enter Mika Rottenberg's universe is to fall down a rabbit hole of stoic drudgery. The worlds the artist conjures in her video installations are populated by extraordinary characters, such as the fantasy ... Read more →
Goldsmith's Centre for Contemporary Art, London
September 6–November 4, 2018
—Reviews
by Chus Martínez
Expedition: "Spheric Oceans" led by Chus Martínez Participants: Julieta Aranda, Claudia Comte, Francesca von Habsburg, Eduardo Navarro, Ingo Niermann, Markus Reymann, Teresa Solar, Albert Serra I decided to name this three-year cycle on artistic intelligence, philosophy, science, and nature the Spheric Ocean. The Ocean is spherical because it is not beside ... Read more →
TBA21–Academy, Vienna
March 9–24, 2018
—Reviews
by Arseny Zhilyaev
Arseny Zhilyaev traveled to Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial. Back in the day, it was one of the Old World's most experimental art venues. "The Planetary Garden," its twelfth edition, opened in June in Palermo. The attempt by Italy's newly minted right-wing populist government to reject a boatload of 629 ... Read more →
Manifesta
June 16–November 4, 2018
"Divided We Stand," the 9th Busan Biennale, opened over the same weekend as the 70th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which split the peninsula in 1948 and precipitated the Korean War. On TV, with limited English-language options, CNN International played a rotating news ... Read more →
Busan Biennale, Busan
September 8–November 11, 2018
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
"Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi)" opens with video Gee, Ulaanbaatar, October 2017 (2018), an interview with the Mongolian rapper Big Gee filmed by artist and researcher Hermione Spriggs (who curated the exhibition) with Alice Armstrong and Curtis Tamm. Gee reflects on the complicated relationship between the Mongolian government, population, and the ... Read more →
Channa Horwitz produced a large body of works which she derived from mathematical equations and equivalences. She took simple sets of numbers and applied different operations to them to produce varied convolutions, which she then expressed as graphic marks, spoken words, or gestures. Individually, the geometries that emerge from these ... Read more →
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Vancouver
July 13–September 16, 2018
Nature has a habit of reproducing its best engineering––why reinvent the circuitry of veins if you have their blueprints in the roots and branches of trees, in the shapes of rivers flowing from tributaries? Fractal patterns are iterated everywhere: in succulents, cauliflowers, snail shells. Vincent Fecteau's sculptures, too, feel borrowed ... Read more →
Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles
July 14–September 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Crystal Bennes
In an episode of the experimental storytelling podcast Imaginary Advice, host Ross Sutherland reflects on the way cultures over the centuries have exaggerated the meaning of the moon, distorting it from astronomical body into an open, figurative channel. "The moon has a powerful gravitational field," Sutherland says. "In poetry, the ... Read more →
Ingleby and the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
July 26–October 20, 2018
How the right foot of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate came to be a part of the latest SITElines Biennial is a secret conspicuously guarded by the exhibition's curators, but what is known about the appendage grants a revealing illustration of the thrilling noir that enfolds an object—or person, ... Read more →
SITElines Biennial, Santa Fe
August 3, 2018–January 6, 2019
Ask Cincinnati native Tony Tasset for a sculpture and you'll get anything from a giant eyeball to a depressed Paul Bunyan to a steel-and-resin rainbow. Invited to the inaugural FRONT International Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, he made Judy's Hand Pavilion (2018), a mammoth silver-colored fiberglass hand modeled on that of ... Read more →
FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland
July 14–September 30, 2018
The inaugural edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) presents work by 104 artists with the intention of "taking the temperature of the human condition at the present moment." The Anthropocene looms appropriately large, as do capitalism, technology, migration, work, time, identity (be it individual, regional, or ... Read more →
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art , Riga
June 2–October 28, 2018
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
The coyote nods to himself, self-assuredly, keeping his eyes steady while his body shifts balance—the motion sensors make his gaze relentless. He brushes his limbs back until he is resting on his hind legs, bracing for a gallop. He retreats, his tail is taut, his front paws are winding up—literally—to ... Read more →
Gaga, Los Angeles
July 11–September 1, 2018
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
When you land in Tunis, all the press materials are in a language you barely understand and despite everyone's best efforts, you constantly end up lost, looking for places you never find. You'll spend hours of research and late-night web searches, riding air-conditioned buses between scattered events, gathering as many ... Read more →
Jaou Tunis, Tunis
June 27–July 1, 2018
Among the artifacts assembled by curators Manuel Borja-Villel and Teresa Velázquez for their illuminating survey of Dora García's work since 1997 are nine posters detailing the program for "The Inadequate" (2011), a 26-week investigation into radicalism, dissidence, and marginality staged by the artist in the Spanish Pavilion at the 54th ... Read more →
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
April 18–September 3, 2018
Pioneering ecologist, science communicator, and marine biologist Rachel Carson found the rhythms of the ocean to be largely indifferent to the rhythms of humans. Coastal forms, she observed, merge and blend in variegated patterns with the ancient surf and with new life, ultimately with the sole agenda of the "earth ... Read more →
Belo Campo, Lisbon
May 14–July 28, 2018
In the back of Ballroom Marfa plays Emilija Škarnulyte's video Sirenomelia (2018)—a short apocalyptic trilogy that explores the ruins of some of our species' most advanced achievements in physics. A camera drifts, disembodied, through the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan. Pieces of CERN's giant supercollider in Switzerland peel apart as ... Read more →
Ballroom Marfa, Marfa
April 13–October 14, 2018
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
Hiwa K doesn't believe that art can change anything. Following a screening of his videos at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Iraqi-Kurdish artist explained his frustration with the uselessness of the whole contemporary art enterprise in the face of profound global violence. To hear him say that he doesn't ... Read more →
New Museum, New York
May 2–August 19, 2018
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Marriott Edgar's 1930s monologue Albert and the Lion recounts how the Ramsbottom family, on holiday in Blackpool, go to the town's menagerie. There, little Albert is so disappointed with the spectacle that he pokes the lion, who promptly eats him, upon which his mother gives the manager an earful: "Right's ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Izabella Scott
Cornwall's picturesque fishing villages, tearooms, and sandy beaches attract 15 million visitors a year, and its southern coastline is dubbed—only half-jokingly—the Cornish Riviera. Part of its attraction derives from art: in the 1930s, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Naum Gabo, and other leading modernists established a colony in St ... Read more →
Groundwork
May 5–September 30, 2018
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
It's intimidating to review the work of an artist the stature of Louise Bourgeois, about whom so much has been written, to whom so much has been ascribed. Bourgeois's life spanned nearly the entire twentieth century and helped redefine what a (feminist) artistic practice can be, how art can intertwine ... Read more →
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
April 21–July 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
When I was a child, I received a disco ball as a birthday gift. Hung haphazardly above my bed and lit by a repurposed old desk lamp, it reflected a scintillating constellation across the ceiling. In a flick of a switch, the quotidian transformed: I had entered a secret world. ... Read more →
Tate Modern, London
March 14–August 5, 2018
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Not so much a city as an unevenly populated, multi-centered megalopolis, and not so much a year as a point in an escalating concatenation of national and global crises, there might seem to be no possible way to get "Made in L.A. 2018" right. Add to that the divisions within ... Read more →
Made in L.A., Los Angeles
June 3–September 2, 2018
Curator Joanna Warsza titled the 2018 edition of Public Art Munich (PAM) "Game Changers," choosing to focus the festival on 20 live events, shifting the definition of public from sites to subjects. In lieu of outdoor sculptures there are events, and in place of a map a schedule. Conceptualizing the ... Read more →
Public Art Munich, Munich
April 30–July 27, 2018
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Long before we, as a species, were categorized as Homo sapiens, Plato proclaimed humans to be "featherless bipeds." As a retort, Diogenes grabbed a chicken, plucked it, raised it aloft, and sarcastically declared "Behold: Plato's man!" Not be outdone, Plato added "with flat nails" to his description. Aristotle later weighed ... Read more →
Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art , Rivoli
March 6–June 24, 2018
Guy Mees (1935–2003) was a leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde whose enigmatic work combined formal diversity with conceptual rigor. A consecutive pair of exhibitions at Barcelona's ProjecteSD—the first from March to April, the second from May to June—shed light on his career, offering carefully curated series of works alongside ... Read more →
ProjecteSD, Barcelona
March 13–June 21, 2018
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
In 2001, Maurizio Cattelan invited a group of the 49th Venice Biennale's VIP guests to join a satellite event in Palermo: a cocktail reception in Bellolampo, the city's main landfill, where the artist had installed a larger-than-life replica of the Hollywood Sign overlooking the Conca d'Oro, the defaced coastal "golden ... Read more →
Manifesta
June 16–November 4, 2018
"Many artists consider books and libraries to be oppressive hierarchies of knowledge, dogmatic and hectoring," writes artist Abigail Reynolds in her new book Lost Libraries. But Reynolds does not agree: "I consider them the gates of freedom." Three simultaneous exhibitions in east London exemplify this fascination with books and their ... Read more →
PEER, London
April 26–June 23, 2018
The four works assembled in Michael Snow's "Closed Circuit" are not among the artist's best-known. Visitors expecting the long mechanical arm of De La (1969–72) or the recto-verso double projection of Two Sides to Every Story (1974) will be disappointed. For all the bombast associated with the Guggenheim Bilbao, this ... Read more →
Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao
March 22–July 1, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
During the press conference for the 10th Berlin Biennale, henceforth snappily referred to as "BBX," the attendees were given the opportunity to contemplate Hakuin Ekaku's lesser-known koan—"what is the sound of one person's inappropriately timed clapping?" The lone applauder, whose ruckus died away with all the glory afforded a deflating balloon, ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
It's hard to think of another Muppet, or any other fictional character, with so streamlined a motivation as the Cookie Monster. Debuting in the kids' TV show Sesame Street in 1969, this bug-eyed, blue-furred humanoid has spent almost five decades in the relentless pursuit of sugary biscuits, to the exclusion ... Read more →
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
January 27–June 3, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
A boy in a bruise-pink jacket jogs through a dusky idyll, limp-kneed and panting for breath. The grass that flanks the path is dappled with blooming flowers: purple, yellow, orange, and white. In the foreground is an upright piano, incongruously plonked between two trees. The boy staggers past it and ... Read more →
Cabinet Gallery, London
April 26–June 2, 2018
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
Bruce Conner's solo exhibition, "Out of Body," takes its title from a life-changing experience the artist had when he was eleven years old. Mesmerized by a patch of sunlight on the floor of his bedroom, he was overcome by the sensation of being "an old ancient person" within his infant ... Read more →
Bellas Artes Projects, Manila
February 24–June 3, 2018
—Reviews
by Max L. Feldman
"Mojave" is the name of the rectangular desert-yellow color furthest to the left in Haim Steinbach's mural eswürdesoaussehen [itwouldlooklikethis] (2018). Painted on the back wall of the gallery, this 13-color dissection of an Ellsworth Kelly painting is individuated by English translations of the Austrian names of wall paint hues (Hitradio ... Read more →
Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna
April 6–June 2, 2018
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
Olivo Barbieri's new solo show—the title of which winks at The American Monument (1976), the acclaimed, anti-spectacular photography book by Lee Friedlander, in which he photographed grand civic monuments against the quotidian surroundings of billboards, streets, and parks—comprises a group of 20 large-format photographs, almost all taken in 2017 in ... Read more →
Galleria Mazzoli, Modena
March 24–May 26, 2018
Just before midnight on February 29, 1960, an earthquake hit the Moroccan city of Agadir, killing between 12,000 and 15,000 people—roughly a third of the city's population. As many were injured; at least 35,000 were left homeless. Yto Barrada's "Agadir," in The Curve gallery at London's Barbican Centre, invokes the ... Read more →
Barbican Centre, London
February 7–May 20, 2018
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
Dakar's elegantly dilapidated Ancien Palais de Justice hosts the Dak'Art Biennale for the second time. Inaugurated in 1958, the courthouse was closed to juridical business in 1992—coincidentally the year that Dak'Art was established. Officially signed over to Senegal's Culture Ministry in 2017, the Old Courthouse is an architectural dream for ... Read more →
Dak'Art
May 3–June 2, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick Steffen
Dear Chris, How sweet it was talking with you at the opening of your show. You allowed me to introduce myself, so I could share some words I have longed to tell you since I arrived in this city. I was introduced to Los Angeles through your writings: a primal, unfettered ... Read more →
Château Shatto, Los Angeles
March 24–June 23, 2018
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
Los Angeles is an unruly city. Under shaggy palm trees and the bruised purple blooms of jacarandas, roads snarl in mile upon mile of naked asphalt and concrete lined with buildings from every conceivable shape and era. Mostly there are low-slung, postwar ranch houses and bungalows with yards swollen with ... Read more →
Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
April 5–May 12, 2018
—Reviews
by Monica Westin
Ken Lum is a prolific writer as well as a conceptual artist, deeply attuned to semiotics across media, whose past work includes a series of "language paintings" that depict nonsensical words in colorful designs. He would probably be amused to hear that I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary while ... Read more →
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
March 15–May 12, 2018
It's summer in May. It's been a long winter, and a long semester teaching art history is drawing to a close. The past four months I've been talking to my students about the political possibilities of art: trying to convince them not to look away, but to be moved, to ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 2–6, 2018
There are occasions in which the multifaceted shape of time becomes obvious. Occasions in which the concentration of similar initiatives, aimed at similar audiences and presenting similar outcomes, attest to the different moments in which organizations, individuals, and their mentalities are situated: how, despite coexisting simultaneously, collective mindsets aren't contemporary ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
April 27–29, 2018
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
What's the difference between a model, a mimic, and a dupe? Taxonomy? Strategy? Spin? Mike Cooter attempts to answer such questions in this exhibition. Radar—a commissioning body based at Loughborough University—have tasked him with considering Polish dramatist, director, and artist Tadeusz Kantor's (1915–1990) interest in the latent theatricality of and ... Read more →
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester
March 15–May 6, 2018
Liu Wei's "Shadows" is a rigorous exercise in time-space travel. A series of heavily pigmented, depthless shapes hang on the walls of the gallery's foyer ("Caves," 2018) serving as oblique entry points into the main exhibition space, where the viewer encounters a cluster of studded and welded metallic structures (Shadows, ... Read more →
Long March Space, Beijing
March 18–May 6, 2018
In his 2014 lecture "The Future of Forensic Science in Criminal Trials," judge Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, identified a communication problem. In light of the increasingly complex science used in court, he called for a set of judicial primers: standardized documents, written in "plain ... Read more →
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London
March 7–May 6, 2018
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Procrustean—what does the word even mean? In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the son of Poseidon, and a thief who tortured his victims by making them lie on an iron bed. If their bodies were too long, he'd cut off the oversized bits; too short, he'd stretch their limbs to fit. ... Read more →
Gianni Manhattan, Vienna
March 10–April 28, 2018
Like a thesis hidden in a footnote, a small projection in one corner of an exhibition of junkyard complexity shows a loop from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), starring John Wayne and James Stewart. In the scene, Stewart's character, a lawyer in the frontier town of ... Read more →
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), Los Angeles
February 10–April 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Jeanne Gerrity
In an early scene in the recent blockbuster hit Black Panther, the black supervillain Erik Killmonger disputes the narrative spewed to him by a supercilious white curator regarding an African artifact on view in the "Museum of Great Britain," asserting instead that it is a spoil of war from the ... Read more →
Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
March 15–April 21, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
Watching João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva's Cowfish (2001) is harrowing. The poor fool struggles on a plate and then pukes a little water before going still. Any viewer would assume the film's subject—a cowfish—dies, but in the end its survival remains unclear. Death is withheld by a flicker and ... Read more →
Kunstverein München e.V., Munich
February 17–April 15, 2018
Eager to see the art in Laure Prouvost's first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York, visitors might breeze through its central installation: Uncle's Travel Agency Franchise, Deep Travel Ink. NYC (2016–18). Situated at the entrance to the gallery, it looks like an unkempt and outdated version of an ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
March 9–April 14, 2018
—Reviews
by Stefanie Hessler
The year is 1977. Iggy Pop just released "The Passenger," Eric Clapton mourns his son's death in the 1990s-hit "Tears in Heaven," and Ronald Reagan's nuclear weapons build-up has the world holding its breath. Time is warped in Gerard Byrne's seamless amalgamation of historical events, rock hits, and news reports ... Read more →
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm
February 22–April 7, 2018
Marveling over the evolution of his latest exhibition, Charlemagne Palestine remarked: "This idea or obsession that I had with a few animals at the beginning, never did I imagine that it would become such a maximal, enormous work like this. It's the biggest ever with about 18,000 or more. That ... Read more →
356 Mission, Los Angeles
January 25–April 15, 2018
Those of us who willingly attend and return to Art Basel Hong Kong must still see hope in the global convolution of capital. If you don't, call yourself a pessimist. When this hope is solely financial—which seems to be the case for many galleries—it belies a detached cynicism that ridicules ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
March 29–31, 2018
—Reviews
by Lucy Reynolds
I almost walk past the entrance to "Women Look at Women," the inaugural exhibition at Richard Saltoun's new space on London's New Bond Street, delayed and disorientated by the glossy rows of designer shops and galleries that surround it. Catherine—a friend on a break from the picket line where she, ... Read more →
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
February 15–March 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
At least Condo, in London and New York (and soon also Mexico City and São Paulo), and Okey-Dokey, in Düsseldorf and Cologne, had snappy names and branding. The latest manifestation of the increasingly popular gallery share model, hosted by three Los Angeles galleries, does not have a name. Its program, ... Read more →
Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles / Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles / Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
March 4–31, 2018
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
Museums are known today as natural habitats for art. But in Renaissance Europe, before their collections specialized in works of art, museums hosted cabinets of curiosities, with their awkward mixtures of rare and bizarre objects. In the eighteenth century, demand arose across Europe to open museum collections—typically owned by royalty, ... Read more →
Centrum für Naturkunde, Hamburg
November 10–March 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Neringa Černiauskaitė
The lifespan of a bee, with its strict trajectory and tireless labor, is a common metaphor to describe hard work. It's a figure of speech that functioned well in the industrial economy, where the individual was diminished to a cog in an endless assembly line, working in and for a ... Read more →
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Vilnius
February 9–April 1, 2018
—Reviews
by Philomena Epps
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's practice, with its hubbub of miscellaneous and licentious references, evokes a mood of historic and anthropological ambiguity. Her works enmesh periods of cultural rebellion over the centuries, from medieval history, folk plays, and pagan festivals, to the genesis of Dada, and from the DIY culture of drag ... Read more →
Sadie Coles HQ, London
February 22–April 7, 2018
—Reviews
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
A piercing whistle punctuates the blaring of a trumpet. But in the columned central space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the only visible instrument is a grand piano. For three days a week throughout the course of the exhibition, the instrument is played—and, one could say, worn—by a pianist who ... Read more →
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
February 6–May 20, 2018
To shit on a book—surely only an animal could do such a thing? In a former farm building, now home to Hauser & Wirth Somerset, lies an early edition of a book by Mark Twain: A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889), a satire of medieval European chivalry ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
January 20–May 7, 2018
I'm not usually a fan of art about art, for the simple reason that it tends to perpetuate the potential solipsism of a perilously self-involved discipline, but something about Cerith Wyn Evans and his consistent ability to transmute art-historical references into quasi-mystical arcana has always struck me as agreeably mystifying. ... Read more →
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
February 10–May 6, 2018
—Reviews
by Ania Szremski
The art-fair think piece is as stale as the art fair itself. What could be said already has been, from puzzling over the mysterious machinations of the market, to annual denunciations from gallerists, and ethnographies of those who buy and those who sell. The form of writing that is truest ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York
March 8–11, 2018
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
In 2006, French filmmaker and polymath Jean-Luc Godard was commissioned to curate an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, devising a series of 18 maquettes—nine large, nine small—as a plan for "Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema." The exhibition would link a series of rooms—each with its own title, like ... Read more →
Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
January 14–March 11, 2018
The Old Beechworth Gaol, northeast of Melbourne, was founded in 1864, just as the importation of convicts from Britain ceased, but kept its doors open—or rather, shut—until its closure in 2004. The most notorious prisoner in this Jeremy Bentham–inspired panopticon was Ned Kelly, the iconic "bushranger" and gang-leader who killed ... Read more →
Old Beechworth H.M Prison, Victoria
February 16–18, 2018
—Reviews
by Tess Edmonson
After the completion of The Dinner Party (1974–89), for a five-year period from 1982 to 1987, Judy Chicago interrupted her study of female subjecthood to focus instead on its political other, masculinity. The result is a series of paintings and bronzes titled "PowerPlay," a selection of which is currently on ... Read more →
Salon 94, New York
January 10–March 3, 2018
—Reviews
by Max L. Feldman
Július Koller's "anti-happenings" are reflexive practices, acting out a lived situation—relating mostly to Czechoslovakia's repressive, post–Prague Spring "normalization" period between 1969 and 1987 and the limits of artistic activity at the time. Documenting silly or banal everyday activities, including ping-pong games, taking photographs of groups standing in a question mark ... Read more →
Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
January 17–February 24, 2018
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
This year's edition of ARCOmadrid embraced a temporal and conceptual gambit: the Future. It was, however, mostly corralled in the eponymous section at the fair, curated by Chus Martínez, Rosa Lleó, and Elise Lammer and featuring works by artists from 20 international galleries, including Nara Roesler, São Paulo; Union Pacific, ... Read more →
ARCOmadrid, Madrid
February 21–25, 2018
—Reviews
by Kathleen Ditzig
Developed by the Singapore government in 2013 in an attempt to create hype around the fair Art Stage Singapore, Singapore Art Week (SAW) is a loose collection of events organized by museums, art spaces, and cultural producers. This year's edition featured a series of festivals that turned the Civic District's ... Read more →
Singapore Art Week (SAW), Singapore
January 17–28, 2018
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
"Songs for Sabotage," the fourth New Museum Triennial, is suavely branded as a survey of 26 subversive practices from around the world. The curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, frame the exhibition with an astute awareness of the challenges it faces as an institution that would seem to reify the ... Read more →
New Museum, New York / New Museum Triennial, New York
February 13–May 27, 2018
Juan Downey (1940–1993) has been recognized as an early pioneer of video art, but like many of his contemporaries, his interest was much broader than a single medium. Initially trained as an architect in Chile, where he was born, he traveled throughout Europe, meeting artists working with kinetics and interaction, ... Read more →
Rutiga Golvet at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
January 18–February 20, 2018
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
I just didn't get Sofia Hultén's work Pattern Recognition (2017). Several sets of 12 small perforated metal sheets, like those that hang on workshop walls, are arranged in tidy grids. Each set holds a number of tools or objects, short pieces of chain on one, plastic cutting templates on another, ... Read more →
Museum Tinguely, Basel
January 24–May 1, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
To my left the casual love of mismatched hearts is expiring. The American woman says, "you're sad," and the Frenchman nods. She tells him to calm down. It is breathtakingly awkward. They resign themselves to stillness until a grinding electronic drone heralds their graceless end. She makes a break for ... Read more →
transmediale, Berlin
January 31–February 4, 2018
The scale and ambition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which packs 593 short and feature films into 12 days of independent cinema, as well as talks, performances, and gallery installations in venues across the city, makes it almost uniquely difficult to approach, even for the experienced visitor. The sprawling ... Read more →
January 24–February 4, 2018
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
For true mystics, there is no division between the real and the spiritual. The symbolic folds into our lives, shaping the world and us in it. The cool kiss of rain can be a curse or a blessing from the gods. Stumbling in the street en route to meet your ... Read more →
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
January 16–March 3, 2018
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
For Sondra Perry's solo exhibition at Bridget Donahue, New York, all the walls are painted Rosco Chroma Key Blue. The deeply saturated color is used on television sets and in the production of special effects for movies and videogames because it contrasts so profoundly with most human skin colors. Chroma ... Read more →
Bridget Donahue, New York
January 7–February 25, 2018
In the basement of a former Berlin crematorium, a small brass instrument sputters and hisses. The sculpture—Vartan Avakian's Composition With A Recurring Sound (2016)—could be the baby cousin to a trumpet or saxophone. It is also the closest this group exhibition about rhythm gets to danceability. No surprise there. SAVVY ... Read more →
SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
November 30, 2017–January 28, 2018
A modernist critical framework would have you believe that the difference between a machine and sculpture is the same as between politics and aesthetics: a machine uses power to fulfill a function, while a sculpture is all about form and taste. Knowing that this is bullshit—that there is no apolitical ... Read more →
Marlborough
January 6–February 10, 2018
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
A cactus in a terracotta pot stands beside a laptop playing music through a speaker. The balcony doors are wide open. A cool breeze prompts me to the terrace. I see a brick building, leafy trees, and people crossing the street. I can hear foliage rustling. I look around the ... Read more →
Fine Arts, Sydney
December 1, 2017–January 25, 2018
One of my earliest writing gigs was for Casper, a short-lived little magazine founded in May 1998 by artists Luis Felipe Ortega, Daniel Guzmán, Gabriel Kuri, and Damián Ortega. I was vacationing in Mexico City and during a two-week stay with Kuri was co-opted into writing about Osaka's noise music ... Read more →
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town
November 18, 2017–January 29, 2018
—Reviews
by Patrick J. Reed
When the clock struck twelve in Berlin, "in search of characters…" transitioned from Galerie Neu's final offering of 2017 into its first of the new year. Twenty-two works by fourteen artists comprise the exhibition exploring "questions of artistic identity/ies, authorship, and authority," per the gallery press release. These perennial investigations ... Read more →
Galerie Neu, Berlin
December 8, 2017–January 19, 2018
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
As you walk up to Armada—through a courtyard ringed with industrial sheds and machine shops—placards appear to the right and left that read "adagio" ("drive slowly"), "non urtare" ("caution"), and again, "adagio." Even if you aren't the size of a truck, these signs have a way of making you proceed ... Read more →
Armada, Milan
November 22, 2017–January 20, 2018
—Reviews
by Simone Menegoi
The fashion for Chinese decoration, architecture, and craft in Europe was the first great wave of exoticism in Western culture. It lasted for more than a century, from roughly 1670—when Louis XIV commissioned the Trianon de Porcelaine, a Chinese-inspired architectural folly, for Versailles—to the end of the eighteenth century. It ... Read more →
Franco Noero, Turin
October 31, 2017–February 3, 2018
—Reviews
by Lizzie Homersham
"If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what the very word 'citizenship' means." I was sent into a cold rage when I read these words what feels like a never-ending day ago in the transcript from Theresa May's Conservative Party ... Read more →
Cordova, Barcelona
December 1, 2017–January 13, 2018
—Reviews
by Seth Kim-Cohen
"Sonic Rebellion" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit offers two substantial proposals. First, it posits that the music of Detroit, ca. 1965–2000, was an active participant in the contemporaneous political and social struggles of the city, voicing and, in some cases, enacting resistance to the existing power structure. Second, ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit
September 8, 2017–January 7, 2018
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
I had forgotten about The Day After until the North Korea/US missile crisis brought it back to mind with a bang. Aired in November 1983, the American TV movie terrified over 100 million viewers with its graphic images of a nuclear conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, leading ... Read more →
Galleria Fonti and Museo Madre, Naples
There is an astonishing sequence in Robert Mugge's 1980 film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a documentary about the great intergalactic avant-garde jazz musician, artist, and poet. It occurs when Sun Ra is playing a solo during his band's—the Arkestra—performance in a Baltimore ballroom. Sun Ra stands in front of ... Read more →
Galerie Buchholz, New York
November 2, 2017–January 13, 2018
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
There were no hesitations, no missteps; no point at which one limb converged onto another, when one cut of cloth got caught up in another. A pair of machines, whose materials were listed obliquely, solely, as "readymade industrial robots," rest promenade-style, side by side, oriented toward the entrance—toward me—before the ... Read more →
Gagosian Le Bourget, Paris
October 15–December 22, 2017
Flowers fade at different rates. In the November chill of a Glasgow art gallery, cut flowers—carefully arranged in a vase on the floor, their silhouette cast against the wall by the light from a projector—are taking their time to die, or to appear dead. (When exactly do cut flowers die?) ... Read more →
Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow
October 27, 2017–January 28, 2018
—Reviews
by Maria Kjaer Themsen
Nils Staerk is the latest commercial gallery to spring up amidst the coffee shops and organic wine bars in Nordvest, a district of Copenhagen that the local media are more likely to associate with violent crime and unemployment. A further reminder of the uncomfortable coexistence of two worlds stands directly ... Read more →
Nils Staerk, Copenhagen
November 4–December 16, 2017
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
In his three-volume book Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Charles Lyell pioneered a theory whose clunky title belies its elegance. Uniformitarianism, as Lyell's argument is known, suggests that the earth was shaped, over hundreds of millions of years, by incremental processes that are observable all around us: erosion, sedimentation, and so ... Read more →
Seventeen Gallery, London
November 3, 2017–January 27, 2018
Remember to React. Jenny Holzer is trying to tell us something. She has been trying to tell us something since the early 1980s, when she conceived her "Survival" series, from which that sentence emerged. If you're looking closely, it's one of the first things you'll see at Art Basel Miami ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 7–10, 2017
On September 19, 2017, Mexico City was hit by one of the most destructive earthquakes in the country's history. Gallery Weekend Mexico City was originally scheduled to open September 21, by which time everyone who could was out in the streets clearing rubble and handing out food and water. The ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend CDMX, Mexico City
November 9–12, 2017
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
For some people, economy is mostly about money. But that is stupid: economy is actually about something else. Money is just the medium conventionally assigned to all tasks understood as economic. In the end, money is just a medium. For all those who firmly believe that the medium is the ... Read more →
Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
October 28–December 9, 2017
Not having a story to tell from the beginning or possibly starting from the middle is how Taoism describes time: continuity without a starting point. Stories abbreviate and expand in "intensiveness," a term Haegue Yang uses, in dialogue with Jimmie Durham, to describe a mode that, similarly to belief, can ... Read more →
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
October 14–November 25, 2017
Dublin is a dirty and disjointed city, a tangle of loosely connected neighborhoods best navigated on foot. On arrival my smartphone gave up the ghost, transforming the schedule of Dublin Gallery Weekend—a semi-coordinated program of exhibition openings, performances, and events—into a Situationist strategy. Deprived of online mapping services, I was ... Read more →
Dublin Gallery Weekend, Dublin
November 23–26, 2017
—Reviews
by Devon Van Houten Maldonado
What does it mean to present a group show of black artists based in the United States and United Kingdom—Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Rodney McMillian, Julie Mehretu, Kara Walker, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—in Mexico City? Here, the white/black binary of racial discourse in the US and (to a lesser extent) Western ... Read more →
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
November 11–December 16, 2017
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
During his two terms as mayor, Eduardo Paes rewired Rio de Janeiro into a leading "smart city"—a raise of the six-million-resident city's foundation that he was able to parcel out into a few crisp segments of a neat, satisfied TED talk. He dispensed the recipe for urban achievement: find and ... Read more →
It felt entirely appropriate to see "Time To Die"— Joep van Liefland's first solo exhibition in Japan—on Halloween. As evening fell, the Blade Runner-esque streets around Nanzuka Gallery began to seethe with a human froth of staggering zombies, gibbering corpses, and wounded cosplay nurses. Despite their macabre costumes, the crowds ... Read more →
NANZUKA, Tokyo
October 21–November 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
The 2017 edition of the Jakarta Biennale proposes a soulful understanding of Indonesia, in which "jiwa" reigns. Jiwa is a pre-Islamic, polytheistic, and specifically Indonesian concept that signifies a way of living in which thinking and feeling go hand-in-hand, and of living in harmony with nature and with one another. ... Read more →
Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta
November 5–December 19, 2017
"The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or place." That once startling, now iconic statement by Douglas Huebler (1924–1997) was crucial to the foundation of Conceptual ... Read more →
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
October 14–November 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
An exhibition vitrine in a contemporary exhibition is a knowing nod to long traditions of display. By recreating a form of museum presentation, it relates to what Tony Bennett calls the "museum idea" and its way of defining knowledge and, more broadly, power. Museums, according to Bennett, are places where ... Read more →
Vitrine, Basel
September 22–December 3, 2017
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Whirlpools of words, sans-serif swirls: language is both subject and material of Ferdinand Kriwet's exhibition at Georg Kargl Fine Arts, part of this year's curated by_Vienna. In some of Kriwet's text-based works, the typographical forms take clear precedence over linguistic sense; in others, the words' meaning packs the stronger punch. "KRIWET" ... Read more →
Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna
September 15–November 30, 2017
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
If your first associations with Colombia are cocaine, paramilitary violence, and the rapacious plunder of natural resources by neo-colonialist corporations, then you are only half right, according to this spirited, unkempt, and organizationally flawed exhibition of Colombian artists at The Box, Los Angeles. Along with all these clichés (eagerly resold ... Read more →
The Box, Los Angeles
September 14–November 4, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
The medieval wardrobe of a sadomasochist, the secret torture chamber gear of a conflicted superhero, grim relics of gods from the deepest abysses of a broken dimension, or, as they truly are, artworks, sparsely hung, dangling from ropes, splayed like bodies, and rippled into curtains of parachute silk, with one ... Read more →
Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles
September 17–November 22, 2017
—Reviews
by Lucy Reynolds
Cosey Fanni Tutti's exhibition at Cabinet Gallery is divided into two parts, a photographic exhibition and a film, which together invite the visitor to negotiate not only questions of morality but also archival memento mori. Upon entering the upper gallery, the viewer confronts frames from Cosey's 1977 photographic collaborations with ... Read more →
Cabinet Magazine, Berlin
September 22–November 4, 2017
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
In her 1974 memoir Handbook in Motion, Simone Forti describes how, when she moved from San Francisco to New York in 1959, the city seemed a "maze of concrete mirrors." New York didn't just disorient: it "shocked" her. She took solace from the city's alienating architecture by rooting herself in ... Read more →
Hollybush Gardens, London
September 22–October 28, 2017
—Reviews
by Simone Menegoi
Katinka Bock compares works to words and exhibitions to texts. The analogy explains the relationship between the two aspects of the Franco-German artist's work: the sculptures, silver prints, and occasional films, on the one hand, and the sophisticated displays that she creates out of them, whose value is greater than ... Read more →
Meyer Riegger, Berlin
September 15–October 28, 2017
The practice of Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Cassils expands upon—and queers—a feminist performance-art tradition, molding their transgender masculine physique through rigorous fitness regimens and durational actions. Though in "Monumental," Cassils's current New York exhibition, abstraction has entered the artist's repertoire. Cassils grapples with their political desire to represent transgender lives ... Read more →
Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
September 16–October 28, 2017
—Reviews
by Michelle Standley
As respite from the dark clouds that have lately been gathering over women's heads in the United States—most recently in the announcement of plans to restrict women's protection from workplace harassment and access to birth control—perhaps a little comic relief is in order. One contender for the role of feminist ... Read more →
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart
September 9–October 22, 2017
One of the three gallery spaces at David Zwirner's Ruth Asawa exhibition contains a display case featuring archival photographs taken by Imogen Cunningham of the artist in her studio and with her family; an earlier photo of Asawa in class with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College; a letter Asawa ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
September 13–October 21, 2017
Amar Kanwar's latest video installation delves into more mystical concerns than the documentary format, for which he is known, might seem capable of containing. The eponymous single-channel video at the heart of "Such A Morning" (all works 2017) is an exquisitely installed piece of visionary slow cinema—a work whose mode ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
September 19–October 14, 2017
—Reviews
by Herb Shellenberger
Leave or Remain, Trump or Clinton, terror, peace, boredom, or indifference: no matter where the world is at culturally, politically, socially, or existentially, there will always be another Frieze fair in early October. If last year's edition occurred within the shadow of a particularly pronounced period of political uncertainty, by ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 4–8, 2017
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Ever since the end of the Cold War, an aesthetics of mourning has characterized contemporary art's understanding of its own critical history. "Burdened with a sadness it cannot dispel," several generations have been delving into these "realms of defeated utopia," looking back rather than forward. At Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, ... Read more →
Temnikova & Kasela , Tallinn
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
Emma Lavigne's "Floating Worlds" is the second in a "thematic trilogy" of Lyon Biennales exploring the "modern" (a perhaps onerous keyword issued by its artistic director, Thierry Raspail). Lavigne's title references the Japanese idea of "the floating world" (ukiyo), a mindset originating in the seventeenth century which recognizes life as ... Read more →
Biennale de Lyon
September 20, 2017–January 7, 2018
You put on headphones and wander across a football field at the end of the world. There are instructions: "Go to the corner of the field, or if there is someone there, stand at the goal line at a place where you can see the entire pitch." From an iPod ... Read more →
LIAF, Lofoten
September 1–October 1, 2017
—Reviews
by Tessa Jackson
Copying and re-using others' images or artworks always generates considerable debate. Just like solving a crime, it becomes necessary to establish a motive. Almost 200 years separate Thomas Bowdich's original colored aquatint The First Day of the Yam Custom (1818) from Godfried Donkor's large replica, which takes the same name ... Read more →
Gallery 1957, Accra
August 22–October 30, 2017
—Reviews
by Natasha Marie Llorens
Vava Dudu's "Vertige Profonde" at Marseille's Salon du Salon is visually balanced to the point of stillness. The solo show occupies two adjoining rooms on the third floor of a spacious old bourgeois apartment on l'Avenue du Prado, a wide boulevard radiating out of the city center towards the south ... Read more →
Salon du Salon, Marseille
August 24–September 30, 2017
The flourishing of South Africa's commercial galleries over the last two decades has coincided with the atrophying of infrastructure, collections, and curatorial programs at the country's major public museums. State neglect, hobbled budgets, and poor leadership at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, as well as important municipal ... Read more →
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
August 24–September 23, 2017
Can the German art market support four art fairs? The battle over market share is in full swing. Art Karlsruhe is a bit out of the game. Although it seems like a major event with more than 200 exhibitors, it can only cater to the country's southwestern local audience due ... Read more →
art berlin, Berlin
September 14–17, 2017
—Reviews
by Ingo Niermann
Earlier this summer, after a public talk between Elena Sorokina and my wife, Chus Martínez, the three of us were invited by Eduard Mayoral of Galeria Mayoral to dinner. We hadn't yet reached dessert when Eduard asked us what to make of Salvador Dalí. They were about to open a ... Read more →
Galeria Mayoral, Barcelona
September 14, 2017–January 5, 2018
Nancy Holt's works seem to be camouflaged in the hangar that hosts her Ibiza exhibition at Parra & Romero. This sense of spaciousness is relevant to Holt's practice, who remains best known for her site-specific earthworks. Like many artists of the 1960s and '70s, Holt was critical of the gallery ... Read more →
Parra & Romero, Ibiza
June 2–September 27, 2017
—Reviews
by Cameron Allan McKean
The city of Yokohama blends almost seamlessly into Tokyo, forming one of the largest and most disaster-prone urban agglomerations in the world. But there are subtle differences between Yokohama and its northern neighbor—the smell of the Pacific, the quiet, moat-like boulevards—and major ones: this is where Western modernity breached the ... Read more →
Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama
August 4–November 5, 2017
THE BOAT The metaphor of the ship of state is best known from Plato's Republic. In the "collective exhibition concept" developed by Udo Kittelmann for the Fondazione Prada, this maritime trope of political community is evoked unmistakably yet only obliquely, mediated through the titular citation of Leonard Cohen's devastating ... Read more →
Fondazione Prada, Milan
May 13–November 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Francis McKee
The marriage of Italian designer Martino Gamper and Pollok House in Glasgow, set up by The Modern Institute, is a perfect match. Originally the ancestral home of the Stirling-Maxwell baronetcy, the house was built in 1752 and is run now by the National Trust as a public museum. Much of ... Read more →
Pollok House, Glasgow
June 5–July 30, 2017
—Reviews
by Simone Menegoi
"Can you see anything?" Lord Carnarvon anxiously asked Howard Carter, who was peering, through a small hole by the light of a candle, into the anteroom of the tomb of Tutankhamun. "Yes, wonderful things!" was his famous answer. Viewers who access Nick Bastis's exhibition do not see "wonderful things"; on ... Read more →
Ermes-Ermes, Rome
May 6–July 30, 2017
A rule of thumb: hearing about other people's trips abroad is boring. Another: hearing about their dreams is even worse. Given that the work of Tamara Henderson draws on the Canadian artist's world-girdling nomadism (her CV is a litany of travel grants and residencies) and her own unconscious (past projects ... Read more →
Rodeo
May 17–July 29, 2017
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
The invitation to the third solo show by Mandla Reuter at Francesca Minini bears no title or explanation. It relies on just one image, evocative enough on its own: a moonless sea, rippled by waves. Even the press release, stripped of all syntax, is reduced to a chain of words ... Read more →
Francesca Minini, Milan
May 7–July 29, 2017
Where to begin? Where else but at this stage? A cotton boll embalmed in a bell jar like the Disney rose in Beauty and the Beast (1991): Aria Dean's Dead Zone (1) (2017) gives the rose's place to a white commodity once harvested by black people made commodities. The cotton ... Read more →
Château Shatto, Los Angeles
June 10–August 12, 2017
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
The inaugural ARoS Triennial, "The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times," opened in Aarhus, 2017's European Capital of Culture, on the morning that Donald Trump stood in the White House garden and announced his plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. ARoS's director, Erlend Høyersten, promises that this ... Read more →
ARoS Triennial
June 3–July 30, 2017
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
There is no animal in this country that does that type of thing. It was the size of a giant tiger. It was about a meter long and had black, silky fur. The belief in the existence of elusive, strange, fabulous, and extraterrestrial animals is ubiquitous and timeless. Predatory giant turtles, ... Read more →
Galerie Pompom, Sydney
June 7–July 2, 2017
The reign of Stella Kesaeva and the Stella Art Foundation over the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale ended in 2015. Over the course of three biennales, they showed western audiences works by the artists who secured Moscow conceptualism's place in art history, and transformed it into an export commodity ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 13–November 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Though at present the concept of "media" is almost wholly equated with communication technologies, throughout the modern period this notion extended beyond the technological field, to include aesthetic and spiritual registers. In the late nineteenth century, a medium was someone with the alleged ability to act as a psychic conduit ... Read more →
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
April 21–July 3, 2017
—Reviews
by Catalina Lozano
For her first exhibition in Mexico City, LA-based artist Kerry Tribe removed the front wall of Parque Galería and transformed it into a makeshift screening room. The crumbling architecture, with its exposed dry walls and frayed edges, introduces an exhibition in which seemingly solid physical and psychical structures are undone. Tribe's ... Read more →
Parque Galería, Mexico City
May 6–July 1, 2017
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
The new extension of Centro Pecci (designed by NIO Architecten Rotterdam, and inaugurated last fall) is a ring-shaped volume clad in golden aluminum, halfway between a UFO from a 1950s B-movie and the corporate headquarters of a German car brand, surrounded by an urban sprawl of office blocks, residential buildings, ... Read more →
Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
April 29–June 25, 2017
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Where is the bright line between life and the simulation of life? And what then are the criteria for assessing aliveness? These questions are forever reconstituted and assessed anew at life's fringes—around automata, the dead, artificial intelligence. 2017's prestige AI television series Westworld is only the most recent thinking-through of ... Read more →
Simon Preston, New York
April 30–June 25, 2017
When lost for words, hands are tools to point, wave, and otherwise indicate meaning. While much of this form of communication is intuitive, firsthand knowledge is highly performative: as hands trace airborne paths, their gestures form recognizable patterns that may relay receptiveness or fear, in a cognizant yet affective process ... Read more →
Maisterravalbuena, Lisbon
May 16–June 29, 2017
The air was hot and filled with din. Art Basel 2017 opened on Tuesday as a more laid-back affair than the previous two editions, but the overall mood was nonetheless upbeat. And how could it not be, given the breathtakingly vulgar fun-fair installation Now I Won (2017) by Swiss artist ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
June 15–18, 2017
Now half a century old, the decennial public art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster has unquestionably grown up. The first exhibition featured only male artists while now almost half of the participants are women; a retrospective exhibition of Michael Asher's photography at Skulptur Projekte Münster—the artist participated in every edition from ... Read more →
Skulptur Projekte Münster , Münster
June 10–October 1, 2017
—Reviews
by Anders Kreuger
"We all act as if we have no choice but to consume more and more" This quote, from Mongolian artist Ariuntugs Tserenpil, serves as the first of three titles for these reflections on Documenta 14 in Kassel. Its label of "the world's most important exhibition" must still carry some ... Read more →
documenta
June 10–September 17, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
Here's the latest Spring menswear line worn by the hottest male models of the twenty-eighth century, those jaunty scions of cyborg overlords. Our wetwear bodies found a hardware durability after we and our machines, long flirting, finally coupled. Moodily lit with mint and hot pink, humanoid bods sport flight jackets ... Read more →
Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
April 29–June 17, 2017
—Reviews
by iLiana Fokianaki & Yanis Varoufakis
Created in 1955 by artist and curator Arnold Bode, Documenta sought to advance the cultural reconstruction of Germany within the postwar European order. Recurring every five years, it has since unfolded into a periodic forum for contemporary art. When Adam Szymczyk was appointed artistic director of Documenta 14 in November ... Read more →
documenta
April 8–July 16, 2017
At a moment when all kinds of anxieties can be tweaked by a tweeting president, Mel Bochner—a highly respected first-generation Conceptualist—has found his voice. Or perhaps I should say, these uneasy times have caught up with Bochner's word-based art of language and ideas. Other founding Conceptualists of the late 1960s— Robert ... Read more →
Peter Freeman Inc., New York
April 19–June 24, 2017
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Six years in, Syria's Civil War has been the subject of a vast quantity of information—in the form of user-generated video, reportage, news analysis, social media updates—and yet we seem no nearer to an adequate means of representing it. Representation and resolution are often intertwined: the clarity of a representation, ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
May 4–June 10, 2017
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
According to the exhibition's introductory text, "Quiet," curated by SALTS director and Art Basel Parcours curator Samuel Leuenberger, is inspired by Susan Cain's 2012 book of the same title, which champions introverts in a world skewed in favor of the ebullient extrovert. It is an odd premise for an exhibition, ... Read more →
Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zürich
April 13–June 5, 2017
"What have you eaten today?" a metallic voiceover inquires. The reply, uttered by a child, hesitantly, is "nothing." Yet in the course of the transitory interrogation that unfolds in the middle of Eva Kot'átková's most recent film Stomach of the world (2017), currently being shown by the Polyeco Contemporary Art ... Read more →
Meyer Riegger, Berlin
April 28–June 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Gustavo Grandal Montero
"Un Arte A Realizar [An Art In Becoming]" is the first solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to the Argentinian artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, who died in 1997. Relatively unknown in Europe, his name has until recently been associated with mail art, that most underrated of avant-garde movements. The exhibition ... Read more →
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
April 3–May 19, 2017
—Reviews
by Cameron Allan McKean
Earth-stuff goes through myriad transformations on its path to usefulness in our world. Soil, stone, water, oil, plants, animals, and the rest all pass through processes of cleaning, smoothing, separating, reconstituting. And at the end of that violence is an exquisite, terrifying flatness: one that expresses itself through identical buildings, ... Read more →
Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
April 21–May 20, 2017
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
Christina Mackie's installations have an instinctive and provisional feel about them. They present the viewer with arrays of disparate objects, arranged on trestle tables, walls, and shelves, assembled according to a spontaneous logic of correspondence and juxtaposition. Mackie refers to this aspect of her work as "trestle art." Wolfgang Tillmans' ... Read more →
Herald St, London
April 13–May 21, 2017
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
There was widespread suspicion about "Viva Arte Viva" even before Christine Macel's 57th Venice Biennale opened last week. This year's edition fell short of gender parity with almost two-thirds of the participants male, fomenting heated critiques on social media upon release of the artist list. Racial metrics were worse; case ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 13–November 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"Viva Arte Viva" is a tautological title. Since a tautological statement is one that is necessarily true on the basis of its circular syntactical structure, it's logical to assume that Christine Macel, the curator of the 57th Venice Biennale, is asking us to believe that art is alive, and/or that ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 13–November 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
At the time of his death in 2007, Jörg Immendorff was celebrated in his homeland as one of postwar Germany's most famous artists, and also as one of its most infamous. Earlier that year the terminally ill, functionally incapacitated painter had directed a team of assistants to produce an official ... Read more →
Michael Werner, New York
March 16–May 13, 2017
—Reviews
by Matthew McLean
One origin myth of ceramics: that far back in prehistory, basket makers packed their containers with clay to form a lining, and one day dropped one of these vessels into a fire, finding, when the ashes cooled, that the clay had hardened and remained where the woven structure was destroyed. Ceramics, ... Read more →
Kubikgallery, Porto
April 8–May 20, 2017
—Reviews
by Rachel Wetzler
The first thing I saw upon entering the tent at Frieze New York was Elmgreen and Dragset's Rite of Passage (2014) at Massimo De Carlo, a tattered sign bearing the word "MIRACLE" with a white vulture perched on top, flanked by lengths of torn chain link fence. This dismal tableau ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 5–7, 2017
—Reviews
by Keren Goldberg
The number of Tel Avivan galleries mounting consecutive group shows is a symptom of the Israeli art market's gloomy state. While you might assume that Dvir's latest group exhibition—its second in a row—is another driven by commercial imperatives, it does draw concrete formal and contextual ties between works by major ... Read more →
Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
March 18–May 6, 2017
In the wake of the events of May 1968, German Minimalist Charlotte Posenenske wrote in Art International that "it is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to solving urgent social problems."," Art International no. 5 (May 1968), n.p.] Posenenske's "'Statement' [Manifesto]," ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
April 28–30, 2017
"I don't know what it's like to be black in America," wrote the artist Dana Schutz in her protracted defense against calls for the removal and destruction of her painting Open Casket (2016). She was responding to mounting fervor over her rendition, included in the Whitney Biennial, of the mangled ... Read more →
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai
March 8–May 15, 2017
September 5, 1782. Bartolina Sisa, Aymara leader of the indigenous uprising against the Spanish in Bolivia, is brutally tortured, publicly humiliated, and killed by hanging. Her body is dismembered and, to prevent further rebellion, her head and extremities are exhibited at several locations known for their resilience. Bartolina Sisa has ... Read more →
Travesía Cuatro, Madrid
February 24–April 29, 2017
Word on the street is they got the Crenshaw Cowboy. Into a gallery, that is. Anyone who has turned onto the westbound I-10 at Crenshaw Boulevard has likely noticed him, an itinerant junk-assemblage artist who shows his sculptures at the top of the onramp. He also gives advice on fame ... Read more →
Venus, Los Angeles
March 11–May 20, 2017
Capturing the unseen has been a taking-off point for photographic ambition since the medium's inception. Ephemeral moments, underlying truths, and the supernatural have all been teased out through choices around opening and closing shutters. Featuring small-format photographs produced from the mid-1950s through the early '70s, this exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, ... Read more →
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
March 9–May 6, 2017
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
Only someone with a lying mouth, according to Yoruba oral tradition, would speak first and look for visual confirmation second. Untold centuries later, the expression retains its value: photography's maneuvers depend on the fact that truth is determined by the eye. The complete history of photography is inextricable from colonialism in ... Read more →
M+B, Los Angeles
March 18–April 22, 2017
The visitor to Josh Smith's show at STANDARD (OSLO) is faced with 11 Grim Reapers painted in oil on canvas, all of them equipped with the customary black robe and scythe. Smith's angels of death are not solitary, otherworldly figures, but a motley crew rendered in a seemingly slapdash manner, ... Read more →
STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo
March 17–April 15, 2017
In artist Sanya Kantarovsky's latest curatorial venture, an exhibition at Metro Pictures organized around the underappreciated Dutch painter René Daniëls, he continues to examine the mechanics of artistic positioning. Similarly, in his previous curated exhibition, "No Joke" at Tanya Leighton (Berlin, 2015), he grouped together work that, through humor and ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
March 17–April 22, 2017
The fourteenth edition of Documenta takes place, for the first time in the institution's history, across two locations. By staging it in Germany and Greece, and expressing the hope that an exhibition bankrolled by the former might effectively critique the infrastructures of power that have immiserated the latter, curator Adam ... Read more →
documenta
April 8–July 16, 2017
What could be more pertinent to today's helter-skelter mudslide into the political abyss than a reflection on the idea of justice? The eighth edition of the Contour Biennial is dedicated to this most noble of themes. Both thrilling and frustrating, the biennial offers vertiginous perspectives by artists and theorists, as ... Read more →
Contour Biennale, Mechelen
March 11–May 21, 2017
—Reviews
by Herb Shellenberger
From the darkness, a bright, circular spotlight illuminates a theater curtain. Searching intermittently along its folds, the light traces paths which uncover crimson underneath deep black. The curtain finally pulls upward revealing a moon of bright white. The opening images of Mary Helena Clark's By foot-candle light (2011) present ... Read more →
Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
March 18–26, 2017
The phrase "make-believe media" was coined by Michael Parenti in 1991 to describe how the United States' entertainment industries reproduce myths that justify the unequal distribution of power. The racism, militarism, and misogyny coded into pop cultural forms like the television drama, he proposed, do not reflect social realities so ... Read more →
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo
February 3–April 2, 2017
—Reviews
by Anna Wallace-Thompson
Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria has long examined the architecture, urban planning, and customs of what she calls "Gulf Futurism," including the phenomenon of mall culture. Her solo show in Dubai presents a new iteration of works exhibited last year at the Whitney Museum, New York, which further that investigation. The room-sized ... Read more →
The Third Line, Dubai
February 22–April 1, 2017
—Reviews
by Daniel Szehin Ho
Twenty years after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, Hong Kong stands at a crossroads. The generation to come of age in the intervening decades has become restless, frustrated by the rejection of demands for universal suffrage (the election for the next Chief Executive takes places ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
March 23–25, 2017
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
Bottles of seawater sit among makeshift red flags on charred concrete breezeblocks. "It's like a fire," says the artist, Dineo Seshee Bopape, of her installation, +/– 1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (2017), which is scattered about the courtyard of one of Sharjah Art Foundation's warren of spaces. Small ... Read more →
Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah
March 10–June 12, 2017
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
There is no image more prescient of modern displays of masculinity and status than Judith Bernstein's drawing COCK IN THE BOX (1966), inspired by a history of Vietnam-era bathroom-stall graffiti. Whether those lewd sketches were made to parody politics in wartime, as comic relief for those on the john, for ... Read more →
The Box, Los Angeles
February 11–March 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
One clean cut and—snip!—the plait of hair flops to the floor. Then comes the next braid—snip!—and the next—snip-snip! Strand by strand, all the remaining black hair of this Asian woman, dressed in traditional Kyrgyz garb, is sheared off by her own hand. It falls around her feet, leaving her neck ... Read more →
Laura Bulian Gallery, Milan
February 9–March 17, 2017
One day the interface between humans and computers will be seamless. For now, it involves necks bent over smartphones, hours sitting hunched in front of a monitor, fingers and arms that still need to extend toward their devices. Despite all the talk about disembodied experiences and virtual worlds, computer technology ... Read more →
Bridget Donahue, New York
January 27–March 12, 2017
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
It was only a couple of days after the opening, while sitting in the audience of a lecture by Italian playwright Romeo Castellucci at Teatro dell'Arte in Milan, that Will Benedict's "The Social Democrat" at Giò Marconi really clicked in my head. Call it synchronicity. Castellucci delivered his speech, titled ... Read more →
Gió Marconi and Fondazione Giuliani, Milan and Rome
If the art auction is the ultimate hunger games of ostentatious display for your taste and bank account, the art fair is the auction's suburban or exurban cousin: the mega shopping mall, where everything is under one roof. Whether or not you went in knowing what you wanted to get ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York
March 2–6, 2017
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
The name "The Commercial" is unusually explicit for a gallery, but the title of the group exhibition currently on view in this one-room gallery in Sydney's Redfern/Chippendale precinct is not to be taken so literally. While "Harvest" brings to mind food, crops, and still lifes, the exhibition also plays with ... Read more →
The Commercial Gallery, Sydney
February 11–March 4, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
Despite their enigmatic, aloof character, most of the works in Kader Attia's current exhibition at Lehmann Maupin are relatively easy to make sense of. Whether in their medium (neoconceptual sculpture), their mode of facture (readymade assemblage), or their topic (cultural hybridization), they exemplify what we now expect of "global contemporary ... Read more →
Lehmann Maupin, New York
January 13–March 4, 2017
Berlin-based Robin Rhode's third solo exhibition with Stevenson is an accomplished recapitulation of ideas and gestures that have featured in his mature practice since leaving South Africa in the mid-2000s. Rhode's work is grounded in repetition, notably his Eadweard Muybridge-like photo animations, which here include Paradise (2016) and Inverted Cycle ... Read more →
Stevenson, Cape Town
January 26–March 4, 2017
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Over the decade and a half of his career to date, Terence Koh has generated so many myths that it is now nearly impossible to begin thinking about his work without first acknowledging the tales of his personal and professional decadence in New York during the pre-crash mid-aughts, or the ... Read more →
Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles
January 28–March 11, 2017
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
As 2017 opens there is a sense that all bets are off—that it is time to roll the dice and keep a hand open to all possibilities. Perhaps this is all the more so in the Netherlands—in many ways the closest of the EU countries to Britain and perhaps facing ... Read more →
Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, Amsterdam / Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam / Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam / Martin von Zomeren, Amsterdam / tegenboshvanvreden, Amsterdam / Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam / Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam
January 15–February 25, 2017
—Reviews
by William Kherbek
Descartes, Deleuze, Lacan, Nancy, Rilke, Weil, Heidegger (!) (just to name a few)—the gang's all here at Marcus Steinweg's new show at BQ, whose title, "For the Love of Philosophy," certainly seems to ring true. "The self is the placeholder and performer of chaos. Descartes already knew this, that is ... Read more →
BQ, Berlin
January 14–March 11, 2017
Geoffrey Farmer's lyricism of control is on show at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, although this time with a new suggestion of malignity. Farmer is an exponent of the artistic practice of finding a part of a derelict, languishing image, or two, or more, and through juxtapositions translating these elements into novel, ... Read more →
Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
January 14–February 25, 2017
Muhammed Ahmed Faris is the only Syrian who has traveled to outer space. A colonel in the Syrian Air Force, Faris—the subject of Turkish artist Halil Altindere's video Space Refugee (2016)—joined the Soviet cosmonaut program in 1985 and was part of a mission to the Mir Space Station in 1987. ... Read more →
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
January 7–February 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Jacob Korczynski
Throughout an expansive practice that spans more than half a century, Michael Snow has questioned the conditions of perception and pushed against the material properties of multiple mediums. Snow's work has remained relevant to successive generations of artists because of the generosity it can extend to viewers. In encountering his ... Read more →
Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto
January 14–February 11, 2017
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
What's to be gained from aestheticizing resistance, from reducing political protest and its violent and repressive fallout to a highly stylized image? This is the final question raised by Martine Syms's second solo show in London, a tastefully oblique, risk-free display that simultaneously draws on and hollows out the recent ... Read more →
Sadie Coles HQ, London
January 13–February 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Rodney Graham's large-format light-box tableaux have been a mainstay of his oeuvre since 2006, and are consistently sophisticated and detailed. The artist's current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich includes seven new light-box works that do not disappoint, but, I wondered, why produce these works now? Graham has been active ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
January 21–March 11, 2017
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
Sometimes an artwork responds to the world outside; sometimes the world outside responds to an artwork; and sometimes neither knows of the other, yet each is enhanced by it all the same. Such a moment occurred recently when one could march down Piccadilly, in protest with and in the presence ... Read more →
Simon Lee Gallery, London
November 23, 2016–February 4, 2017
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
A church, before being appropriated for something beyond its original purpose, needs to undergo a ritual called "profanation." The procedure is a sort of reverse engineering of the initial consecration. What once belonged to a god is handed back to human life. "And if 'to consecrate' (sacrare) was the term ... Read more →
Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
October 23, 2016–April 30, 2017
A nose—the lead character in Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Nose" from 1836—fashions itself as a decorated civil servant, so esteemed one can hardly question its privileged stature, as such cachet ought to be unquestionably deserved. No two noses are the same, Gogol notes. Some straddle along Nevsky Prospect without ... Read more →
Galeria Pedro Alfacinha, Lisbon
December 17, 2016–February 18, 2017
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
When writing the now-famous entry for the word informe (formless) in the surrealist journal Documents, Georges Bataille started by saying that "a dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words, but their tasks." "Formless" is a word tasked with declassifying (déclasser), which in French also connotes degrading ... Read more →
Dan Gunn, Berlin
November 26, 2016–February 18, 2017
The first paradox one encounters in Luis Camnitzer's exhibition at Parra & Romero in Madrid is the apparent contradiction between its title, "Dibujos" [Drawings], and its content, two installations titled El Cuaderno Rayado [The lined notebook] and Dibujos en el Agua [Drawings on water]. Exhibited in separate gallery spaces, each ... Read more →
Parra & Romero, Ibiza
October 26, 2016–February 11, 2017
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
The art world is overstuffed with collages of YouTube clips and Internet artifacts, with most of these trafficking in an ironic glibness that is overly praised either for its affect or lack of it. Though cut from the same digital cloth, the compilation video Love Is The Message, The Message ... Read more →
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
November 12, 2016–January 28, 2017
At a recent film screening in Zurich, an artist whose work was about to be premiered half-joked about the emergent trend of updating exhibition press releases with references to the recent US presidential election and the theme of imminent universal doom left behind by November's stunning outcome. Suddenly, there's a ... Read more →
Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich
December 9, 2016–January 28, 2017
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
"If anything emerges to cut up, I'll go anywhere, anytime" wrote Gordon Matta-Clark in 1975. Earlier that year, Paris had come calling, and, at the invitation of the ninth edition of the Paris Biennale curated by Georges Boudaille, the artist realized Conical Intersect (1975). Photographs, photomontages, and film footage of ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
December 8, 2016–January 19, 2017
Guest curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty, the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), titled "Forming in the pupil of an eye," is an assembly of artist-created realities. Shetty outlines his curatorial concept with the story of a young traveler who went on a long journey to meet a sage. ... Read more →
Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi
December 12, 2016–March 29, 2017
—Reviews
by Cameron Allan McKean
Pottery is place, folded and fired. It is soil, stone, flora, topography, and climate, massaged by human tradition and technique. In Japan, the placeness of ceramics has been taken to an extreme with local variations in style proliferating across the island nation. This sensitivity to place and materials echoes in ... Read more →
Blum and Poe Tokyo, Tokyo
November 18, 2016–January 21, 2017
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
Craggy peaks of stone, desolate plains, parched and rasping arctic coasts—still caught perhaps in some distant geologic era—provide a home to stray beasts of all kinds: the spindly heads of snakes rise like pinnacles from the summits of crumbling towers. The sagging legs of pachyderms prop up arcades redolent of ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
November 9, 2016–January 13, 2017
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
There is no more poetic organ than the human heart: a blood-soaked snarl of muscle tissue whose constriction is our literal life force, its cadence—its pulse—has been held accountable for not only bodily function but as the instrument of conscience, intention, love, and courage; a spiritual and corporal engine. The ... Read more →
Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles
November 12, 2016–January 7, 2017
Spiros Hadjidjanos's third solo show at Future Gallery is both technically and conceptually complex—it's up to the viewer to decide how far down the rabbit hole to go. Yet each work functions on multiple levels, and is rewarding in equal proportion to how much time one dedicates to figuring it ... Read more →
Future Gallery, Berlin
December 10, 2016–January 28, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
Whatever one might think of Ai Weiwei, he has made it impossible to simply not think about him. Ai's will-to-notoriety has led to him to become all but ubiquitous, with much of this publicity deriving from his transformation into the world's most prominent artist-activist. Critical reactions to this development have ... Read more →
Multiple Venues, New York
November 5–December 23, 2016
I was sent into darkness. I couldn't see a single thing. There was a fuzzy light right behind the gallery door illuminating press releases laid out on a small table, and a gallery staffer equipped with a small flashlight. But she simply pointed into the dark: "That way." That way ... Read more →
Esther Schipper, Berlin / Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
David Noonan and Renee So, whose work is shown in concurrent solo exhibitions at Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, share an interest in the research, appropriation, and reconfiguration of traditional iconography. Hung on the walls of the main gallery, hidden down a terraced street in the suburb of Paddington, David Noonan's ... Read more →
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
November 24–December 17, 2016
The 1980s was inaugurated with the 24-hour news cycle: CNN transmitted its first broadcast on January 1, 1980. Five years later, independent curator Anne Livet—in collaboration with Nature Morte gallery founders Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy—organized an exhibition called "Infotainment." Traveling to several U.S. cities, it featured the work of ... Read more →
Elizabeth Dee
October 29–December 17, 2016
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
Huma Bhabha's humanoid sculpture In the Shadow of the Sun (2016), displayed on a low white plinth in a brightly lit room in London's Stephen Friedman Gallery, stares at the viewer with inscrutable, smudged black eyes. The figure is female. She wears a hood. Her torso, cut from Styrofoam embellished ... Read more →
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
November 22, 2016–January 28, 2017
In a shallow bay window facing 2nd St., a ledge overflows with studio clutter: a couple dozen euros in coins between a few dying plants; a bowl filled with loose earrings and studs; a keycard from the Waldorf Astoria; a castle of used tea candles, Red Bull cans, and tiny ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Los Angeles
October 16–December 31, 2016
—Reviews
by Monica Uszerowicz
It has been hard, lately, to think about art. I don't mean to imply that art isn't powerful, transformative, or even a necessary distraction. The problem, really, is that it's been hard to think about anything besides the new president-elect, or how every check I deposit helps fund the poisoning ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 1–4, 2016
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Exploded canvases, split screens and multiple channels, mixed-, multi-, and inter-media: Carolee Schneemann has been clear in her rejection of medium specificity in favor of what one might call medium promiscuity. Since the early 1960s, she has consistently incorporated images (both moving and still) into multimedia environments that include elements ... Read more →
P•P•O•W Gallery, New York / Galerie Lelong, New York
October 21–December 3, 2016
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"Dear President, / Your profile is vague, / You have no arms, no hair, no legs, and no sex / Your enemy is your lover. / I need make-up, underwear and hormones! / Dear visitor, / Are you optimistic, / When our country is at war? / Is freedom more ... Read more →
Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement
November 9, 2016–January 28, 2017
Where the phrase "gallery weekend" might once have euphemized a romantic indiscretion, or announced a Happening, it now connotes a program of events coordinated to attract a small but influential international audience to a city with aspirations to the status of a cultural hub. Korea's contribution to this increasingly popular ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Korea
October 13–16, 2016
A source of artistic fascination since the nineteenth century, when it became the subject of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, the grandeur of Upstate New York's Hudson Valley also figures in Jacky Connolly's first solo exhibition, at Kimberly-Klark in Queens, New York. The exhibition's centerpiece is a video ... Read more →
Kimberly-Klark, New York
October 22–November 20, 2016
At the 11th Shanghai Biennale, it isn't possible to take a photograph without capturing people; the vast Power Station of Art—an electric plant turned kunsthalle since 2012—is busy throughout the preview day and public opening. The curators, Raqs Media Collective, have titled this edition of the biennale "Why Not Ask ... Read more →
Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai
November 11, 2016–March 12, 2017
Under the artistic direction of Susie Lingham, Director of the Singapore Art Museum, and nine other curators, the fifth edition of the Singapore Biennale, "An Atlas of Mirrors," showcases sixty artists and three artist collectives from nineteen countries and territories around South, East, and Southeast Asia. Spanning eight venues in close ... Read more →
Singapore Biennale
October 27, 2016–February 26, 2017
—Reviews
by Herb Shellenberger
"A repetitive moment becomes eternity." This fragment of speech, ringing through Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in Philippe Parreno's installation Anywhen (2016), might equally describe the frustration or elation of viewers' experiences of moving image artworks. This season's blockbuster exhibitions of film and video—Frieze Film (October 6–9, 2016), BFI London Film ... Read more →
Tate Modern, London / BFI Southbank / Frieze, London
—Reviews
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
While it has been widely exhibited in her native Portugal, Ana Jotta's work hasn't been presented in depth to the Barcelona public since the early 1990s. So this mini-survey of her production from 1980 to the present, framed as part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, is overdue. "Abans que me ... Read more →
ProjecteSD, Barcelona
September 30–November 26, 2016
—Reviews
by Mihnea Mircan
The inauguration of the European Parliament building in Brussels was marred by a defect of architectural planning: visitors approaching it were blown over by currents of air inexpertly funneled around the construction. One imagines stacks of European bureaucracy sent into elegant airborne swirls by the gusts of wind. The front ... Read more →
Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels
September 8–October 29, 2016
—Reviews
by Daniela Castro
The first sentences of Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944) read: "A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so ... Read more →
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
August 31–November 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
During the day, Halloween masks look pretty cheesy. Hanging from the drugstore rack's seasonal aisle under the terrible clarity of fluorescents and the afternoon sun, it's hard to image these killer clowns and fat-cheeked Frankensteins frightening anyone. Their warped faces and weeping pustules, yellowed horns and sharpened teeth, all a ... Read more →
Gavlak, Los Angeles
September 17–November 5, 2016
He was considered a lightweight in the early days of post-minimalism but for decades Bruce Nauman has been praised as one of the most wildly influential artists of our time. His video performances with the sounds of their own making hover between tedium and enthrallment, banality and profundity, repetition and ... Read more →
Sperone Westwater, New York
September 10–October 29, 2016
—Reviews
by Leigh Markopoulos
Fifty years after painting the earliest work in this exhibition, Suzanne Blank Redstone has her first solo show. The name may be unfamiliar, but her work at first glance appears to participate in a recognizably twentieth-century art-historical dialogue. Featuring primary-colored geometric forms and grids, her compositions instantly evoke Piet Mondrian, ... Read more →
Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
September 9–October 29, 2016
—Reviews
by Jacob Korczynski
"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our own fantasies. But once having exposed them, having named them, having proclaimed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you, and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws ... Read more →
La Biennale de Montréal
October 19, 2016–January 15, 2017
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
Few major exhibitions in recent memory have generated anything like the sort of intensely polarized response that greeted the recently concluded 9th Berlin Biennale, curated by the New York-based DIS, an increasingly notorious group of Gen X and Y "creatives" with close ties to the fashion and advertising industries. A ... Read more →
Petzel Gallery, New York
September 8–October 22, 2016
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Rows of numbers instill in me a sickening panic. I got that feeling, familiar from childhood mathematics lessons and annual tax returns, in Hanne Darboven's current exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles. Perhaps there was no need for such histrionics. In 1973, the West German Darboven told the writer Lucy Lippard ... Read more →
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
September 9–October 29, 2016
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
Adam Curtis's new film HyperNormalisation (2016) is about the diffusion of power through the manipulation of the media. It posits that politicians adopted the basic tenets of techno-utopianism to create an oversimplified worldview of a global economic and political landscape which had become overwhelmingly complex. The creation of mass-mediated, caricatured ... Read more →
Paris Internationale, Paris / FIAC, Paris
October 19–23, 2016
It's a sunny autumn day in the small Japanese city of Okayama, and two British men born in the 1960s are conversing about cameras. Liam Gillick and I both own the retro-looking Fujifilm X-Pro1, which we've chosen for its impressive price-to-performance ratio. "I've used it a lot in my work," ... Read more →
Okayama Art Summit
October 9–November 27, 2016
—Reviews
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
"Facility of DECLINE" at Gladstone Gallery, New York, "mirrors but does not reproduce" Matthew Barney's iconic 1991 exhibition of the same name at the gallery's SoHo space. Immediately upon entering, one is immersed in Barney's now familiar yet ever fantastic world of petroleum jelly, mythic characters, seductive hermeticism, and ever-revelatory ... Read more →
Gladstone Gallery, New York
September 9–October 22, 2016
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
I passed a group of women wearing hijab on the beach the other day, talking in Arabic and English. They had pulled their chairs into the water and were sitting with the bottom of their skirts in the sea. "It's hard for our sex to find happiness," I heard one ... Read more →
The Third Line, Dubai
September 18–October 22, 2016
Spaces is a feature of art-agenda that proposes a thematic examination of galleries based on the analysis of their physical and spatial configurations. Every two months, art-agenda publishes a new reflection on the spatial characteristics of galleries, their architecture, identity, and relation to their historical and geographical context. The sixth ... Read more →
Art fair reviews serve for many as a guide on what to see (and what to avoid); for some as a memorandum on trends, institutions, and artists to follow; and for a few as the starting point for a wish list, supporting acquisition and investment decisions. These texts frequently respond ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 6–9, 2016
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Heike-Karin Föll's exhibition nests within Rochelle Feinstein's concurrent, longer-running show at Galerie Francesca Pia. The pragmatic arrangement suits, because modesty is Föll's camouflage, starting with the conditions of the exhibition. At the gallery entrance are 4 notebooks in a vitrine, while the remainder of the works are in a side ... Read more →
Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich
September 9–October 7, 2016
While driving through the Mojave Desert two hours east of Los Angeles in the area surrounding Joshua Tree National Monument, among the most striking aspects of the scrub-and-bleached landscape are abandoned wooden shacks that regularly punctuate the view. The majority are nothing more than weather-blasted frames with doors and windows ... Read more →
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
September 9–October 8, 2016
In a city where most galleries are located in apartments, the experience of visiting exhibitions goes against the art-tourist impulse to catch as catch can. Stand outside buildings, buzz in, climb stairs, see the neighbors in the hallway—it's an experience of proximity that is different from viewing art at a ... Read more →
Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Warsaw
September 23–25, 2016
—Reviews
by Kiki Mazzucchelli
Almost a year ago, when chief curator Jochen Volz announced his proposal for the 32nd edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil was already undergoing a severe political crisis, with the country split between those who supported the democratically elected coalition government and those who called for the impeachment ... Read more →
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, São Paulo / São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
September 10–December 11, 2016
The title of the tenth Taipei Biennial, "Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future," includes everything but the term hammered throughout the exhibition: history. Curated by Corinne Diserens, this biennial departs from the 2014 edition helmed by Nicolas Bourriaud on the theme of accelerationism. Where Bourriaud's apocalyptic-yet-seductive ... Read more →
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei / Taipei Biennial, Taipei
September 10, 2016–February 5, 2017
Contemporary biennials are never simply showcases for new work: they bear the weight of meta-commentary. As they struggle to articulate the conditions of their own production and reception, they become lightning rods for debates, not least those concerning art world complicity with, or resistance to, globalization. The networks and flows ... Read more →
TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria
August 19–November 6, 2016
—Reviews
by Javier Montes
"Anchovies Dream of an Olive Mausoleum" is the subtitle Chus Martínez has given to "Idiosyncrasy," her new arrangement of the Helga de Alvear Foundation's collection of work from the second half of the twentieth century, assembled over 50 years by the Madrid-based German-Spanish gallerist. By locating the foundation in the ... Read more →
Visual Arts Center Helga de Alvear Foundation, Cáceres
April 29, 2016–April 9, 2017
Hanging right inside the main entrance in Gallery 1, facing incoming visitors, Agnieszka Polska's Glass of Petrol (2015) is the one work that cannot be missed at the 11th Gwangju Biennale. Depicting a champagne flute filled with shiny gasoline, the colorfulness of which resembles that of Planet Earth, Polska's digital ... Read more →
Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
September 2–November 6, 2016
Fouad Elkoury's photographic installations produce in me a swell of desire and mourning for places that I have never directly observed. Since the 1970s, Elkoury has photographed his home country of Lebanon and the surrounding areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, tracing a geography of places through ... Read more →
Rodeo
June 25–September 24, 2016
In his introduction to the exhibition's catalog, Boris Groys, the curator of this year's edition of Ljubljana's triennial, titled "Beyond the Globe," refers to catastrophe movies. This pop culture allusion should come as no surprise: the destruction of the Earth by various means is mass culture's response to the anxieties ... Read more →
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
June 3–September 18, 2016
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Aj-ibur-shapu), from which Michael Rakowitz's exhibition at Barbara Wien in Berlin borrows its name, was how the street which ran through the gate of Ishtar, in ancient Babylon, was known. Built around 575 BC under King Nebuchadnezzar II and dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, ... Read more →
Barbara Wien, Berlin
April 30–August 20, 2016
—Reviews
by Valerio Mannucci
Mark Leckey's exhibition at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, the Roman location of Gavin Brown's enterprise, is the latest iteration of a series running back to the 2013 Hayward Touring show "The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things." The original display took inspiration from digital images collected on Leckey's hard drive, physical instantiations ... Read more →
Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, Rome
May 25–July 16, 2016
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
It is lamentable and somewhat curious that John Akomfrah is just now receiving his first major exhibition in the US. Despite the critical acclaim Akomfrah has received in the UK and Europe, both for his recent solo output and his earlier work with the Black Audio Film Collective, he remains ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
June 24–August 12, 2016
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
I've lost all my pride I've been to paradise And out the other side. With no one to guide me, Torn apart by a fiery wheel Inside me. —The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band's "I won't hurt you" (1966), heard in Laida Lertxundi's Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live (2015) In LA, everyone's Marlon ... Read more →
Made in L.A., Los Angeles
June 12–August 28, 2016
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
I walked straight past the entrance to Pilar Corrias's gallery. The lights are off and inside it's dark and quiet. The only work on the ground floor is Sam Lewitt's A Weak Local Lexicon (MHTL) (2016), an unlit installation which converts the charge from the light source, powered from a ... Read more →
Pilar Corrias, London
June 23–August 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
Resistance is a two-sided relation. It may also include more players, as we will discuss shortly. But losing its counterpart puts it in a difficult place. All political art has to deal with this dialectic entanglement. In 1976, artists Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek were summoned to the Polish Ministry of ... Read more →
ŻAK | BRANICKA, Berlin
April 28–July 30, 2016
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
Things happen, and then they happen again, but not the same way, not quite; such is the logic of the biennial. And then there are things which have never happened before, and which happen now and in a time that seems somehow out of time, or takes our "now" out ... Read more →
Liverpool Biennial
July 9–October 16, 2016
—Reviews
by Rachael Rakes
Ever-regenerating discussions in mainstream documentary discourse pit form in opposition to function. It is still commonly understood that utility and representable actuality risk becoming diluted or confused by formal invention or experimentation with narrative structure. This reasoning foregrounds a perpetuating valuation in the inherent power of the documentary as a ... Read more →
Murray Guy, New York
June 2–July 15, 2016
—Reviews
by Pedro Neves Marques
There is a subplot in Harmony Korine's movie Mister Lonely (2007) that would make a fitting companion to Michael Stevenson's exhibition "Signs & Wonders." It tells the story of a nun who survives her fall from a missionary aid plane flying over the forests of Panama. The miracle inspires her ... Read more →
Carl Freedman Gallery, London
June 8–July 9, 2016
The internet and its social media spawn have made modes of communication increasingly seamless, with displays of personhood now embedded in a post or link. And while the democratic polyphony of voices has perhaps never been greater, so too is its expression through corporate-owned technologies. Ever since Sadie Benning was ... Read more →
Callicoon Fine Arts/Mary Boone Gallery, New York
April 28–July 29, 2016
—Reviews
by Milena Hoegsberg
Lea Porsager's solo show at Nils Stærk pulls viewers into a universe "packed with astonishing unheard-of facts, helix patterns and fermionic seeds" through the eyes of #ET. In #ET (all works 2016), a text authored by the artist, Porsager's extraterrestrial alter ego of sorts takes viewers at full speed through ... Read more →
Nils Staerk, Copenhagen
April 29–July 2, 2016
—Reviews
by Lucy Reynolds
Barcelona's Loop art fair, which started in 2003, is the oldest and most established initiative to assert the commercial potential of film and video. The medium's ephemeral nature, and its associations with the very different market values of cinema, have contributed to a continued reluctance from collectors, attracted by the ... Read more →
LOOP Barcelona, Barcelona
June 2–4, 2016
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
At the apex of art and money, the air is thin and the atmosphere is replaced with rarified pain. Rather than terrestrial life, only blood fortunes are endemic here, whose constituent lifestyles are at least as abstract as the most totemic artworks that give this place meaning. All the vectors ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
May 5–June 25, 2016
"When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable," the Guerilla Girls asked in 1989, "what will your art collection be worth?" Predicting that "the art market won't bestow mega-buck prices on the work of a few white males forever," their printed notice listed 67 female artists (several of whom are ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
When word got out that Hervé Falciani, a dapper systems engineer at HSBC's hushed private bank in Geneva, had lifted the identities and details of 130,000 account holders in 2008, the Swiss government was put in the unfortunate position of having to ask its neighbors to extradite this thief or ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 16–19, 2016
During the first decade of neoliberalism, not long after Live Aid, Sandy Nairne made a series of six films called "State of the Art" for the UK's Channel 4. They provide a fascinating glimpse into a 1980s contemporary art world both condemning and colluding with international capital. In the fifth ... Read more →
Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice
May 28–November 27, 2016
—Reviews
by Ingo Niermann
Contemporary artists are great at being dilettantes. Some make a point of how liberating it is to lack skill, others of how liberating it is to delegate to those who know better. Meanwhile, machines continue to outdo humans in more and more skills. More and more humans work in some ... Read more →
Manifesta
June 11–September 18, 2016
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
As the central body in our planetary system, the sun has been revered through history as the source of our energy and the basis of our calendars. "Ancient Lights," Nicholas Mangan's first solo exhibition in Mexico City, is a sun worshipper's investigation into the myriad conceptions of our star, from ... Read more →
LABOR, Mexico City
April 22–June 11, 2016
At Parallel, Oaxaca, curatorial-artistic-investigative-philosophical team Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione present "Elusive Earths III," the third iteration of their ongoing ethnographic inquiry into the history of geophagic traditions. The practice of geophagia—earth eating—is adopted by human and nonhuman animals alike and occurs virtually worldwide. Among humans it generally appears in ... Read more →
Parallel, Oaxaca
April 29–June 7, 2016
"Advertisting … is the only art form we [in the United States] ever invented." Gore Vidal The fourth floor of Berlin's Akademie der Künste overlooks Pariser Platz: the Brandenburg Gate, the French embassy fringed with barricades, a teeming Starbucks. Tourists mill around the square, while up on the mezzanine, between ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
June 4–September 18, 2016
—Reviews
by Tess Edmonson
Berlin's history of internecine violence is visible on its civic surface, a characteristic that holds currency in both mainstream and art tourism; what differentiates these two modes is a style rather than a politics. Who can say what a city means? Gentrification mistakes lack of capital for lack of life, confuses ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
June 4–September 18, 2016
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
-- Thank you for the kind words -- :-) -- And thank you for the bonus This telling fragment of chat, extracted from Cécile B. Evans's Working on What the Heart Wants (2016), informed my experience of this multichannel video installation, which records a group of humans interacting with and through machines, ... Read more →
Lira Gallery, Rome
May 6–July 2, 2016
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Since it is impossible to say—in the work of K.r.m. Mooney just as in the world—where one thing ends and another begins, it seems appropriate to start by considering the structure that houses this exhibition. An ancient wooden shed, it was once a garage for the large Craftsman home it ... Read more →
Reserve Ames, Los Angeles
April 10–July 24, 2016
—Reviews
by Anders Kreuger
Although I usually find conspicuously inarticulate people more annoying than those who are just a bit too articulate, I confess to having harbored a certain reserve toward 35-year-old Dutch artist Jonas Staal. His work as an artist includes doctoral research at the University of Leiden, extensive public lecturing, and setting ... Read more →
Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica
May 4–June 13, 2016
Exhibition spaces are, at times, haunted by the work they housed in the past. Walk through a museum and former installations will reverberate. Think of the Arsenale in Venice, visited by the ghosts of biennials past. This is all the more evident in galleries. The steady relationship between a gallery ... Read more →
Simon Preston, New York
May 1–June 19, 2016
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
Best known for her alternately macabre and humorous sculptures—body parts cast in polyester resin, anthropomorphic wads of used chewing gum, plastic lamps featuring disembodied red lips or pink breasts, and Carrara marble belly rolls—Alina Szapocznikow also made hundreds of drawings over the course of her short career. Following a renewed ... Read more →
Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
April 1–May 28, 2016
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
Shelagh Wakely's Papillon de Nuit (1993)—modestly framed on the white wall of a metal-floored room at Richard Saltoun Gallery—is a collage assembled from photographic documentation of an installation of the same name, in which a video monitor showing a restless, fluttering moth was placed on a glass table, surrounded by ... Read more →
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
April 1–May 13, 2016
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
Among the many brilliant and confounding works in David Hammons's current retrospective is one entitled A Movable Object/A Japanese Garden (2012). The piece centers around a wheeled flatbed dolly, a perfectly banal machine bearing strange cargo: chunks of broken asphalt interspersed with unrecognizable articles of clothing and lengths of colorful ... Read more →
Mnuchin Gallery, New York
March 15–May 27, 2016
On Wednesday, the day of Frieze New York's invitation-only preview, a friend of mine, another part-time art writer, tweeted: "Feels like a good weekend to go to something you loathe, run into people you sort of know, and make small talk about the inanity of it all." Those who work ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 5–8, 2016
Words, like the gray matting in Robert Morris's Lead and Felt (1969/2016), are woven. Yet, like these felt strips, descriptions shift. In a shared context with Kishio Suga's Parameters of Space (1978/2016), material and form take on meanings that bend, twist, and track the local climate. The immediate world provides ... Read more →
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
March 12–May 7, 2016
When the 7 percent value-added-tax rate on fine art went up to 19 percent in January 2014, it spelled to many the end of the Berlin art world. Proclamations followed that the market would dry up, and collectors would scatter to more cosmopolitan locales with less pricey export taxes. Without ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
April 29–May 1, 2016
Annlee quietly welcomes you to the Fridericianum's ticket counter. Though she is still invisible, her voice embraces those standing in the great entrance hall of the museum. "Can you imagine me?" she asks melancholically, "I can imagine you… It's easy. I can see you. And I can see her." Her ... Read more →
Fridericianum, Kassel
January 31–May 1, 2016
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
In her catalogue introduction, Koyo Kouoh calls Ireland "the first and foremost colonial laboratory of the British enterprise." It's a striking statement from the curator of EVA International biennial in Limerick. Titling the biennial "Still (the) Barbarians," Kouoh uses it as a platform to consider how the legacies of colonialism ... Read more →
EVA International
April 16–July 17, 2016
Some twenty years after the founding of the People's Republic of China a proposal was made to change the traffic rules so that cars would stop at green lights and go at red, because red was the designated color of action. In the same spirit, citizens named their children after ... Read more →
Antenna Space, Shanghai
March 18–April 25, 2016
Everything is in motion in the main room of Rosa Barba's exhibition at Parra & Romero, Madrid. The mechanical buzz of film projectors is broken by the tack-tack of a slowed-down typewriter and the purr of an engine that rhythmically bursts out. Dimly illuminated by their own light, four mobile ... Read more →
Parra & Romero, Ibiza
February 24–April 23, 2016
—Reviews
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
While Charles Baudelaire's definition of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent" is a familiar truism of contemporary understandings of "the modern," Baudelaire's casual, even offhand 1863 observation, "nature, being none other than the voice of our own self-interest," is less well known. Yet if one were to draw a ... Read more →
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
That only 6 of the 75 locations numbered on Glasgow International's essential city map are host to the "Director's Programme" says something of the generous weave of the "official" and the "collateral" here, doing away with the two-tiered hierarchies usual in such events. Instead, a loose net is cast around ... Read more →
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Glasgow
April 8–25, 2016
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Pasiphae, the protagonist of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley's film series "The Minotaur Trilogy" (2013–15), was the queen of Crete, married to king Minos, the son of Zeus and Europa. Her story is a tale of offence and punishment, but not a straightforward one. Minos, who had just ascended ... Read more →
Arratia Beer, Berlin
March 12–April 16, 2016
One of the most affecting commissions of the 20th Biennale of Sydney is placed out on its own—"in between" its six main venues—at one end of the city's Botanical Gardens. Archie Moore's A Home Away From Home (Bennelong/Vera's Hut) (2016) in part re-imagines the diminutive shelter offered to an Indigenous ... Read more →
Biennale of Sydney
March 18–June 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh
The maxim "less is more" hardly springs to mind when thinking about Art Basel Hong Kong. Yet Art Basel's global director, Marc Spiegler, uttered those very words during the media reception for this year's edition, arguing for quality over quantity and noting that all three of the franchise's fairs in ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
March 24–26, 2016
It is now impossible to speak of Ana Mendieta's pioneering, ritualized, land-body performance art without referring to the still unsettling manner of her untimely death—fallen, pushed, or thrown from a 34th-story window on Mercer Street, New York. Back in 1988, shortly after her husband Carl Andre was acquitted of Mendieta's murder, ... Read more →
Galerie Lelong, New York
February 5–March 26, 2016
It's only appropriate that visitors to Michael Werner's current Marcel Broodthaers exhibition would encounter a stuffed parrot as part of the installation Dites Partout Que Je L'Ai Dit (1974). Broodthaers was a master at creatively parroting—both consciously and unconsciously—the tropes, images, and theory that may now seem a bit tame ... Read more →
Michael Werner, New York
January 28–March 26, 2016
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
"Rats live on no evil star." And "In a regal age ran I." There is no apparent truth, no evident foundation, in these two double-sided expressions—same characters, reverse order—whose heads and tails can switch places like a juggler's pins. Just a tumbling act of letters on the tightrope of some ... Read more →
Giò Marconi, Milan
February 11–March 19, 2016
—Reviews
by Tess Edmonson
Of the six paintings that make up Jeanette Mundt's "Heroin: Cape Cod, USA," three render figures of women at rest. Of these, Jeanette Mundt (all works 2016) is a self-portrait; we see her body contorted into the archetypal pose of the butt selfie: the back side of her body facing ... Read more →
Off Vendome, New York
February 18–March 26, 2016
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
To cut to the chase: Seth Price banks on banality. Bides his time building constructs, rather than content; repeating forms overblown by rhetoric. Most famously, his oft-cited essay "Dispersion" (2002) has served as justification for the material choices made in his career, quoting—nay, preaching—redistribution of existing materials as alternative currency ... Read more →
356 Mission, Los Angeles
January 30–April 3, 2016
"Who isn't here?" I asked myself on the lead-up to the 2016 incarnations of the Armory and Independent art fairs. And I asked myself again upon leaving. A few weeks ago, I received the announcement that Laurel Gitlen Gallery closed. As an art student in Portland, Oregon, I had missed ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York
March 3–6, 2016
Happy? Ronaldreagan. Hungry? Ronaldreagan. Afraid? Ronaldreagan. Invoke him often enough and The Gipper's name passes from rote signification into a malleable abstraction. All too easy—as David Snyder demonstrates in "2THNDNL" with the video Ronald Reagan, Fathers & Sons (all works 2016). Dozens of jaws, clipped from TV's talking heads, from ... Read more →
Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
January 23–March 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
Like dance draws lines in space and time, Andrea Geyer's first solo exhibition in Mexico City leaves a pleasant yet evanescent memory. Through crisscrossing imaginary and factual lines, the artist connects past histories and current politics with a sharp focus on the role of women in the arts. Encompassing a ... Read more →
Parque Galería, Mexico City
February 4–April 11, 2016
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
Siera Hyte's "The Sometimes Hour"—an installation of carefully corroded objects and scratched or tampered images at Ellis King gallery, Dublin—has the air of a murder mystery. Hyte's is one of two solo exhibitions running simultaneously in the space, the other a retrospective of the American artist Michael Ross, whose confounding ... Read more →
Ellis King, Dublin
January 29–March 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
Francesc Ruiz's second solo show at Madrid's garcía galería delves into the visual communication of one of Spain's most iconic institutions, the Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos—the national postal service, commonly known as Correos—whose graphic identity was created in 1977 by Spanish designer and artist José María Cruz Novillo (b. ... Read more →
garcía galería, Madrid
January 16–March 5, 2016
—Reviews
by Pedro Neves Marques
November 25, 1975 marked the beginning of the end of Portugal's Processo Revolucionário em Curso (Ongoing Revolutionary Process). This brief socialist experiment, which began with the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, marked the attempt by an alliance between the military, workers' unions, and political movements to free the country ... Read more →
Victoria Miro, London
February 2–March 24, 2016
Munem Wasif's serene photographs, which are among the first works you encounter at the Dhaka Art Summit, depict one apparently desolate landscape after another. But if you stay with the images—don't follow the urge to move on—then small figures start to appear. In one, which seems initially to document nothing ... Read more →
Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka
February 5–8, 2016
The group exhibition inaugurating Maria Bernheim's new gallery represents, according to its introductory text, "simply a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new." The space's spotless, Chelsea-esque features—sanded concrete floors and the requisite glass storefront—certainly make for a no-nonsense stage on which to appraise the goods on ... Read more →
Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zürich
December 18, 2015–February 13, 2016
—Reviews
by Carla Acevedo-Yates
Puerto Rico's art scene, which extends beyond the borders of San Juan to cities on the US mainland, has yet to be fully apprehended on its own terms. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Puerto Rico's artistic production cannot be detached from its thorny political status vis-à-vis the ... Read more →
San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial
October 24, 2015–February 28, 2016
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
In "Ultimate Paradox," swaths of rich, saturated color hang across each of 20 framed photographs. Rust-hued powdery tree trunks overshadow a flittering, out-of-focus leafy green background (Alentejo, 1993), an angle which would have required the photographer to climb several meters into the tree's branches; the acid-azure knotted tree trunk shot ... Read more →
Château Shatto, Los Angeles
December 12, 2015–February 20, 2016
When it comes to galleries, size does matter. With the big getting bigger, one London gallery suggested the small get together. Condo is a collaborative project between 24 galleries from 11 different cities housed in eight London spaces. Initiated by Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, Condo's premise is simple: each of ... Read more →
Condo, London
January 16–February 13, 2016
—Reviews
by Myriam Ben Salah
At the risk of immediately doing away with any probity or intellectual credibility whatsoever, I have to confess that the last thing I watched on my computer before landing in Los Angeles was an old episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians" featuring the over-the-top wedding of Kim Kardashian and ... Read more →
Art Los Angeles Contemporary / Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles
February 1, 2016
Usually we're the ones falling into tables. At the opening of Zurich-based artist Jan Vorisek's first Swiss solo show at Galerie Bernhard on that dark December eve, it was tables that were falling into us. Ouch! And there we were, right in the middle of his ideas, in Rented Bodies ... Read more →
Galerie Bernhard, Zürich
December 12, 2015–January 23, 2016
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was murdered on October 9, 1967, by the Bolivian 2nd Ranger Battalion. Che was captured alive on October 8, but the Bolivian regime feared a trial would rally support for the revolutionary cause, and decided to summarily execute their wounded prisoner. A CIA agent instructed the executioners ... Read more →
Campagne Première Berlin
November 28, 2015–February 27, 2016
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Los Angeles-based artist Pat O'Neill has been making work for the last 50 years, and yet it's rarely seen in New York. A key figure in West Coast experimental cinema, O'Neill is probably best known for highly plastic and technically accomplished films like his lysergic 7362 (1967) or his extraordinary ... Read more →
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
December 12, 2015–January 23, 2016
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
In difficult times, we look to the past for comfort and clarity. In the wake of France's deadliest attacks since World War II, Corita Kent's late 1960s and early 1970s silkscreens promoting pacifism and tolerance take on an unexpected urgency. Planned well before terrorists killed 130 Parisians, Galerie Allen's exhibition ... Read more →
Galerie Allen, Paris
December 10, 2015–January 30, 2016
—Reviews
by Antonia Alampi
Subject of the orientalist eye par excellence, Marrakesh is a glossy and colorful concentrate of its plural roots, with a strong dose of Arabic and Berber culture Europeanized by French colonialism and mass tourism. While several North African and Western Asian countries are witnessing a dramatic decrease in tourism due ... Read more →
Voice Gallery, Marrakesh
October 30, 2015–January 20, 2016
—Reviews
by Ingo Niermann
There are countless jokes about modern art being ridiculously boring and about people only being into it to distinguish themselves from the unrefined, who expect from art what hungry people expect from food. When people keep making fun of you, you can pretend not to listen, or you can start making ... Read more →
von Bartha, Basel
November 7, 2015–January 23, 2016
Jessica Stockholder is an artist known for breaking conventions. Though her sprawling artworks are often referred to as installations, she defines her manifold combinations of color and everyday materials as sculpture. The two floors of Kavi Gupta in Chicago—which entwine a curated group show, "ASSISTED," with her own solo exhibition, ... Read more →
Kavi Gupta, Chicago
September 12, 2015–January 16, 2016
—Reviews
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Robert Smithson grew up collecting rocks, shells, and insects. He adored The American Museum of Natural History, about which he famously said: "There is nothing 'natural' about the Museum of Natural History. 'Nature' is simply another eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction." An iconic figure in what we now know as "Land ... Read more →
James Cohan, New York
November 21, 2015–January 17, 2016
An ambitious metonym wants to give us a glimpse of what Jorge Luis Borges called "the Aleph," that place from which everything in the world can be seen simultaneously. While keeping its gaze fixed on one thing, a metonym is also speaking of many others, seen in something like peripheral ... Read more →
The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka
December 15, 2015–January 23, 2016
If after finishing this review you visit Bridget Donahue's website to learn more about John Russell's current exhibition, "SQRRL," you'll find a brightly hued digital collage of image and text in the place of a static gallery homepage with its neatly tabbed categories linking to exhibitions, artists, about, and contact ... Read more →
Bridget Donahue, New York
November 14, 2015–January 10, 2016
In tandem with "Ich kenne kein Weekend. Archive and Collection René Block," a double-venue exhibition recognizing the work of gallerist, curator, and collector René Block organized in Berlin this autumn, art-agenda presents a three-part feature on Block. Parts I and II (available here and here) consist of an interview led ... Read more →
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin / Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
Dear Simone, Your performances are the jump and splash of a brook, the color of a found leaf, a painted flag wrapping a woman as the river dances around her. At 80, your nimble movements inspire. When I stop to read back about your lifetime of accomplishments and confluences, I can't ... Read more →
The Box, Los Angeles
November 14, 2015–January 9, 2016
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
There is a certain historical irony in the way "ADSVMVS ABSVMVS," Hollis Frampton's last major photographic series, became the basis for his first solo exhibition in New York some thirty years after his death in 1984. Frampton himself might have delighted in this inversion of firsts and lasts; his thinking, ... Read more →
Room East, New York
October 25, 2015–January 10, 2016
At first I had the feeling I was missing something when I encountered the documentation of unbuilt works by Peter Fend at his show "to be built" at Galerie Barbara Weiss, organized in collaboration with the project space Oracle. The drawings, prints, collages, and documents on display, mostly from the ... Read more →
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
November 12–December 19, 2015
In tandem with "Ich kenne kein Weekend. Archive and Collection René Block," a double-venue exhibition recognizing the work of gallerist, curator and collector René Block organized in Berlin this autumn, art-agenda presents a three-part feature on Block. Part I and II consist of an interview led by Luca Cerizza, while ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Marina Vishmidt
You could imagine it happening in a George Barber video. Nothing for a while, then three come along at once—you can almost hear the folksy, mordant voiceover that features in so many of them. Like the cars filmed from above driving an abstract expressionist tableau into being in Automotive Action ... Read more →
Waterside Contemporary, London
September 2–December 12, 2015
In tandem with "Ich kenne kein Weekend: Archive and Collection René Block," a double-venue exhibition recognizing the work of gallerist, curator, and collector René Block organized in Berlin this autumn, art-agenda presents a three-part feature on Block. Part I and II consist of an interview led by Luca Cerizza, while ... Read more →
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin / Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
December 8, 2015
—Reviews
by Simon Fujiwara
"To organize shows and have fun," was what led José García Torres to open his first gallery. It was Mexico DF in the Summer of 2005, and José was 24 years old. With the passing of time, Proyectos Monclova grew to become a fundamental space in the city's artistic scene, ... Read more →
As is appropriate for its place in the calendar, Art Basel Miami Beach is a fair of reaffirmations and revisitations rather than new discoveries. Its great achievement has been, over its 14 years, to stimulate the artistic life of the city in which it takes place. More broadly, there are ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 3–6, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Entering the philosophical lexicon during the eighteenth century, the term "aesthetic" is predicated on a double negation: its object is neither an object of knowledge, nor an object of desire. By introducing the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the concept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality. At ... Read more →
KOW, Berlin
September 17–December 5, 2015
—Reviews
by Jeanne Gerrity
In a diminutive space in San Francisco's financial district, the tradition of representing the vast landscape of the American West is extended and reinvigorated by Richard T. Walker and Letha Wilson. The natural and the manmade collide in Walker's multimedia sculpture the other side of meaning something other than this ... Read more →
Capital, San Francisco
October 23–December 5, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
If the buzzer rings, will you open? Dangers are legion: scammers, Jehovah's witnesses, traveling salesmen, black-eyed children, werewolves. Better to keep the door closed. Much can be inferred from the social response to buzzing at the door. I've lived through the transition from the most pedestrian of locks to an ... Read more →
Galeria Piktogram, Warsaw
September 25–December 12, 2015
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
Chaotic and dense, lively, spirited, and in some senses logistically miraculous, the 2015 Jakarta Biennale takes its cue squarely from the political and geographic condition of Indonesia as an "archipelago state"—a nation comprised of a loose and idiosyncratic cluster of 922 inhabited islands. The exhibition trains its focus simultaneously on ... Read more →
Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta
November 15, 2015–January 17, 2016
—Reviews
by Matthew McLean
"How long do I need to stay," I asked a staff member at Pilar Corrias of Ian Cheng's Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015), "to watch the whole thing?" "It's a live simulation," they said of the title work of the artist's first solo exhibition in London, "so it's infinite." Reconsidering, ... Read more →
Pilar Corrias, London
October 13–November 14, 2015
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
While ruminating on the most curious aspect of ARTBO—namely that it is a public-private partnership run by the city's Chamber of Commerce with "allies" such as Uber—I considered the reasons why the organizers of my trip were taking an international band of curators, collectors, and critics not only to visit ... Read more →
MAMBO, Bogotá and Medellín
October 1–4, 2015
Ângela Ferreira occupies a special position in the history of artistic approaches to archival practices. One of the pioneers of research-based strategies at the very beginning of the 1990s—before these strategies had a name and long before they became a widespread (sometimes jaded) paradigm—the artist also applied her archival impulse ... Read more →
Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon
September 24–November 14, 2015
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"My dear friend, I write you on domenica [Sunday], because it's the only feminine day of the week." "My dear friend, solitude or company?" "My dear friend, tonight I danced salsa forever." "My dear friend, I hate the static nature of electric lights." "My dear friend, I prefer daisies." "My ... Read more →
Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Naples
September 24–November 14, 2015
On the occasion of their nomination for the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2015, Slavs and Tatars' work can presently be viewed at two locations in Berlin. One is the Hamburger Bahnhof, the institution hosting the prize. There, books by the art collective are offered up for viewing in what looks ... Read more →
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler / Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Berlin
September 9–November 14, 2015
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
Japan: a land of austere beauty, arcane social ceremony, and indecipherable ritual, or a techno-futurist nation replete with densely populated neon cityscapes. These are the two reductive interpretations that repeatedly color western dispatches from the "land of the rising sun." While a dichotomy between preservation and progress exists (as it ... Read more →
White Rainbow, London
September 24–November 7, 2015
The past decade has seen a shift in art's center/periphery model, as so-called "Outsider Art" gains both curatorial and market visibility. Yet far from losing its particularity, as David Maclagan notes in a 2012 frieze roundtable, Outsider Art risks becoming "a prospective concept, continually enlarging itself, not least because of ... Read more →
Kent Fine Art, New York
September 11–November 7, 2015
—Reviews
by Mihnea Mircan
Stones have been "in" for quite some time: in recent years the "artist as archaeologist" has been rubbing shoulders—and comparing excavation gear—with the artist as geologist or speleologist, figures who have thus far received less scrutiny. Curated by Evelien Bracke, "Listen to the Stones, Think Like a Mountain" borrows the ... Read more →
Tatjana Pieters, Ghent
August 23–November 8, 2015
Astute observers in the art world were puzzled by Mike Kelley's move from Metro Pictures to Gagosian in 2005. It seemed as if he had left a warm and supportive family concern for the cold new world of unfettered late capitalism. In the wake of the artist's 2012 suicide, there ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Los Angeles
September 10–October 24, 2015
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
Now that curators have pulled and stretched the contemporary art exhibition to its full elastic potential, now that the contemporary art institution is conceived as the pluralistic host for any sort of artistic practice whatsoever, now that exhibitions can take place anywhere at any time and simultaneously offer the widest ... Read more →
CAPC Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux, Bordeaux
May 28–October 31, 2015
—Reviews
by Rachael Rakes
Wu Tsang's work employs the fruits of creative human exchange as both a subject and a method. Whether engaging with various facets of queer community (Wildness, 2012, and A Day in the Life of Bliss, 2014), or previously unfamiliar subjectivities (The Shape of a Right Statement, 2008, based on a ... Read more →
Clifton Benevento, New York
September 3–October 31, 2015
—Reviews
by María Palacios Cruz
Manon de Boer's minimalist cinema is at its most radical in her latest film On a Warm Day in July (2015), currently on view at Jan Mot, Brussels. Like a number of her films made over the past ten years, it features a performance—American Soprano Claron McFadden improvises on a ... Read more →
Jan Mot, Brussels
September 12–October 24, 2015
—Reviews
by Rachel Wetzler
Cobra, a short-lived association of artists based in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam who published an eponymous journal from 1948 to 1951, has the dubious honor of being frequently invoked as a locus of postwar avant-garde activity in Europe, while its works remain all but invisible outside of the group's native ... Read more →
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
September 9–October 17, 2015
—Reviews
by Patrick Langley
Sociologists have a name for the acute disorientation that half an hour at Frieze London can induce: the "Gruen effect." Named after Victor Gruen, the Austrian émigré who designed America's first malls in the 1950s, it describes the sense of temporal and geographical dislocation that sets in when you enter ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 14–17, 2015
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
One of the biggest stories of the year in U.S. literary fiction was the publication of Garth Risk Hallberg's debut novel City on Fire, for which the young author received a reported two-million-dollar advance––a startling number, even by the hyperinflationary standards of the contemporary art market. Such a bet seemed ... Read more →
MoMA PS1, New York
October 11, 2015–March 7, 2016
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
A black metal door of an industrial-like brick building welcomes visitors to Lawrence Markey, a gallery that opened in the early 1990s in New York and moved to San Antonio in 2005. In a city with plenty of artist-run spaces and non-profits but only a handful of commercial galleries, Lawrence ... Read more →
Lawrence Markey, San Antonio
September 10–October 16, 2015
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
Madame Bovary losing silver, aluminum objects at sea. Madame Bovary losing an aluminum tampax at sea. Madame Bovary losing a Victorian doll at sea. Madame Bovary making pickles, painting bats, breaking porcelain. Madame Bovary posing as Salo, sitting in a Breuer chair, stitching pearls into her skin. Madame Bovary, in ... Read more →
Goton & Édouard Montassut, Paris
September 17–October 15, 2015
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
The evidence that we live in a dystopia is mostly swept out of sight, and kept out of mind. So let's be clear that Trevor Paglen is engaged in a form of politically urgent visual labor. His work, most notably in photography, has given visual texture to a very real, ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
September 10–October 24, 2015
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
A long, long time ago—in 1976—an artistic collective called COUM Transmissions, of which the active members at the time were Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson, held a short exhibition at the ICA in London entitled "Prostitution." Pornographic photographs of Cosey Fanni Tutti were the main element: these ... Read more →
Galerie Bernhard, Zürich
August 28–October 10, 2015
Two paintings in Ian Burn's "London Works" frame the exhibition's two-year time span, 1965 to 1967—a transformative and immensely productive period in the practice of the Australian conceptual artist, best known as a member of the group Art & Language. Together, these paintings tell a story of oscillation and negotiation ... Read more →
Milani Gallery, Brisbane
September 12–October 17, 2015
Much is said and little is shown in Coco Fusco's video installation And the Sea Will Talk to You (2012). We are on a raft, it seems, adrift in the middle of the Florida Straits, the camera dipping intermittently below the turquoise waves and back up to a blank horizon. ... Read more →
Cecilia Brunson Projects, London
September 3–October 23, 2015
At the entrance to Lawrence Abu Hamdan's "The All Hearing" a tape delay device perches on a plinth, its magnetic tape wrapped around an external spool (The End of Every Illusionist, 2013). Through the attached pair of headphones emerges the artist's voice, its vowels lightly pressed by his Yorkshire upbringing, ... Read more →
Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica
August 4–October 31, 2015
—Reviews
by Tess Edmonson
As with all art fairs, the advent of Berlin's abc art berlin contemporary brings with it a smallish number of collectors and a torrent of platitudes, most of them having to do with how depressing it is to look at art as though shopping. I wonder if it might be ... Read more →
ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 17–20, 2015
Bruce Nauman's Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) was my first love. It was that work, the one that still, however far and many times I turn, sits at the base of my vocabulary. I don't know if I can say why, it is just that this work hit something. I've ... Read more →
Gagosian, Paris
May 21–September 26, 2015
—Reviews
by Pieternel Vermoortel
On my way to curated by_vienna, a Grand Tour of the city's galleries timed to coincide with the Vienna Biennale, I pass by the city's sleek new Hauptbahnhof. Migrants from Syria and Afghanistan come together here after having traveled along what the media call the "Eastern Land route" and "Western ... Read more →
curated by_vienna, Vienna
September 11–October 17, 2015
This relatively modest biennial possesses the unique character of being something of an assignment. Invited by Lyon Biennale director Thierry Raspail, curator Ralph Rugoff was given a word—modern—upon which to base his biennial, and Rugoff responded with the title and concept "La vie moderne." Less a concept than a multifaceted ... Read more →
Biennale de Lyon
September 10, 2015–January 3, 2016
In an age of financialization, notions of value are increasingly abstracted, constructed from algorithmic equations as opposed to distinct processes or materials. As Franco "Bifo" Berardi writes succinctly of our era: "monetary value produces more monetary value without being realized through the production of goods." This observation indicates a departure ... Read more →
Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong
August 7–September 26, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms" takes its name and inspiration from the eponymous book Thought-Forms (1901) by the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, who, after the death of the prominent Theosophist Madame Blavatsky (1831–91), expanded and re-conceptualized her attempt to extrapolate Newton's theory of color into a syncretic ... Read more →
Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
September 5–November 1, 2015
Tokyo's Rat Hole Gallery is beside a church, apartments and a small park. Removed from the passing traffic, stairs from the street lead to a basement entrance hidden behind frosted glass. By locating them so precisely in the show's title, Glasgow-based Andrew Kerr suggests the new paintings for his first ... Read more →
Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo
July 10–September 6, 2015
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
Brown is a composite color, made by combining complementary hues—a warm neutral. It's only itself when contrasted with a brighter shade; fuschia or aqua always appear so, while brown is brown only in comparison to another color; its visibility is dependent on the color next to it. Over centuries, brown's ... Read more →
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
July 25–August 29, 2015
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
"In Motion," the group exhibition currently on view at Starkwhite, Auckland, is a continuous dance of colors, with works from four contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand—Rebecca Baumann, Brendan Van Hek, Grant Stevens, and Alicia Frankovich—and two historical artists: the Hungarian-American artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) and New Zealand-born Len ... Read more →
Starkwhite, Auckland
July 10–August 8, 2015
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
The soothing whispers of the song drift beneath the shift and chatter of the opening party like a lavender mist, velvety fingers. The next door gallery was open but not opening. Empty, its harsh white lights beam like a drugstore. But here, the light is softer. Everything is softer. Ooh baby ... Read more →
Phil Gallery, Los Angeles
July 11–August 14, 2015
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
"Summer," Alex Israel's second solo show with Almine Rech, imports the artist's signature California cool vernacular—sunglasses, surfboards, convertibles—to an eighteenth-century mansion in Paris. Describing the physical, cultural, and industrial landscape of his hometown, the LA native's recent paintings and sculptures are all about plastic, airbrushing, and plenty of sunshine. In the ... Read more →
Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
June 13–July 27, 2015
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
On a long drive into the city our tour guide, a "colored"(1) woman and self-confessed strict Old Testament observer, railed against recent student activism at the University of Cape Town: "They pulled down the statue of Cecil Rhodes and he did more for the black people than they have done ... Read more →
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
May 23–July 18, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Long before post-internet aesthetics and ubiquitous networking began to overhumanize technology, men in gray flannel suits were the standard metaphor for the dehumanizing nature of corporate technocracy. This expression, which swiftly became vernacular, stems from a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, describing the ... Read more →
Silberkuppe, Berlin
June 27–August 22, 2015
"Gallery 3010," which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Sfeir-Semler Gallery and the 10th anniversary of its Beirut branch, asks what it means to exhibit objects and ideas in a gallery environment, and interrogates the relationship between the gallery and its context. Bringing together artists from different generations, contexts, and sensibilities, ... Read more →
Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut
April 2–August 1, 2015
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
For this show, knowing too much before seeing may not be helpful, and may even spoil your viewing experience. Bojan Šarčević is an artist who doesn't like to wrap his art in too much information. Objects and works are supposed to stand for themselves. At his show at Berlin's BQ, ... Read more →
BQ, Berlin
May 1–July 18, 2015
—Reviews
by Barbara Sirieix
In Kafka's "The Burrow" (1931), one of his last unfinished short stories, the reader is taken through a network of tunnels, built by the constructor-narrator, which constitutes his home, his fortress, and his life's obsession. The channels ploughed by his fixated thoughts seem to merge with those of his ... Read more →
Momentum, Jeløya, Moss, and the Oslo Fjord
June 13–September 27, 2015
—Reviews
by Ovul O. Durmusoglu
The end of Mother Theresa Boulevard, a pedestrian street in downtown Pristina, is marked by the slightly run-down Grand Hotel Prishtina and its weird twin, a post-war attachment to the main building. It is a sunny Saturday afternoon, summer has definitely arrived, and excited teenagers dressed up for their school ... Read more →
LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina
May 23–July 3, 2015
In the "Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Brittle Love" from 1920, Tristan Tzara famously provided instructions on how to write a Dada poem: get a newspaper and some scissors, snip out individual words and put them in a bag, shake it and then withdraw slivers of text, write down ... Read more →
Alexander Gray Associates, New York
May 28–June 27, 2015
Bruce Conner used to give fits to museums and galleries. He exasperated William C. Seitz when he served as his consultant for the landmark 1961 exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which culminated in the artist dumping a box of junk at the ... Read more →
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
April 30–June 26, 2015
—Reviews
by Ingo Niermann
During Art Basel's preview days most visitors appear to be elderly heterosexual couples. More so than having children, collecting art bears the promise of keeping wealthy couples together. Children grow up and leave the house, but the collection stays and can grow forever. Like people, collections cannot be divided without ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 18–21, 2015
There is a first time for everything! Speaking at Art Basel's media reception, director Marc Spiegler remarked that "the line between finance and art sometimes seems hard to discern." Pressed, he admitted that he had never drawn this connection in public before, specifying that "art can be used as a ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 18–21, 2015
—Reviews
by Leo Goldsmith
Words pulsate, then bleed into abstraction. Fields of color fragment into pixels or smear into mutating organisms. Swarming text grids explode into chaotic rainbow clouds, blinking dots, stars, and spirals. Snaking orange lines and pointillist textures form strobing mandalas, mosaic embroidery, and Pac Man architecture, tumbling geometries of throbbing color ... Read more →
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
May 1–June 20, 2015
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
Hard-drive art: exhibitions and discrete works as life audits, comprising the photographic and documentary contents/detritus of an artist's hard drive or cloud-space (a collective term for an individual's online storage facilities). Not yet a widely acknowledged post-digital subgenre, but seemingly the organizing principle behind Frances Stark's disappointing greengrassi solo show: ... Read more →
greengrassi, London
April 30–June 20, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Kader Attia's current exhibition, "Scarification, Self Skin's Architecture" at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, is the latest iteration of a project the French-Algerian artist initiated with his installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, presented at Documenta 13 in 2012. That first iteration could perhaps be described as an essay ... Read more →
Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin
May 2–June 20, 2015
This column aims to introduce and analyze the activity of a number of gallerists and galleries. I am interested in presenting not necessarily the history of major galleries and their successful careers, but to reflect on a series of experimental approaches to the gallery format, and to discuss the different ... Read more →
A.I.R. Gallery (Artist In Residence Gallery), New York / Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York
—Reviews
by Ricardo Matos Cabo
Recurrent in Alexandre Estrela's practice is the use of images from nature, as well as a consideration of the way in which they are transformed and questioned through the employment of various technologies of recording and reproduction, sometimes explored to the limits of legibility and denaturation. This is often achieved ... Read more →
Galeria Pedro Alfacinha, Lisbon
April 23–June 18, 2015
—Reviews
by Minoru Shimizu
The past few decades in the art world have seen the emergence of both relational art and "Zombie Formalism." The former is a primarily public funding-dependent, social democratic art, in which the artist is a kind of facilitator, who, because of his or her participation in the contemporary-art game, is ... Read more →
Kodama Gallery, Kyoto
May 9–June 13, 2015
—Reviews
by Vincenzo Latronico
The most striking works in Raphael Danke's "Stoneflesh Aura" are arrangements of small objects nailed to three unprepared canvases. They catch your eye, then transform two times as you observe them. At first glance, they seem to be shards of pink-red quartz only partially revealed from within the rock that ... Read more →
Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin
April 28–June 6, 2015
—Reviews
by Jenny Nachtigall
The protagonist of Fanny von Reventlow's novel The Money Complex (1916) suffers from a pathological lack of cash. She is afflicted with a grave sickness of fetishism: money is a being with "whom" she had a very painful relationship that failed dramatically—hence her ailment and impoverishment. In the present times ... Read more →
Deborah Schamoni, Munich
April 10–June 6, 2015
—Reviews
by Luis Camnitzer
I flew in on May 12, on one of the first charter flights direct from New York to Havana. We landed, and the stewardess happily announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Miami." After some hesitant laughter from the passengers, she genuinely apologized and added: "I'm so sorry, I meant to ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
"The missionary went on to talk about the Holy Trinity. At the end of it Okonkwo was fully convinced that the man was mad. He shrugged his shoulders and went away to tap his afternoon palm-wine." So begins the tragic encounter between the fictional Igbo Chief Okonkwo and the religious ... Read more →
Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
May 2–June 8, 2015
An exhibition title containing a phrase like "Vive Le Capital" suggests a degree of irony in its subject matter. With a roster of some 24 artists and ambitious claims of "exploring the omnipresent power of global finance," one expects an assortment of vaguely related works—critiques, interventions, manifestos—all of which gravitate ... Read more →
BANK, Shanghai
March 29–May 24, 2015
What is the role of description in the way we talk about art? In art-historical discourse, iconography won out over formal analysis. The focus on line, color, and shape was replaced by the primacy of the subject matter. But more often than not, talking about art means talking about stuff ... Read more →
Rodeo
March 14–May 23, 2015
Vitaly Komar, formerly half of the illustrious team Komar & Melamid, which split in 2003, continues to paint in a style he has dubbed "New Symbolism." For more than a decade, his virtuosic paintings of the proverbial scales of justice, tiny birds of truth, hulking Russian bears waving red flags, ... Read more →
Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
March 28–May 2, 2015
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
Far above the North Atlantic, a plane is flying from Venice to New York. Most of the passengers in business class sleep comfortably in their lie-flat seats, but one stays awake sipping complimentary champagne. His voice barely audible above the jets' white noise, he muses: "Is there even any difference ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 14–17, 2015
—Reviews
by Isobel Harbison
From bended knee comes Isabel Nolan's most recent body of work. At Dublin's Kerlin Gallery, this position between seating and standing is suggested in various depictions of John Donne, Lucretia, and Saint Jerome, in a polystyrene sculpture of a seated lion, and in a series of flags hung from bent ... Read more →
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
April 1–May 16, 2015
Okay, in the event that you, dear reader(s), are not too tired of the harried Venice musings of the art-agenda corps rearing up in your inbox, here's a final reflection. Allow me to start with an offensively obvious observation. In case you haven't noticed, Venice is not particularly adapted to ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 9–November 22, 2015
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
When Kenya announced the artist list for their pavilion for this year's Venice Biennale, forefronted for the second time in a row by Italian hotelier Armando Tanzini, alongside an astounding nine foreign participants and only one Kenyan, the only appropriate response—as far as I was concerned—would have been something akin ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 9–November 22, 2015
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
A 2015 exhibition titled "All the World's Futures" is more likely than not to be bleak (in tone). Earth, in curator Okwui Enwezor's curatorial statement, is "shattered and in disarray, scarred by violent turmoil, panicked by specters of economic crisis (…) Everywhere one turns new crisis, uncertainty, and deepening insecurity ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 9–November 22, 2015
Gallery Weekend arrives just as the first green leaves appear to relieve the city's relentless gray. This is Berlin at its best: colorful, uncharacteristically cheerful, and ready to welcome the influx of art tourists for its annual weekend of openings and attendant festivities. This year a total of 47 galleries ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
May 1–3, 2015
—Reviews
by Carla Acevedo-Yates
"Queerness is not yet here"—at least according to José Esteban Muñoz, who in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) argues that queer aesthetics is fundamentally utopic. The same could be said for much of Ad Minoliti's work, in which queer exchanges are understood not ... Read more →
Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City
April 7–May 2, 2015
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
Pierre Bismuth's "Where Is Rocky II? Teaser-Trailer" offers itself as a conceptual riddle. The two videos in the exhibition, one a two-minute teaser, the other a three-minute trailer precisely edited to Hollywood convention, play in alternation, advertising a film about an artwork that may be hidden, forgotten, or non-existent. They ... Read more →
Team (gallery, inc.), New York
March 29–April 26, 2015
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
Pescara is a city of concrete, much of which is not too pretty, as it dates to the postwar building frenzy, which hurriedly filled the gaps carved out by Allied carpet bombings in 1943. Benedetta Spalletti's gallery, Vistamare ("sea view," even if the Adriatic is too far away to be ... Read more →
Vistamare, Pescara
March 7–May 16, 2015
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
Standing knee-deep in brackish water as dark as iodine, two stocky women, closely resembling each other and completely naked, have their backs turned to us. Their arms hang slack along their sides in a very relaxed pose that wraps their bones in unmoving shadow and highlights their mature, voluptuous buttocks, ... Read more →
Kaufmann Repetto, Milan
March 12–April 20, 2015
—Reviews
by Pablo Martínez
Behind every balance is a hidden tension—a negotiation between opposed bodies that equalizes their forces in order to form stability. There is, however, a permanent risk of falling, and imbalance occurs when one side shifts forces and disturbs the distribution of weight. Behind any image of equilibrium, one can glimpse ... Read more →
Travesía Cuatro, Madrid
February 27–April 30, 2015
There is a clear spatial hierarchy at art fairs: modern and old master works on one side, contemporary on another. But this year's SP-Arte, in its 11th iteration, inaugurated a new section called "Open Plan," installing the most ambitious and large-scale works on the third floor of Oscar Niemeyer's Bienal ... Read more →
SP-Arte, São Paulo
April 9–12, 2015
—Reviews
by Keren Goldberg
Milk production in two very different countries is the departure point of British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara's solo show. North Korea does not produce any fresh milk, while Israel's milk yield per cow is one of the highest in the world. In concordance with these facts, Fujiwara collaborated with two kinds ... Read more →
Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
March 14–April 25, 2015
Shopfront esoterica and modernist sculpture rub shoulders in "Tell Her Nothing She Tells All," Myfanwy MacLeod's current exhibition at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Borrowing its title from a slogan common to psychic shops, the show continues MacLeod's interest in using pop and vernacular languages to, as she puts it, "speak to ... Read more →
Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
March 21–May 2, 2015
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
At the center of Claire Fontaine's new show, "Stop Seeking Approval," is a series of monochrome paintings, in gray, a burnt red, and black. They have been painted using anti-climb paint, their colors dictated by price and availability. Anti-climb paint never dries, so in addition to making its object hard ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
February 26–April 4, 2015
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
As its title suggests, "Plastic Mouthfeel II," the latest exhibition from New Zealand artist Dan Arps, is a space full of viscous forms, loaded with colors and textures, that causes a constant sense of elastic deformation. Take, for example, Studio Units with Double Hamper (2015), a set of five white ... Read more →
Michael Lett, Auckland
March 4–April 5, 2015
As capitalism solidifies into a global religion, iconoclasm—traditionally defined as the destruction of sacred artifacts—accordingly shifts its tactics, where it doesn't become coopted. However inadvertent it may have been, the last notable iconoclastic act in Europe—"Beast Jesus," an elderly Spanish woman's attempt in 2012 to improve, while in fact defacing, ... Read more →
The Boiler, New York
March 5–April 5, 2015
—Reviews
by Agnieszka Gratza
The recent resurgence of interest in the pioneering work of Turkish artist Nil Yalter (b. 1938), whose career spans four decades, owes much to Cornelia Butler's 2007 exhibition "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In her retrospective of feminist art from the ... Read more →
MOT International, London
February 6–March 28, 2015
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
Featuring bright colors and interactive technology, Davide Balula's current exhibition seems, at first glance, a significant departure from the artist's earthy process-oriented oeuvre. It's certainly in stark visual contrast to his last show with Frank Elbaz, "The Buried Works" in 2012, which turned the gallery into a vivarium with six ... Read more →
Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris
February 21–March 28, 2015
"Tropenkoller" translates from German to English as "tropical frenzy," but the climate seen in these ten pieces collected over the last five years and exhibited at Modern Art, London doesn't really come from anywhere other than some intoxicated area within Lothar Hempel's brain. Throughout the two decades of his career, Hempel ... Read more →
Modern Art, London
February 27–March 21, 2015
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Behold: a red headband-wearing cat warrior brandishing a gold-plated .45 automatic astride a rearing white unicorn that breathes fire; all this in front of a rainbow, some violent explosions, and a castle from Super Mario. No, this isn't my fantasy, it's simply a Google image search return for "what does ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
February 7–March 28, 2015
In its third iteration under Swiss direction (Art Basel purchased the Art Hong Kong fair in 2013), Art Basel Hong Kong features an abundance of works that wobble, waft, or otherwise cross the threshold between different modes of sensory perception, in attempts to break with an exhibition format and context ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
March 15–17, 2015
—Reviews
by Barbara Sirieix
Following the artist's wish to have no reproductions of her work, this review will include no images. No text? At Air de Paris, the press release is nowhere to be seen. This recognizable signature of Trisha Donnelly's exhibitions is one of various measures to limit the documentation of her work: ... Read more →
Air de Paris, Paris
January 17–March 14, 2015
—Reviews
by Francis McKee
Jack Smith (1932–1989) embodied a certain kind of New York—a chaotic, unpredictable, and unregulated city where creativity thrived amidst squalor and raw energy. Smith's performances (from 1969 onwards) often took place in domestic spaces tipped towards catastrophe by his accretions of junk and debris, and by his regular assertions of ... Read more →
The Modern Institute, Glasgow
January 24–March 7, 2015
In Rina Banerjee's exhibition "Migration's Breath," the Indian-born, New York-based artist's sculptures are like mystical creatures borne out of an enticing mixture of natural and commercial detritus—plastic, cowry shells, brightly colored ribbons, light bulbs, doll parts, feathers, rope. Her works on paper create contexts for the gods, monsters, and mortals ... Read more →
Ota Fine Arts, Singapore
January 23–March 21, 2015
Trendspotting is a competitive sport at art fairs. Still, with every fashion, there's always an artist who either reinvents worn forms or executes them so well it's hard not to admire. This year, it's the case of objects hanging from fishing lines—a frequent fair staple—and Glenn Kaino's A Shout Within ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York
—Reviews
by Mihnea Mircan
A "dark pool" is a form of high-speed trading whose machinations take place outside the reach, and modicum of control, of regular markets. But rather than indict a hypertensive and extra-judicial financial system, David Panos's "The Dark Pool" is concerned with a different set of transactions, binding labor and the ... Read more →
Albert Baronian Gallery, Brussels
January 16–March 7, 2015
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
We are all told again and again that in a more or less distant future, machines will take over—either in the form of an inverted big bang, a type of singularity, or over the course of a gradual transition. Even creative jobs will not be safe from the robot's omnipotence. ... Read more →
Galerie Neu, Berlin
February 6–March 7, 2015
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
Daniel Malone is not a painter, but his current show is full of paintings. And while it may be a solo exhibition, there are two artists in the room. The second is Colin McCahon—but more about him in a minute. Upon entering Hopkinson Mossman's gorgeous, bright white gallery space, the ... Read more →
Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
January 29–February 28, 2015
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
The phrase "Surround Audience" sounds like it could be the name of an EDM party, a function in a home theater system, a Quickmeme caption, or Michael Fried's worst nightmare. It is actually the title-cum-motto-cum-slogan of the 2015 New Museum Triennial, which at first glance appears to be some mixture ... Read more →
New Museum, New York
February 25–May 24, 2015
Having transformed Capitain Petzel's glass showroom gallery into a dark, carpeted two-floor Kino, Yael Bartana went on to invert heaven and hell. Inferno (2013), screening on the ground floor, was all fire, brimstone, death and destruction, while True Finn (2014), in the basement below, was a peaceful haven of snowy ... Read more →
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
January 23–February 28, 2015
Ian Breakwell was an iconic figure of London's counter-culture in the 1960s and '70s whose bleak and laconic text-works, films, performances, and photo-collages explored motifs of alienation, desire, and bathos. Always something more than a gallery artist, Breakwell worked with organizations such as the London Filmmakers' Co-op (LFMC), the Artist ... Read more →
Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
January 21–February 21, 2015
—Reviews
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
It's a bit like meeting a landmine that's about to detonate. In his first solo show at Anton Kern, Erik van Lieshout explodes into our consciousness as a wild-child provocateur, a Pac-Man Expressionist running rampant 24/7, videotaping everything in his life, while making art out of every piece of paper, ... Read more →
Anton Kern Gallery, New York
January 15–February 28, 2015
—Reviews
by Pedro Neves Marques
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." A fine phrase for art, but just as eerily appropriate for politics in these days of technocratic, neoliberal control over "non-societies" jam-packed with contemporary "me only" pathologies—from entrepreneurship bullshit to non-dom tax evasion. What William Burroughs couldn't possibly have imagined was how this iconic ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
January 13–February 14, 2015
How can one detach oneself from the contemporary communicative capitalism that legitimizes the perpetual upgrading of governmental surveillance, as recently exemplified by certain state responses to the shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris? A valuable point of entry is the work of artists who lived under extreme ... Read more →
ChertLüdde, Berlin
January 10–March 28, 2015
If mourning is a working-through of past history, a process that, if effective, results in a letting go, then South African-born Kemang Wa Lehulere embodies the melancholic, the subject who refuses to release the lost object; a grieving subject whose pain knows no end. When considering the work of Kemang Wa ... Read more →
Stevenson, Cape Town
January 22–February 28, 2015
"Unlived by What is Seen" showcases the work of 34 artists, collectives, and organizations, spanning across three galleries (Galleria Continua, Pace Beijing and Tang Contemporary) located in Beijing's 798 Art district. In contrast to its elusive English version, the show title reads straightforwardly in Chinese: Bu Zai Tu Xiang Zhong ... Read more →
Galleria Continua/Pace Gallery/Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing
December 13, 2014–March 15, 2015
Stupidity is a tricky thing. It's omnipresent, but usually hidden. It can be the place where things begin—first drafts, new ideas—but it's also a final judgment. As philosopher Avital Ronell points out, stupidity has its own nature and contours, yet we rarely take time to explore it. We tell children ... Read more →
Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York
January 6–February 8, 2015
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
No one intended it to begin with assfucking and passed out hippies. But there it was. Past freeways of traffic and a phalanx of security guards, I stepped into Art Los Angeles Contemporary (or the acronymical ALAC) last Thursday night and glanced to my right to see Milavepa, a 1966 painting ... Read more →
Art Los Angeles Contemporary / LA Art Book Fair, Los Angeles / Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles
—Reviews
by Carles Guerra
Jochen Lempert's work is often presented in large compositions of black-and-white photographs demanding close inspection. This time is no different. Ranging from medium-sized to small and tiny prints, this exhibition of his now classic repertoire of flora and fauna gives visitors the feeling of being at an amateur's show, where ... Read more →
ProjecteSD, Barcelona
November 20, 2014–January 30, 2015
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
In 1991, in response to critiques of his exhibition "No Man's Time" at Villa Arson in Nice, curator Éric Troncy wrote a letter to the editors of Flash Art, in which he argued that the exhibition had been "based on no particular concept," thus locating it outside of any theoretical ... Read more →
Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
January 10–February 14, 2015
Entering Galleria Guida Costa's diffusely lit gallery from their front reception room to see "Men's Talk" feels like entering some kind of illicit and profane chapel. Whilst the space—which occupies an old print workshop a stone's throw from Turin's main railway station—bears distinct traces of its past, felt through its ... Read more →
Galleria Guido Costa, Turin
October 10, 2014–January 31, 2015
—Reviews
by María Palacios Cruz
Since Susan Sontag announced the demise of cinephilia in her prescient 1996 essay "The Decay of Cinema," discourses around the death of cinema have been widespread, fuelled in part by the replacement of celluloid by digital technology. Since our understanding of the world has been so influenced by movies—one irrevocably ... Read more →
Maureen Paley, London
November 24, 2014–January 25, 2015
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
The archive is dated; we now live in the age of footnoted fictions, as artists, writers, politicians, and technocrats each try to shape political reality through semi-plausible myths… each "based on a true story." As such, it might be time to start weighing the techniques of Hito Steyerl, or Ben ... Read more →
D+T Project Gallery, Brussels
December 13, 2014–February 7, 2015
Along the edge of the Arabian Sea in Fort Kochi, men haul in so-called Chinese fishing nets, now a popular tourist attraction, while beyond them container ships move in and out of the industrial port. Both testify to the region's importance as a site of transnational circulation, centuries old and ... Read more →
Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi
December 12, 2014–March 29, 2015
Last November, Nico Vascellari moved into the Sala delle Armi in Rome for a month. A huge, rationalist building built in 1934 as a fencing school, and adapted, in 1981, as the Aula Bunker of the court of Rome, it hosted a series of famous trials—namely that of the kidnapping ... Read more →
Monitor, Rome
October 30, 2014–January 17, 2015
What exactly a Scottish bagpipe player was doing performing at a Manfred Pernice opening was not immediately clear to me, nor perhaps to anyone else who was there. And yet, seeing the musician periodically march out and solemnly blow into and kneed his large, bladder-shaped bag among a group of ... Read more →
Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna
November 19, 2014–January 22, 2015
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she ... Read more →
Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
November 19, 2014–January 17, 2015
Carried by the city's intense traffic leaving behind the decrepit bronze colossus that is downtown Cairo, a cab ride from battered Tahrir Square to the lusher, more affluent Zamalek neighborhood feels like a prelude to Basim Magdy's most recent exhibition. Gypsum Gallery is located on the sprawling metropolis's green lung, ... Read more →
Gypsum Gallery, Cairo
November 18, 2014–January 13, 2015
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
Twenty-first century communication has dramatically changed the way information reaches us. Popular interpretations of knowledge and history seem to do so without historical consciousness and self-reflexivity. Rather than playing with the structure of history, Amalia Pica, in her solo show at Stigter van Doesburg, "One Thing after Another," concerns herself ... Read more →
Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam
November 27, 2014–January 17, 2015
—Reviews
by Jeanne Gerrity
Paul Chan is clearly energized by the Greek word polytropos. Homer used the word, translated as "cunning," numerous times to describe Odysseus. This information, conveyed by Chan to a rapt audience during a two-part lecture, was included in the opening-week program for the new gallery Kiria Koula in San Francisco's ... Read more →
Kiria Koula, San Francisco
November 6, 2014–January 10, 2015
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
What do things want? The notion of animism is correlated with the problem of agency—who or what can be said to have volition. According to Norbert Wiener, "our consciousness of will in another person is just that sense of encountering a self-maintaining mechanism aiding or opposing our actions." One can ... Read more →
Esther Schipper, Berlin
November 14, 2014–January 15, 2015
At one point in his 1960 book, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti surveys "the symbology of nation states." The English, he writes, see themselves as captains surrounded by sea; the Swiss are a single body linked beneath mountain peaks. Germans, in turn, assume symbolic form as an army, which ... Read more →
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm
November 14–December 20, 2014
Los Angeles has long been pursuing the economies of pink, but it has been pursuing a phantom. Pink is a non-existent wavelength of light. We cannot perceive it, but literally imagine it. Its features disclose themselves in every BPA-free bottle of pink coconut water, in Lindsay Lohan's strawberry blonde tresses ... Read more →
Supportico Lopez, Berlin
November 14, 2014–January 3, 2015
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
The news that Yvon Lambert is closing his Paris gallery is hardly shocking. What is remarkable, however, is how long his run lasted. Fifty-plus years spent working with contemporary artists puts Lambert in the rare position of being both an art historical footnote and a current art market player. The ... Read more →
Yvon Lambert, Paris
November 22–December 20, 2014
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
"Migrating Forms" is easily New York's most eclectic film festival. A glance at the program, now in its sixth year, can be dizzying: a half-inch videotape documentary from the seventies here, a Korean art film there, and all manner of experimental film and artists' film in between. Instead of theme, ... Read more →
BAMcinématek, New York
December 10–18, 2014
Do you think any collectors were bothered by the raw, open drywall and exposed electric wiring at Christopher Williams's newest exhibition at David Zwirner? Or did they read it as a bad-boy "fuck you" without actually feeling insulted? Did they read it as Christopher Williams probably intended, as a savant ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
November 6–December 20, 2014
—Reviews
by Pablo Martínez
There is something about Ángela de la Cruz's "Traspaso" [Transfer] that leaves one cold. The first impression is that of having arrived somewhere unexpected, when everything is already over. Strewn across the floor, canvases without stretchers and in different forms—two rolled against the wall (Roll (Navy/Turquoise) and Roll (Turquoise/Navy), both ... Read more →
Galeria Helga de Alvear
November 6–January 3, 2015
—Reviews
by Nickolas Calabrese
The site of the apocalypse is not spatial, but temporal, and right now it is in Miami. Every December, clouds of glowering collectors stumble onto and through each other, fingering abstract paintings and driving rented Lambos. Perversely, beyond the work of certain depraved dealers, conniving collectors, and the substandard artists ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 4–7, 2014
If some version of the afterlife exists, and if Aby Warburg manages to find a little peace there, he might be pleased to see Geoffrey Farmer's "Cut Nothing, Cut Parts, Cut the Whole, Cut the Order of Time" at New York's Casey Kaplan. During the last few years of his ... Read more →
Casey Kaplan, New York
October 30–December 20, 2014
—Reviews
by Ilaria Bombelli
A barren desert, a swarm of apparitions: the Italian writer Dino Buzzati's novel, The Tartar Steppe (1940), is one of the few in Italian literature in which the idea of a hallucination, or fata morgana, becomes a narrative mechanism with allegorical power, peopled by characters worn down by endless waiting, ... Read more →
Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna
October 10–December 6, 2014
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
The 10th Shanghai Biennale is sited inside one of Earth's most colossal art containers, The Power Station of Art, a 42,000-square-meter decommissioned coal power plant used as the Urban Future Pavillion of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and converted into China's first and only state-run contemporary art institution in 2012. Entitled ... Read more →
Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai
November 23, 2014–March 31, 2015
Human beings are destroying the planet. If we want to save it we must therefore make inhuman art. Arguments to this effect seem to have enjoyed some currency in recent curatorial practice. Alas, Eija-Liisa Ahtila's accomplished video installation at Galleri Charlotte Lund in Stockholm does not save the world, nor ... Read more →
Galleri Charlotte Lund, Stockholm
October 4–December 6, 2014
—Reviews
by Carles Guerra
This exhibition is one of the first since Harun Farocki's unexpected death in July. In the absence of the artist himself, "4 films from 1967 to 1997" pays tribute to the man—chosen by his partner and collaborator, Antje Ehmann—who has been perhaps among the most influential artists and filmmakers of ... Read more →
àngels barcelona, Barcelona
October 9–December 5, 2014
—Reviews
by Claudia Arozqueta
The recent disappearance and alleged assassination of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Normal School in the southern city of Iguala, Mexico, has once again raised the alarms of an entire country already shocked and affected by corruption, violence, and poverty. But while for years organized crime has spread violence, the disappearances ... Read more →
Galería OMR, Mexico City
September 19–December 19, 2014
—Reviews
by Mariah Nielson
Models are used in architectural practice to represent and communicate ideas. In "Pre-arranged Comfort," artist Katarina Burin transforms San Francisco's Ratio 3 into a 1:1 model that proposes an exhibition of the work of designer and activist Fran Hosken (b. 1920). Burin has constructed four spaces that compose an immersive ... Read more →
Ratio 3, San Francisco
November 7–December 20, 2014
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
A day prior to the opening of Alexandra Navratil's "Plunge / Soar," an article appeared in The Economist online suggesting that the low cost of human labor—brought even lower as other automated processes render people redundant—would be the major barrier to the widespread adoption of driverless cars. This interesting—and horrifying—thought ... Read more →
BolteLang, Zürich
October 25–November 29, 2014
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
It's hard to find much affection for art fairs. Aside from their unvarnished commercialism, they are, after all, why some gallerists never see their children/partners/ornamental budgerigars. However, Independent—a fair that has taken place in New York every March since 2010 to coincide with the Armory show—has induced warm feelings over ... Read more →
Independent Art Fair New York, New York
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Someone has cut a large hole in the chain-link fence that separates Los Angeles's François Ghebaly Gallery and Night Gallery. Perhaps eight feet in diameter, it is large enough to drive a car through and at the opening of concurrent recent exhibitions by Sayre Gomez (at Ghebaly) and JPW3 (at ... Read more →
Francois Ghebaly / Night Gallery, Los Angeles
—Reviews
by Barbara Sirieix
There are not many galleries above the ground in Paris. Every time I walk up the narrow stairs to the second floor of 1 rue Charles-François Dupuis, I brace myself, as if I'm about to enter a state of altered air density or gravity. Previous events there have often dwelled ... Read more →
Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris
October 23–December 20, 2014
—Reviews
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Our contemporary ontology is one of acceleration and mania. Along with the logic of global and cognitive capitalism, we look to our iPhones and the internet as the source for these intensified temporalities. Indeed, walk out on any street and hundreds of individuals are engaged in locating their sense of ... Read more →
Gladstone Gallery, New York
October 17–November 8, 2014
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
Keren Cytter hypnotized me twice in the past few weeks. And I liked it. The first time was in London, where her audio piece Constant State of Grace (2014) was installed in a busy corridor at Frieze Art Fair. Headset on, I was asked by a robotic voiceover to let ... Read more →
Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan
September 24–November 13, 2014
—Reviews
by Vivian Ziherl
The first week of October proved exceptional for Wendelien van Oldenborgh. As an awardee of the 2014 Heineken Prize for Art—the Netherlands's wealthiest prize—the artist and filmmaker had swept through a schedule of lectures, media appearances, and finally a private audience with the Dutch monarch. For an artist best known ... Read more →
Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam
October 4–November 15, 2014
Eighteen venues, scattered around New Orleans. Huge distances between them. A rusty pedal brake cruiser bike. And two and a half days to see it all. This is now the third official Prospect New Orleans since the biennial was inaugurated in 2008. In actuality this is the fourth incarnation of the ... Read more →
Prospect New Orleans, New Orleans
October 25, 2014–January 25, 2015
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
"Is there sexual innuendo in the artworld?" Cady Noland, in response to this question posed by John Waters and Bruce Hainley in Art: A Sex Book (2003), answered with a very prompt: "Yes. 'Euphemisms.'" According to the infamous artworld absentee, artists and dealers are screwed, and often engaged in "one ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris
October 23–26, 2014
—Reviews
by Jeremy Millar
Amber is a form of slow catastrophe, a long compression. A transformation, then, of the resin which once flowed thickly down branch and trunk before these extremities were replaced by those of heat and pressure found deep within chthonic sedimentation. A "beaming sun" (elektron) caught underground, amber's classical name was ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth, London
September 13–November 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
There is a problem facing the history of media: that time can not be represented independently of the technologies of information. We cannot simply write a historical account of technical inventions, because these inventions themselves structure the temporality of events and processes in our world. This is, at least, according ... Read more →
Dan Gunn, Berlin
September 13–November 8, 2014
Here's how you make the most of an art fair booth: hang two-dimensional works on the walls you've got, place a large sculpture on the floor in the center, locate a round table with a few chairs in a corner. The result of such standardization is the rise of fair ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 14–18, 2014
The wool of a black sheep, I was surprised to learn, isn't black at all—it comes in numerous subtle variations of dark brown. Helen Mirra's recent exhibition "Waulked," offers several such lessons; seemingly random observations about organic materials, traditional crafts, and what could be called "more grounded" ways of being ... Read more →
Peter Freeman Inc., New York
September 11–October 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
A sequence of photos by Chris Marker on display at New York's Peter Blum Gallery features a little girl. The 51 images are mostly snapshots; matte, legal-pad-sized prints hung evenly at eye level around the four walls of the gallery. Some appear to have a kind of incidental chronology, following ... Read more →
Peter Blum Gallery, New York
September 4–October 18, 2014
Everything Would Appear To Man, As It Is, Infinite. The title and subscript from Michael John Whelan's framed print on the second floor of Athr's 1500-square-meter gallery space in Jeddah encapsulates the ambitious group show "The Language of Human Consciousness." The exhibition—curated by collector and Athr's co-founder Mohammed Hafiz, closely ... Read more →
Art Residency | Al Balad
July 10–October 10, 2014
—Reviews
by Melissa Gronlund
The nouveau romanciers of France in the 1950s attempted to write a new sort of novel, as their name signaled: portraits of characters that would be comprised entirely of external effects, with none of the glimpses into interiority of the conventional novel—characters' private thoughts and feelings—which the group argued were ... Read more →
Kate MacGarry, London
September 19–October 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Taro Nettleton
To coincide with his second exhibition in Japan, "BC RIPS" at Tokyo's Taka Ishii Gallery, Sterling Ruby has curated a show of photographs by Los Angeles artists Sarah Conaway and Melanie Schiff. Held at the small Taka Ishii Gallery Modern space in Roppongi district and featuring just five images–one of ... Read more →
Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
September 9–October 4, 2014
—Reviews
by Genevieve Yue
The slide projector last appeared in pop cultural consciousness on the television period drama Mad Men. Don Draper, pitching a fictional ad campaign to Kodak executives, clicks through a carousel filled with own family photos: his head leaning against his wife's pregnant belly, his daughter sitting atop his shoulders. The ... Read more →
Microscope Gallery, New York
September 5–October 6, 2014
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
It's tempting to throw Londoner Stephen Willats in with the crop of neglected artists born in the first half of the last century currently being "unearthed" by the voracious contemporary market machine. Willats, born in 1943, may fit the generation, but to suggest that he required rediscovery would be misleading. ... Read more →
Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel
September 5–November 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
No official record of the most cited influence on the work of contemporary artists is kept, but if a tally had been taken over the past five years, top of the list, just squeezing by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, would be the experimental composer and benign orientalist John Cage. ... Read more →
Seventeen Gallery, London
September 4–October 4, 2014
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
The 7th edition of abc art berlin contemporary, as in previous years, embodies the event of exhibition rather than the collective buying and selling of art. As the fair's organizers have prominently emphasized, this year includes a vast program of 40 performances, lectures, readings, sound works, films, and theater productions: ... Read more →
ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 18–21, 2014
"I like Girls" is a stockroom show loosely organized around a statement that irreverently alludes to feminism, which combines Barbara Kruger's Untitled (We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard) (1985) with a range of works by New Zealand artists Ava Seymour and Yvonne Todd. At the last minute ... Read more →
Peter McLeavey Pop Up Gallery, Wellington
August 26–September 16, 2014
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
"The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene," curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, casts human subjects as both increasingly ghostly, stressing limitations and finitudes, as well more aligned with the organic, strange, and sensory. In other words: both more dead and more alive. These qualities have been thrown into relief by the ... Read more →
Taipei Biennial, Taipei
September 13–January 4, 2015
The past 10 years have seen an expansion in the recognition of Latin American artists worldwide, as well as a multiplication of the numbers of galleries and art-related events in Brazil, especially in São Paulo. Being so, a survey of the city's growing number of contemporary art institutions such as ... Read more →
CAIXA Cultural, São Paulo / Instituto Tomie Ohtake / Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo / Museu da Casa Brasileira, São Paulo / Museu da Cidade de São Paulo, São Paulo / Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo / Sé, São Paulo / Phosphorous, São Paulo / Galeria Nara Roesler / Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
September 9, 2014
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
When Jessica Morgan made "Burning Down the House" the title of her Gwangju Biennale, who could have predicted the sinking of the Sewol ferry in April? Or that the censorship of Hong Sung-dam's mural satirizing South Korea's President Park Geun-hye—whose administration has been criticized for bungling the crisis and putting ... Read more →
Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
September 5–November 9, 2014
When British curator Charles Esche moved to São Paulo to orchestrate this year's Bienal—alongside Galit Eilat and Oren Sagiv (from Israel) and Pablo Lafuente and Nuria Enguita Mayo (from Spain)—he stressed that this is a show anchored on the now, on the goings-on that are shaping the world as we ... Read more →
São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
September 6–December 7, 2014
The resuscitation of older female artists' careers has become so prevalent in recent years that it could now be seen as a trend. Take Etel Adnan (b. 1925), Judith Bernstein (b. 1942), Dorothy Iannone (b.1933), and Maria Lassnig (1919-2014), for example. And yet, we all know how the art world ... Read more →
ŻAK | BRANICKA, Berlin
May 2–September 13, 2014
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
The Phasmida are an order of insects whose rocking march always seems hesitant. Every step they take, "stick insects"—as Phasmida are commonly called due to their resemblance to sticks or leaves—will reluctantly stretch out a leg, making cadenced, side-to-side movements as if tentatively rehearsing the next. Biologists will tell you ... Read more →
Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
June 26–August 30, 2014
—Reviews
by Natasha Ginwala
When foraging for food in the wild, orangutans conduct an intriguing ritual known as the "fruit stare."(1) It unleashes a mimetic contract hinged upon intentionality and co-presence. What makes the tree surrender its fruit? The practiced stare of the orangutan coaxes it into interdependency—and possibly, divulgence—while registering a temporal circuit ... Read more →
Silberkuppe, Berlin
June 28–August 2, 2014
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
Irregularly and perhaps just a bit irrationally, lawmakers and treaties carve hard demarcations of time from a spinning globe. Workers clock in there, the lunch hour is now here—Daylight Savings Time always confused the hell out of me. Whatever you think noon is, it's now mostly an abstraction. Time zones ... Read more →
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
July 12–August 23, 2014
Hong Seung Hye's sixth solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery is a retrospective, after a fashion. Arrayed around K2—one of the Seoul gallery's spaces—are prints, sculptures, and furniture that co-opt the titles and forms of her earlier works. The stainless steel structure in On & Off (all works 2014), for example, ... Read more →
Kukje Gallery, Seoul
July 10–August 17, 2014
—Reviews
by Mitchell Anderson
Pamela Rosenkranz's exhibition at Karma International in Zürich is a complete mess. At first glance, the show lacks the sleek style and execution one has come to expect from an artist who has made a career exploring the slick visual codes and branding techniques used to commodify the natural world. ... Read more →
Karma International, Zürich
June 14–July 26, 2014
—Reviews
by Sabrina Tarasoff
The sea is said to speak to us in an amalgam of mysterious and alluring analogies, which are drawn from its depths and, at times, swallowed all too easily by the contemplative desires of artists, poets, and theorists alike. The metaphors are countless, yet invariable—from the reflective surfaces of still ... Read more →
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
June 12–July 26, 2014
—Reviews
by Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna
Pursuing a clearly spiritual approach within a Christian cultural and ethical context, Andrea Büttner is one of the few contemporary artists who could plausibly cite St. Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century Catholic friar who committed himself to a life of poverty, as a key influence. Her work Tische [Tables] (2013), ... Read more →
NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona
May 30–July 11, 2014
Apparitions, classified as celestial and flighty phenomena, spawn earthly suppositions from their beholder. And these thoughts can be utterly profane: Are Lassie and Bambi checking each other out, as Elad Lassry's Collie (Deer) (2013) ensemble suggests? Wasn't Bambi a minor? Wasn't Lassie gay? What gender was Bambi supposed to be ... Read more →
Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
June 12–August 23, 2014
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
People who have lost arms or legs often report experiencing a "phantom limb"—the sense that the limb is still there, or that they can still move or feel it. It's a good metaphor, too, for current post-internet art debates concerning the shifting relationship of real to virtual, digital to material. ... Read more →
Pilar Corrias, London
June 27–August 1, 2014
"The projection of the New York art world as the metropolitan center for art by every other art world is symptomatic of the provincialism of each of them."(1) wrote in 1974 the Australian art historian Terry Smith, in the article "The Provincialism Problem," (2) which has been contested ever since, ... Read more →
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
May 31–July 21, 2014
—Reviews
by Dessislava Dimova
On the way to David Lamelas's latest show, which inaugurates Jan Mot's new location in Brussels, I wondered how much of an artist's practice is trapped in the discourses surrounding its inception. After all, aren't artworks entangled with, if not contingent upon, the conditions that govern the time of their ... Read more →
Jan Mot, Brussels
June 11–July 19, 2014
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
"Free Internet," Trisha Baga's exhibition at Giò Marconi, is a scrappy, energetic, stoned out tour de force in visual stimulation. Behind 3D glasses, your eyes have to move fast in order to focus on her continuous ping-pong of vacillating images: floating slices of salami, overlapping images, bats in caves, cats ... Read more →
Giò Marconi, Milan
June 6–July 18, 2014
—Reviews
by Gleb Napreenko
Just as the individual is born into language and, per French philosopher Louis Althusser, is interpellated by ideology, any contemporary art show is born at the behest of financial and political considerations into a world already filled with expectations for it. As a result, the big question is the surplus ... Read more →
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
June 28–October 31, 2014
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
Hung against a backdrop of deep-red curtains the statement, "YOU ARE THE PRIME MINISTER," glows in electric blue neon. Even in daylight its artificial, storefront brightness beams through waterside contemporary's windows and is legible far beyond them into the large social housing complex surrounding the gallery. Although it is clearly visible, ... Read more →
Waterside Contemporary, London
June 12–August 9, 2014
The 1990s art world began with the rumblings of multiculturalism and identity politics and closed with a resurgent art market interested in—as it frequently is—painting, and figurative painting in particular: John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and the total ascendance of Gerhard Richter. In between these two moments a variety of forms ... Read more →
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
June 12–August 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Every June, Art Basel lands like a spaceship with a rapacious tractor beam that transfixes the city's Messeplatz. Within it, for that week, a dense microcosm emerges where the artificial conditions of the elite international art world hold sway. But the effect can be felt further afield too, with some ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
"Real experiments that really fail have to take place in a festival, rather than in an exhibition, because this way you don't have to take responsibility for them two or three weeks later when they are still going on," said Klaus Biesenbach at the opening of "14 Rooms," an exhibition ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 19–22, 2014
—Reviews
by Barbara Sirieix
"A video titled Milk and Honey." These are the opening subtitles appearing on a plasma screen in the first room of Basma Alsharif's solo exhibition in Paris. The following words, spoken in Arabic by a male narrator, introduce a story to come, of a woman's lost love. They immediately remind ... Read more →
Galerie Imane Farès, Paris
April 3–July 30, 2014
Benno von Archimboldi—the mythical writer in Roberto Bolaño's 2004 novel 2666—used to draw algae as a child. The meticulousness with which the boy captured the greenish pulp he encountered on his prohibited dives in muddy waters extended into his writing as a grown man. None of this is known to ... Read more →
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
May 3–July 26, 2014
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
About three years ago, something unexpected happened in Frances Stark's art. After two decades of making work about herself—about her anxieties and obsessions, her identity crises and motivational struggles—she started making work about other people. Stranger still, her subjects became, in most instances, young men of color. Stark's current exhibition "Bobby ... Read more →
Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
May 17–June 28, 2014
Sasha Litvintseva's beautifully observed short film Alluvion (2014) follows a group of three tourists as they meander around an unidentified city against the backdrop of daily life: where women and children take their exercise in an open-air gym and laborers hammer away in a shipbuilding workshop. Litvintseva describes, ominously, how ... Read more →
Carlos/Ishikawa, London
May 2–June 14, 2014
Having had the privilege of seeing the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in several different contexts (New York, Kassel, and even Bangkok), none have resonated with me so strongly and strangely as that of Mexico; how peculiarly apropos to see his new film in Mexico City. Shown among a furtive constellation ... Read more →
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
May 20–June 14, 2014
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
At times, history is anachronistic. Documentary practices define a film genre that existed before the invention of film. In a sense, the documentary impulse was what made film possible in the first place: workers leaving the factory, the rustling of leaves, a train entering the station, or a street scene ... Read more →
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
May 29–June 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Riddled with countless tributaries, a map of the Amazon River and its drainage basin seemingly presents an image far too complex to be used as the basis of a mnemonic device; however, Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870), a radical American pedagogue and women's rights advocate, turned explicitly to its topography in ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
May 29–August 3, 2014
"Who Shall Deliver Us From the Greeks and Romans?"—an exhibition curated by Cristiana Perrella for Galeri Manâ—directly addresses a recent trend in contemporary art of looking back towards classical Greek and Roman visual culture for sources and inspiration. The presentation includes works from a range of artists from different backgrounds—such ... Read more →
Galeri Mana, Istanbul
April 3–May 10, 2014
I puzzled over the word "euqinimod" in the exhibition's title for some time, until I figured out that it's the artist's name spelled backwards. And for viewers familiar with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's work of the past two decades, the show does seem like an inversion of her typical approach, and an ... Read more →
303 Gallery, New York
April 17–May 31, 2014
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
Entering ARRATIA BEER from the back doorway, one encounters a sculptural object, covered in raw canvas and impressive in size. Padded and rectangular, it obstructs the view of the entire gallery. Through its center, which is weighed down by an extra layer of fabric, there is a row of buckles, ... Read more →
Arratia Beer, Berlin
May 2–June 14, 2014
—Reviews
by Melanie Pocock
At an art fair like Art Basel Hong Kong—now in its second year—what it means to be "truly global" warrants some reflection. For the fair's global director Marc Spiegler, it meant increased participation from western galleries, artists, and collectors, creating a more "global" market for Asian art and a seemingly ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
May 15–18, 2014
"On a Critique of Spatial Reason" could be the subtitle of Runo Lagomarsino's current exhibition "Against My Ruins" at Nils Stærk. Upon entering an old factory hall, the gallery appears quiet, and in an almost overwhelming way, the works are conceptually ordered. But after leaving the space, the spatial order ... Read more →
Nils Stærk, Copenhagen
April 22–May 17, 2014
A rather Duchampian vignette set the tone for my visit to this year's Frieze New York, the third edition of the London-import fair that takes up residence in an airy custom tent on Randall's Island, the East River stopover noted both for its athletic fields and psychiatric asylums. In the ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 9–12, 2014
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
In a clip from a 1985 BBC-TV interview, viewable on the BBC's website, French writer and activist Jean Genet describes a dream he had in which the film crew revolted against the television-interview paradigm wherein a subject (in this case Genet himself) talks in front of a camera while half ... Read more →
Marcelle Alix, Paris
March 23–May 17, 2014
Klaus vom Bruch (b. 1952) is something like this Gallery Weekend's wicked fairy godmother. Even though he and his gallery SASSA TRÜLZSCH were rightfully invited to participate in the event's tenth anniversary, vom Bruch's "In the Future …" series (2008–14) casts some rather sardonic prophesies upon the (art) world. In ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
May 2–4, 2014
On Fabio Sargentini's website, the heading "gallerista regista scrittore" (gallerist, director, writer) appears directly under his name. While this text is dedicated only to the first of the above-mentioned professions, it will also consider the very peculiar nature of Sargentini's various activities through almost half a century. A multifaceted figure, ... Read more →
Eighteen years have passed since Hal Foster's critical remarks on the position of the artist as ethnographer. That text, together with Catherine David's 1997 Documenta X, and its questioning of the anthropological foundations of Western culture, became two groundbreaking events, which heralded a tightening of the artistic and anthropological inquiries ... Read more →
Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo
March 22–May 3, 2014
When was the last time you walked into a painting exhibition at a commercial gallery and saw something truly politically radical? The answer for many in the West is likely "rarely, if ever," especially if we're referring to West Chelsea or London's Mayfair. "The Un-Officials | Art Before 85" highlights ... Read more →
Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing
March 1–April 12, 2014
The testimony of the witness still has an important place among many artists and writers who identify their works with activist politics, dissidence, the subaltern, and the liberation strategies particularly favored in the last decade of the twentieth century. However, in these times, in which human testimony has been displaced ... Read more →
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid
February 18–May 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
On May 13, 1846, United States President James K. Polk went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Mexico. His rallying cry: "American blood has been shed on American soil." While eleven Americans were killed and six more were wounded in what is now known as the ... Read more →
LABOR, Mexico City
March 23–May 24, 2014
With his latest deliberation on narrative, text, and the future, Heman Chong offers a handsome presentation of paintings, text pieces, and a found book in his new solo exhibition "Of Indeterminate Time Or Occurrence" at Singapore's FOST Gallery. Greeting you on one wall is a series of small paintings—organized in ... Read more →
FOST Gallery, Singapore
March 8–May 4, 2014
In 1996, his body bloated, his liver consumed by cancer, and his work more popular than ever, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) set about his final series of self-portraits. Taking Théodore Géricault's iconic 1818–19 painting as its point of departure, and working from photographs taken by his wife Elfie Semotan, "The Raft ... Read more →
Skarstedt, New York
March 3–April 26, 2014
—Reviews
by Andrew Stefan Weiner
On its face, the phrase "Silicon Valley Contemporary" seems redundant or even tautological. For decades now the IT industries have pervasively reshaped almost all aspects of daily life on an increasingly global scale. Dinner plans, Hollywood blockbusters, presidential elections––all are now encoded, routed, and delivered to our personal screens. So ... Read more →
Silicon Valley Contemporary, San Jose
April 10–13, 2014
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Before it became a commercially viable mode of artistic production celebrating the hegemony of the market over the social, Pop was—albeit briefly—an art of critique. When popular mass culture motifs where first adopted by contemporary artists in the early-1950s, they seemed to announce a revival of Dadaism. For Eduardo Paolozzi, ... Read more →
Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
March 8–April 12, 2014
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Archetypal pretty boys with guitars play a gig in a second-hand bookshop. T-shirts hang off their limber bodies, their pale skin wrapped tightly around their cheekbones. An audience, primarily made up of young people, occupies the space, nodding their heads, smoking and clambering over one another while the band bounces, ... Read more →
gb agency, Paris
March 1–April 12, 2014
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
An idyllic scene of Dionysian abandon: six naked bodies splash across the sun-flecked, crystalline surface of a lake, moving, one by one, in slow motion past the camera's lens. They are all smiling, healthy, happy, vital, and young. This is the opening sequence of Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mahwah, NJ) ... Read more →
Hales Gallery, London
February 28–April 12, 2014
—Reviews
by Catalina Lozano
The title of this year's Cuenca Biennial, "Leaving to Return," is a somewhat self-explanatory expression. It's not a figure of speech based on metaphor. Rather, it defines intention as being marked by affects, and the truthful will to return as embedded within an affective relation to place. As suggested by ... Read more →
Bienal de Cuenca
March 28–June 27, 2014
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
A spotlight can transform quite a bit with an economy of means, making something instantly visible, no matter how small or familiar. Post-winter sunlight can achieve a similar effect, which is why "The Spring Awakening" was an apt title choice for the program of exhibitions, openings, and performances organized around ... Read more →
Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium , Milan / Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan / PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan / Triennale Milano, Milan / Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan / Peep-Hole, Milan / Battaglia Fine Art Foundry, Milan / Careof DOCVA, Milan / Studio Guenzani, Milan / Francesca Minini, Milan / Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan / Giò Marconi, Milan / Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan / Kaufmann Repetto, Milan / Galleria Zero, Milan / Gasconade, Milan / Fluxia, Milan
March 31, 2014
Milan, a city that cultivates its world-famous reputation as the capital of fashion and design, is currently taking big steps to relaunch its identity as a center for artistic production, and miart, its two-year-old upstart art fair, has been playing an essential role in this reinvention. With its access-controlled, rational ... Read more →
miart, Milan
March 28–30, 2014
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
When a speech act contradicts what is said, this is called a performative contradiction. In the mid-1970s, the fight for women's rights found itself in an inconsistency of this kind, when the general logic of gender construction was cast into doubt. By mapping a useless alphabetical order onto kitchen tools, ... Read more →
Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam
February 22–March 29, 2014
Money continues to pour into art, and with it, stories multiply about art's manipulation by callow titans of finance. Speaking of the recent decade, one pundit said not so long ago: "The conversation has turned from 'Is art an asset class?' to 'Art is an asset class,' and then to ... Read more →
The smell of marijuana was really thick in the air at Los Angeles's Redling Fine Art. "You can get a contact high just walking into this place!" I blurted out to the woman behind the counter. She smiled broadly already stoned? and informed me that the gallery runs exhaust fans ... Read more →
Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles
February 26–April 5, 2014
—Reviews
by Lawrence Liang
A dilapidated building earmarked for demolition and destined to join the debris of socialist modernity in Jia Zhangke's 2006 film Still Life abruptly transforms into a UFO in the middle of the night and takes off to an uncertain future. A moment of flight that rejects the burden of the ... Read more →
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi
January 31–February 28, 2014
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Braco Dimitrijević's current exhibition at MOT International offers a careful selection of early works by this Paris-based, Sarajevo-born pioneer of Conceptual art. The show's title, "Early London Years," refers to the period from 1971 to 1973 when the artist lived there, although a number works produced in other cities like ... Read more →
MOT International, London
February 7–March 22, 2014
"This is a dot. A dot is a sound. A dot is a sound in space. This is a dot in space…" This is the voiceover, augmented with psychedelic tonal music, which emanates from a speaker casually draped with hand-painted fabrics reminiscent of an American flag. The sonically infused gallery ... Read more →
Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto
February 20–March 22, 2014
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
The most streamlined mythology of the past two decades of the Whitney Biennial goes something like this: 1993 represented the Big Bang of art and identity politics, and since then, the curve has bobbed up and down like a sine wave, going above and below the axis of overthought mediocrity ... Read more →
Whitney Biennial, New York
March 7–May 25, 2014
Even for art audiences who are by now used to all kinds of dematerialized art objects—performers in lieu of objects or sets of instructions replacing lists of media—this exhibition of four artist-writers at Galerie Wien Lukatsch sets the bar high. It consists solely of recorded voices with no visual props ... Read more →
Galerie Wien Lukatsch, Berlin
February 22–April 4, 2014
—Reviews
by Agnieszka Gratza
"What's not to like?," a fellow critic concurred as I waxed lyrical about Zarina's solo show, which I had seen a few days before in Delhi. The opening was timed to coincide with the India Art Fair, around which a number of glittering events have coalesced in what has become ... Read more →
Gallery Espace, New Delhi
January 24–February 28, 2014
—Reviews
by Natasha Ginwala
A young woman hovers about one story above ground, secured to a central column in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy (National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts) in Dhaka. As part of her performance Sat on a Chair (2014), artist Yasmin Jahan Nupur remains trapped and uncannily motionless over the space ... Read more →
Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka
February 7–9, 2014
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
Alexandre Singh's spectacular, ambitious project The Humans (2013) is not the easiest artwork to discuss. A three-hour, three-act play with music-and-dance numbers, The Humans presents the audience with a wildly absurd remix of an origins-of-man narrative, borrowing and stealing from the Bible, the classics, Shakespeare, and other references too numerous ... Read more →
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
January 24–March 29, 2014
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
The week before Kilian Rüthemann's new exhibition opened at RaebervonStenglin in Zürich, a band of the great, good, wealthy, and hangers-on were in the luxurious Swiss mountain village of Gstaad for the launch of "Elevation 1049: Between Heaven and Hell," an exhibition of works "positioned in and defined by the ... Read more →
RaebervonStenglin, Zürich
January 31–March 8, 2014
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Whether general improvements in a national economy benefit all members of society equally or not, the inverse—large-scale divestment—can certainty reap unemployment, ghettoization, a rise in crime, and other social ills. Consider Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican border city just south of El Paso, which has been the site of some of ... Read more →
YONKE, Ciudad Juárez
January 25–February 15, 2014
—Reviews
by Jennifer Piejko
Over the decades, John Miller has produced a body of work that is semi-ambiguous in concept, yet is—in terms of deadpan humor and wry observation—unwaveringly his own. In the 1980s, he made pieces that appeared to be caked in human waste, like paintings with brown splotches and appropriated objects covered ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
January 16–February 22, 2014
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
On a recent Saturday morning, while half of Los Angeles's art community was shelling out ten dollars to park their cars outside the dispiriting aircraft hangar of Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the city's preeminent art fair, and the other half was trying to find an empty meter downtown for Printed ... Read more →
Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles
February 1–2, 2014
The cornerstone of Isaac Julien's new exhibition in London is PLAYTIME (2014), a seven-screen, high-definition video installation that features well-known actors James Franco, Maggie Cheung, and Mercedes Cabral, as well as Swiss auctioneer Simon de Pury. Set across three continents, the work follows a suite of characters—the Artist, the Hedge ... Read more →
Victoria Miro, London
January 24–March 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
In the late 1990s, equipped with directions furnished by the Utah Arts Council, Tacita Dean traveled to the Great Salt Lake in search of Robert Smithson's Land art masterpiece Spiral Jetty (1970). Though she was ultimately unsuccessful in locating the massive earthwork (likely, it was submerged at the time), her ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
January 15–March 1, 2014
The limelight on political struggle, uprisings, and Egypt's "revolutions" over the last three years has eclipsed the otherwise unprecedented number of recent art initiatives surging in Cairo amidst the tumult. However, for many years, the capital's growing art milieu has lacked a serious commercial gallery to introduce artists to markets, ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
Riding one of the many waves that have made their way across the country from New York over the past five years, Hannah Hoffman, a new gallerist in Hollywood, has opened up her space at the intersection of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, just around the corner from the ... Read more →
Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles
January 14–February 15, 2014
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Remember Spellbound? In Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 thriller, Gregory Peck stars as an amnesiac patient whose dreams were famously designed by Salvador Dali. Scissors, eyes, curtains, faceless men, decks of cards—a whole panoply of Surrealist tokens parade before the piercing intellect of Dr. Constance Petersen, played by Ingrid Bergman. Conflating Sigmund ... Read more →
Croy Nielsen, Berlin
January 10–February 22, 2014
The pants belonging to the "friend" of the eighteenth-century Welsh pirate Captain Howard Davis were apparently very tiny. Their sculptural replica, crafted from painted papier-mâché and complete with a petite button fly, now sits in a storage box made of birch in the Tenth Avenue space of the venerable Paula ... Read more →
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
January 11–February 15, 2014
—Reviews
by Fernanda Lopes
"If it does not work, I will close it next month," Luisa Strina decided when she first opened her gallery in São Paulo in 1974. She wanted to be an artist, but soon realized she was more interested in the universe surrounding the work of art; the artists Luiz Paulo ... Read more →
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
December 17, 2013–February 22, 2014
On a recent long-haul flight, I caught myself consumed by a scene on the little screen in front of me. In addition to the in-flight entertainment program and the animated map view, the interface offered a live feed from a camera attached to the bottom of the plane, tracking a ... Read more →
Modern Art, London
January 10–February 8, 2014
As one wanders through the rooms of Rodeo's apartment-cum-gallery space, works by eleven artists loosely connected by a low-key aesthetic make a timely statement on the condition of materiality now. Familiar media—a 16mm film, 35mm slides, paintings—are reinvented and intermixed with works fashioned from objects found in the domestic domain, ... Read more →
Rodeo
November 15, 2013–February 8, 2014
—Reviews
by Federico Florian
The raw material of Thea Djordjadze's work is memory—of past times, faraway places, and emotions. "Oxymoron Grey"—her new (and second) solo show at Milan's kaufmann repetto gallery—seems to illustrate this idea entirely and intimately. The exhibition's title may allude to the "oxymoronic" nature of her art, which hovers between painting ... Read more →
Kaufmann Repetto, Milan
November 21, 2013–February 1, 2014
In his latest exhibition, Akram Zaatari offers a way of reading images collectively by looking at the lives and motivations of the photographers who made them. Assuming the role of curator, the artist selects photographs and materials from the Arab Image Foundation (AIF)—which he co-founded with Walid Raad and others ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
November 27, 2013–February 1, 2014
—Reviews
by Daniel Tucker
It is tempting to venerate images of bodies gathered, simply because they are seductive. They contain the charge of all that is political—the possibility of power in conflict. For this reason, they appear consistently in the mediated distribution channels and propaganda produced by the powerful and the powerless alike, ranging ... Read more →
Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
December 13, 2013–January 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Inverting the specters of progress in his 2005 Le Siècle, Alain Badiou revisited the decade-long about-face of a Greek mercenary force that successfully fought its way home from a failed, early-fourth-century incursion in Persia. He did this as a means of determining where a sequacious political left stands today, and ... Read more →
Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels
November 15, 2013–January 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Kerstin Stakemeier
Natalie Czech's first exhibition at Capitain Petzel is an exemplary case of thought rendered in the medium of photography. In her series "Poems by Repetition" and "Voyelles" (both 2013), Czech employs photography as a means of inhabiting a range of artistic literary genres—poetry, journalistic media, lyrics from popular music, and ... Read more →
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
November 23, 2013–January 25, 2014
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
"You can't bring culture to people, you can only bring it out of them." That's Robert Rauschenberg, in a 1968 manifesto titled "Proposals for Public Parks" which the curators of the 2013 Carnegie International—Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski—have reprinted in the catalog for their exhibition. Rauschenberg's assertion poses ... Read more →
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
October 5, 2013–March 16, 2014
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
I hate to admit this now, but my eyes rolled involuntarily when I first heard that the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo would be holding solo exhibitions of work by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, since both artists have already had major shows in Paris museums, but it ... Read more →
Centre Pompidou / Palais de Tokyo, Paris
In their current exhibition at Casey Kaplan, Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler look backwards and askance, mining their archives for oblique portraits of the museum and factory floors, fast inclining towards abstraction. Gillick has periodically advocated for a methodology that functions as a "critical double" and "parallel structure" to a ... Read more →
Casey Kaplan, New York
November 1–December 21, 2013
—Reviews
by Alenka Gregorič
This fall, the IRWIN collective repeated their historic "Back to the USA" exhibition at Galerija Škuc in Ljubljana, where it was first shown to the Slovenian public in 1984. This new presentation of their work brought forth information about the collective that was largely unknown to the Slovenian and international ... Read more →
Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana
October 15–November 3, 2013
Looking up into the night sky, you wouldn't think that the color of the universe is beige, or "cosmic latte," as a group of scientists from Johns Hopkins University has dubbed it. But then again, looking at Andy Boot's new sculptural installation, you wouldn't think that the exhibition has anything ... Read more →
Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna
November 27, 2013–January 25, 2014
Within sixty seconds of walking into the Miami Beach Convention Center, I had already seen two White Men Wearing Google Glass—a new, supremely annoying demographic fitting seamlessly into the obnoxious displays of wealth that have long characterized Art Basel Miami Beach. Admittedly, there isn't much surprising about the presence of ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 5–8, 2013
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
Michael E. Smith has left the gallery nearly empty. Entering the space of Clifton Benevento, my first impression was one of absence, in sharp contrast to its location. Finding the show on the sixth floor of a building in the center of New York's boutique-saturated SoHo commercial district, I could ... Read more →
Clifton Benevento, New York
November 2–December 21, 2013
If someone ever wished to consider the effects of German reunification on the commercial art scene after 1990, Galerie Max Hetzler would make a perfect case study. Hetzler, who had already opened his first gallery in 1973 in Stuttgart, played a central role as an art dealer in Cologne during ... Read more →
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
November 10–December 21, 2013
Who's the tiger? In 2012, the Wall Street Journal headed a report on the emerging economies of Colombia and Peru with the bold headline, "The New Tigers," pitting them against the Asian "Tigers" of the 1960s–90s. Already projected to become the third largest economy in Latin America by 2014, Colombia is ... Read more →
galerie mor⋅charpentier, Bogotá
October 27–November 22, 2013
—Reviews
by Morgan Quaintance
Joan of Arc in flames, women and technological innovation, and the retinal quirks of color perception—there is a complex swirl of ideas and images in the current exhibition by London-based artist Aura Satz at Paradise Row. Collectively, they present a kind of shadowy gestalt, using the cover of darkness to ... Read more →
Paradise Row, London
November 1–December 6, 2013
For an artist perhaps most famous for his "black" paintings—some of the most visually obdurate work ever produced on canvas—Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) spent much of his life taking great pleasure in images. The current show of his work at David Zwirner, which now represents the Reinhardt estate, reveals yet another ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
November 7–December 18, 2013
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
In the cosmos of art collecting, there are few private exhibitors as closely associated with a place (Mexico City) and an industry (juice products) as Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. The thousand-and-one guests who descended on D.F. this past weekend for the lavish opening of collector Eugenio López's David Chipperfield-designed Museo ... Read more →
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
November 19, 2013
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
None of these have titles. I'd like to christen them instead with shifty poems, smoky strings of musical words, or better, give each a dull, quotidian name, culled from tombstones and television shows, like Doris or Louise, Fred or George. These are not the first things to live untitled. Everyday beauties, ... Read more →
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
November 10–December 21, 2013
"Unseen," the title of Willie Doherty's first retrospective in his hometown of Derry, refers to a complex set of impossibilities at the core of his photographic and video practice. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial, three-hundred-page catalog in which Robin Klassnik, the director of Matt's Gallery in London and ... Read more →
City Factory Gallery, Derry
September 27, 2013–January 4, 2014
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
Two artists stand in a studio. One holds a brush, the other a microphone. Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie(1) feverishly walks back and forth between the canvas and his palette and seems completely undisturbed by the pervasive vocal interpretations Dutch-Iranian artist Navid Nuur makes of his rude brushstrokes. This work, The ... Read more →
Galeria Plan B, Berlin
September 20–December 14, 2013
"It's like watching paint dry," you might say of something unreasonably boring. Watching an ice cube melt suggests the same thing. And a melting ice cube was the only thing happening onstage, for about an hour, during Florian Hecker's commission for this year's Performa Biennial. Luckily for the audience, C.D. ... Read more →
Performa
November 1–24, 2013
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
Art fairs rank high among the rather awkward rituals of the contemporary art world. Rarely do stilted power relations come to the fore as clearly as they do on these occasions. Turin's Artissima numbers among the more engaging events within the minor league—less pressure, local flair, more time for talks, ... Read more →
Artissima, Turin
November 8–10, 2013
Jimmie Durham has had a significant presence in the Low Countries of late with a major survey (co-curated by Bart De Baere and Anders Kreuger) in 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp, as well as a solo exhibition at De Vleeshal in Middelburg earlier this ... Read more →
Galerie Michel Rein, Brussels
October 10–December 7, 2013
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
There is an expression I learned as a child when I took my first English classes that never stopped generating sequences of absurdist pictures in my mind: "Not enough room to swing a cat." Over and over again, I imagine the cat, the swing, and the room in variable combinations ... Read more →
Galleria Zero, Milan
October 9–November 11, 2013
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
An aerial view, computer-generated, of a bleak, barren plain, improbably square in shape and bounded by undulating mountains, under a sunless grey sky. The view circles, then sweeps slowly down the speckled grey ground, gaining resolution as we begin to make out a terrain of grayish rocks, stones, gravel, and ... Read more →
Vilma Gold, London
October 16–November 16, 2013
The aggressively roughshod aesthetic that characterizes Henrik Olesen's work clashes immediately with the bourgeois atmosphere of Galerie Buchholz's bel-étage apartment space: the exhibition press release and checklist have been stuck haphazardly onto the wall in the elegant entrance, while two further texts printed on adhesive transparencies are affixed to the ... Read more →
Galerie Buchholz, New York
September 20–November 23, 2013
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
Turning forty is tough. But FIAC is celebrating this milestone in characteristic Parisian style with a slightly more international roster of galleries on view in the Grand Palais (with first-timers from Canada, Ireland, and the Czech Republic). And with an expanded and notably strong "Hors les Murs" (Outside the Walls) ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris
October 24–27, 2013
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
The Swiss artist Heidi Bucher once described her work like that of a forensic scientist: "We paste the rooms and then listen. We observe the surface and coat it. We wrap and unwrap. The lived, the past, becomes entangled in the cloth and remains fixed there. Slowly we loosen the ... Read more →
Freymond Guth Fine Arts, Zürich
October 5–November 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Agata Pietrasik
Galeria Stereo's contribution to the third edition of Gallery Weekend, Warsaw's pre-eminent art event, is a compact and elegant presentation of mostly sculptural, albeit intensely imagistic work by four artists: Nina Beier, Piotr Łakomy, Gizela Mickiewicz, and Michael E. Smith. It is also the first exhibition in the gallery's stylish ... Read more →
Galeria Stereo, Warsaw
September 27–October 31, 2013
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
The ecosystem of Frieze Art Fair in London keeps growing, like a healthy family of good-looking siblings. That is, indeed, exciting, but it is also a real tour de force for visitors, who since last year have not just one, but two highly distinct fairs to enjoy (the main one ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Arnaud Gerspacher
If language is a tool then two things follow: there was a time before the tool was useful, hanging in a pre-anthropological state of potential, and there may come a time when it once again becomes useless. Similarly, if the sign is arbitrary, then there was a time before it ... Read more →
Gladstone Gallery, New York
September 13–October 26, 2013
When musician David Byrne manically repeats the line "same as it ever was," it fails to bring pleasant thoughts to mind. To say these same words about this year's VIENNAFAIR, however, is to acknowledge the value in returning to a pre-existing order. Last year, the fair was a strange hybrid ... Read more →
Positioned like sentries on either side of the North Sea as it collides with the Atlantic Ocean, Norway and Scotland have long been held under the sway of this most frigid body of water. Crane-filled shipyards, woolen fisherman's sweaters, mythical horned Viking helmets, and—as the exhibition "Sea Salt and Cross ... Read more →
The Modern Institute, Glasgow
September 7–October 19, 2013
The principles of OOO—the object-oriented ontology that has emerged within the last decade—are now permeating almost every area of cultural production, structurally redefining the most fundamental relationships between things. In recognizing the agency and independence of all manner of nonhuman entities, and in proposing a system of holding things together ... Read more →
Galeria Quadrado Azul, Lisbon
September 26–November 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Brian Kuan Wood
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! —D.H. Lawrence As a force beyond our control, the weather offers some relief; it's not our fault. And that's probably why we talk about it to avoid talking about other things. But is it only that? In fact, weather fails ... Read more →
Mercosul Biennial Foundation, Porto Alegre
September 13–November 10, 2013
—Reviews
by Kerstin Stakemeier
There are always good reasons to organize a General Idea exhibition—not because of new work or freshly discovered findings, but because the artistic collective's only surviving member AA Bronson has cultivated an afterlife of General Idea that persists into the present day. First initiated in 1969, its central members AA ... Read more →
Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich
September 13–October 27, 2013
Riddle me this: Just what is it that continues to make Carol Bove's focused yet multifaceted sculptural practice so uniquely satisfying? A simple answer might start with her materials—a carefully calibrated mix of concrete cubes and I-beams, petrified wood and peacock feathers, geometric figures fashioned in delicate brass and powder-coated steel, ... Read more →
Maccarone, New York
September 7–October 19, 2013
—Reviews
by Anna Tolstova
At first glance, "More Light"—the title of the 5th Moscow Biennale's main project curated by Catherine de Zegher—seems to describe the exhibition entirely. The broad and luminous space of the Manege Central Exhibition Hall is full of weightless and fragile works flowing through the space like draperies, many of which ... Read more →
Moscow Biennale , Moscow
September 20–October 20, 2013
Considering that Berlin's abc art berlin contemporary is only in its sixth year of existence, it already has a colorful past. Established by a small group of Berlin-based galleries in 2008 as an alternative to the more traditional (and waning) Art Forum Berlin art fair, it is now the center ... Read more →
ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 19–22, 2013
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
In his first exhibition at Galerie frank elbaz, Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson balances tidy conceptualism with dexterous formal conceits in his ongoing, obsessive abstractions of the editorial purview and design of the iconic TIME magazine. Minimally installed, the exhibition is anchored by a room of four wall-mounted mirror works ... Read more →
Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris
September 7–November 2, 2013
Curator Fulya Erdemci has said that the focus of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, "Mom, Am I Barbarian?," is "the notion of the public domain as a political forum." The evocative title is borrowed from poet Lale Müldür's eponymous book, with the obvious connotations of a sense of being an ultimate ... Read more →
Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
September 14–November 20, 2013
For a few years in the mid-2000s, writing made a notable dent in contemporary image-saturated culture—what's ever more loosely called the society of the spectacle. With the explosion of texting and blogs, written language almost seemed to rival visual culture for the attention of citizens, consumers, and everyone in between. ... Read more →
International Center of Photography, New York
May 17–September 22, 2013
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
In her essay on Martha Rosler's Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72) , art critic Laura Cottingham states that the infamous photomontages of Vietnam's killing fields and American bourgeois interiors came as a reaction to frustration. Rosler couldn't bear what she herself calls "the images [that] were always very ... Read more →
Galleria Pinksummer, Genoa
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
For the inaugural iteration of Bergen Assembly—the first ever large-scale international contemporary art triennial in Norway's second city—Moscow-based curators Ekaterina Degot and David Riff turned to another duo, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and their Soviet-era novel Monday Begins on Saturday as the exhibition's guiding sprit. The book itself can be ... Read more →
Bergen Assembly, Bergen
August 31–October 27, 2013
Despite the possession of a rich literary pedigree, the good old chicken-or-egg quandary of fact or fiction seems to receive limited play if not in the Latin American context, then the Mexican context of contemporary art (and by literary, I mean of course Julio Cortázar, and even more importantly, Jorge ... Read more →
Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
July 16–August 17, 2013
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
In the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), freelance work was tolerated in just a handful of professions. Reinhard Mende was one of the few who worked as a freelance photographer and his career nearly spans the life of the GDR as a state. His independence might be the reason his ... Read more →
Galerie Thomas Fischer, Berlin
June 22–August 3, 2013
For over two decades, British artists (and sisters) Jane and Louise Wilson have meticulously documented the architectural ruins of twentieth-century modernity. In specific, their focus has been directed towards the dire fate of obsolete military-industrial constellations. Like many artists coming of age after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, their ... Read more →
303 Gallery, New York
June 25–August 2, 2013
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
"Transmissions" is the second of two back-to-back group shows at Altman Siegel. Gallery manager McIntyre Parker curated the first, which he titled after a line in a poem by Matthea Harvey: "O the sleeping bag contains the body but not the dreaming head." In contrast to such titular loquaciousness, the ... Read more →
Altman Siegel, San Francisco
June 6–August 31, 2013
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Not long into a recent visit to Christine König Galerie in Vienna, I was overcome with anxiety. Faced with a lot of work by artists I'd never heard of, I felt a familiar, acute need for a press release to explain the clipped and cryptic "is my territory.," the group ... Read more →
Christine König Galerie, Vienna
June 28–August 3, 2013
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
The group of sculptures gathered here feel like the remnants of some stranded explorer's dedicated toil, the evidence of an island-bound prisoner bent on making the most of his imposed yet paradisiacal isolation. And it's this placid, oceanic mood that dominates "Dreams Chunky," Jack Lavender's first solo show at The ... Read more →
The Approach, London
June 6–July 28, 2013
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Strictly speaking, you cannot interpret information; you can only decode it. Information is technical in nature; it concerns the precision with which a series of symbols are transmitted across a medium. These symbols can consist of anything—black font on paper, electrical pulses, colored flags. "Low Visibility," the first Berlin solo show ... Read more →
Johann König, Berlin
June 29–July 27, 2013
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
The title of the group show currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar, "ambient," invites historical speculation. Where does ambience settle as an interpretive framework? The show even designates an event, of sorts, that puts forward ambience as an artistic strategy. The press release opens with an anecdote from the liner ... Read more →
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
June 20–July 26, 2013
—Reviews
by Kerstin Stakemeier
Munich is a place for long shots. It lacks Berlin's elegantly wasted charm and it is not an international youth hostel of art. Quite on the contrary, for emerging artists or for young galleries Munich is a rough patch with its incredibly high rents and living expenses. But its haute ... Read more →
Deborah Schamoni, Munich
June 22–July 20, 2013
After being featured in both the 2012 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum's Triennial, the young artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang is set to enter the art world at large in a big way. His film Wildness (2012), which was featured in the Biennial, documented a recurring party Tsang and ... Read more →
Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
May 4–July 7, 2013
—Reviews
by Daniella Rose King
"Never Odd or Even" seamlessly traverses the twenty-year trajectory of Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead's practice, marked by their explorations of the World Wide Web and the (mis-)information it creates and disseminates. In their video games and installations, they present a set of narratives that, one imagines, might resemble the ... Read more →
Carroll / Fletcher, London
May 24–July 13, 2013
In Karaköy, Istanbul, down the hill from the ongoing peaceful protests near Taksim Square, Galeri Manâ has been open only intermittently for the last three weeks. Yet the elegant exhibition on view there since late May serves as a moment of silence (contrasted to the immediate surroundings) and as a ... Read more →
Galeri Mana, Istanbul
May 23–July 6, 2013
—Reviews
by Federica Bueti
This is a silent party. Many guests have come here to celebrate the spring equinox. Spirits and things are freely circulating in the space. This is how it feels when entering Özlem Altin's exhibition "Cathartic ballet" at CIRCUS. All is still, a perfect silence, yet something is happening. At the entrance, ... Read more →
CIRCUS, Berlin
April 27–June 29, 2013
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
A frustrated Berliner recently posited Wolfgang Tillmans to me as the only example of a truly successful youngish artist living and working in the city. This is, of course, ludicrously far from accurate, but as hyperbole it illustrates something telling about the aura of the young-at-heart photographer who has been ... Read more →
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
May 4–June 15, 2013
Let me begin with a disclaimer and beg my readers to indulge the following attempt to parse the contents of my thoroughly art-addled skull. For the sheer quantity of said material that the brain within said skull has been exposed to over the past five days could and should starkly ... Read more →
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Art Basel is vast. It always is. But this year it's larger than ever, with the site expanded by some 20%. Consequently, Design Basel is now brought into the fold on Messeplatz and the Swiss Art Awards are around the corner but in an improved space. The Basel experience has ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
June 13–16, 2013
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
Singing, dancing, crying, hugging—there has been much discussion over the past decade about how Jesper Just's films critique codes of masculinity (particularly those established by Hollywood) by showing men doing "unmanly" things. In a hiatus from his androcentric—if critically so—worldview, the three films currently showing at Galerie Perrotin feature ... Read more →
Galerie Perrotin, Paris
April 20–June 15, 2013
Hauser & Wirth opened its latest show in its flagship London location at 196 Piccadilly with a new exhibit entitled "Trade Routes." The exhibition comes at a time when recent iterations of major international exhibitions from the likes of Documenta to the Gwangju Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, and ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
May 3–July 27, 2013
Passers-by who found themselves at the farthest reaches of Berlin's Friedrichstrasse in late April may have been surprised to notice an array of animated body parts on display in a shop window. A pair of eyes, a pair of hands, a face, an arm, two knees and their feet protruded ... Read more →
Meyer Riegger, Berlin
April 26–June 8, 2013
The original purpose of the encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe (…) and transmit it to those who will come after us, stated renowned encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Following such guidance, this overview of the Biennale outside the Biennale considers its subjects alphabetically. For if there is a ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
June 1–November 24, 2013
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
National pavilions can come in all different forms—naturally. Consider, for example, my first night in Venice, where I found myself at a grand palazzo for a dinner collectively hosted by Sadie Coles, representing England; Jose Kuri and Monica Manzutto, representing Mexico; and Gavin Brown and Barbara Gladstone, here representing the ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
June 1–November 24, 2013
—Reviews
by Vincenzo Latronico
Loosely defined, an encyclopedia is a systematic survey of specific topics. As objective as it might strive to be, such a survey inevitably involves both sides of the epistemic equation: the world—which may or may not resist, or be exhausted by, the categories imposed on it—and the knowing subject—its ambition, ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
June 1–November 24, 2013
—Reviews
by Elena Sorokina
10 Anarcho-communist minutes (all works, 2013) consists of a long list of general questions about collectivity—though it could be a rhetorical monologue or an address to an imaginary spectator. They are written on yellowish pages torn from a book dedicated to foundry work and sand molding. These pages are suspended ... Read more →
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
May 4–June 22, 2013
It was a debut, a big one. But the private preview opening of Art Basel Hong Kong was threatened with a black rainstorm warning, which yielded nothing other than the solid banality of Hong Kong humidity. Inside, relief: the Art Basel HK fair feels like a nineteenth-century crystal palace, spacious, ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong
May 23–26, 2013
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
The lust to be a "totalizing eye" immediately sprung to mind when walking into Gabriel Lester's "The Secret Life of Cities." It's one of the key notions expressed in Michel de Certeau's chapter "Walking in the City" that "the fiction of knowledge is related to [the] lust to be a ... Read more →
Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
April 27–June 1, 2013
Anyone who grew up in the 1970s and watched the Children's Television Network/PBS educational series Sesame Street was subliminally prepared for the gamut of conceptualism in (contemporary) art. No character prepared one better than the "Mad Painter," who popped up in the unlikeliest of places in his Chaplinesque bowler hat ... Read more →
Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
April 10–May 25, 2013
—Reviews
by Vincenzo Latronico
The traditional form of the novel, as we know it since the nineteenth century, seems oddly impervious to change. In comparison to the extraordinary evolutions undergone by art, very little has changed between today's mainstream fiction and its Balzac, Austen, and James equivalents. Most of the novel's purported evolutions have ... Read more →
Supportico Lopez, Berlin
April 26–June 8, 2013
For the entirety of the year, Lili Reynaud-Dewar will only make and exhibit bedrooms. Her current exhibition at CLEARING, New York, contains the requisite furniture, though the French artist seems less inclined to follow in the theatricality of Claes Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble (1964) than to meditate on the conditions necessitating ... Read more →
"Contemporary art: one, us: zero," quipped a friend as we mistakenly toured what appeared to be the off-limits back room of Marian Goodman's booth at Frieze New York. We were looking for Tino Sehgal's performance Ann Lee. Aware of the nature of Sehgal's work probing social boundaries through real life ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 10–13, 2013
Black-and-white photo wallpaper depicting a gargantuan hand holding an iPhone with two text message bubbles visually dominates Ryan Gander's show at Annet Gelink in Amsterdam. With the imperative title Be Prepared (2013) the stage is set for potential. I learn that the text displayed on the phone describes a ... Read more →
Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
April 13–May 18, 2013
—Reviews
by Stefan Heidenreich
It was in 1843 that Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and a friend of Charles Babbage, sketched out a concept for machine calculations. Today she is considered the first computer programmer. Lovelace's claim to fame comes as the first entry in a timeline that is given as a ... Read more →
Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
April 27–June 30, 2013
—Reviews
by Edward Sanderson
In this inaugural exhibition in Star Gallery's new Beijing space, curator Su Wei addresses certain perceived limitations in the discourse surrounding Chinese performance art. Drawing on the work of eight artists, the presentation avoids "formulated mechanisms," Su writes, to specifically address works "irreducible to any classification within the historical ... Read more →
Star Gallery, Beijing
April 13–May 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Berlin's been looking downright spiffy lately. Design hotels (to host the import-export set), shiny office buildings (populated by "for rent" signs), and self-important artisanal coffee shops keep popping up. There's a new Waldorf-Astoria. People dress better. These days, when you call a restaurant, store, or gallery, someone actually answers. It wasn't ... Read more →
Gallery Weekend Berlin
April 26–28, 2013
—Reviews
by Jacquelyn Davis
In Katarina Löfström's third solo exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, one is cajoled by both the comfort of repetition and sensory parameters related to any given reality. Perception, after all, is adaptable and even, at times, restrained. Human beings are able to train themselves to hone attractive skills and master talents through ... Read more →
Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
April 4–May 12, 2013
During the month of March, Rio de Janeiro played host to the openings of two much-anticipated new institutions: the MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio) and the Casa Daros. The MAR is housed in two buildings, the heritage-protected Palace Dom João VI and a neighboring modernist building (formerly a central ... Read more →
Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro / Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro / Casa Triângulo / Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo / SESC Pompeia, São Paulo
—Reviews
by Arnaud Gerspacher
The plush trappings of power, stripped down and isolated: this seems to be one of the themes and strategies of Danh Vo's show "Mother Tongue" at Marian Goodman Gallery. The title comes from a small calligraphic drawing by the artist's father, Phung Vo, who, while not knowing the language he ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
March 20–April 27, 2013
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
After Hiroshima, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, it is time, once again, to speak about atoms. However, the title of Gert Jan Kocken's Spartan yet powerful exhibition teases us with another question: what language shall we use, and how will such a choice temper or frame the conversation? Although the title ... Read more →
Motive Gallery, Brussels
March 23–May 11, 2013
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
Hot on the heels of her first solo exhibition with Chantal Crousel ("Ajar" at the gallerist's satellite showroom, La Douane, October 18–December 7, 2012), Haegue Yang's current show at Crousel's flagship gallery moves beyond the venetian blind installations and drying rack sculptures for which the South Korean-born, Berlin-based artist is ... Read more →
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
March 15–April 27, 2013
—Reviews
by Gabriela Jauregui
The Zona Maco art fair week (April 10–14) got off to a good start with the notion of a nude bird at Etienne Chambaud's exhibition at LABOR called "The Naked Parrot." The path was there, the bird absent. Rainbow-colored bird shit, echoed in the emailed invitation image of multicolored pigeons, ... Read more →
Zona Maco, Mexico City / Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City / Galería Desiré Saint Phalle, Mexico City / Galería OMR, Mexico City / Lulu, Mexico City
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
I'm just about to cry when he goes and does something ridiculous. My weepiness is more a wet testament to my propensity to weep than it is in the weepworthiness of whatever I'm watching, which in this case is Guido van der Werve in his latest film, Nummer veertien, home (2012). ... Read more →
Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
March 9–April 20, 2013
—Reviews
by Iona Whittaker
It is an inexorable fact that every work of art is a response in some form. Irish artist Brendan Earley has created works in response to Beijing, where he was an artist-in-residence at Galerie Urs Meile last year. One might hazard the suggestion that Beijing is a city that is ... Read more →
Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing
March 2–April 28, 2013
—Reviews
by Kareem Estefan
Much to their surprise, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige recently came across a half-century-old Lebanese postage stamp depicting a rocket emblazoned with a cedar tree. Though enshrined in official history, this inscrutable, fantastic image—seemingly the stuff of science fiction—commemorated an event no one could remember. An enigma, it intrigued the ... Read more →
CRG Gallery, New York
February 28–April 20, 2013
There is a morbid fascination in observing cinema's material world. That world which stands still, which is not affected by the transience of the moving image; which can be observed for the desired time and angle, and which steadily reveals itself upon our eyes. This possibility is the revenge of ... Read more →
Kate MacGarry, London
March 9–April 20, 2013
If you are looking for an artist who really confronts the so-called "Digital Divide" and asks "what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital" (to quote from a critical dispute that recently played out in the pages of Artforum), then British filmmaker Ed Atkins is your ... Read more →
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
March 2–April 9, 2013
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
Is it possible to talk about art made in Los Angeles without crediting the city with everything that makes its art unique? Why are artists in Southern California so often asked to explain how their work is influenced by its infrastructure or climate? Is "Made in Space," the exhibition curated ... Read more →
Night Gallery, Los Angeles
March 16–April 15, 2013
I don't know if I've ever seen—and experienced—as much unadulterated glee in an art gallery or museum as I did at the opening of Gelitin's "The Fall Show" at Greene Naftali last September. The gallery was filled with makeshift sculptures of different shapes fashioned from relatively cheap materials and placed ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
February 28–March 30, 2013
Outside it's like any other apartment building; inside hides a cinema. NON, located in a grand building on the bustling Istiklal Avenue, has been transformed into a multiplex cinema with three delectable episodes of Aslı Çavuşoğlu's Murder in Three Acts (2012–2013) on view. Murder, yes, "crime scene investigations" (CSI), yes, ... Read more →
NON, Istanbul
March 1–April 13, 2013
The adage that culture follows trade is something like globalization's subtitle. When it comes to art fairs, however, trade follows culture. Art Dubai, now in its seventh year, seems to be a prime example of this reciprocal development. Among its participating seventy-five galleries, the fair is attracting a rising number ... Read more →
Art Dubai
March 20–23, 2013
Hovering somewhere between a mini-golf course and a rug emporium, Nora Schultz's solo exhibition at Campoli Presti is a peculiar presentation. It is a quiet show, filled with careful arrangements of office carpets and rubber mats, partially hung from strings and paired with found objects. The space serves at once ... Read more →
Campoli Presti, London
February 27–March 28, 2013
—Reviews
by Antonia Alampi
A Qawwali song in Urdu fills one of the narrow lanes of the new Sharjah Art Foundation spaces. It has been interpreted by a group of about thirty Pakistani musicians, sitting on the floor, while art professionals arrived en masse for the most anticipated event in the region. The music ... Read more →
Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah
March 13–May 13, 2013
MY DEAR J—, when you did me the honor of asking for an analysis of the Armory Show, you said, "Be brief; do not write a review, but a general impression, something like the account of a rapid philosophical walk through the galleries, an overview of a century of art ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York
—Reviews
by Nickolas Calabrese
Despite his radical experiments in music, modernist composer Charles Ives had the belief that America and its intellectual landscape were filled with the robust spirit of practicality. Ives liked to recall a quote from his father: "If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he ... Read more →
Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
February 1–March 23, 2013
In the weeks leading up to this year's Independent art fair, the self-styled "temporary exhibition forum" that has taken up residence in the former Dia Art Foundation building during each Armory week since 2010, I felt a creeping, empathetic anxiety. How would exhibitors respond to the increasingly crowded field of ... Read more →
Independent Art Fair New York, New York
March 7–10, 2013
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
Whenever I see a photo by Luisa Lambri, I think of a painting done by Gwen John (whose work remained in the shadows of her more famous brother Augustus until recently). It's called A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris (1907–9) and it depicts a luminous corner of ... Read more →
Studio Guenzani, Milan
February 16–March 30, 2013
George Barber, the pioneering British video artist influential in defining the Scratch Video movement, launched his first solo show at Waterside Contemporary with "The Freestone Drone"—an installation that resembled a domestic yard-cum-war zone. As one entered, strung up across the gallery walls were numerous washing lines, covered with sheaths of ... Read more →
Waterside Contemporary, London
February 2–March 23, 2013
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
Politics is similar to art in that both are often reduced to questions of representation. The question of who or what is being represented by who or what; the question of whether this representation is legitimate or effective; and most importantly, the belief that the most important work is simply ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
February 7–March 9, 2013
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Repetition, as a meaning-production device, is overrated. Especially if you just spent half an hour on the subway on your way to see it. Karl Holmqvist's latest solo show is two shows, or rather Karl Holmqvist's two solo shows are one show, depending on your take. The two Berlin venues ... Read more →
Galerie Neu, Berlin / MD72, Berlin
February 10–March 16, 2013
While standing in "Spring Rain," Norwegian artist Camilla Løw's third solo exhibition at Elastic, a poem by American poet and essayist Charles Bernstein came to mind. "The Order Of..." was published in 1977 and is a playful meditation on issues surrounding epistemology and theoretical linguistics. Typographically inventive, it bears ... Read more →
Elastic, Malmö
February 1–March 9, 2013
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Everything you see here has lived out a solitary life of its own in a shop window on a quiet street in the East Village. One by one, sixteen works by Martin Boyce, John Giorno, Wesley Martin Berg, Matteo Callegari, Wyatt Kahn, Alan Shields, Bruno Gironcoli, Ann Craven, Joyce ... Read more →
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York
February 2–March 23, 2013
To adequately reflect on the present moment requires a certain distance, some way of pulling out of the perpetual now of contemporary time and into another. This phenomenon can be evidenced in the compression of time that occurs when attempting to recall the near past; years turn into events and ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
January 30–March 9, 2013
For a fair that has been around for thirty-two years, ARCO has weathered its share of ups and downs. Economic woes are at the root of the uncertain and gloomy mood that has reigned supreme in Spain's cultural sector of late. Although the selection of galleries and visitors remains steadfastly ... Read more →
ARCOmadrid, Madrid
February 13–17, 2013
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
"You gotta love Jack Pierson" begins the flagrantly winking press release the artist wrote for his latest solo show, "The End of the World" at Regen Projects's new palatial quarters located squarely in Hollywood, California. A literary effort, the statement morphs the typical promotional details of an artist bio into ... Read more →
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
January 12–February 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Natasha Ginwala
Standing in front of Drawings on a Conversation (2012) at the Nature Morte booth in the midst of the 5th India Art Fair, one cannot help but relate its dense and chaotic weave to the general experience of art viewing in Delhi this week. Indeed, this work by Raqs Media ... Read more →
India Art Fair, New Delhi
February 1–3, 2013
Svenja Deininger's current show at Marianne Boesky Gallery has a quietness to it, an air of minding its own business that can be initially disarming. From a distance, the geometric abstractions look as pristine and empty as the gallery's walls: no external references, no critical provocations, nor expressive painterly effects—nothing, ... Read more →
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
January 17–February 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Mara Traumane
The current exhibition at ŻAK | BRANICKA introduces visitors to one of the most elusive and imaginative phenomena of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde: the creative quests of the Croatian artist group Gorgona. The show is indicative, indeed, of a new stage of recognition of regional avant-gardes from the 1960s–1970s, with ... Read more →
ŻAK | BRANICKA, Berlin
January 18–March 2, 2013
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
I thought it might be my imagination, but it seemed that every winter I happened to be in Vienna, Galerie Hubert Winter—a mod two-level space directly behind the MuseumsQuartier—was showing another exhibition by the late Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen, who was born in 1949. The name was the same, ... Read more →
Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna
January 10–March 6, 2013
At the heart of this exhibition lurks a singularly misanthropic humanism. Never have I felt so simultaneously wanted and unwelcome, so integral and superfluous to a grouping of artworks. So delicate and poised are these pieces, and, in some cases, so potentially lethal, that the comparatively graceless human figure seems ... Read more →
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
January 22–February 16, 2013
For nearly five decades, Daniel Buren has used 8.7-centimeter stripes to highlight the lack of phenomenological neutrality of the exhibition space, his ubiquitous colored bands appearing everywhere from institutions such as Paris's Grand Palais and the Centre Georges Pompidou to the hallowed escalators of Art Basel. Not soon forgotten ... Read more →
Petzel Gallery, New York / Bortolami Gallery, New York
January 10–February 16, 2013
What happens when semiotic experimentation, psychedelia, and storytelling meet? This seemed to be the question that underpinned the very peculiar practice of a collective called Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, founded in Moscow in 1987 by three young artists—Sergei Anufriev (*1964), Yuri Leiderman (*1963), and Pavel Pepperstein (*1966). Of the three, Pepperstein ... Read more →
Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan
November 27, 2012–February 16, 2013
—Reviews
by Maia Gianakos
In a world mediated by images, where the brutality of remote events is diluted by means of oversaturation and repetition, how does the real endure? And in the space of the cinema, where narratives are taken as spellbinding truths, what constitutes the real? When entering into the cinematic contract, we ... Read more →
Arratia Beer, Berlin
January 11–February 9, 2013
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
This darkened period following the new year, with only slim pickings of sunlight, is habitually described in the northern hemisphere by one succinct word: depressing. With the celebrations around the winter equinox to keep spirits up now over, people trudge glumly back to work, cheerless. Still, beyond existential gloom, this ... Read more →
Pilar Corrias, London
November 22, 2012–February 2, 2013
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
In 1967, a young Robert Barry spent six weeks on a former racehorse farm in Belmont, New York, as part of an artists-in-residence program sponsored by the Whitney Museum. The documentary photographs he shot during his summer on the farm—a medley of picket-fenced country roads, grazing horses, and artists convening ... Read more →
Yvon Lambert, Paris
December 14, 2012–January 26, 2013
The term "problem play" originated when nineteenth-century theater made a realist turn, saddling characters and stories with the cause célèbres of the day. In simplest form, drama gave way to soapbox sermons and moral absolutism. The prevalence of such mediocrity may account for why the problem play's most artful contributor, ... Read more →
Leo Koenig Inc., New York
November 20, 2012–January 12, 2013
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
There are portraits of two women in this exhibition by Miroslaw Balka and Roni Horn. Who knew that a portrait of a lady could reveal so much, that a portrait of a lady could become a portrait of the artist? It's tempting to read these images as condensed biographies reflecting ... Read more →
Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan
November 28, 2012–February 9, 2013
What does it mean to be a believer or a non-believer? Is belief essential for society's wellbeing or is it merely divisive? And is there an alternative to this antagonistic binary opposition? The group exhibition "Believers" at Berlin's KOW sets these questions and more in motion. The notion of belief is, ... Read more →
KOW, Berlin
November 10, 2012–February 3, 2013
—Reviews
by Natasha Ginwala
An anti-censorship quote from the first century claims that when paper burns the words fly away. But what happens when the paper itself is granted flight? In the film Manifestul (Manifesto, 2005) a hand appears from the edge of a balcony and releases a cluster of pages. They swirl ... Read more →
D+T Project Gallery, Brussels
November 30–December 22, 2012
Mickalene Thomas first gained acclaim with her stunning painted portraits of African-American women. She easily could have continued producing this kind of portraiture work à la Chuck Close or Kehinde Wiley and become quite successful in a similar way; instead, she has restlessly explored a variety of genres and mediums—including ... Read more →
Lehmann Maupin, New York
November 14, 2012–January 5, 2013
—Reviews
by Miguel A. López
"Angel, is it you?" is the second solo show in Lima by David Zink Yi, the Berlin-based Peruvian artist. Although his work has been shown in small group exhibitions since 2008, Zink Yi's practice was virtually unknown in Lima, given that his artistic production and training happened abroad. It was ... Read more →
80M2 Livia Benavides, Lima
November 14, 2012–January 13, 2013
Satellites: it's getting awfully crowded out here in outer space. Nearly twenty "satellite" fairs have developed around the core of Art Basel Miami Beach, aka "the big fair." So what happens when one exits the artificially-lit warren of booths in the Convention Center, leaving the insularity of planet Basel to ... Read more →
UNTITLED. Miami Beach / Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami / SCOPE Art Show / NADA, Miami / Vizcaya Museum and Gardens / The Bass, Miami Beach
Much can be—and, of course, has been—said about the role of Art Basel in the global art market. It's a fair, after all, that can turn certain "peripheral" cities into cultural centers. What was Basel, what was Miami, before the advent of the art fair? In particular, Art Basel laid ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 6–9, 2012
—Reviews
by Steffen Zillig
Articles about Etel Adnan's paintings tend to start with her impressive cultural breadth—with her Christian Greek mother, Muslim Syrian father, and the triangle of her travels. Born in Beirut in 1925, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and later taught at San Rafael College in California, but with ... Read more →
Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut
November 2, 2012–January 12, 2013
—Reviews
by Judith Vrancken
Four women stand in a light-flooded room, barefoot and dressed in simple black. The youngest is in her early thirties, the oldest in her early seventies. A metronome is turned on to an eager 120 beats per minute. One of the dancers counts in Hebrew softly, "Achat, shtaim, shalosh, arba," ... Read more →
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna
November 23, 2012–February 24, 2013
—Reviews
by Tara McDowell
Stepping into Ratio 3's new space on Mission Street in San Francisco and encountering Miriam Böhm's austere photographs involves no small amount of perceptual and cultural reorientation. On Mission Street, inner-city kids, leftist bohemians, young hipsters, and day laborers move through a stretch of San Francisco populated by taquerías, Chinese ... Read more →
Ratio 3, San Francisco
November 9–December 14, 2012
Long before Ali G's Borat, Andy Kaufman was touring the East Coast with his stand-up comedy character Foreign Man, an ambiguous entertainer from a fictional island in the Caspian Sea, who, with his overtly strong accent, inept punch lines, and naïve questions, created awkward moments on stage of almost unparalleled ... Read more →
Carlos/Ishikawa, London
November 15–December 15, 2012
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
It is day one of my press trip to Doha, Qatar, and our itinerary starts with a walk around the pier adjacent to the Museum of Islamic Art, which culminates in Richard Serra's 7. As we approach the massive sculpture, a journalist walking by my side confides, "I was here ... Read more →
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
October 17, 2012–March 31, 2013
—Reviews
by Arnaud Gerspacher
If you're overly tapped into art world tropes or academic hotspots, it's tempting to think that there would be little new to offer in the archival impulse, in interrogating documentary conventions, or in playing with the effects fictions have on the facts. But like Harun Farocki, Amar Kanwar, or Omer ... Read more →
Sperone Westwater, New York
November 1–December 22, 2012
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
In 1969, amidst growing student protests across Germany, three female students bared their breasts during a lecture by Theodor W. Adorno; they then proceeded to shower him with flower petals. This protest, as it were, was a probable rebuttal to the German philosopher's summoning of the police to forcibly ... Read more →
Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam
November 11–December 15, 2012
—Reviews
by Katharina Neuburger
All of the signifiers are already there: a postage-stamp image of a sailor in full sailor garb hoisting a mainsail, the stylized trace of its having already been posted, the otherwise blank postcard just waiting to be filled with some carefree lines about warm summer evenings. It's the invitation to ... Read more →
Galerie Buchholz, New York
November 9, 2012–January 5, 2013
Recalling Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," we could equally say that an art fair is an art fair is an art fair is an art fair. And the 19th edition of Artissima—a fair with a well-deserved reputation for quality—moved a step away from ... Read more →
Artissima, Turin
November 9–11, 2012
Füsun Onur (born 1938) is an artist whose practice is defined by the persistent use of modest materials. While her work recently met with a greater audience this summer at Documenta 13, in the local Istanbul context she has been showing with Maçka Sanat Galerisi since 1987. Her fifth solo ... Read more →
Maçka Sanat Galerisi, Istanbul
October 9–December 1, 2012
One thing I have noticed about Mexico is a proclivity to let no part of an animal go to waste. Just the other night, I was in a famous twenty-four-hour taquería, El Borrego Viudo, and on the menu were not only cabeza (lamb's head) and lengua (beef tongue), but also ... Read more →
Galería Desiré Saint Phalle, Mexico City
October 12, 2012–January 13, 2013
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
For more than ten years Kerry Tribe has carefully exploited the medium of film to coax a poetics of contradictions out of human mechanisms like memory, cognition, and perception. These subjective, internal workings are what we rely on to piece together a knowable world, though few would argue that their ... Read more →
1301PE, Los Angeles
September 29–November 10, 2012
In 1973, Hollis Frampton sent a letter of protest to the curator of MoMA who had asked him about the possibility of doing a retrospective of his work, "for love and honor and no money."(1) The working conditions of artists may not have changed much today, but perhaps there has ... Read more →
White Cube, London
September 7–November 11, 2012
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
"La Demeure Joyeuse II" or "The Happy Home II" is the first show in Francesca Pia's new space in the Löwenbräuareal, Zürich's hub for contemporary art. It's no wonder the mood is optimistic, though the title refers not to this specific setting but to an exhibition of the same name ... Read more →
Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich
October 2–November 17, 2012
—Reviews
by Mara Hoberman
It's hard to pinpoint the moment that FIAC actually started. Extramural events—gallery unveilings, private museum tours, an "immaterial" auction, a magazine launch, a performance on a bateau mouche, and lots and lots of parties—began in earnest on Monday, just one day after Frieze ended, two days before FIAC's "guest of ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris
October 18–21, 2012
—Reviews
by Karol Sienkiewicz
In 1983, Czech writer Milan Kundera defined Central Europe as those states that historically and culturally belonged to the West, but had been politically assigned to the Eastern Bloc in the geopolitical wrangling of the Cold War. His notable essay "The Stolen West" (1983) accentuated the shared cultural heritage of ... Read more →
Raster Gallery, Warsaw
September 28–November 10, 2012
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
A friend once complained that contemporary curating is too conceptual. The goal, he said, ought to be the collection of suggestive affinity—this reminds me of this. If the conversation between works is too clear, or too overdetermined by the frame of the show, the energy dissipates, and individual pieces become ... Read more →
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
September 22–October 27, 2012
—Reviews
by Gareth Bell-Jones
I actually enjoyed going round the Frieze fair this year, which I think is a first. I've always felt like a trespasser taking up valuable booth space, dealers looking over the shoulder of my second-hand cardigan. But with this review to write, I had a legitimate reason to take up ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 11–14, 2012
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
I saw David Maljkovic's exhibition in Rome on the same day the Italian association of contemporary art museums (A.M.A.C.I.) had called for a general meeting in the capital, to discuss the impact of the economic crisis and protest against the government's indifference toward all its requests. The assembly was held ... Read more →
T293 Rome, Rome
September 18–November 10, 2012
—Reviews
by Carol Yinghua Lu
"Modern Monster/Death and Life of Fiction": Taipei Biennial 2012 September 29, 2012–January 1, 2013 "Reactivation": The 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012 October 2, 2012–March 31, 2013 Anselm Franke, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012, once remarked that art is a specialized language that shouldn't be downplayed for popular appeal. True to his ideals, nearly all ... Read more →
Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai / Taipei Biennial, Taipei
It's a cruel fact of art writing that when political work is positioned under weighty rhetoric, its vim and potency become threatened. The press release for Zoe Leonard's exhibition at Murray Guy wavers on doing just that, suggesting that the show waxes philosophical on the nature of photography by asking ... Read more →
Murray Guy, New York
September 15–October 27, 2012
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Everything feels hyper-politicized right now. This is true in the real world, of course ... and, increasingly, in the art world. Lately, at least in Central Europe, fake (or "fake"?) Occupy camps are cropping up at nearly every major contemporary art event. The recent Berlin Biennale's camp-as-university is probably the ... Read more →
Galerie Martin Janda / Galerie Meyer Kainer / Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna
September 20–October 25, 2012
"Welcome to my life" is written in large letters on a wooden board, announcing the uphill spill of an urban landscape made of brightly painted hollow bricks. Meanwhile, further multilingual signs—many not without humor—ask so-called favela tourists for donations. It's been at least since the year 2007 that the Project ... Read more →
São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
September 7–December 9, 2012
—Reviews
by Matteo Lucchetti
With Olivier Babin, Pierre Bismuth, Christian Burnoski, Ryan Gander, Alex O., Dan Rees, Ariel Schlesinger, Yann Sérandour, Markus Sixay, Ron Terada, & works from the collection of Jonathan Monk In Ecce Bombo, a cult, late-70s movie by Nanni Moretti, there is an iconic scene in which the protagonist, Moretti himself, is ... Read more →
Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
September 7–October 27, 2012
Simon Starling returns yet again to the career of Henry Moore in Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010), currently on view at Casey Kaplan, New York. The film traces the troubled history of the British sculptor's monument, Atom Piece /Nuclear Energy, from its 1967 installation at the historic site of Chicago ... Read more →
Casey Kaplan, New York
September 6–October 20, 2012
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Come inside and I will draw the curtains—shut out the streets and the harsh brightness of day in favor of dim bluish light. And we will find ourselves in a small beautifully proportioned room. You will immediately understand that this is a private space—an environment meant for one person or ... Read more →
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
September 1–29, 2012
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Brought to you by Kulturprojekte Berlin, the producers of last year's "based in Berlin" survey, Berlin Art Week is a mayoral initiative funded by the Senate Chancellery for Economics and the Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs, which seeks to make up for the loss of the ill-fated Art Forum Berlin ... Read more →
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin / Berlin Art Week, Berlin
—Reviews
by Christel Vesters
In a recent conversation with the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie published in Mousse magazine, the French-British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz described McKenzie's work as having "conscious slippage." It sounded a bit cryptic, but after having visited her recent exhibition of paintings at the Antwerp gallery Micheline Szwajcer, I knew exactly ... Read more →
Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp
September 6–October 20, 2012
Many find the enigmatic or a little game of playing coy just irresistible. And what attracts people in humans also goes for, well, things arty. Why else would the question of whether abc—art berlin contemporary—is an art fair or not come up over and over again, since its foundation five ... Read more →
ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 13–16, 2012
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
Berlin-based Natascha Sadr Haghighian's exhibition at Carroll / Fletcher might appear visually spare, but with each work, Haghighian draws you further into a game of institutional hide-and-seek, in which visibility and invisibility, the act of remaining hidden and being revealed, are played out as Machiavellian manipulations of the conventions of ... Read more →
Carroll / Fletcher, London
July 20–September 22, 2012
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
In a striking departure from the previous versions of the Baltic Triennial, curators Defne Ayas and Benjamin Cook, joined in their efforts by artists Ieva Misevičiūtė and Michael Portnoy, compressed this episodic large-scale exhibition into twelve days spanning the symbolic end of summer and onset of fall. Concentrating solely on ... Read more →
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Vilnius / Baltic Triennial
August 24–September 9, 2012
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
With Tina Braegger, Antoine Catala, Ida Ekblad, Nikolas Gambaroff, Nicolas Guagnini, Yngve Holen, Alex Israel, Helen Marten, John Miller, Olivier Mosset, Amy O'Neill, Sean Paul, Carissa Rodriguez, Greg Parma Smith, Alan Uglow, and Hannah Weinberger. What is the difference between a "standard operating procedure" and a formula, an ... Read more →
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
July 14–August 25, 2012
—Reviews
by Arnaud Gerspacher
Repetition is never sameness. This is the first thought I had seeing Taryn Simon's "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII" (2008–11). An aesthetics of taxonomy, each chapter in the work is comprised of identical framed panels of varying width showing three types of information under glass: 1) ... Read more →
Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
May 25–July 28, 2012
With Katinka Bock, Etienne Chambaud, Hernán Díaz, Fabien Giraud, Karl Holmqvist, The Institute for Figuring, and Nicholas Mangan. In the keynote essay for "Sinking Islands," on view at LABOR, Mexico City, curator Vincent Normand provocatively asks, "What would be an exhibition of things flat-out alone, requiring the presence of no one?" ... Read more →
LABOR, Mexico City
July 14–August 31, 2012
Stepping out of time can be a risky proposition, however carefully planned the escape. Art has always been in conflict with time: whether as a magical or religious symbol of the eternal, as the marker of its maker's immortality, and, in the twentieth century, as an increasingly riven material object ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
June 28–August 3, 2012
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
With Wolfgang Breuer, Matthew Buckingham & Joachim Koester, Whitney Claflin, Martin Creed, Melvin Edwards, Ida Ekblad, Sam Falls, Kenji Fujita, Wade Guyton, Allison Katz, Rita Mcbride, Charlotte Posenenske, Sam Pulitzer, Heather Rowe, Gedi Sibony, Michael E Smith, and Anicka Yi Like its punning title, "Steel Life," the multigenerational group show curated ... Read more →
Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
May 25–July 28, 2012
—Reviews
by Barbara Casavecchia
Blame it on Pippi Longstocking and a 70s-style, girl-power upbringing, but as a kid I too dreamt of living alone with a clever white horse called Old Man whom I could lift up with a finger. I refused to take too seriously the circus of adults who pretended to have ... Read more →
Kaufmann Repetto, Milan
May 17–September 8, 2012
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Although dogs are "man's best friend," no other species has been as manipulated by humans—a strange take on friendship indeed. This tenuous power play between love and dominance lies at the heart of "Dogma," Metro Pictures's summer group show organized around the very relationships and allusions "forged between mankind and ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
June 28–August 10, 2012
With Vanessa Billy, Cathy Wilkes, Karin Lehmann, Alice Browne, Phyllida Barlow, Joanna Slusarczyk, Lucy Clout, James L. Mathewuse, Rehana Zaman, Sean Edwards, Lawrence Weiner, An Endless Supply, Matt Golden, John Frankland, Natsue Ikeda, Matthew Richardson, Chris Evans, Rachal Bradley, Matthew Smith, Carl Plackman, James Torble, Jack Strange, Fischli & ... Read more →
Limoncello, London
May 16–June 30, 2012
—Reviews
by Marina Fokidis
Communication is the quest, communication sans barriers. Angelo Plessas's works form a certain kind of a deliberate "digitally naive" poetry, like a weed within the over-wrought special-effects garden of cyber space. His works are connected with the internet through organic and natural processes—but it's not that he's fascinated with technology ... Read more →
Rebecca Camhi Gallery, Athens
May 30–September 22, 2012
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
Seeing Yona Friedman's tight, unpretentious exhibition Berlin is like scoring a perfect set of Cliffs Notes, a cheat sheet, to the oeuvre of a visionary thinker, avant-garde theorist, offbeat urban planner, and reluctant utopian. The exhibition's title "Handbuch" means "handbook," and that's exactly what this is: a how-to compendium of Friedman's ... Read more →
Cneai at Chert, Berlin
June 28–July 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
For an artist as avowedly controversial as Santiago Sierra, the evidence is hard to locate. Instead of polemical denunciations or excessive apologetics we find an endlessly reiterated testimony to their existence. What is Santiago Sierra? Controversial, the answer comes back, unanimous. Or, almost as often: difficult. But where does ... Read more →
Team (gallery, inc.), New York
June 7–July 27, 2012
—Reviews
by Maaike Lauwaert
"It's not easy being green." To some, this line will evoke the Apple commercial showing a camera circling the new (green) iMac against a white background. Through the green plastic one could see part of the inside of the computer, and the sad voice of Kermit the Frog slowly pulling ... Read more →
Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels
June 2–July 21, 2012
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Much discussion of performance or Land Art from the 1960s and 70s considers whether the art consists of the work itself or its documentation. Could it really be experienced secondhand? Was the art the idea … or the stuff of it? Such recondite questions had to be put in the ... Read more →
RaebervonStenglin, Zürich
June 8–July 28, 2012
—Reviews
by Michelle Grabner
Collage is Arturo Herrera's preferred medium. He deploys its vast paper-based vocabulary the same way an abstract painter would activate a range of color, mark, stroke, and line. But it is the juxtaposition of disparate imagery, structural invention, and the disjunction of fragments and surfaces that drive his collages. Critic ... Read more →
Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
May 10–June 23, 2012
When Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa was unveiled in the Paris salon of 1819, there were gasps of horror (and low whistles of admiration) at its political audacity. The painting depicted a public scandal of just three years prior, the tale of a slave ship stranded at sea ... Read more →
Carolina Nitsch, New York
May 4–June 23, 2012
This is a strange exhibition. Not because it is bad, by any means. Even if it might not succeed at what it sets out to do, it nevertheless manages to achieve quite a lot. The continental sequel to a group exhibition that took place last summer at Bischoff/Weiss gallery ... Read more →
Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris
June 7–July 28, 2012
The artist Jill Magid went to Texas, and boy did she have a coinkidink coincidence in true Southwestern style. By which I mean it involved guns. After being invited to create a project for Arthouse in Austin, she became interested in Vanity Fair's profile of a sniper who had done ... Read more →
Honor Fraser, Los Angeles
June 2–July 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Colin Chinnery
Upon entering Art Basel straight off the train from Kassel, I cannot but help recall the last time Documenta coincided with Art Basel. Back in 2007 the art market, animated by the roaring finance sector, had almost superhero-like qualities, with special powers like selling work before it even existed, and ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 14–17, 2012
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Remains, residues, remnants, repairs, relics. The 13th edition of Documenta, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, inhabits a strange temporality. The exhibition includes little limestone figurines, the "Bactrian princesses," the remnants of a civilization long gone (Central Asia, ca. 2000 B.C.); deformed artifacts from the Beirut National Museum, damaged during the Lebanese ... Read more →
documenta
June 9–September 16, 2012
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
"When we read, there is a voice inside our minds that narrates aloud, but silently, in what has been termed 'subvocalization.' Our accelerated way of life—the dissemination of speed-reading techniques, for example—dissolves that voice. In response, the Writers Residency seeks moments of 'chorality': instances of mutual commitment, whether loud or ... Read more →
documenta
June 9–September 16, 2012
Postcards from Kassel Postcard 1: The Format Dear reader, I hope these lines find you well, wherever you are right now. I have decided to address you through postcards, as to remain on Documenta 13's wavelength. In fact, those who have followed the development of this Documenta may have noticed ... Read more →
documenta
June 9–September 16, 2012
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
There are artworks that work on the viewer's apprehension of an implied absence, and then there are artworks that simply stand there waiting for that apparent lack to be filled in by contextualizing talk. The former has something to do with aesthetic experience, the latter with a loss of interest ... Read more →
Pace Gallery, London
May 24–July 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Jonas Žakaitis
OK, let's start with a joke heard by the author on the way to the site of Manifesta 9. Two men were waiting for a bus together in the central station of Genk (Belgium), one of them equipped with a basket full of red apples. "Here, have an apple," the man ... Read more →
Manifesta
June 2–September 30, 2012
—Reviews
by Jonathan Griffin
The doubling begins immediately. An exhibition across town, organized by MOCA and James Franco, called "Rebel," themed (incredibly) around Franco's resemblance to James Dean, finds its evil twin in "Rebel Dabble Babble." It began with Franco inviting Paul McCarthy to collaborate on a project based on Rebel Without a Cause ... Read more →
The Box, Los Angeles
May 11–July 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Lara Sarcevic
For his second exhibition at Air de Paris, Thomas Bayrle presented three series of works from different periods of his career. Following a logic of inverse chronology, the exhibition proposed a progressive dive into the history of Bayrle's work, from his most recent grey cardboards to his more colorful paintings, ... Read more →
Air de Paris, Paris
April 20–May 26, 2012
—Reviews
by David Spalding
In the mannered world evoked in the best-known films and video installations of Yang Fudong, people don't speak much, perhaps because they have nothing to say. Instead, they preen and posture, as if posing for the still photographs they also appear in. A moody, attractive bunch, they tend to dress ... Read more →
ShanghART, Beijing / ARTMIA Gallery, Beijing
May 12–June 15, 2012
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
Middlebrow. Middle America. Middle manager. Middle-of-the-road. Middle-age. Middle-age spread. Middle of the day. The middle is disappearing, or as one prophetic poet put it, the center cannot hold. But it does, sort of. John Miller has placed his finger on it, holding it down like a loose sheet of paper that ... Read more →
Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles
May 12–June 23, 2012
The title signals the conditions: the exhibition constitutes a loose survey of Mark Dion's sculptural production dating back more than two decades. And, as evidenced by the ten three-dimensional works, Dion has arranged a world of found objects into scenarios investigating our reality in literal ways. But this description falters: ... Read more →
Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin
April 28–June 16, 2012
Hairdressers, Trinidad, one of several diptychs in Martha Rosler's "Cuba, January, 1981," shows two women looking at each other. In the first image, the blonde addresses the camera, seemingly in mid-speech, while the brunette watches her in profile. In the accompanying image, the brunette smiles for the camera, while the ... Read more →
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
April 20–May 26, 2012
"Return to Noreturn" revisits Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's 2008 exhibition in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern. The anterior references and influences that are often implicated in her works are therefore doubled here, incorporating not only the original exhibition, but also the triggers—personal, literary, historical, cultural—that informed it. Add to this ... Read more →
Esther Schipper, Berlin
April 21–May 24, 2012
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Contingency and probability are long-standing conceptual interests for Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri. His 2011 exhibition at South London Gallery was titled "Before Contingency After the Fact," for example. His current show at Sadie Coles is titled "Classical Symmetry, Historical Data, Subjective Judgement," which, according to statistician David Spiegelhalter, are the ... Read more →
Sadie Coles HQ, London
March 1–May 26, 2012
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
Elad Lassry's hometown exhibition on Smiley Drive, at David Kordansky's warehouse gallery in Culver City, presents a spectrum of the artist's rapidly diversifying practice. Most every component—from photos, to drawings, to sculptures, to architectural interventions—remains both cleverly engaged while also unreachably disjointed from each other. The overall effect is that ... Read more →
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
March 23–May 26, 2012
—Reviews
by Nickolas Calabrese
The hot city summer is just around the corner, the Knicks are mercurial as ever, and labor union art handlers are still out of work. New Yorkers have reason to complain. An apt occasion to gripe about the Scrooge McDucks of the art world came and went: the first New ... Read more →
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York / Paula Cooper Gallery, New York / Elizabeth Dee / Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York / Harris Lieberman / Simon Preston, New York
As what remains of the public domain is increasingly privatized, art fairs are becoming the real museums of contemporary art. It's not a coincidence that the London-based Frieze Art Fair's inaugural appearance in New York City includes a panel titled "Expanding Museums" featuring the directors of the Museum of Modern ... Read more →
Frieze New York, New York
May 4–7, 2012
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Orpheus's descent into the Underworld and fruitless return finds its best contemporary analogy in the fate that befell the Chilean miners trapped underground for two months before their rescue in October 2010, when they were hauled to the surface one by one to a waiting barrage of media. In both ... Read more →
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
April 26–May 25, 2012
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"Forget Fear!" could be the title of Die Hard's next installment. But it's actually the title of the 2012 Berlin biennial. The parallels with the "good cop gone rogue" idiom are not accidental. The 7th Berlin biennial, curated by Artur Żmijewski in collaboration with associate curators Joanna Warsza and the ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
April 27–July 1, 2012
Whatever one may say about this exhibition, it cannot be denied that it possesses the virtue of necessity. This sense of necessity is made all the more evident by its contrast with the ignominious and highly anachronistic nationalism of the last two vague and ultimately superfluous triennials, both of which ... Read more →
Palais de Tokyo, Paris / La Triennale
April 20–August 26, 2012
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
What could you possibly say about Candida Höfer that's not been said before? The German photographer has been around for a long time, doing mostly one thing—shooting apparently flawless, always unpeopled images of monumental public interiors—since her career began in the 1970s. As distant and calculated as they are breathtakingly detailed ... Read more →
Johnen Galerie, Berlin
March 2–April 14, 2012
An artist's best consigliere is often another artist, a partner in crime who follows the adventurous path of an undefined yet malleable future. Chance encounters often lead to influential long-lasting relationships. Youthful firebrands grow canny to become wizard practitioners of subversive unorthodoxies. Such is the case in "looking at my ... Read more →
Christine König Galerie, Vienna
March 23–April 28, 2012
Art fairs—unlike biennales—aren't allowed the luxury of an "off year." And so it is that Zona Maco finds itself sandwiched between two Very Big years—with the opening of Carlos Slim's Soumaya Museum last year and the debut of the David Chipperfield-designed facilities for La Colección Jumex slated for 2013. Now ... Read more →
Zona Maco, Mexico City / Casa Luis Barragan, Mexico City / LABOR, Mexico City / Archivo , Mexico City / Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City / Galería OMR, Mexico City
April 18–22, 2012
—Reviews
by Marina Fokidis
The use of the written word in contemporary artworks is nothing new. The structure of text, meaning, semiology, as well as language's effectiveness as a tool of communication have been explored for many years, by many extraordinary artists and in many ways. Kosuth, Weiner, Darboven, Rosen, you name it. Yet, ... Read more →
Mounir Fatmi's invocation of that evocative term "oriental" for his second US solo exhibition is no accident. The Paris-based Moroccan artist frequently draws on charged references—linguistic, political, and historical—to deepen the critical bite of his work. The artworks themselves, however, are usually juxtapositions of found objects that produce conceptual ... Read more →
Lombard Fried Projects, New York
March 9–April 14, 2012
These days nothing fades quicker than a trend. Who would like to be caught dead in the haircut Jennifer Aniston sported as Rachel in the 1990s television series "Friends." Hairstyles are not meant to last, and yet some of their advertisements have found a small niche of survival in outmoded ... Read more →
Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
February 17–March 31, 2012
Conceptual art has long had a reputation for being a bit dispassionate and cerebral, but recent curatorial and scholarly approaches have emphasized its more human and even emotional sides. Bas Jan Ader's 16mm, silent film I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) is somewhat of a lynchpin work in this ... Read more →
303 Gallery, New York
February 24–March 31, 2012
—Reviews
by Emily Cormack
Every article one reads on de la Cruz's work will begin with a character analysis of the firey Spaniard who gave birth to a child despite spending months of the pregnancy in a stroke-induced coma. This kind of mythologizing inevitably foregrounds the artist as the subject of her own work. ... Read more →
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
February 4–March 17, 2012
—Reviews
by Judith Schwarzbart
From an historical perspective, abstraction in art represents both a radical avant-garde achievement and the perfect format for art as luxury. Abstraction gave birth to the ultimate autonomous works, and—one could claim—freedom itself. Free from commissioners' intensions, moralization or political agendas. And it was free to be absolutely self-absorbed. From a ... Read more →
Tensta Konsthall, Tensta
January 12–April 22, 2012
—Reviews
by Sohrab Mohebbi
-Today my horoscope said the road to hell is paved with good intentions; does that mean that you are barking up the wrong tree? - I think it's more like you are pissing in the playground. From Arms are Overrated, Stanya Kahn, 2012 It is unclear where the impulse lies, ... Read more →
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles
February 18–March 30, 2012
Superflex, the Danish trio who famously installed a life-sized replica of JP Morgan Chase's bathroom in a dumpy Lower East Side diner, has opened a comparatively sober exhibition at Peter Blum, stringing banners emblazoned with the logos of bankrupt banks throughout the gallery's Chelsea location. Appropriately titled "Bankrupt Banks," the ... Read more →
Peter Blum Gallery, New York
March 1–April 14, 2012
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
The crossed hammer-and-sickle insignia of the Bolshevik revolution has a sense of certainty to it. But it's an old design, and a lot has happened since it first declared the coming triumph of the proletariat. So Marks (2011) the first work you see on entering Frith Street Gallery, has a ... Read more →
Frith Street Gallery, London
February 24–April 12, 2012
"The Arab Spring is (not quite) Old News" Old news. That's how Fred Sicre (of Abraaj Capital, Art Dubai's partner) dubbed the Arab Spring. The flaming politics of the last year's events have been reduced to the mere glimmers in the Emirati's up-and-coming art fair. In the past three years, the ... Read more →
Art Dubai
March 21–24, 2012
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
Partial, relaxed, and idiosyncratic are not typically positive associations for large survey shows. But these have been multiplying recently, and perhaps that is why that most venerable of panoramas, the Whitney Biennial, finds itself relieved, a little, of its historical pretensions towards completeness. Any survey is just one of an ... Read more →
Whitney Biennial, New York
March 1–May 27, 2012
—Reviews
by Catalina Lozano
Aleksandra Domanović's practice analyzes socio-political transformations through the production of images and narratives largely based on popular culture. By decontextualizing and reconfiguring media content, Domanović delves into the accumulative nature of information and its intrinsic indexicality. Like many artists born on the communist side of the Iron Curtain, she is ... Read more →
Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
February 4–March 24, 2012
—Reviews
by Arnaud Gerspacher
The Grand Inquisitor and Diogenes are crucial figures of the ungovernable—one as cynical exercise of power with impunity, the other as mocking embrace of bare life and irreverence towards authority. These two figures continue to represent the polarities we inhabit: the unofficially ungovernable states and institutions that wield great power ... Read more →
New Museum Triennial, New York
February 15–April 22, 2012
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
A few months ago there was a photograph circulating on Facebook that made my stomach turn. Not knowing where to find it now, I simply (if wincingly) typed into Google the following: "photograph of Indian chief crying." The image immediately appeared, conjured magically out of the internet ether. There he ... Read more →
Nicolas Krupp Contemporary Art, Basel
March 2–April 28, 2012
—Reviews
by Cindy Nemser & Anna Gritz
Cindy Nemser's "The Art of Frustration" warrants a second take because of her critical view onto a time period that is now fetishized almost blindly. At hand of what is most likely the exhibition "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" at the Whitney Museum in 1969, the review reveals a writer coming to terms ... Read more →
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
May 19–July 6, 1969
—Reviews
by Karol Sienkiewicz
Symmetry rules the world, as if god created it with a mirror in hand. Stereo Gallery in Poznań, western Poland, has two rooms like a man has a pair of hands, a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, two cerebral hemispheres, etc. The stereophony in the gallery's name reflects ... Read more →
Galeria Stereo, Warsaw
February 3–March 10, 2012
—Reviews
by Maaike Lauwaert
Book blurbs often say things like "unputdownable" or "you want to start rereading the book as soon as you've finished it." The film Gonda (2012) by Ursula Mayer (1970, born in Austria, lives and works in London) has this same compelling and luring quality. As soon as her 30-minute film ... Read more →
Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam
March 3–April 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
It's an imperfect exhibition, neither focusing on one aspect of Dan Graham's work, nor conveying its breadth: nonetheless, since his MoCA LA retrospective in 2009 (and before that to boot), it has hardly seemed necessary to state his importance in the development of conceptual art, or how his multifaceted practice ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
February 11–April 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Kimberly Bradley
"Round and round she goes; where she stops, nobody knows." This little rhyme popped into my mind as I entered Johann König's gallery for Alicja Kwade's current solo show, "In Circles." A mad array of 54 industrial and everyday objects loosely arranged in concentric rings fills the gallery's front space ... Read more →
Johann König, Berlin
February 18–March 17, 2012
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's artistic proposals are not only inspiring but also very appropriate for our present times. It is hard to define the reason without sounding vague, because it is a sort of atmosphere, a suspension from the everyday world through the introduction of a parallel sphere that, if ... Read more →
Lia Rumma, Milan
January 19–March 3, 2012
"Domination, Hegemony, and the Panopticon" is the fourth installment of "The State," a series of exhibitions at Traffic, curated by the gallery-library-design studio's founder Rami Farook. "The State" also includes a socio-historical journal and forum, a platform for dialogue and exchange about the state of the world today. The current ... Read more →
Traffic, Dubai
February 2–March 31, 2012
—Reviews
by Gitanjali Dang
Our sense of gravity and orientation is controlled by a little something in our ear. The Otolith Group—Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun—derives its name from this inner ear doodah. So it's not too far fetched to suggest that ears guide the group's visual art practice. And if hearing is important, ... Read more →
Project 88, Mumbai
January 11–February 3, 2012
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
This year's edition of ARCOmadrid Art Fair was having none of the doom and gloom that usually accompany the fair. The Spanish art scene has tended to berate its most important and oldest art fair, a feeling which intensified when it was subject to management disagreements and ensuing conflicts with ... Read more →
ARCOmadrid, Madrid
February 15–19, 2012
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Andrea Büttner's second show at Hollybush Gardens is a study in humility, painted in a shade of don't-look-at-me grey. The dominant color in the exhibition is that particular commonplace grey of worker's uniforms—the cheap, mass-produced pencil skirts of hotel workers and public servants, or school uniform blazers. It's the fabric ... Read more →
Hollybush Gardens, London
January 27–March 4, 2012
—Reviews
by Colby Chamberlain
When it comes to Colab, there's not yet a definitive history. From one perspective, Collaborative Projects was an artist-run funding scheme struck up during the fabled efflorescence of late-70s downtown New York; it consisted mostly of clashing egos who tolerated one another for the sake of self-advancement and government support, ... Read more →
Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York
January 8–February 12, 2012
FROM MY INSTITUTION TO YOURS A Personal Remembrance by John Miller On Wednesday, February 1 at about 11:00 am I received a telephone call with news I never expected to hear: Mike Kelley had committed suicide. The caller was Jim Shaw. His tone was matter-of-fact, grim and mournful, but also frustrated. I ... Read more →
Fredrik Værslev's exhibition seems to suggest that paintings are trivial; that they are—to turn a phrase—"for the birds." Indeed, the five untitled paintings that make up the bulk of the show are rather innocuously referred to in the press release as "bird paintings," an allusion to the manner in which ... Read more →
Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö
January 27–March 3, 2012
"I WANT DANDY." There's no denying that it's appealing, even catchy, not as catchy perhaps as the maddeningly infectious pop song of which it is a jeu de mot, but catchy in a way that goes beyond an inane, knee-jerk impulse to sing it. Or maybe perplexing is a better ... Read more →
Gaga Fine Arts, Mexico City
January 14–March 3, 2012
—Reviews
by Joanna Fiduccia
Whatever their intentions, posthumous gallery exhibitions rarely feel sincerely elegiac. Even the most reverential show can make the cynic in us suspect efforts to stoke the market for the master's remnants. This is not the case here. In contrast to the citywide retrospection of "Pacific Standard Time," the current bonanza ... Read more →
China Art Objects, Los Angeles
January 7–February 4, 2012
Michael Wang's recent one-week exhibition, "Carbon Copies," had nothing to do with those antiquated, inky sheets necessary before the advent of more efficient means of reproduction. For one thing, Wang's work was nowhere near as messy. A trained architect, he used his first solo exhibition to "copy" twenty contemporary artworks ... Read more →
Foxy Production, New York
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
The show ended in chaos, typically. On Saturday, January 14th, two incongruous flutists drifted into the exhibition space filled with visitors bending and shaking the cacophonous sculptures. It's a scene that is only an amplified version of any given afternoon during the exhibition, throughout which the artists, Ei Arakawa and ... Read more →
Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
December 17, 2011–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Jian-Xing Too
Allan Sekula's exhibition "Polonia and …" opens with a new piece, Europa (2011). Hung on a dark pink wall, Europa shows a man trying to sleep on a long narrow baseboard heater at the foot of a glass wall in Charles de Gaulle airport. A difficult balancing act, three of ... Read more →
Galerie Michel Rein, Brussels
November 10, 2011–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
Commenting on new work by a "great" artist is always difficult. The task is fraught with paradoxes. After all, the moment you're faced with recent work from an artist who has long ago been elevated to the canon of contemporary art history, what is there left to say? The work ... Read more →
White Cube, London
December 9, 2011–February 26, 2012
—Reviews
by David Catherall
Mirroring a range of ephemera and printed matter on the periphery of exhibition making, publishing, and artistic practices, Brussels-based MOREpublishers have presented the group show "EXHIBITION" to reflect on their own activities of commissioning artist editions. By employing a syntax of framing and formatting, "EXHIBITION" plays on both the notion ... Read more →
Galerie Van Der Mieden, Antwerp
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." After seeing "Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis" the bleak exhibition by Jos de Gruyter and Harld Thys currently on display at Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin, Beckett's utterance comes to mind. "Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis" (In the Empire of the Solar Eclipse, 2011) is presented as the postmortem ... Read more →
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
December 16, 2011–February 4, 2012
Upon entering Galeri Manâ's large doors, the viewer is greeted by almost complete darkness. A wooden stage is setup with a projection screen diagonally dividing it into two. On the side closer to the door are the remains of a burnt piano and a new Steinway, glaringly juxtaposed. A heavily ... Read more →
Galeri Mana, Istanbul
November 26, 2011–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Pauline J. Yao
There is something immensely gratifying about seeing an artist produce a roomful of artworks out of meticulously collected miscellaneous receipts, letters, forms, and paper ephemera from daily life. Perhaps this is due to the familiarity of the materials, or the fact that most of us take comfort in knowing that ... Read more →
Beijing Commune, Beijing
November 26, 2011–February 26, 2012
—Reviews
by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
After several years of teaching and working in printmaking, the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer made what he considers to be his first conceptual piece. It was 1966: written in black plastic lettering over a white board, two sentences accosted the viewer, "This is a mirror. You are a written sentence." ... Read more →
Parra & Romero, Ibiza
November 3, 2011–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Up until now, Grieder Contemporary was located in the lush suburb of Küsnacht, just outside of Zurich. Delightful though this was—with opening parties spilling over into the garden of the gallerist's modernist villa—getting there could be a pain and short opening hours further deterred many visitors. Now relocated to central ... Read more →
Grieder Contemporary, Zürich
October 28, 2011–January 21, 2012
—Reviews
by Kevin McGarry
Eileen Quinlan's second exhibition at Overduin and Kite explores an array of departures from the old tricks of her "Smoke and Mirrors" series (2004–2007): signature photographic still lifes of colored light passing through said materials, capturing all the flecks and blemishes that mar the ethereal compositions with engrossing, analog textures. ... Read more →
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
November 20, 2011–January 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Willesden Junction, London, is not a particularly pretty place. It wasn't in 1966, when Leon Kossoff painted Willesden Junction, Summer No. 1, and it's not now. Overwhelmingly brown—a sprawling intersection of converging train tracks into a vast expanse of metal, rust, stones, and dirt—it is industrial and unlovely. Kossoff, however, ... Read more →
Haunch of Venison, London
December 7, 2011–February 18, 2012
—Reviews
by Mariangela Méndez
Drawing is most itself when other than itself. The exhibition "Des(enho)" ventures beyond drawing by locating the very act (its gesture) in the context of a larger domain: mark-making, mapping, transposing, translating. This list of verbs is not accidental; the exhibition renders acts, actions, activities, rather than objects. Rodrigo Moura, ... Read more →
Casas Riegner, Bogotá
November 25, 2011–January 27, 2012
From the first, Laura Horelli's exhibition "The Terrace" is a movement backwards; a complex history is laid out for us to enter and reconstruct. Along the wall leading away from the gallery's entrance is a series of six images and texts entitled Terrace of European Single Person in Kileleshwa (2011), ... Read more →
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
November 25, 2011–January 7, 2012
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
Up to their knees, they're identical: laced-up leather boots, pale socks, paler legs, shadow-strewn knees. Then difference begins. On the left, ruffles become a dress. On the right, checked shorts become a white shirt, become a soft bow tie knotted under a boyish face. Soft bangs falling over his forehead, ... Read more →
Edwynn Houk Gallery, Zürich
November 17, 2011–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Maaike Lauwaert
The title of Wilfredo Prieto's solo show at Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam is as witty as it is tricky. "The Emperor's New Clothes" takes its name from the well-known 19th-century tale by Hans Christian Andersen on vanity, cunning, and the willing suspension of disbelief, a tale about a narcissistic ... Read more →
Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
November 26, 2011–January 21, 2012
If one of the critiques—made by writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks—directed against early second-wave feminism was that it focused primarily on the concerns of white, middle-class, heterosexual women, more recent protest cultures have been criticized for fracturing into a plethora of identities and subject positions that resist ... Read more →
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
October 29, 2011–January 7, 2012
In the tenth year of Art Basel Miami Beach, the number and range of supplementary events has skyrocketed. From satellite fairs, such as the more established NADA and Pulse or the newer Seven, to well-known private collections, quirky pop-up exhibitions, and endless performances, the peripheries of the fair have become ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
December 1–4, 2011
—Reviews
by Jonathan T. D. Neil
Cognitive dissonance. It's a cliché by now, a toss-off term used to explain (or to keep from explaining) all sorts of contradictions, hypocrisies, moral and ethical failings, feats of self-loathing, etc. It has become a standard operating principle, the kernel of cynical reason, the delivery mechanism of mental detachment. And we ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami
THE INTERIOR "In truth we are men because we slide towards the useless material; otherwise we would be reduced to the biologically perfect condition of the better-organized colony of insects, where nothing happens that is not useful to material life," wrote Carlo Mollino (1905–1973) in "Utopia e Ambientazione" (Utopia and Setting), ... Read more →
Francesca Minini, Milan
November 16–January 14, 2012
—Reviews
by Michelle Grabner
"Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan." This cultural postulate ... Read more →
Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
October 21–November 23, 2011
—Reviews
by Stephen Squibb
Claire Fontaine's migration from Reena Spaulings to Metro Pictures for "Working Together," her first show in Chelsea, pressurizes her concept of the ready-made artist. If this idea was once experimental, now it is deployed in the field at large. Fontaine has described the ready-made artist as referring, "to the reproducibility ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York
November 3–December 10, 2011
The adjective shared by most of the work in this exhibition is "dramaturgical." So I want to stage this review in three different "acts," each of which deals with some aspect of the exhibition. Act One: Theatricality. The original impetus of "People Things Enter Exit" was to put the work of ... Read more →
Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
October 28–December 3, 2011
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
All the gang is here. An open-mouthed munchkin, mouth pitched back in roaring vavoom, the Reagan-headed claymation adventurer Gumby, weird scientists, weirder hippies, butch baseball players, and a gang of distant surfers sliding down the faces of pristine blue curls, most of it accompanied by the clipped noir narrative and ... Read more →
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
November 4–December 22, 2011
It is no coincidence that NON chose the Swedish artist Annika Eriksson to open up their new gallery space, located in a historical building (the renowned Misir Apartments) on Istiklal, the most crowded and renowned avenue of Istanbul. Previously located in the Tophane district, the gallery was subject last year ... Read more →
NON, Istanbul
October 29–December 9, 2011
—Reviews
by Antek Walczak
Let's start this review typically, with a jaunty little narrative that encapsulates what's happening in Michael Krebber's latest show at Greene Naftali Gallery. Probably the most famous of Goya's "Black Paintings" made between 1819-1823, painted directly onto the walls of his home at the time, the Quinta del Sordo (Villa ... Read more →
Greene Naftali, New York
October 20–November 19, 2011
—Reviews
by David Spalding
Caught in that dark crawlspace between the living and the dead, hounded by a destructive, unending hunger and burdened with the need to indoctrinate: this is today's American empire as it appears in "Vampire," Sterling Ruby's exhibition of new and recent work at The Pace Gallery, Beijing. Ruby has always ... Read more →
The Pace Gallery, Beijing
September 24–November 5, 2011
—Reviews
by Gareth Bell-Jones
Black-and-white images of young androgynous women illustrate the introduction to Moyra Davey's video Les Goddesses (2011). Wearing tight white t-shirts and cropped black hair, they stare directly into the lens. Davey speaks over the images in monotone, and introduces the female lead of the film, the protofeminist philosopher Mary ... Read more →
greengrassi, London
September 17–October 29, 2011
Looking at Nader Ahriman's paintings is somewhat analogous to reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus or Pound's Cantos; you need a guidebook to navigate the arcane references and codes. Nonetheless, his artistic gravitas grabs you immediately, pulling you into his very own dialectic apparatus. Mythological man-machine hybrids abound in theatrical mise en scènes ... Read more →
Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna
September 20–October 29, 2011
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"At present," everything is at steak [sic]. "One must dance until the music stops," to quote the sentence made famous by a Citigroup manager in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. The music, however, had long since stopped when he said it. There is a similar after-party feeling to ... Read more →
BQ, Berlin
October 22–December 17, 2011
—Reviews
by Marina Fokidis
In "The Basement of Alamo," Alex Hubbard transforms the Eleni Koroneou gallery into a laboratory of zymosis. For his first solo exhibition in Athens, the artist has presented a new series of seven paintings, all made in 2011, which rely on a dynamic juxtaposition of different materials and applications. Employing ... Read more →
Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
September 29–November 12, 2011
—Reviews
by Caroline Soyez-Petithomme
Following the opening of FIAC on Wednesday, positive feedback confirmed a strong start. Perhaps a little dazed after the opening, a few dealers–such as Isabelle Alfonsi, co-founder of Marcelle Alix with Cécilia Becanovic–scattered to deal with collectors and other VIPs scanning everything in the booths. Marcelle Alix took part in ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris
October 20–23, 2011
In a dim, narrow courtyard, a pothole, ringed by pieces of broken concrete, has filled with dark water. The camera lingers on this scene in one unmoving five-minute shot, as two young boys meander around the confined concrete area, in Sharon Lockhart's most recent film, Podworka (2009). One of the ... Read more →
Blum and Poe Tokyo, Tokyo
September 23–October 29, 2011
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
Was the lack of booze a sign? Previously on opening night in the big tent, waves of waiters would set out at a given time to distribute a slow flood of Pommery, gradually inebriating a crowd of revelers. This year change is afoot. After a hard afternoon of strolling the boulevards ... Read more →
Frieze, London
October 13–16, 2011
An autumnal smiley face—made out of two bicycle wheels, some tree twigs, and some dry leaves (freckles from summer?)—is the first thing greeting the viewer of Blake Rayne's "Shade Subscription." Once we go behind the wall abutting this work, named after the artist himself, Blake (2011), it seems only appropriate ... Read more →
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
September 17–October 29, 2011
As in Keren Cytter's previous work, "Video Art Manual" strings together clichéd, Freudian-tinged narratives with a bad case of ADHD. Comprising four videos and a series of peripheral drawings, "Video Art Manual" is the stuff masochistic art critics live for: as soon as one eye rolling-worthy moment passes, such as ... Read more →
Zach Feuer, New York
September 10–October 15, 2011
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Tom Molloy has been making pencil drawings for years, whose subjects are taken from photographs in the newspapers, pornography or official pictures of Texans executed under the death penalty. His style is painstakingly photorealist, though he refrains from the luxurious darkness of B pencils, keeping the images light and impassive, ... Read more →
Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
September 3–October 9, 2011
Gardar Eide Einarsson has a way of working which is both playful and disparaging. His recent show at STANDARD (OSLO) is no exception. "Discourses, Institutions, Buildings, Laws, Police Measures, Philosophical Propositions, and so on" consists of three mock-modernist paintings, an appropriated photograph, and five readymades. Four of the readymades are ... Read more →
STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo
August 26–September 24, 2011
—Reviews
by Stefaan Vervoort
Informed by the rather upsetting constellation that "the body is under full attack," Falke Pisano's installation at Amsterdam's Ellen de Bruijne Projects continues along the path set out by her series of works entitled "Figures of Speech" (2005-2010). With figuration now appended to the video lecture-cum-abstract sculpture format, the work's ... Read more →
Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam
September 10–October 22, 2011
Globalization tends to be portrayed as a mode of abundance (more goods, more communications, more transit, more transactions), and yet its economic underpinnings create conditions of deprivation and want. Diango Hernández's work navigates between poles of efficiency and scarcity, beginning with his earliest public artistic forays as a member of ... Read more →
Alexander and Bonin, New York
September 6–October 12, 2011
Unlike most biennials, this is not so much an exhibition about what art can be, but about what it is. If there is anything radical about this exhibition, it is its refusal to conform to those biennial conventions that have come to characterize this particular exhibition format of the last ... Read more →
Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
September 17–November 13, 2011
—Reviews
by Joanna Fiduccia
When the term "romantic conceptualism" reached its apotheosis several years ago, the touchstone appeared, almost unanimously, to be Bas Jan Ader's I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971). Gushing affect, it also self-reflexively performed the romantic artist's predicament: the subjectivity romanticism gives license to profess proves, alas, incommunicable. Consistently and ... Read more →
Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
September 3–October 1, 2011
Organizing an international biennial or triennial exhibition is, in principle, a thankless task. Your two main audiences, locals unfamiliar with recent artistic developments and globe-hopping art citizens eager for new discoveries, have opposing needs and desires. Apportioning artworks among multiple venues, securing the funding to meet an outsized budget, and ... Read more →
Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama
August 6–November 6, 2011
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
The fourth edition of the ABC (Art Berlin Contemporary) is fated to be the most contentious: the show is being held against the background of Art Forum Berlin's demise—the city's official art fair that has ceased to exist after negotiations to merge the two events collapsed. While ABC began as ... Read more →
ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 7–11, 2011
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Can an exhibition be too tight? Such is the question when experiencing the immersive world of "La Carte d'après Nature," a group show curated by Thomas Demand currently on view at Mathew Marks, which debuted in late 2010 with a few variances at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. The exhibition itself ... Read more →
Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles
July 19–October 8, 2011
—Reviews
by Antek Walczak
They're glittering, these threads that shimmer more than shine, reflecting off the warm light overhead, which dominates on the left side of the panel, enhancing the gradation effect. Tiny loops of black thread barely stick out of the surface here or there. Let's call them signs of weaving. From the ... Read more →
The past month brought another turn to the space race, as the closure of NASA's cash-strapped, shuttle program made more room for Chinese, Indian, Russian, and even commercial enterprise. With twenty-nine private companies presently vying for Google's $30 million, Lunar X prize, we are well on the verge of the ... Read more →
Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
June 25–July 31, 2011
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
Guests were asked to bring their sturdy invitation cards, perforated with a code containing four seconds of music (Invitations, 2011) to Anri Sala's opening at Galerie Chantal Crousel. Throughout the evening, those cards were fed into a barrel organ in the courtyard, which played familiar notes in a discordant fashion. ... Read more →
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
May 14–July 30, 2011
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Steering clear of chest-beating monumentalism, Peter Fischli and David Weiss's "Sculpture Now" contains an embarrassment of riches. With 35 significant works by 27 artists crowding the generous spaces of Eva Presenhuber's gallery, it is nonetheless a self-effacing show. The works have been "arranged"—that is, Fischi and Weiss have made no ... Read more →
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York
June 1–July 30, 2011
"Am I going haywire? Seriously. Am I going to finish the goddamn thing?" Hollis Frampton was frequently anxious about his monumental Magellan film project. "If you don't finish an epic poem it is a more or less magnificent ruin," he said. "This I probably have got to finish or I ... Read more →
Gladstone Gallery, New York
June 24–July 29, 2011
Something uncanny this way comes at Hauser and Wirth London: for Christoph Büchel's latest feat in politically-charged trompe l'oeil, the Swiss artist dropped a well-used community center straight onto Piccadilly. Though it only opened a couple weeks ago, the gallery's usual parquet is covered by worn linoleum, and each successive ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
May 13–July 30, 2011
In the context of the current Turkish political climate, there is a tongue-in-cheek criticality to the work of Vahap Avşar. Just across the street from the New Museum, in the swanky Charles Bank Gallery, the multifaceted work of this Turkish artist troubles the viewer—just enough for a double take. His ... Read more →
Charles Bank Gallery, New York
May 9–July 10, 2011
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
The end of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of interest in narrative practices. Often referred to as "the narrative turn," this new field of inquiry originated in French structuralism's general approach to language, and more explicitly from Tzvetan Todorov's passion for what he termed "a science of narrative," la ... Read more →
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
June 8–September 10, 2011
—Reviews
by Joanna Fiduccia
"The Lifestyle Press," a group exhibition curated by Gil Blank, opened with its ambitions foreclosed. Just days before, Blank had been informed that the publication which was to accompany the show, a mock junk-mail circular with coupons that could be used toward the purchase of artworks, would not be printed ... Read more →
Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
May 14–June 25, 2011
Michael E. Smith's first solo exhibition at this gallery is bit of a surprise. Known for his deployment of disfigured domestic and urban products, car manufacturing materials, and generally toxic plastics, the Detroit born-and-based artist has partially shed the intensely saturnine pall that normally hangs over his portentous arrangements for ... Read more →
Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Detroit
May 7–June 18, 2011
Be it tax evasion or political activism with excessive media, or the former that makes the perfect bait for the latter, it will be hard to tell. What is certain is that artist Ai Weiwei was released on bail by the Chinese police after being arrested and detained without access ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
May 13–July 16, 2011
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
At the core of the work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák is the sometimes hopeful, sometimes melancholic reflection on the character and experience of human community, society, and its institutions; in the background, the question hovers of how individuals are obliged to live alongside each other, in the humdrum every-day. ... Read more →
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich
June 10–August 28, 2011
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
How does one write about an art fair? Dear reader, I am being sincere. If one is not an art market journalist gleefully scribbling down the cost of a collector or celebrity's (or celebrity collector's) pre-preview purchase of huge German neon painting, my question is less rhetorical than the subtext ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 15–19, 2011
—Reviews
by Michèle Faguet
As the debate over the alleged mishandling of the mysterious E. coli outbreak in Germany raged on in the local and international press, Berliners had their own little controversy to distract themselves with: the opening of the mega-exhibition "based in Berlin," warily anticipated (and even boycotted) by many members of ... Read more →
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Berlin / Autocenter / PM Galerie, Berlin / Salon Populaire / After the Butcher, Berlin
June 8–July 24, 2011
With its ludicrous mismatch of scale (83 artists in the main exhibition, 89 national pavilions, 37 collateral events) and logistics (crowds numbering thousands, endless slow-moving queues, and a labyrinthine city navigable only by foot or boat), the Venice Biennale is something like a theater of the absurd. An unsettling sense ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
June 4–November 27, 2011
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Welcome to Biennale Nation. Like the city of Venice, it's a bit hard to navigate with its quick twists and idiosyncratic logic; better find an insider or a tour. If you care for an adventure, use the title of the fair's curated section as a compass: ILLUMInations. At first ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
June 4–November 27, 2011
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was momentarily "covered by a bluish-white glare." (1) An atom bomb, the first to be dropped on a human population, had exploded 580 meters above the ground. A 4.4-square-mile section of the city center was more ... Read more →
International Center of Photography, New York
May 20–August 28, 2011
Eastern European melancholia has a residual effect in the post-Communist era. To the Western capitalist-bred outsider, it's a palpable element in a contemporary artistic milieu that grapples with traumatic memories. Take a stroll though the Vienna flea market—with its leftover household porcelain bric-a-brac, faded Stalinist era postcards, and propagandistic souvenir ... Read more →
curated by_vienna, Vienna
May 12–June 18, 2011
—Reviews
by Antek Walczak
The ubiquitous pairing of writing and photography as amateur pastime and teenage site of self-? (? = production, estrangement, submission, replication?) has as much to do with the pioneering use of Livejournal (LJ) in the early 2000s by the then-emergent figure of the emo, as it does with the eventual ... Read more →
Murray Guy, New York
April 21–June 4, 2011
—Reviews
by Michelle Grabner
Combining realist fiction with strains of truthiness, Rinus Van de Velde harnesses our contemporary compulsion for storytelling for its own sake, stating, "although the stories I create are fictional, I still try to believe in them." But he also employs fiction as a literary device to undercut a host of ... Read more →
Moniquemeloche, Chicago
April 2–May 14, 2011
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
It is difficult to describe the intense pleasure afforded by this small, precise exhibition of works by Louise Nevelson and Isabelle Cornaro. Although four decades separate these two artist's series on view, their striking affinity lies in a shared interest in limits—each explores the frame and the monochrome—and the infinite ... Read more →
There is little, in the conventional sense, to see in Walead Beshty's first solo exhibition at Regen Projects. The vibrant, chromatic ribs of the Black Curl series, for example, derive from chance effects of colored light on photographic paper. A separate set of light jet prints, in shallow, plexi boxes, ... Read more →
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
April 16–May 14, 2011
What should we make of paintings made by an artist whose self-declared maxim is "The Whole World + The Work = The Whole World"? Whether this stands for an expansive, optimistic "anything goes" or a reductively pessimistic hopelessness is largely a question of personal temperament, or indeed of momentary mood. ... Read more →
The Lower East Side is a strange place. Imagine the area a mere three years ago: as the financial crisis loomed, galleries such as Invisible-Exports, Lisa Cooley and Rachel Uffner joined or replaced the efforts of veteran spaces Orchard, CANADA, and Reena Spaulings, casting the gallery district as a more ... Read more →
Itinerant, New York
April 23–May 8, 2011
—Reviews
by Colin Chinnery
Liu Wei's largest solo show to date deals with two main visual tropes—the horizon and the city. The first monumental sculpture we are confronted with is a megalopolis bristling with corporate towers perched high upon a bare rock, guarded further by a broad building in the shape of China's national ... Read more →
Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
March 20–May 3, 2011
Coming from a conceptual background with little connection to anything that moves, I have long been trying to understand what is at the core of the definition of the cinematic. The shattered space full of tiny wood objects, naïve drawings, photographs, photocopies, and roost-like structures for watching and listening to ... Read more →
Galleria Zero, Milan
April 8–May 14, 2011
The most striking thing about Rirkrit Tiravanija's recent New York show is also its most organic aspect: the windows and doors of the main exhibition space have been removed, exposing the interior to the street. From the outside, the space looks empty except for the soaring black letters spray-painted on ... Read more →
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
March 5–April 23, 2011
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Zurich's art world was more-than-ordinarily abuzz when Peter Kilchmann and Eva Presenhuber unveiled new gallery spaces on the 14th April. Both have moved a few hundred meters north-west to the Diagonal building at the base of Switzerland's new tallest building, away from the Löwenbräu-Areal brewery where they had previously lived ... Read more →
Gallery Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
April 15–May 28, 2011
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
"Property itself has become a more social endeavor," Wired Magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly wrote three years ago. The now famed blog post describes the dematerialization of raw materials and other saleable objects as a social phenomenon, citing shared music, books, and movies, as among the goods on their way out. ... Read more →
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
March 18–April 23, 2011
"The image is one thing the man is another, sure I'm a shy country boy," Elvis Presley once quipped at a press conference before standing up grinning to reveal a glittering diamond studded belt buckle to a fawning media assemblage. Before there was bling there was the King, and the ... Read more →
Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna
April 6–May 7, 2011
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
While considering the strange juxtaposition of the skyscraper's program, architect Rem Koolhaas—in his 1978 Delirious New York—speculated that the 'plot' of the Downtown Athletic Club's ninth story was a tale of "eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked." Similarly congested is the exposition hall, which these days can be found hosting ... Read more →
Zona Maco, Mexico City
April 6–10, 2011
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"The Bell Show" and "The Gong Show," curated by Dieter Roelstraete, is a two-fold exhibition marking the second collaboration between adjacent galleries in the middle of Berlin Tiergarten, Micky Schubert and Lüttgenmeijer. Illustrating their titles, the shows respectively feature works concerning either gongs or bells. In Lüttgenmeijer's "The Bell Show" some ... Read more →
Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin / Micky Schubert
February 25–April 16, 2011
Anna Ostoya's twenty-eight canvases in Bortolami Gallery mark the twenty-eight days of February 2011. Upon the gallery's invitation, Ostoya set herself specific rules of production—to initiate a new piece each day for the duration of February, and to work only on 20 x 24 inch canvases with four main materials: ... Read more →
Bortolami Gallery, New York
March 1–April 2, 2011
—Reviews
by Michelle Grabner
Representational landscape is a risky genre. Its natural grandeur and boundless perspectives can seduce, instilling wonder and discovery. Yet more often, the genre triggers trite familiarity with both the subject and the material quality of the medium. Claire Sherman, however, with her nimble brushwork and compositional restraint, manages to navigate ... Read more →
Kavi Gupta, Chicago
February 19–April 9, 2011
On Saturday September 30th 1967, Robert Smithson boarded the number 30 Inter-City bus to Passaic, carrying with him a copy The New York Times, a spiral notebook, a paperback of Brian Aldiss's Earthworks and his instamatic camera. This kit of the modern day explorer was most likely not so different ... Read more →
Matt's Gallery, London
January 26–March 20, 2011
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
An austere, Mars-meets-Minimalism environment greets visitors to "Pressure Drop," Sofia Hultén's recent exhibition at RaebervonStenglin. Strewn over the gallery floor are large, glittery rocks that conjure both a meteor shower come to inexplicable rest, and the boulder-bedeviled construction sites just outside the door (the gallery is in an industrial area ... Read more →
RaebervonStenglin, Zürich
February 11–April 2, 2011
—Reviews
by November Paynter
There are few occasions in the art world calendar where a commercial fair and a biennial are as closely aligned in time and space as the Sharjah Biennial and Art Dubai. March 16th saw the tenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial titled "Plot for a Biennial"—curated by Suzanne Cotter and ... Read more →
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah / Art Dubai
March 16–May 16, 2011
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Parmenides once said, "nothing comes from nothing," all matter is born of some other stuff, transformed. In parallel, ideas build off forbears. Thus, all art, as with all exchanges, is derivate, and at the same time, potentially transformative. Even so, there is a slight irritation when a new voicing resembles ... Read more →
Peres Projects, Berlin
February 12–April 23, 2011
—Reviews
by Pauline J. Yao
The 2011 Singapore Biennale, under the artistic direction of Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, gathers sixty-three artists from thirty countries in four different venue locations: the Old Kallang Airport, the National Museum of Singapore, the Singapore Art Museum, and Marina Bay. It is one of the ... Read more →
Singapore Biennale
March 13–May 15, 2011
—Reviews
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
In the darkened gallery, two projectors, each threaded with a black-and-white 16mm film by Joachim Koester, cast twin beams of light on two whisper thin screens sandwiched between them. The screens are suspended back to back on taut wires and seem to float in midair. The room purrs and hums ... Read more →
Jan Mot, Brussels
January 29–March 12, 2011
It is unusual that a work sums up an artist's practice and sensibility so acutely and simply as the single piece exhibited in Cerith Wyn Evans's "Assemblage" at Galerie Neu. Imagine the bling of an enormous Murano glass chandelier, blinking its way through a score of Bataille in Morse code, ... Read more →
Galerie Neu, Berlin
February 4–March 26, 2011
Remember "Mr. B," the supposed predator-collector living in the Nordic Pavilion during the 2009 Venice Biennale, whom we found dead in his house pool? His cadaver has now re-emerged—so to speak—in Elmgreen & Dragset's latest antithesis: the sauna they have opened at Helga de Alvear Gallery in Madrid. But Mr. ... Read more →
Galeria Helga de Alvear
January 19–March 4, 2011
Armory Arts Week 2011 may be remembered as the year of art fairs that failed to defy our expectations. Unlike 2010, which saw the debut of Independent, or 2009, in which the glimmerings of a healthy art market emerged after the major 2008 recession, despite some shifts in gallery loyalty, ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York
Macho, violent, and angry: such is the America portrayed in Galleria Massimo De Carlo's inquiring exhibition. The show opens with the remnants of a ghost town, a derelict shed, and all that is missing is the tumbleweed. But here what's being referenced is not the Wild West, but rather the myth ... Read more →
Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
February 15–April 20, 2011
A heady gallery opening experience last October found a few scattered souls humming to themselves in a series of empty rooms. At that same gallery one month later, a man performed a pantomime of sorts on invisible strings. Standing over a block of wood with a radio antennae sticking out ... Read more →
VeneKlassen/Werner, Berlin
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
There's something slightly strange about walking into an installation designed to look like a homemade living room in every way but the lighting. In the case of Kai Althoff at Gladstone Gallery, the cement floor painted bright yellow doesn't exactly scream domesticity either, but the artist has integrated enough interior ... Read more →
Gladstone Gallery, New York
January 15–March 5, 2011
—Reviews
by Joanna Fiduccia
A clear glass valve on a strand of silver party beads beckons from the entrance to Eli Hansen's exhibition, "Next time, they'll know it's us." Dangling from a nail, it gives off a felonious pong, like those signs of a subculture that pass under the noses of the majority while ... Read more →
The Company, Los Angeles
January 21–February 26, 2011
—Reviews
by Christophe van Gerrewey
After years of close friendship and close reading of each other's work, Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner have finally made an artwork together. "A syntax of dependency:" occupies the first floor of the M HKA in Antwerp—a sort of indoor park interrupted by square columns and large wall openings from ... Read more →
M HKA, Antwerp
February 3–May 22, 2011
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
A few weeks ago I found myself in the winter chill outside Kunsthaus Zurich, watching a trance-like Yorgos Sapountzis methodically pace the platz as he dragged a tattered bouquet of bright, flag-like fabrics attached to poles behind him. After herding the audience about like an expert cowpoke, he and his ... Read more →
Freymond Guth Fine Arts, Zürich
January 21–February 19, 2011
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
With both parents working as practicing psychiatrists, Javier Téllez tells us that early in life he found it difficult to distinguish the boundaries between normalcy and pathology. Having experienced the plight of mental patients from an all-too-personal perspective, he soon began to embrace collaborations with the mentally afflicted as his ... Read more →
Arratia Beer, Berlin
January 22–February 26, 2011
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
mounir fatmi is an artist of resistance. It starts with his name, written lower case to challenge conventional orthographies that do not accommodate him. He was born in Tangier and lives in Paris, and the idea of exile and iconoclasm of Western, African, and Arab traditions appear frequently in his ... Read more →
Analix Forever, Geneva
January 13–February 23, 2011
Upon first glance, an erotic reading of Michel François's work might at seem a bit unorthodox, but with all the tension, indexes of expenditure, and sheer materiality coursing through his first solo show in Paris, such a reading is, at least in part, inevitable. For while the Belgian Brussels-based artist ... Read more →
kamel mennour, Paris
January 7–February 5, 2011
Edward Krasiński and Eustachy Kossakowski were friends, artists, and key members of the Polish neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s. Their recent exhibition at BROADWAY 1602, titled "J'ai perdu la fin!!!" (I Have Lost the End), is a retrospective of their collaborative work. Nearly a hundred small, framed black-and-white photographs, ... Read more →
BROADWAY 1602, New York
January 15–February 19, 2011
An art fair on the internet? Absurd or ingenious? Even a technophobe like me knows that the internet is a rich source of innovation, so why not harness this in the interests of the art market? After all, most galleries rely on the website as their portal to a wider ... Read more →
VIP Art Fair
January 22–30, 2011
There is something theatrical about Peter Coffin's recent exhibition at Herald St. The scene is set for what appears to be a science-play consistent of three main set components: clouds, hanging plants, and neon wires—backdrops, curtains, and stage lighting. The gallery/stage functions as a cosmic model, or rather a rehearsal ... Read more →
Herald St, London
January 15–February 20, 2011
Seth Price is an artist with conceptual charm: he transforms even the most unassuming materials and practices into contemplative works of art with a Duchampian flick of the wrist. For his exhibition at Friedrich Petzel, "Non-Speech, Fire and Smoke," Price continues to re-imagine what is deemed artistic media by presenting ... Read more →
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
January 7–February 19, 2011
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
When viewing Compass, I had an uncanny feeling of being lost. Part of this had to do with the theatrical power of the work, yet a sense of dread came over me as I realized that this was actually a restaging. Although it is great to revisit a work, this ... Read more →
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
November 19, 2010–January 29, 2011
The white box was never so intimate; enclosed in the square-shaped, relatively small room is a man's seemingly haphazard collection of oddities, triggering a sense of invasiveness upon entering. In "DilSiZ" at Rodeo, Gabriel Lester activates "luck" as a material, thus connecting the dissimilar physical objects in the exhibition. The experience ... Read more →
Rodeo
November 27, 2010–February 12, 2011
—Reviews
by JJ Charlesworth
There's a kind of neo-conceptualism that loves puns. After all, it was old-style conceptualism that first sternly denounced the usually invisible join between object, language, and concept, but that was only on the back of the dry wit of conceptualism's own errant uncle, Marcel Duchamp, who, unlike his dour descendants, ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
November 23, 2010–January 29, 2011
—Reviews
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Text—as a never-finished, always-mutable, and labored process of thought—is the internal organizing logic of Amanda Ross-Ho's recent production. The artist prepared the press release for her show, "A Stack of Black Pants," as a sequential composite of paragraphs from the press releases accompanying her previous three exhibitions at Cherry and ... Read more →
Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
November 6–December 22, 2010
Matthew Brannon's letterpress works felt delightfully and deceptively anachronistic in the early decade, resurrecting motifs of mid-century American advertising with pithy captions on the cosmopolitan set. Forged in the margins of ad copy and commodities, the artist's alter egos appeared forever prey to the doubts, inadequacies, and frustrations that even ... Read more →
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
October 30–December 4, 2010
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
The entrance is through a ramshackle furniture shop; I walk between tables into the back and up the stairs. We're in the middle of Zurich's old town, where cheek-by-jowl buildings with uneven floors and low doorways are de rigueur; having the opportunity to snoop around one is an unusual treat. ... Read more →
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
December 9–19, 2010
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Wishing for respite from the throngs at Art Basel Miami Beach, I walked over to the Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, a new gallery launched not in the obligatory blighted-cum-gentrifying Wynwood "gallery" district, but nestled in a former shoe store on one of South Beach's rather banal shopping strips. As the ... Read more →
Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami
December 2–January 13, 2011
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
I lost 15 minutes of my life stuck in a traffic jam beside a sewer pipe in Miami. The cab from the new fair Seven to a restaurant in South Beach cost $35 dollars, and when I arrived I was afraid I smelled of shit. One of the less charming ... Read more →
SEVEN / Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami / PULSE Contemporary Art Fair / New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)
November 30–December 5, 2010
—Reviews
by Colin Chinnery
One enters the modest exhibition space of Sprovieri through what looks like a homemade security gate. The title of the show, "Arts, Media, and Sports," hails from atop of this eponymous work, throwing visitors into a realm of Durhamian logic. What do these three realms—art, media, and sport—have in common, ... Read more →
Sprovieri, London
October 7–December 4, 2010
The Host and the Cloud, the most recent work of Pierre Huyghe, is an overwhelming mise-en-scène of the contemporary imaginary. The action (of the film) takes place in the former building of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. Built by Jean Dubuisson—a disciple of Le Corbusier—and located in ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
October 23–November 27, 2010
—Reviews
by Antek Walczak
It could happen as follows. You are perhaps 25 years old, in another 25 years you will be 50, and in that future possibility you will be on a dance-floor, where you will see, dancing in the corner, Marc Jacobs. He is as taut in the face as he is ... Read more →
White Columns, New York
January 9–10, 2011
—Reviews
by Michelle Grabner
"I must get out of this house," betrays the thought bubble floating near Tom's bewildered expression as he sits in an overstuffed chair with an open book in his hands. Tom, the feline-half of the notorious duo Tom & Jerry, sits alone without his little tormentor in Karl Haendel's Tom ... Read more →
Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago
October 15–November 13, 2010
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
Luc Tuymans's paintings set a somber mood at David Zwirner: a ship at sail with its stern to a cloudy horizon; a conspiratorial faceless portrait; a panel discussion dissolving as its participants are cast in blinding light. The 11 works in his latest show titled "Corporate" darkly depict corporations as ... Read more →
David Zwirner, New York
November 6–December 21, 2010
—Reviews
by Michèle Faguet
Like the images of empty streets of his hometown Düsseldorf, and the cities he visited and photographed as a young artist in the late 70s and early 80s—New York, Rome, Paris, Brussels—Thomas Struth's recent group of photographs depict the landscapes of technological infrastructures in which the makers of these structures ... Read more →
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
October 7–November 27, 2010
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
We were a few lonely clouds last Thursday, wandering around Turin's Lingotto district trying to find Artissima's new location in the Oval, a recently built exhibition hall tucked out of sight from the main road. Our path took us under the monumental ramp of the former Fiat factory that stands ... Read more →
Artissima, Turin
November 5–7, 2010
When you consider that Devo stands for "devolution"—the band's neologism for the dysfunctional, herd mentality of modern society—you begin to get a sense of the dialectical complexity that underpins Abraham Cruzvillegas's exhibition. Among the handful of curios that can be found in the voluminous, photocopy publication that accompanies this exhibition ... Read more →
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
October 23–November 20, 2010
Beyond the overwhelming personal tragedy, one of the many unfortunate consequences of suicide is that a life's work is often mitigated through the lens of it. For Angus Fairhurst's first gallery exhibition since his 2008 suicide, it is at once impossible to elide this tragedy yet simultaneously a disservice to ... Read more →
Sadie Coles HQ, London
October 12–November 27, 2010
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Born in Vietnam but raised in Denmark, Danh Vo is a "man without qualities." "What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context – nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of ... Read more →
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
October 2–November 6, 2010
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Der Kehlkopfverschlußlaut singt. —Paul Celan Considering the stigmas of alcohol and its abuses, advertising such products can be tricky. Cleverly, Ricard hit upon an idea: sponsor an eponymous prize at an art fair, throw a party for the winner, and then partner with the Pompidou to donate a work to the collection ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris
October 20–23, 2010
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
I had dropped out of law school when I met Eve. She was very beautiful. Very pale, cool in her black dress, with never anything more than a single strand of pearls. And distant. Always poised and distant. By the time the girls were born, it was all so perfect, so ... Read more →
Karma International, Zürich
October 9–November 13, 2010
There is an ambiguous theatricality to the recent Marcel Broodthaers exhibition at Marian Goodman. The gallery has reconstructed the 1972 Section Cinéma in its entirety (three carefully installed rooms of films and objects), alongside the work's precursor, the 1970 Cinéma Modèle. The theatrical effect is a combination of intention and ... Read more →
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
September 2–November 13, 2010
Strolling through the landscaped gardens—past elegant fountains and late blooming roses—that connect the light drenched 1930s halls staging Berlin's art forum art fair and the abc art berlin contemporary exhibition in the 1950 Marshall Haus pavilion, it was easy to forget the gallery politics that have until this year separated ... Read more →
art forum berlin, Berlin / ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin
September 29–October 2, 2010
—Reviews
by Colby Chamberlain
The birth of the curator has led to the death of the artist. Or, at least, that's the impression one gets from a gloss of the current literature on exhibition practices. Concerns percolate that the expanded portfolio of the curator now encroaches on the artist's autonomy. Yet it's important to ... Read more →
Emily Harvey Foundation, New York / Maya Stendhal Gallery
September 16–October 16, 2010
How do you follow, and what do you do after "The Void," the so-dubbed 28th edition of the São Paulo Biennial (2008)? Its Artistic Director, the internationally known and experienced curator Ivo Mesquita, left the huge second floor of the Oscar Niemeyer building entirely empty as a comment on the ... Read more →
São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
September 25–December 12, 2010
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
Rob Pruitt's joint exhibition at Gavin Brown's enterprise and Maccarone, "Pattern and Degradation," presses a few of my buttons. Even before stepping into the gallery I had some concerns—the notion of filling over 8,200 square feet with two years of new work without compromising quality seems a stretch, so naturally ... Read more →
Maccarone, New York / Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
September 11–October 23, 2010
The title of Rashid Johnson's first solo show in Berlin makes a sideways allusion to "Stranger in the Village," an essay written in 1955 by American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. This is worth bearing in mind; not because the situation in Berlin mirrors that of the remote ... Read more →
Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
September 7–December 23, 2010
Shameless nepotism or inspired programming? It's hardly a surprise that Jeffrey Deitch's first exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA would set critics atwitter, regardless of the subject, but watchdog fingers started wagging double-time with April's news of a planned survey of the work of Dennis Hopper. Rushed by Deitch ... Read more →
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles
July 11–September 26, 2010
—Reviews
by Adam Kleinman
Everywhere you look these days there seems to be some exhibition, text, or reference to the work of German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985). And often enough, these presentations focus on a central paradox; that the artist decidedly ended her career circa 1968-9—by ceasing to make new work, while also preventing ... Read more →
Artists Space, New York
June 23–August 15, 2010
—Reviews
by Andrew Berardini
A recent billboard project in Los Angeles featured an image of a shirtless black man (the artist Kori Newkirk) on a white background, his mouth stuffed to bursting with a snowball. LA Times critic Christopher Knight observed that it looked like a ball of cotton, thus in some ways conjuring ... Read more →
Country Club Projects, Los Angeles
July 17–August 21, 2010
—Reviews
by Michèle Faguet
Sometime in the wee hours of September 1, 2010, the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, true to its name, permanently closed its doors. Initially weary of its program, the TKB's audience had become massive—if not always enthusiastic—during the course of the institution's brief, yet tumultuous, history. Over 200,000 visitors drawing both from ... Read more →
Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin
October 29, 2008–August 31, 2010
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
It can be difficult in our age of post-everything to comprehend the political import and impact of art and architecture in the 20th century, when stakes—see: two world wars, and the modernist and/or progressive ardor that arose around them—were high. It is far easier in our climate, in which art ... Read more →
New Jerseyy, Basel
August 6–28, 2010
The premise is a nine-part exhibition inspired by an edgy crime thriller, promising equal parts complexity and intertextuality. The results, however, aren't quite as involved. "Lush Life: An Exhibition in Nine Chapters" is grouping of a nine loosely-themed summer shows scattered throughout New York's Lower East Side. The exhibition takes ... Read more →
Salon 94, New York / Lehmann Maupin, New York / Collette Blanchard Gallery / Invisible-Exports, New York
June 17–August 13, 2010
—Reviews
by Colin Chinnery
MadeIn is a cultural production company founded a year ago by the Chinese experimental artist Xu Zhen. He founded the company in an attempt to define and combine his various outputs beyond his own artwork, such as the non-profit space BizArt, China's leading online contemporary art forum Art-Ba-Ba (which translates ... Read more →
Long March Space, Beijing
May 30–August 8, 2010
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
When Jill Magid wrote "What is a reasonable man in a box?" on the Whitney's wall I suspect she already knew the answer. The text references the a leaked 2004 memorandum from the US Justice Department prescribing legal means for the CIA to employ illegal torture techniques such as confinement ... Read more →
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
July 1–September 12, 2010
Respected artists in their own right, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have also led a fruitful collaboration since 2005, pairing their unique temperaments in taut, reflexive films and installations. Theirs is a method that emphasizes the transformations, shifts, and slippages that images and ideas can undergo: through the entropic sedimentation ... Read more →
Murray Guy, New York
June 25–August 6, 2010
When Johann König opened his first gallery space, not only was he the youngest kid on the block, but he also faced another challenge: he was nearly blind. "How much I see is a myth!" he told me recently. How much can he see now in the year 2010? Suffice ... Read more →
Mario Garcia Torres is well acquainted with the past of Peep-Hole, one the newest non-profit spaces run by three curators in Milan. In fact, he not only alluded to it, but he also enhanced its weight. In a letter given to the visitor, the artist stated his wish to "create ... Read more →
Peep-Hole, Milan
June 2–July 24, 2010
—Reviews
by Aoife Rosenmeyer
Plucked from the sky, a Sea Harrier and a Sepecat Jaguar jet have fallen to earth in Tate Britain. It's the work of Fiona Banner, and in an average summer critics would be busy drawing tidy parallels between the work and the UK's ongoing military involvement in overseas conflicts. But ... Read more →
Tate Britain, London
June 28, 2010–January 3, 2011
—Reviews
by Pauline J. Yao
Liang Shuo's most recent solo showing "Fei Te" ("Fit") involves a bit of wordplay. The Chinese words "fei" (expense) and "te"(special) register meaning individually but their combination does not, except as a phonetic match for the English word "fit." The same might be said about Liang's current installation, a sprawling ... Read more →
C5 Gallery, Beijing
June 12–July 25, 2010
With an exhaustive monographic exhibition currently on show in Bonn, a lengthy touring retrospective recently over, and last year's opinion-dividing outing in the Venice Biennale's German Pavilion, not to mention the reams of printed matter and symposia that make up the productive phenomenon that is Liam Gillick, what can a ... Read more →
Esther Schipper, Berlin
June 12–August 31, 2010
Since first stepping onto the other side of the lens in the mid-90s, Rodney Graham has fashioned himself as all color of amateur and outlaw in a wry game of wish fulfillment for an artist of inescapable renown. Cowboys, pirates, saloon men, and Sunday painters, these pseudo-egos follow the performative ... Read more →
Lisson Gallery, New York
June 23–July 31, 2010
Michel Auder's current New York exhibition could be called "epic," if his approach weren't so far removed from any claims to grandeur. There are samplings from four decades of film and video, shown as single- and multi-screen installations, accompanied by film stills, polaroids, postcards, and the occasional rooster lamp. The ... Read more →
Participant Inc., New York / Zach Feuer, New York / Newman Popiashvili Gallery / Anthology Film Archives, New York
June 24–August 13, 2010
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
The reason why things don't remain the same is because they were never thus. Everything contains manifold dialectical possibilities. A man's home might be his castle, yet no castle is a monolith. No hotel room is a monolith either. In the Bethlehem Inn, the drop ceiling above John Smith's head ... Read more →
Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
June 12–July 24, 2010
—Reviews
by Jennifer Teets
"For 'Euro' and 'dollars' one should write 'xeno' and 'money' respectively. The Eurodollar has long since shed its attachment to Europe. It is, in fact, no longer geographically located but circulates within an electronic global market which, though still called the Eurodollar market, is now the international capital market. And ... Read more →
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris
June 5–July 25, 2010
—Reviews
by Colin Chinnery
After seeing what felt like thousands of artworks in hundreds of booths at the fairs, the feeling of walking around Basel's old town in search of the nine individual art projects of Jens Hoffmann's Art Parcours was a welcome hiatus from fair fatigue. But what made Parcours a coherent project ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 17–19, 2010
The Finest Worksong 16 June 2010 Last weekend during the Berlin Biennale I found myself wedged up against a rock star. (Rock star? That's a far cry from what Michael Stipe means. His lyrics gave solace to a whole generation of purblind pubescents in the late 80s.) He said hello, shyly, ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel
June 15–19, 2010
—Reviews
by Quinn Latimer
It was a profoundly disorienting encounter: in a room of Picasso paintings at the Fondation Beyeler, I suddenly came across a tall, muscled, black man in a pair of silver hot pants dancing silently and joyfully to music on his headphones. This go-go dancer atop a small, square white platform—both ... Read more →
Fondation Beyeler
May 22–August 29, 2010
Solitude, abandon, restlessness, vulnerability: feelings a visitor might not expect to experience at the Palazzo Citterio. The refined 18th century rococo façade is at home in the elegant Brera district of Milan, but despite its chic external architecture, this sober face hides the perfect setting for Paul McCarthy's delirious "Pig ... Read more →
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan
May 20–July 4, 2010
—Reviews
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Everything lilts and tilts in Rachel Harrison's upright totems. Boxy facets jut out at every angle and swollen protrusions bulge all over the rough, peaked, and slathered stucco-like surfaces. Her piecemeal monoliths totter drunkenly in a barely-balanced equilibrium of unstable, crudely Cubistic passages. Their scale and verticality loosely suggest the ... Read more →
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
May 27–July 10, 2010
—Reviews
by Michèle Faguet
Days 2-3: Thursday, June 10th & Friday, June 11th Day two began at a nondescript warehouse at Mehringdamm 28 to see an installation of George Kuchar films (selected by film curator Marc Siegel) and a brick, (oddly) chapel-like construction housing new sculptural work by Cameron Jamie. Nestled between parking lots and ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
June 11–August 8, 2010
In an untitled text from 2005, the artist collective Claire Fontaine drew a distinction from the shopworn idea of distributed, democratic power, claiming, "Now power explicitly exhibits all the violence it needs to conserve itself" and, thus, implicitly excluding the participation of society's many constituents. Left to suffer a slow ... Read more →
Invisible-Exports, New York
May 14–June 20, 2010
—Reviews
by Daniel Tucker
I have always wanted to show how … your problems are also our problems and vice versa but I also wanted to show the way which our histories are interwoven and dependent on one another. I think we have to continue to place socialism and post-socialism in a larger context, ... Read more →
Bucharest Biennale, Bucharest
May 21–July 25, 2010
—Reviews
by Paddy Johnson
Is a lot of empty space and a couple of big slabs of marble enough to unify an exhibition? Almost certainly yes, which is also the problem: it's too easy to make a show look cohesive when there's not much in it. For her fourth solo show at Casey Kaplan, ... Read more →
Casey Kaplan, New York
May 8–June 26, 2010
—Reviews
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
"this freaks me out for some reason" –TheCGIMaster, comment posted on YouTube, 9 months ago Klosterfelde gallery's exhibition of Michael Snow, the poster child for experimental media, perfectly mirrors the maze of his artistic life. Almost an attempt at a comprehensive retrospective, the show spans through several decades of no less diverse ... Read more →
Klosterfelde Gallery, Berlin
April 30–June 4, 2010
—Reviews
by Michèle Faguet
Day 1: Wednesday, June 9th Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, the sixth edition of the Berlin Biennale seeks to examine the manner in which art negotiates "reality"—a loaded term, described rather abstractly in the curatorial statement—in a time of historical crisis and renegotiation that begins with the fall of communism and is ... Read more →
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin
June 11–August 8, 2010
—Reviews
by Colby Chamberlain
Several installations from P.S.1's inaugural exhibition "Rooms" (1976) have left a lasting mark on the institution—literally so, as they're embedded into the building. In the attic, Richard Serra's steel-beam Untitled is sunk into the concrete; Alan Saret's The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple pierces through a wall. ... Read more →
MoMA PS1, New York
May 23–October 18, 2010
On the August day in 1944 that Charles de Gaulle headed a liberation parade through Paris, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: "We are drawing up a so-called 'list of the Divinely Gifted,' of about 300 to 400 truly outstanding artists, who will have an impact beyond their time, and ... Read more →
No other context I know places as much importance on exhibition architecture as today's Russia. The level of ambition is very high: walls and other complex structures are built and painted, carpets are laid, walkways are constructed, and the rooms are illuminated as in a theater performance. As a visitor, ... Read more →
—Reports
by Chris Fite-Wassilak
"No one / expects the violence of glances, of offices, / of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors," a woman states. I am standing in a dark basement, the small room filled out with the bulk of three identical black sculptures, something like oversized, stylized Us, that make up ... Read more →
Frieze, London / Hollybush Gardens, London / Pace Gallery, London / Arcadia Missa, London / Marian Goodman, London / Gagosian Gallery / Gasworks, London / Alison Jacques, London / Jhaveri Contemporary , Mumbai / Hua International, Berlin / Gianni Manhattan, Vienna
—Reports
by Tess Edmonson
My tour of Toronto's first Gallery Weekend started on a Saturday morning at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, where artist Andy Patton joined Petro in discussing a suite of new Carol Wainio paintings. In view of Wainio's fluffy, Rococo landscapes, Patton reminded a small audience that paint is essentially "just colored ... Read more →
Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto / Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto / Towards Gallery, Toronto / Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Toronto / Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto / Franz Kaka, Toronto / Erin Stump Projects, Toronto
—Reports
by Emily McDermott
Since the beginning of last year many artists have turned inward—or at least towards their immediate surroundings. Last week, during Berlin Art Week and Gallery Weekend Berlin's Discoveries edition, over 70 exhibitions (some long-delayed) opened in the city's galleries, institutions, project spaces, and private collections, featuring both established and emerging ... Read more →
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin / BQ, Berlin / Galerie Neu, Berlin / neugerriemschneider, Berlin / Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin / Klemm's, Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Berlin / Wentrup, Berlin
In June 2021 Urs Fischer exhibited "The Intelligence of Nature," a group of paintings made during a year when Fischer, like many, was forced to spend more time at home than normal. After artists' and curators' immediate—and sometimes kneejerk—responses to the Covid-19 outbreak have passed, and as we discover the ... Read more →
We take a short break over August. A time to catch our breath and, praise be, to see some shows. To help us and you to make the most of the summer we asked a few of our recent contributors to nominate the exhibitions that they are looking forward to ... Read more →
It would be impossible to think about London's first Gallery Weekend in early June outside the context of the slow re-emergence from lockdowns. I know this strange sensation is not unique, but the experience of a public disaster dealt with largely by isolating from society has also marked the way ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London / Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London / Emalin, London / Arcadia Missa, London / Lisson Gallery, London / Herald St, London / Carlos/Ishikawa, London / Sadie Coles HQ, London
During a recent project researching the history of nightclubs in Johannesburg, frustrated by the limitations of orthodox archives—newspapers, magazines, music books, biographies, Facebook groups—and the mythologizing of DJs and musicians, I turned to artists for additional insight. Where did they dance, I asked, and how, if at all, did these ... Read more →
—Reports
by Osman Can Yerebakan
Nostalgia was the prevailing feeling as I approached Frieze New York's new home at The Shed in Hudson Yards. I wasn't around when the piers were a queer hub of sex and solidarity, but I remember the East River breeze on the ferry to Randall's Island on previous visits to ... Read more →
—Reports
by Patrick Langley
London's galleries are open again. Exhibitions that were paused or postponed last fall have emerged from enforced hibernation into a cultural environment altered by six months of—well, not very much. To a quarantine-addled critic, this presents a quandary. One of the pleasures—and pitfalls—of writing about art is using it as ... Read more →
The Approach, London / Gagosian Gallery / Modern Art, London / Rodeo / Sadie Coles HQ, London
I'm not advocating tax fraud, and I'm not a lawyer. I'm just saying—whether you've put your stimmy checks in Bitcoin and become a millionaire, or are simply feeling the gravity of 1099 forms at tax time, or find NFTs baffling or exhausting—plain old-fashioned money-laundering is still a thing. That artworks ... Read more →
—Reports
by Oliver Basciano
By rights I shouldn't be writing this. I should be on the streets of São Paulo, beer in hand, as carnival rages around me. The bloco—street party—that passes under my window is a queer one. There would be a lot of kissing and not a lot of clothes. Instead, the ... Read more →
The art world has been grappling with social media ever since its potential beyond the purposes of keeping in touch with loved ones first became apparent. Its platforms allow individuals to communicate with audiences without the mediating power of institutions, or to mobilize groups behind a cause with the aim ... Read more →
It's tempting, when signing off on the past year, simply to bid good riddance to bad rubbish. But we wanted first to acknowledge those who have been cheated by 2020. To that end, we've asked some contributors whose work with us was disrupted—because the show they were commissioned to ... Read more →
—Reports
by Aaina Bhargava
A year and half has passed since the first protests arose in Hong Kong against the extradition bill which would have allowed for legal cases to be tried in mainland China. The advent of Covid-19 put a visible end to the citywide disturbances that have occurred since, allowing for a ... Read more →
Para Site / Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong / Fine Art Asia / Empty Gallery, Hong Kong / Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong / Lehmann Maupin, New York / Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong / Rossi & Rossi / de Sarthe Gallery
—Reports
by Anna Mirzayan
Earlier this month, the touring exhibition "Dawoud Bey: An American Project" arrived at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. This retrospective of the photographer's 45-year career—which opened in February at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will move next spring to New York's Whitney—features portraits and photographs from ... Read more →
In more ordinary times, the high season for Lagos's art scene runs through October and November. This year, as in other cities across the world, major events have been scaled back and directed towards a local audience, with an emphasis on smaller physical events and online presentations. But disruption in ... Read more →
Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Lagos / Museum of Contemporary Art Lagos, Lagos / kó Gallery, Lagos / Rele Art Gallery, Lagos / Omenka Gallery, Lagos / Art Twenty One, Lagos / hFactor, Lagos / Treehouse, Lagos / LagosPhoto Festival, Lagos / ART X Lagos, Lagos
I'm wondering what it would be like if the United States just let go. Like stopped uniting. Like stop opposing part to part, and a foot say Florida just relaxed shaking all those old bodies free and extended itself deeper into the water maybe nudging Cuba, not even entirely doing ... Read more →
—Reports
by Rachel Valinsky
Working in near-isolation in her Parisian bedroom-studio from the early 1970s until her death in 1981, the Alsatian artist Marcelle Cahn took an archive of old tourist postcards—the Eiffel Tower, a train station, a cathedral, a sleek white marble polar bear—and dappled them with shapes of varying sizes and colors. ... Read more →
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris / Air de Paris, Paris / Galerie Sultana, Paris / kamel mennour, Paris
—Reports
by Chris Fite-Wassilak
It's an unlikely benediction: two identical photos frame Dozie Kanu's exhibition "Owe Deed, One Deep" at Project Native Informant: a small, slightly blurred image of a tower with a hand at the top, reaching awkwardly towards the sky. Emo State (2020) seems to have been taken from a moving car, ... Read more →
Project Native Informant, London / White Cube, London / Sadie Coles HQ, London / Modern Art, London / Castor , London / Gossamer Fog, London / CUBITT
—Reports
by Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism explores the relationship between technology and identity. In this extract from her forthcoming book, she considers the work of Juliana Huxtable and Victoria Sin in the context of her proposal that the "glitch" is a means of renegotiating and subverting normative categories of sexuality, race, and ... Read more →
—Reports
by Jillian McManemin & Matthew Post
STATEMENT A – SAY HER NAME Rebeccah Blum was murdered last week. Her body was discovered in the apartment of a male artist. In the days after her death, tabloids and, later, some sections of the art press casually reported variations on the formula: "Brad Pitt's friend, male artist X, ... Read more →
—Reports
by Terence Trouillot
I didn't think I'd be this excited to go back to a gallery. In some ways, I've enjoyed experiencing art within the confines of my Brooklyn apartment over the past months, and I'm still excited by the possibilities arising from the advent of novel digital platforms. But this time away ... Read more →
Hauser & Wirth Institute, New York / Fridman Gallery, New York / Painting Center, New York / Bridget Donahue, New York / Petzel Gallery, New York
At first glance, the brick is a very simple thing. Perhaps the oldest building material still in use, bricks were made and sun-dried in hot climates as early as 7000 BCE; the fired brick with which we are familiar has been around since c. 3500 BCE. The brick's making is ... Read more →
The world is angry, the world is fearful. I am mobilized and (in part) optimistic. At times, I feel resentful. This is not new. I am not shocked. Over the course of a few days in early June, I scrolled through hundreds of quotes by Angela Davis, reading lists including ... Read more →
Every time I approach White Cube's gleaming south London base, I am reminded of a trope in science-fiction films: a professor of linguistics is whisked to a top-secret government facility, decontaminated, and introduced to an alien intelligence whose ominous burps she is tasked with translating. These daydreams are no doubt ... Read more →
White Cube, London / Hauser & Wirth, London / David Zwirner, London / Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London / Marian Goodman, London
When it comes to a work of art, what is the measure of time that matters? It's easy to point to where a work of art takes place: to the gallery in which it is installed, the place on a map where an earthwork is sited; even the extent of ... Read more →
What does it mean to be critical, subversive, nonconformist, and free during a global pandemic? Subversion and resistance are so entwined in the history of art and critical theory—partly justifiably, partly as empty heroics—that even calls for communal solidarity in a public health emergency risk seeming, from that perspective, conformist ... Read more →
Anxiety over contamination, contagion, and infiltration manifests in contemporary art as a genre of digital animations depicting uncannily corporeal human figures. A trio of videos by Kate Cooper—recently displayed in the New Museum, New York, as part of its "Screens Series" program—subjects a female-presenting character to a series of skin-deep ... Read more →
—Reports
by Rosanna Mclaughlin
"The photo booth provided a safe-space for queer culture," reads a text on the wall in the first room of Tate Modern's 2020 Andy Warhol retrospective. How times have changed. Ten years ago, the museum's exhibition "Pop Life: Art in a Material World" cast Warhol as business-bro godfather to Damian ... Read more →
—Reports
by Terence Trouillot
The title of Jim Ricks's painting, I'm So Bored with the U.S.A. (2019)—borrowed from the Clash song—might be taken as a comment on how pervasively Mexico City's Art Week has, in recent years, been dominated by the country's relationship with its northern neighbor. This teal-colored canvas, the text of its ... Read more →
Daniela Elbahara, Mexico City / Galería OMR, Mexico City / Material Art Fair / Salon Acme, Mexico City / Zona Maco, Mexico City / Qipo Art Fair, Mexico City / La Feria de la Acción, Mexico City / Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
—Reports
by Sabrina Tarasoff
"The Magic and Flair of Mary Blair," an exhibition of the Disney artist's dreamy, acid-laced concept pieces at the Hilbert Museum of California Art, burned to mind what freakish and caustic things fairytales can be. Best known for her work on Alice in Wonderland (1951), Blair's mutant gouaches drag you ... Read more →
Hilbert Museum of California Art, Los Angeles / Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles / O-Town House, Los Angeles / Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles / Reena Spaulings , Los Angeles
A citywide rally on December 8, 2019, marked six months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. 800,000 people attended—a tenth of the total population. When I arrived the following weekend, the streets were quiet. I wasn't there for the protests—I was there to see art. Yet I couldn't escape the ... Read more →
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong / Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong / Empty Gallery, Hong Kong / David Zwirner, Hong Kong / Pace, Hong Kong / Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong
—Reports
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
Many cities have adopted the gallery weekend format, and while there is a risk that this proliferation can lead to homogeneity, the particular strength and energy of Amsterdam Art Weekend lies in its steadfast commitment to art and artists, and to not limiting its remit to the commercial sector. Now ... Read more →
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam / Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam / Oude Kerk, Amsterdam / rongwrong, Amsterdam / Kunstverein, Amsterdam / De Appel, Amsterdam / GRIMM / Amsterdam Art Weekend, Amsterdam
In Camille Henrot's video Saturday (2017), presented at the Faena Festival as part of Miami Art Week, the artist zeroes in on the Seventh-day Adventist Church in cryptic yet hypnotic fashion. Images of church services, baptism ceremonies, and a backstage look at a TV prayer telethon service titled "Let's Pray!" ... Read more →
Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami / Miami Art Week, Miami / Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), Miami / Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami / PINTA MIAMI, Miami
—Reports
by Stefanie Hessler
A camera pans over a beach littered with driftwood. As the lens approaches a stack of branches arranged as if for a bonfire, a rocket-like screeching sound pierces the scene. An instant later, the wood goes up in flames. The image fades to a view of the artist Rebecca Belmore ... Read more →
MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Montréal / Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal / Darling Foundry, Montréal / The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal / Galerie de l'UQAM, Montréal
The most useful warning ever given to me while studying the Parisian avant-garde was "don't forget they were all sleeping with each other!" A vital reminder that modern art was not the product of a pure and original creative act, but rather the consequence of cross-pollination that occurred thanks to ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris / Centre d'art contemporain d'Ivry – le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine / Monnaie de Paris, Paris / Paris Internationale, Paris / Museé national de l'histoire de l'immigration, Paris / Jeu de Paume, Paris
—Reports
by Chris Fite-Wassilak
The world is burning. This is not a metaphor. The sky is bleached a searing lime green, tinged with burned orange that reflects off relentless choppy waves. Suddenly, the sky goes blood red and the horizon blackens, the sun a dull hole punched in the sky. Our view shifts, panning ... Read more →
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Tate Modern, London / Sadie Coles HQ, London / Sprüth Magers, London / Frieze, London / Goldsmith's Centre for Contemporary Art, London / Marian Goodman, London
—Reports
by Ingo Niermann
Next year, Art Basel turns 50, and animals are still not allowed. There's not even a "Pets Lounge," as there is for kids, even though the fair's premises are big enough to host a whole circus. Art Basel was founded in 1970, a year before Swiss women gained suffrage. Women ... Read more →
Often referred to as the chocolate capital of the world, it's said that no visit to Brussels is complete without a trip to one of the city's famous chocolate shops. In Hank Willis Thomas's exhibition "Donnez votre main" at Maruani Mercier, the American artist shows a new body of work ... Read more →
Maruani Mercier, Brussels / Xavier Hufkens, Brussels / Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels / La Loge , Brussels / dépendance, Brussels / Art Brussels, Brussels / WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Brussels
Hong Kong floats, at least according to Xi Xi's short story, "The Floating City." In this sensitive portrait of Hong Kong, the city has stabilized into myth, while its inhabitants have turned into a group of happily amnesiac petits bourgeois, desiring only for peaceful homes. After a few years of ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong / Hong Kong International Film Festival, Hong Kong / Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong / Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong / Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong / Para Site
Twenty-five years ago, a group of young dealers, including Pat Hearn, Colin de Land, and Matthew, Marks started the first contemporary art fair in New York at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Titled the Gramercy International Art Fair, it spanned floors 12, 14, and 15 (there is no 13, of course) ... Read more →
The Armory Show, New York / Independent Art Fair New York, New York / VOLTA / Team (gallery, inc.), New York / White Columns, New York / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York / Ryan Lee, New York / Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
A man wearing pajamas and a bathrobe clutches a branded coffee mug and ponders the distance through the drawn curtains of the Museo Jumex terrace gallery window, his graying eyebrows knitted in maudlin unease. This is Mike, artist Michael Smith's alter-ego who in the exhibition at Jumex, "Imagine the view ... Read more →
Museo Jumex, Mexico City / Zona Maco, Mexico City / Material Art Fair / Karen Huber Gallery, Mexico City / Salon Acme, Mexico City / Fundación Marso, Mexico City / Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City / Salón Silicón, Mexico City / Ladrón Galería, Mexico City
—Reports
by Christina Catherine Martinez
"This is a stupid town. It's lazy, it's polite, it's so sissy in its mentality, so go along with everything that goes along. It's corporate-owned, it's a town owned by Hollywood, and it's about time it grew up. It's about time that it took art and said come on baby, ... Read more →
O-Town House, Los Angeles / Now Instant, Los Angeles / Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Los Angeles / Hammer Museum, Los Angeles / Frieze LA, Los Angeles / Spring Break Art Fair / Art Los Angeles Contemporary
In early October, I went to Detroit for the first time. I was invited on a press trip by Culture Lab Detroit. Positioning itself as a socially conscious arts organization, its annual conference hosts discussions at different sites throughout the city. This year's summit was dubbed "The Crisis of Beauty," ... Read more →
Culture Lab Detroit, Detroit / Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum, Detroit / Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, Detroit
—Reports
by Lauren Mackler
Stamina This is by no means comprehensive, so I'll get my highlights out of the way. Rounding down, and starting with the experiential: I found the hunt for the various venues of Avant-Première compelling. This casually organized event was comprised of small Parisian galleries and emerging ventures opening their shows ... Read more →
Avant-Première, Paris / FIAC, Paris / Centre culturel suisse, Paris, Paris / Centre Pompidou / kamel mennour, Paris / Paris Internationale, Paris / Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, Paris
—Reports
by Mariana Cánepa Luna
Just as Frieze Art Fair opened last Wednesday, Prime Minister Theresa May gave her keynote speech—and dared to dance again—at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. She announced that freedom of movement would be terminated "once and for all" by limiting access to "highly skilled workers" (in short, migrants earning ... Read more →
Frieze, London / Tate Modern, London / Goldsmith's Centre for Contemporary Art, London / South London Gallery, London / Tate Britain, London / Whitechapel Gallery, London / Sprüth Magers, London
The Tribune Tower in Chicago's Downtown, home to the Chicago Tribune until a few months ago—it is being converted to luxury apartments—includes a collection of stones from famous buildings around the world embedded into its exterior. The newspaper's journalists on assignment brought these stones back from Notre Dame and the ... Read more →
Art Institute of Chicago / Kavi Gupta, Chicago / Graham Foundation, Chicago / EXPO CHICAGO, Chicago / Aspect/Ratio, Chicago
This Art Basel Roundup comes fresh on the heels of a visit to the opening of the 10th Berlin Biennale. This is significant because, whatever you might say about the current edition, it was conspicuously and refreshingly non-white and non-Western-European centric. As a white-dude viewer, I felt, perhaps for the ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel / Liste, Basel / Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel / Kunsthalle Basel, Basel / Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Münchenstein
—Reports
by Patrick Langley
En route to Helsinki this February, as the plane dropped through patchy cloud on its descent to the Finnish capital, I peered through the window at the country's south coast. Instead of a clean line demarcating land from sea, there was a fragmentary confusion of dark islands set amid wastes ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki / Galleria Sinne, Helsinki / SIC, Helsinki
Walking home at night, I pass by Campaign (1972), a two-channel video installation by Ferdinand Kriwet projected onto the storefront windows of Georg Kargl Fine Arts. In the dark street, the images of television footage from the 1972 US presidential campaign fronting Richard Nixon and George McGovern are silent; at ... Read more →
Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna / curated by_vienna, Vienna / Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna / 21er Haus, Vienna / MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Vienna / Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna / Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna / Secession, Vienna
The wide eyes and open mouth of a child are a reminder that, even at art fairs, there is still space for the occasional moment of wonder. The girl has good taste: she's enthralled by Endless (2012), a sculpture by Claire Morgan at the FIAC booth of Galerie Karsten Greve. ... Read more →
FIAC, Paris / Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris / Galerie Karsten Greve / ASIA NOW – Paris Asian Art Fair, Paris / Paris Internationale, Paris / Palais de Tokyo, Paris
"1866 - TO CULTIVATE YOUR LAND IS TO SERVE YOUR COUNTRY - 2017." This is the phrase that appears on a billboard above the bleachers at the central courtyard of La Rural fair and congress center, a neuralgic space of Argentine agricultural policy with deep symbolic and affective roots. On May ... Read more →
As I missed out on international art events this season because New York is so far away, all I could think of was how unlucky their curators are. You work on Venice or Documenta for a year or two or four. You start out researching when there's a somewhat liberal ... Read more →
Metro Pictures, New York / Reena Spaulings, New York / Foxy Production, New York / Chapter NY , New York / New Museum, New York / David Zwirner, New York / P!, New York
I've often found myself wondering whether it would really be such a radical gesture to show a majority of work by women without bracketing it as women's work. What would it be like to experience a city filled with exhibitions that weren't reinforcing the patriarchal tendencies of the art world? In ... Read more →
Garúa, Lima / 80M2 Livia Benavides, Lima / Revolver Galeria / Proyecto AMIL, Lima
In 2015, Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared that the financial crisis, which began when global markets collapsed in 2008, was over, but that its legacy still endured. When recession hits, luxury goods dealers are among the first to panic, and the art market is no exception; luckily for Spain, ... Read more →
Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, Madrid
—Reports
by Matthew Evans
Berlin affluence is an oxymoron that might describe something in the big gap between pilsner and champagne, or pork schnitzel and sous-vide. Events like Berlin Art Week and its commercial fair abc art berlin contemporary have been pushing the German capital onto the national and international buyers' tour for nine ... Read more →
Berlin Art Week, Berlin / ABC Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin / Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin / Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin / Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin / ACUD gallery, Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Berlin
—Reports
by Jeanne Gerrity
The opening of a temporary exhibition space co-hosted by Andrew Kreps and Anton Kern, at a new gallery complex called Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco's Dogpatch district, was timed to correspond with the arrival of the international art world elite to fête SFMOMA. These openings and reopenings come at ... Read more →
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco / CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco / KADIST, San Francisco / San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco / Gagosian Gallery / Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco / Et al. etc, San Francisco / FraenkelLab / Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco / The David Ireland House, San Francisco
Brussels, still reeling from the ISIS nail-bomb attacks at Zaventem Airport and Maalbeek metro station in March, was raw and rough around the edges when the time for its scheduled art fairs arrived—the more traditional Art Brussels and the progressive New York transplant Independent. Needless to say, cautionary sentiments preceded ... Read more →
Art Brussels, Brussels / Independent Brussels / BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels / WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Brussels / Galerie Rodolphe Janssen / La Loge , Brussels / Waldburger Wouters, Brussels / Clearing, Brussels
When Claus Föttinger installed his Bar 60/99-16 (2016) in the booth of Düsseldorf's Van Horn Gallery at Art Cologne, Rhinelanders did what they are said to do best and partied, using the installation as an actual bar. Yet what might have been expected to be the biggest celebration—the opening of ... Read more →
Art Cologne / Art Brussels, Brussels / Gallery Weekend Berlin / Frieze New York, New York
Despite this year's Art Basel Hong Kong taking place over the coldest and wettest Easter experienced in Hong Kong since 1978, the buffeting winds and rain did little to deter the audience from exploring beyond the confines of the Convention Center. Rather, the weather provided a common topic of commiseration ... Read more →
Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong / Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong / 100 ft. Park, Hong Kong / Things that can happen, Hong Kong
The inaugural edition of ARCO Lisbon (May 26–29, 2016) was announced to the world on the same day that an anti-austerity alliance in Portugal's parliament passed a vote to dissolve its center-right government. On the day that journalists came to preview the venue at which the fair would be held, ... Read more →
ARCOlisboa, Lisbon / Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon / Galeria Ze Dos Bois, Zdb
—Reports
by Barbara Casavecchia
A man goes back and forth, slowly, silently, carefully balancing framed paintings and works on paper. He transports them from a pile perched atop a canyon to a Mondrianesque storage grid positioned on another peak nearby. From beginning to end, he walks on a tightrope. Shot against the spectacular background ... Read more →
Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art / Riga Art Space / Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga / 427, Riga / Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Riga
It was difficult, having recently attended the opening of an art fair, to dispute Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's assertion that "we live in the age of oligarchs." The newly appointed director of two of Turin's most celebrated arts institutions told me, as we meandered through the halfway re-hung galleries of the Castello ... Read more →
Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art , Rivoli / Artissima, Turin / Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Turin / Fondazione Merz, Turin / Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin / Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Turin
—Reports
by Melissa Gronlund
On November 17, Abu Dhabi Art opened to its VIPs: an event so popular authorities had to redirect traffic off the highway to a new exit. Now in its seventh year under this name, the art fair of the United Arab Emirates' capital city hosts a smattering of blue-chip galleries—Lisson, ... Read more →
Abu Dhabi Art, Abu Dhabi / Art Dubai / Farjam Foundation, Dubai / Warehouse421 / Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
—Reports
by Claire Moulène
Emancipation. Such could be the keyword of this FIAC week in Paris. Since its 2003 takeover by the duo Martin Béthenod and Jennifer Flay (and then by the latter, on her own), the grand old lady that is FIAC has regained the golden splendor of the Grand Palais and the ... Read more →
Paris Internationale, Paris / FIAC, Paris
In an art fair week, when it seems like everyone around is constantly discussing where they were, what they saw, and how it was, discourse is dependent on physical participation, on the encounter with art in a space, strengthening the primacy of the exhibition as a mode of experiencing artwork. ... Read more →
Chisenhale Gallery, London / Serpentine, London / Pilar Corrias, London / Frith Street Gallery, London / Maureen Paley, London / Carlos/Ishikawa, London / Robilant+Voena / David Zwirner, London / Frieze, London / Wilkinson Gallery / CUBITT
—Reports
by Barbara Casavecchia
Gold (2004), performed by Alexandra Bachzetsis at the Natural History Museum on the opening night of Parcours, said it all: she entered the room wearing stilettos and a tiny, shiny golden bikini, her body covered in oil like a wrestler. She turned a camera on and started dancing in front ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel / Theater Basel / Swiss Art Awards, Basel / Liste, Basel / Kunsthalle Basel, Basel / Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Münchenstein / Der TANK, Basel / Musée Tinguely, Basel / SALTS, Basel
—Reports
by Kareem Estefan
From houses scorched to the earth in Breezy Point, Queens, to homes completely swept away in Staten Island, when it came ashore late last month Hurricane Sandy wreaked unprecedented havoc on life as we know it in New York City. The storm cut off power for nearly a million New ... Read more →
Printed Matter, Inc. / Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York / David Zwirner, New York / The Kitchen, New York / Postmasters
—Reports
by Laura McLean-Ferris
Jeff Koons's giant blue egg sculpture—that outlandishly chatoyant and seductive object—looks as though it could have landed from another planet or another time. Its cracked top serves as a reminder of the way that Koons created a fundamental fracture within art history with his compelling work, and I was reminded ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel / Fondation Beyeler / Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
—Reports
by Vivian Sky Rehberg
One hears a lot of grumbling about Art Basel. Or maybe it's just the leftist company I keep. Still, I was surprised to meet more than a few people who had travelled all the way to Basel for reasons peripherally related to the fair but who had refused to step ... Read more →
Art Basel, Basel / Kunsthalle Basel, Basel / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
In a recent writing workshop, this editor was asked whether critics should be "objective" or "subjective" in their approach. For all that it was baldly stated, the problem is both delicate and perennial. How is it possible to say of a particular work of art that it is good or ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
There has been much talk over the past year of the advent of a "new normal," and with it a pressure to identify its characteristics. How should we define the changing conditions under which we are now living? How should they be reflected in our cultural production, and to what ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Regular readers of this column will have noticed a change in the image accompanying it. Where these letters were previously introduced by a few lines snatched from books the editors happened to have on their shelves, this one is paired with a view of London from the desk of artist ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
There is a saying in French, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." It translates, roughly, as "don't open your editorials with a quotation in French, if you want anyone to read them." As such, it is among those critical principles that endure through even the most dramatic changes ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Karen Barad describes a 1922 experiment that changed the course of quantum physics. Stay with us here. Rather than get into the details of what Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach were investigating—our grasp on space quantization is loose—we'll merely highlight that their attempts to ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Last Friday, security guards prevented a group of protestors from entering New York's Museum of Modern Art. The action was organized as part of the artist-led "Strike MoMA" campaign, which calls for a radical reappraisal of the institution's funding model so that "something else can emerge, something under the control ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Prior to writing this I conducted a straw poll among the editorial team: was it really necessary to talk about NFTs in this month's letter? The answer, sadly for me—and for you, if you are as bored as I am by both the pearl-clutching and the burn-it-all-down triumphalism—was a unanimous ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
In a first for art-agenda, this month we publish a review of an exhibition in Berlin through which a writer at home in London was walked by camera-wielding curators. During lockdown, needs must. In the past year, the editors have projected live streams of socially distanced performances from empty theaters ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Can you hear me? Literally, I mean. Is there a voice in your head, sounding out these words? Stop, if you can spare a moment, and reread this sentence. I did, and now I find myself whispering these words as I type them, a murmuring libretto over the tap of ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Happy new year. It can't be as bad as the last one, as everyone keeps telling us, apparently unaware that fate shouldn't be tempted. We're equally suspicious of statements to the effect that the coming year represents a fresh start, a blank slate, or a new frontier to be conquered. ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
This is the season in which editors round up the year's highlights, string them together, and tell you what they mean. The last of the institutional shows have opened, Miami Beach marks the final stop on the art fair caravan, and so the time arrives to make sense of what ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Where art and literature once satisfied our search for meaning, wrote Don DeLillo, "now we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe." This was back in 1991, it's worth clarifying, but the point stands. Disasters need not even be real to meet our emotional needs, he ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
There is a temptation, when writing these letters, to put forward a hot take on the morning's news. This is especially the case when the US president announces that he has contracted a potentially fatal virus on the eve of a tinderbox election. That you will already have been bombarded ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
The Yokohama Triennale, according to its artistic director Raqs Media Collective, would this year illuminate the "forces that flow […] between the microcosm of singular lives [and] the connected life of the planet." Which is a laudable aim, even if the curators were beaten to the punch by the flow ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
The first principle of art criticism is to see what's right in front of your eyes. This is harder than it sounds. What we know—or think we know—comes to dictate what we see. And you don't have to look too hard, in the current climate, to find examples of those ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
Samuel Beckett's exhortation to "try again," "fail again," and "fail better" might be familiar to readers of cultural criticism—to the extent that the quote is barred from this publication—but you don't often hear it on CNN. Yet there it was at the weekend, as Cornel West eloquently anatomized the historic ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
The ongoing crisis has prompted the circulation of factoids which are intended to galvanize but can have the opposite effect. No writer will ever again need to be reminded, for instance, that William Shakespeare composed King Lear (1606) while sitting out an outbreak of the plague, nor will they want ... Read more →
—Editors' Letter
by The Editors
So, what are we to call "these times"? In recent weeks the editors of art-agenda have received scores of emails declaring them to be "difficult," "testing," "precarious," "strange," "unprecedented," "dark," "challenging," even "unimaginable." "There is no denying that times are tough," reads the opportunistic message from a website builder (discount ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Jacolby Satterwhite & Travis Diehl
The first thing Jacolby Satterwhite showed me when I visited his apartment in Brooklyn was his painting studio. Leaning on walls and furniture and easels were a dozen canvases in various states, some based on family snapshots, others scenes from the mind-bent digital worlds for which he's known. On the ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Sophia Al-Maria & Tosh Basco
Like a lot of Tosh Basco's work, the images I'm looking at on my phone seem to evade capture and demand physical presence. The other day Tosh sent me this fleet of photos documenting the series of new drawings that make up the current exhibition "Angels, Hand Dances and Prayers" ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Xin Liu & Xin Wang
During the prolonged lockdown that defined much of 2020, the Xinjiang-born, New York-based artist and engineer Xin Liu juggled multiple roles. These included participating in a volunteering network that supplied PPE to medical workers in dire need of protection against Covid-19; designing an indie game, Sleepwalk (2020), which reflected on ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Brook Andrew & Pablo José Ramírez
Across his practice as an artist and a curator, Brook Andrew develops kinship with non-western cultures rooted in an intersectional understanding of indigeneity. Andrew is of Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry and was, this year, the first Indigenous artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney since the exhibition's inception in 1973. ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Tomás Saraceno & Erik Morse
The Argentine artist-theoretician Tomás Saraceno works at the nexus of nineteenth-century aeronautics, utopian urbanism, and synergetic cosmography. Although inspired in part by writers like Jules Verne, Paul Scheerbart, and Jorge Luis Borges, Saraceno's hybrid oeuvre is perhaps most indebted to Archigram co-founder and "blobitect" Peter Cook, under whom he studied, ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Xin Wang & Lu Yang
The practice of Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang is best characterized as a continuous project of world-building. His videos, computer games, and digital avatars combine a distinctive repertoire of intellectual traditions and cultural references: Buddhist and Hindu cosmology (as touched on in the 2015 video Moving Gods, exhibited in the China ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Johanna Hedva & Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer and artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin whose interdisciplinary practice traverses mysticism, music, and astrology, and the politics of illness, disability, and gender. They have relocated ancient Greek dramas to a feminized and queered contemporary context, and staged doom metal concerts informed by ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Vivian Sky Rehberg & Maria Lind
I first met the curator, critic, and educator Maria Lind in the early 2000s, while I was working as a curator at the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris and she was the director of the Kunstverein München. We have kept in touch since that time, and my annual visits to ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Ella Kruglyanskaya & Rachael Allen
Ella Kruglyanskaya's "This is a Robbery" reopened at Thomas Dane this week, having migrated to the gallery's website when Covid-19 hit London in March. The transition from a physical to an online exhibition space heightened the intimacy of works—paintings in egg tempera or oil on canvas alongside smaller compositions on ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Xin Wang & Jakob Kudsk Steensen
I spoke with the artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen from our respective quarantines—me in New York City and Steensen in the south of France, where he was working on a virtual landscape during a residency with the Luma Foundation in Arles. This new project—based on the artist's detailed studies of the ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Natasha Marie Llorens & Antonio Bermúdez Obregón
Antonio Bermúdez Obregón is an artist and architect whose work is about the ways in which representations of nature are shaped by a desire to manage it and contain its threat. We met over the course of our respective residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and I ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Irena Haiduk & Hendrik Folkerts
At the heart of Irena Haiduk's recent exhibition "REMASTER" was a question: How can we remake the world using its existing infrastructures? Across the two floors of Swiss Institute in New York, the writer and artist staged scenes taken from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita. As in ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Frida Sandström
In 1939, the German artist Hans Tombrock (1895–1966) inscribed the words of his contemporary Bertolt Brecht's 1935 poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" onto a wooden board. Both in exile from the Nazis, Brecht and Tombrock met in Stockholm earlier in 1939. They collaborated on several works and developed ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Filipa Ramos & Morgan Quaintance
In curating "Letter from Istanbul" at Pi Artworks, London, Morgan Quaintance combined multiple approaches to examine the cultural, social, and political life of Istanbul. He expanded the format of the exhibition to open a direct dialogue between artworks and diverse materials and documents, while also including radio broadcasts and a ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Maria Lind
(Libretto Adapted by Pamela Carter) Cast Maria Lind — Mezzo-Soprano Goldin — Tenor Senneby — Baritone Security Manager — Soprano Staff and Visitors — Chorus Elephant — Non-singing Scene The lobby of the Financial Supervisory Authority, Stockholm. 3 p.m., November 23, 2016. Artists Goldin and Senneby are waiting for curator Maria Lind, with whom ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet
In November 2009, Isabelle Alfonsi and Cécilia Becanovic brought Marcelle Alix into the world. Located since then in the multiethnic neighborhood of Belleville, in the northeast of Paris, Marcelle Alix expresses its dual nature through its title, constituted by two French female forenames, Marcelle and Alix, neither of which corresponds ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Colin Perry
Outside the Frieze Art Fair's tented metropolis in Regent's Park, London's more permanent gallery spaces this week offered countless illuminated or screen-based spectacles. I was transported, more than once, into other worlds: dizzying screen-spaces in which gender, geography, and time blur and fracture. This was all the more pronounced because, ... Read more →
—Conversations
by Laura McLean-Ferris
This spring, two interconnected exhibitions with the same title, "The Magic of the State," were on view in London, at venerable commercial space Lisson Gallery (March 27–May 4) and in Cairo, at the fledgling not-for-profit space Beirut (March 3–April 6). Both shows featured the same list of artists—Ryan Gander, Goldin+Senneby, ... Read more →
From the colonial origins of modern science up to today's decolonial reckoning, art's relationship with botany has been complex and contested. Since the seventeenth century, botany has played a vital role in how we understand, attend to, and live within the world of plants. But as an instrumental science it ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Frances Whorrall-Campbell
Achille Mbembe describes the archive as a "cemetery": a burial ground in which "fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred." Opening up Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's Resurrection Lands (2020)—an online game and speculative digital archive of Black trans experience—I am reminded of this description. Aside from the obvious conceptual resonance ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Kimberly Bradley
In his 1931 essay "Unpacking my Library," Walter Benjamin describes unboxing his collection of books in a single day, working without stop from noon until past midnight. Months after moving house on the first day of Berlin's lockdown, I'm still working on mine; my books are, as Benjamin would say, ... Read more →
In these days of confinement, I've turned to classical Hollywood for comfort. Revisiting Ernst Lubitsch's sublime Design for Living (1933), I came across a line worth noting down: "Delicacy, as the philosophers point out, is the banana peel under the feet of truth." If that is so, eager to avoid ... Read more →
In June 2016, a few days after Britain's EU referendum, I met up with a group of old school friends in Grantchester Meadows, a beauty spot outside Cambridge, England, the city where I lived from my early childhood until I left for university in 1996. Picnicking in this shimmering green ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Barbara Casavecchia
I am not working, so I'm working out. Crunch and plank, back and forth. I do it next to my desk, on the ragged carpet brought back from Morocco decades ago, immersed in the most familiar of interior landscapes. When I was in elementary school, an unspeakable fear of ... Read more →
With every email I receive about new digital programs from museums, galleries, and other art institutions around the world, I feel more conflicted. My sympathy for these institutions, which had little warning before they had to shutter their doors and are now trying to recreate their program online, often for ... Read more →
Imagine a curated overview of contemporary art from the United States titled "Before and After the Vietnam War." Imagine the case not as a new direction for explorative scholarship but as the perpetuating, defining framework, over and over again. "Before and After Tiananmen," Gallery 207 in the 2019 rehang of ... Read more →
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
The demise of film in its previous modes of production and projection has led to the selective canonization of major filmmakers as artists meriting solo exhibitions in museum spaces. In response, curators have resorted to increasingly ingenious strategies to adapt the medium to the contemporary museum's infrastructural and institutional conditions. ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Patrick J. Reed
Severed ears make for convenient plot points—they signal instant mystery. An example: To whom did the pair of ears in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) once belong, and what in the actual hell are they now? Yoked by an arrow and sandwiching a blade, this pictorial element of ... Read more →
—Spaces
by James Voorhies
On a late November Saturday morning in Tensta, a suburb 10 miles northwest of downtown Stockholm, a double-decker bus idled in the plaza of a shopping mall. People stood around drinking coffee and chatting. A woman wearing glasses and a hijab informed them in Arabic to board because the bus ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Natasha Marie Llorens
The main floor of the Musée du quai Branly, inaugurated in 2006, is structured with thick, earth-toned walls. Like the walls of homes one would imagine in villages where an ambient heat requires two feet of earth to maintain the cool of the interior. I run my fingers along one ... Read more →
The latest installment of Spaces considers the history of displaying contemporary art in shipping containers. In August 2016, as global logistics firms slumped toward overcapacity, South Korean shipping giant Hanjin went conspicuously belly up. Over 80 of their cargo ships were suddenly turned away from ports around the world, while ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Leigh Markopoulos
Leigh Markopoulos's Spaces feature, dedicated to "The Historical Gallery," appears here in its original draft. The editorial process was interrupted by Leigh's sudden death, which left her words, alongside all her future projects, forever suspended. Those who had the privilege of knowing Leigh will recognize the tone of her voice ... Read more →
The latest feature of Spaces considers the Experimental Education Protocol on the Greek island of Nisyros as a mode to consider an alternative pedagogical case study. A manifesto published on the occasion of the Experimental Education Protocol, a meeting of artists and sympathizers on a volcanic Dodecanese island in the ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Amanda Lee Koe
They had been to an opening. Now they were driving around the island with no aim, he had a fast car. He put the roof down and her hair whipped about her face and neck and shoulders, she was curious to see how long it would take for him to put ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Barbara Sirieix
The fourth feature of Spaces goes underground. There is a popular conspiracy theory, supported by shady photographs, that the Earth is hollow. The idea traces back through various ancient mythologies to modern times, when visionaries such as John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and Marshall Gardner elaborated speculative hypotheses about the content ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Dimitris Politakis
You had to be there, I guess. To feel the strange vibes of the re-inhabited derelict neoclassical building, evoking faded grandeur and post-industrial urban decay, from the point of entrance and up the old staircase that leads to the rooms, the corridor, and the terraces. To sense the urgency of ... Read more →
In recent months, two film works from 1976 made their belated débuts on the art market, retroactively issued in limited editions. Last June, London's Thomas Dane Gallery showed the meticulous restoration of Bruce Conner's Crossroads, while in September, New York's Greene Naftali exhibited Paul Sharits's Dream Displacement, also recently restored. ... Read more →
—Spaces
by Jonathan Griffin
In the first feature in art-agenda's Spaces series, Chris Sharp enumerated the various species of apartment gallery, a family of spaces that he described as having evolved in contradistinction to the white cube. Sharp's analysis was made largely along architectural—and thus stylistic and perceptual—lines. Wainscoting, paneling, and cabinetry are all ... Read more →
The first feature of Spaces proposes a taxonomy of four phyla to classify the apartment gallery. Any reflection on an exhibition space alternative to the white cube would seem to imply some kind of critique of the latter. But this, at least for me, is not necessarily the case. At ... Read more →
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art history by returning to an influential exhibition, artwork, or text from the recent past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. To coincide with Erik Morse's essay on Tacita Dean's Fernsehturm, Marian Goodman Gallery is hosting a special online screening ... Read more →
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art history by returning to an influential exhibition, work, or text from the past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. In this edition, Wendy Vogel considers how the 2007 touring exhibition "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" marked a generational ... Read more →
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles / MoMA PS1, New York
—Rearview
by Kevin Brazil
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art criticism by drawing readers' attention to an influential text from the past and reflecting on its implications in the present. In this edition, Kevin Brazil introduces an essay by Boris Groys first published in e-flux journal. I was no comrade in ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Ania Szremski
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art criticism by drawing readers' attention to an influential text from the past and reflecting on its implications in the present. In this edition, Ania Szremski introduces an essay by Raqs Media Collective first published in e-flux journal. In their 2014 essay ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Astrid Mania
In the wing mirror on the passenger side of a vehicle, objects are closer than they appear. The texts republished in the Rearview series are those that we wish to draw attention to because they reveal certain "blind spots" in contemporary art criticism. These "found" documents (indeed, quasi-artifacts) are prefaced ... Read more →
This is the second part of Gary Indiana's "Janet Malcolm Gets It Wrong—Part II" (1986). See the first part here . Between 1985 and 1988, early in his career as transgressive downtown playwright, director, and actor, and before he became known for his true-crime novels, Gary Indiana wrote art criticism for ... Read more →
For three years early in his career, Gary Indiana—"toxic downtown savant" and novelist—was an art critic for The Village Voice. Born in New Hampshire and schooled at UC Berkeley, Indiana has written, directed, and acted in off-off-Broadway plays produced in such places as the Mudd Club and in experimental films. ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Leigh Markopoulos
The American art historian and critic Dore Ashton, who recently died at the age of 88, began her lifelong career as an art writer in the years after World War II. From 1955, as the New York Times associate art critic, she made her mark as a proponent of Abstract ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Felix Gonzalez-Torres
A dialogue made of gold: such was the conversation between artists Roni Horn and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, initiated in the early 1990s and only interrupted due to Gonzalez-Torres's death in 1996. It all started on a spring afternoon in 1990, when Gonzalez-Torres, along with his partner Ross Laycock, visited Horn's solo ... Read more →
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
—Rearview
by Tara McDowell
From our contemporary vantage point, is there anything—whether philosophical inquiry or historical phenomenon—more anachronistic than postmodernism? Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition in French in 1979, but the intervening three-and-a-half decades cover a period we now call "the contemporary," even as the label struggles with each passing year to contain ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Clement Greenberg & Antek Walczak
Friday in the Kali Yuga: Clement Greenberg and Bertolt Brecht There's a strong whiff of Abrahamic eschatology around all the web-geekery and folkloric appeal of Friday December 21, 2012. A single day of reckoning to put in your iCal, when the Messiah shows his cards. But like a ramped-up lottery pushing ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Peter Plagens & Tyler Coburn
A year since first reading this review, in the arts library of the author's alma mater, I remain utterly bewildered by its impassioned, personal rhetoric. Peter Plagens speaks with a proprietary and intimate knowledge of Los Angeles that neither reduces his role to that of regional gatekeeper, nor lapses into ... Read more →
—Rearview
by Jill Johnston & Media Farzin
The critic, Jill Johnston once archly observed, is "one who practices the ART of criticism." Johnston honed her skills through deep immersion in the New York scene of the 1960s, as a dance critic and later columnist for the Village Voice, and subsequently as a contributor to Art News, ... Read more →
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
—Rearview
by Robert Smithson & April Lamm
After stumbling across Robert Smithson's vituperative response to a show that took place in 1966 at the Armory, I had to wonder what exactly it was that he saw. "Bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures"? His focus on the "funeral of technology" made me imagine that he'd ... Read more →
69th Regiment Armory, New York
Simone Forti has been dancing the news for four decades. Prior to the death of her father in the early 1980s, the Fluxus artist was more likely to be found reinventing the possibilities of dance in New York or exploring the limits of consciousness in Woodstock than engaging in the ... Read more →
Centro Pecci / Nero Editions
In the late 1980s, when borders were collapsing and capital was carving new channels in which to flow, Cady Noland was producing an art of blockages and impediments. She famously made walls of Budweiser beer cans and created barriers with bars, metal pipes, and sculptures resembling stockades. Where movement was ... Read more →
—Books
by Megan N. Liberty
During the lockdowns, Teju Cole turned to cooking. From September 28 to November 3, 2020 (the date of the US presidential election), Cole's kitchen became his photographic subject. But instead of documenting elaborate freshly plated meals, Cole's images show the juxtaposing edges of pots and pans, cutting boards, and dirty ... Read more →
Greenwashing, as defined by architect and writer Luke Jones in his contribution to Non-Extractive Architecture, Volume 1, is the "shallow or cynical deployment of faux-ecological imagery" considered in contrast to "green authenticity." Edited by Italian architecture and research studio Space Caviar, this sleek collection of astute texts accompanies an exhibition, ... Read more →
V-A-C Foundation and Sternberg
Who really thinks museums are politically neutral? Find these people, and you will have found the audience for Laura Raicovich's new book on the tensions between social movements and museum politics. In 2018, Raicovich resigned as director of the Queens Museum over pushback against her expressions of solidarity with immigrant ... Read more →
An anti-ligature room is a room that contains nothing around which a rope or cord can be tied. Designed to house people considered at risk from suicide, it provides the title, and a guiding metaphor for the state of contemporary culture, for a collection of texts by "Contemporary Art Writing ... Read more →
"A self-portrait," writes Jennifer Higgie in her delightful history of women artists' work within the genre, "isn't simply a rendering of an artist's external appearance: it's also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world." ... Read more →
Simon & Schuster / Weidenfeld & Nicolson
General Motors opened its Lordstown plant in 1966. Built on Ohio farmland purchased a decade earlier, the facility assembled Chevy's full-sized vehicles, democratized luxury items with names to match: Impala, Bel Air, Caprice. In 1971 production at Lordstown—one of GM's most technically advanced facilities—was shifted to the compact Chevy Vega. ... Read more →
University of Chicago Press
In 1985, the book artist and future scholar of print and digital aesthetics Johanna Drucker was working on a chapter of her dissertation on Futurist and Dadaist typography in the Bibilothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. Sitting across from her was a fellow American researcher, flipping through a "marvelous" deluxe edition ... Read more →
Johns Hopkins University Press
One of the many ways that I ameliorated my lockdown boredom was to watch David Attenborough's new Netflix show Our Planet. Each episode begins with a shot of an "Earthrise"—our planet emerging into view as if we were standing on the moon—while the nation's favorite grandfather intones a warning about ... Read more →
MIT Press / ZKM | Center for Art and Media , Karlsruhe
—Books
by Jens Maier-Rothe
Earlier this summer Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt launched a multi-part tribute to Umashankar Manthravadi, a Madras-born journalist, poet, and pioneer of acoustic archaeology. "A Slightly Curving Place," an exhibition curated by Nida Ghouse, ran from July to September and featured audio and video installations inspired by Manthravadi's work; ... Read more →
—Books
by Rosanna Mclaughlin
Abstract painting has spent much of the past decade in the doghouse. Not only has it been usurped by figurative painting, the genre du jour of a time defined by identity politics and visual representation, it has also been tarnished by its association with Zombie Formalism, gaining a reputation (often ... Read more →
Desertion is a compelling and complex political strategy. It is the opposite of joining—which is a precondition for political action almost by definition—and it signals more than simply dropping out or quietly withdrawing. Desertion implies active enlistment—voluntary or involuntary—and thus describes either a process of disillusionment or a breaking point. ... Read more →
During the lockdown, I found solace in books that took me to places beyond my reach. I visited the atemporal lands of the Kesh civilization, brought to life by Ursula K. Le Guin in Always Coming Home (1985); I discovered the outlandish urban bestiary of Shaun Tan's Tales from the ... Read more →
Fitzcarraldo Editions / New Directions
Though she is best known today for her poetry, Bernadette Mayer's 1972 exhibition of her durational writing-and-photography project Memory at 98 Greene Street in New York was highly influential: the young Kathy Acker, for one, began a feverish correspondence with her after her immersion in its images and voice. In ... Read more →
What would a photographed utopia look like? While the origins of photography coincided with the birth of various nineteenth-century utopian schemes, human society has never seemed further from realizing them, in part due to developments in technology—including the production and distribution of images—that seek to solidify social surveillance and control. ... Read more →
For the title of this collection of criticism spanning the past fifteen years, Hal Foster evokes Marx's famous evocation of Hegel: the observation that "all great world-historic facts and personages" appear first as tragedy, then as farce. For Foster the revelation, after 9/11, that many Americans will accept the "trashing ... Read more →
—Meta
by Fernanda Brenner
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. Here, Fernanda Brenner considers how questions of intimacy, digital mediation, and "unlearning habits" influenced her response to the work of Sarah Tritz. My old drama teacher ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. Here, Sylvie Fortin explores ideas of hospitality, surrogacy, and profit, and considers how the pandemic has shaped her response to the work of Jean-Charles de Quillacq. ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. Here, Jesi Khadivi considers how external circumstances—from our ongoing "state of exception" to the unpredictable sleeping patterns of infant children—changed the way she related to, and ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. In this edition, art-agenda's editor-in-chief talks to Julie Béna, whose work in installation, film, and performance makes use of such literary devices as absurdist humor, destablizing ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Saul Anton draws on Charles Baudelaire and Rosalind E. Krauss in reconsidering "Giving Space, Sculpting Time," his essay on the work of Guillaume ... Read more →
—Meta
by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Elizabeth A. Povinelli writes of her relationship to language and considers how her essay on the work of Julien Creuzet, "In the Middle ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Chris Sharp considers the difficulties he encountered in responding to Jean-Charles Hue's films for his essay " Witness on the Threshold ." It took me ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Martin Herbert considers the processes that shaped his monographic essay on Hubert Duprat's work, "Bothness." My trip to the South of France, in ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Christina Li considers the processes that shaped her monographic essay on Neïl Beloufa's work, "Universes Undone." During a visit to Neïl Beloufa's solo ... Read more →
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Sarah Rifky looks back on her monographic essay on Kapwani Kiwanga's work " Perfect Fit ." Saint Louis I started writing "Perfect Fit" in ... Read more →
—Meta
by Andrew Berardini
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Andrew Berardini expands on his monographic essay on Mélanie Matranga's work " A Worn T-Shirt and Expressions of the Inexpressible ." Flowers, if described ... Read more →
—Meta
by Nora Sternfeld & Emmanuelle Lainé
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork , editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Nora Sternfeld and Emmanuelle Lainé reflect together on Sternfeld's essay on Lainé, " Working Conditions ." Art-agenda: Let's start from the beginning. By pairing a writer and an artist who were not previously ... Read more →
—Meta
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork , editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Ana Teixeira Pinto reflects on her monographic essay on Pauline Curnier Jardin's work " The World Inside Out ." It is a strange thing to be a writer who writes in a language that ... Read more →
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork , editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Mike Sperlinger reflects on his monographic essay on Laurent Montaron's work, " Machine Learning ." The exhibition I most regret not seeing is "Voids: A Retrospective," which took place at the Pompidou Center ... Read more →
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork , editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Orit Gat reflects on her monographic essay on Alain Séchas's work, "Vacances ." Essays have invisible bibliographies. The books that are on your desk when writing. The books you reach to because something ... Read more →
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Rachel Valinsky reflects on her monographic essay on Eva Barto's work, "Eva Barto's Gamble." There's trouble in achieving writing's focus when its objects are most evasive. A year ago, I was writing ... Read more →
—Double Take
by Ladi'Sasha Jones & Dina Ramadan
Ella Sheppard Moore's father bought her freedom from enslavement as a child; as the lead arranger and composer of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, she grew up to establish Negro spirituals (or plantation songs) in the landscape of American popular culture. Listening to a 1909 recording of "Swing Low, Sweet ... Read more →
New Museum, New York
February 17–June 16, 2021
—Double Take
by Philomena Epps & Patrick Langley
"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick," wrote Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor (1978), "although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, ... Read more →
Wellcome Collection, London
May 30, 2019–January 26, 2020
—Double Take
by Adam Kleinman & Gilda Williams
Gemini came a little too early to Venice. While the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale was clearly born under the sign of Taurus, the exhibition's mood is that of the mercurial twins who oscillate between opposing states of mind. Don't let yourself be fooled by the exhibition's title, mired ... Read more →
Venice Biennale
May 11–November 24, 2019
—Double Take
by Orit Gat & Rachel Valinsky
I first came to the United States as an "international student." At the risk of bothering the current administration, I stayed here. I remember every moment that I've learned something new about the culture and place I live in: class, labor, and racial relations, geography, history, the political system. I ... Read more →
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
October 13, 2018–March 25, 2019
—Double Take
by Isobel Harbison & Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
"Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow" is an exhibition of works that come from a past that was alive to the future. Initiated by Mexico City's kurimanzutto, held across the two spaces of London's Thomas Dane gallery, and curated by Isobel Whitelegg, the exhibition echoes the interdisciplinary alliances of ... Read more →
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
—Double Take
by Milena Hoegsberg & Natasha Marie Llorens
Religion, magic, art, physics, and mathematics blend in Goutam Ghosh's solo exhibition "Morph, blend and flatten (space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower." The delicate, sometimes dreamlike paintings gain energy from the friction between ideas from different disciplines and systems of thought as they come into contact. Ghosh draws on conversations ... Read more →
—Double Take
by Jörg Heiser & Ben Eastham
Given the current political situation in Turkey, I wouldn't have been surprised if the curators of this year's Istanbul Biennial, Berlin-based artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and IKSV, the corporate-funded foundation organizing the event, had decided to call the whole thing off. Since its first edition in 1987, ... Read more →
Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
—Double Take
by Chris Sharp & Genevieve Yue
The stakes surrounding this Whitney Biennial are, to say the least, high. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a biennial being under more pressure to signify, to mean, to produce meaning, to attempt to offer some special and tangible insight into our current moment. Instead, what the curators Christopher Lew and ... Read more →
Whitney Biennial, New York
—Double Take
by Kjetil Røed & Barbara Sirieix
This year's Bergen Triennial is a mix of carnival, dry reflection, and the reshuffling of archives. The first Bergen Assembly, held in 2013, was preceded by several years of seminars and panels aimed at thoroughly understanding and researching its format. The highlight of this research period was The Biennial Reader ... Read more →
Bergen Assembly, Bergen
September 1–October 1, 2016
—Double Take
by Morgan Quaintance & Lucy Reynolds
"I experience pain and sensation in response to seeing or thinking about another individual getting hit or touched on part of their body." This description of mirror-touch synesthesia—the ability to feel the same or sympathetic physiological sensations and emotional states in sync with another human being, animal, or sometimes an ... Read more →
—Double Take
by Pedro Neves Marques & Stephen Squibb
Dear Ted Kaczynski, It will soon be twenty years since you entered prison. I saw that you finally changed your occupation status to "prisoner" in the Harvard alumni magazine, and that you've listed your eight life sentences as "awards." Controversial as always. Twenty years have done a lot to New York… ... Read more →
Galerie Buchholz, New York
Angela Dela Cruz Art Plastic Wrapped
Source: https://www.art-agenda.com/criticism/
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