ArtSeen
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
By Lauren RossThis exhibition brings together an eclectic group of photographs made over one and a half centuries. Curators Justine Kurland and Dan Torop, themselves photographers, culled work from public and private collections to form an exacting, distinctive compilation. There are many gems to be found by names familiar, forgotten, and yet to be widely appreciated.
Mike Kelley Green Depths And Los Angeles 1955-1985, Naissance d’une Capitale Artistique
By Geoffrey Cruickshank-HagenbuckleOutré art’s an inside job. Can there still be any doubt? Bad boy/bete noir Mike Kelley is showing in Paris at both the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou simultaneously. A product of Cal Arts, Valencia’s prestigious “post-avant” art program, Kelley now teaches at the Art Center in L.A. While reaping undeniably heavy street cred for the extended summer vacation he took between graduate school and his first teaching job.
Daughters of Dada
By Valery OisteanuThe exhibit at Francis M. Naumann gallery honors a dynamic sextet of artists with an assembly of their artworks and memorabilia. Some of these “avant goddesses” predate Dada, while others barely qualify for Dada membership; but each was strikingly original and all were pioneers.
The New Landscape / The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art
By John YauIn terms of both Cubism and modern art, Chaim Soutine did everything wrong with a forcefulness and sense of purpose that rivals Picasso’s. His thickly packed, gelatinous paintings have no overall unity or structural design, and they concede nothing to the decorative. In contrast to most artists, whether post-Cubists or not, he didn’t systematize his gestures. For all their use of viscous paint, they are remarkably unembellished with signs of the painter’s touch.
Report from London
By Sherman SamWe’ve quickly reached the last days of summer, again. Unlike New York, where things gradually quiet down over the final weeks, some galleries over here seem to use the moment to put on more fanciful and creative endeavors, to give in to the pressure of letting their artists curate and to take a chance to display their own creative personalities.
Into Me / Out of Me
By Thomas MicchelliInto Me / Out of Me at P.S.1 is the kind of exhibition you don’t expect to see at a public institution anymore, as even privately funded nonprofits grow more skittish over material that might prove offensive to prudes, snoots, the underaged or the faint of heart.
Julie Monaco
By Stephanie BuhmannJulie Monaco’s dramatic landscapes, ranging from black-and-white to a deeply saturated blood-red monotone, are as theatrical as they are polished, Presented under Plexiglas, these slick compositions unfold with
Rudy Burckhardt
By Ben La RoccoRudy Burckhardt, best known for his photography, films and beguiling autobiography, Mobile Homes, also made extraordinary paintings of everyday life. In “29th Street Panorama” Burckhardt records every detail of the water towers, windows and brick buildings visible from the rooftop from which he worked.
Hans Richter
By David MarkusHans Richter is best known to art history for his contributions to avant-garde cinema. “Rhythmus 21” (1921)—one of the earliest examples of abstract film—set a precedent for the application of painterly formalism to the expanding realm of cinematography.
Rosa Loy
By James KalmImagine one of Balthus’s pubescent models running away from the chateau, joining a band of gypsies or a bizarre cult of female smugglers, and ending up in a university town behind the Iron Curtain.
Zaha Hadid
By Cynthia EardleyAnyone disheartened by current world events should make it a point to visit the Guggenheim Museum’s 30-year retrospective of Zaha Hadid, one of the most prolific and inventive architects practicing today and the only woman to win architecture’s prestigious Pritzker Prize
Clare Gasson
By Shane McAdamsLondon-based artist Clare Gasson uses sound as her primary medium, but she is far from what most gallery goers would consider a “sound artist.” Even so, her first New York exhibition at Parker’s Box—with its cradles of headphones, formations of speakers, and ample darkness—serves up all the preliminary indications that might get her work falsely accused.
Report from Germany
By Barbara WeidleBob Dylan, all in black and wearing a Stetson, stood on the stage in front of the Rhine-Herne-Canal. Without a word to the audience in the sold-out open-air arena on a perfect summer Sunday evening in the Ruhrgebiet, one of Germany’s old industrial centers, he just sang his songs, as always, as if he had never sung them before. “Like a Rolling Stone, ” “Forever Young,
