ArtSeen
Street
By Joshua K. LeonVeteran artist James Nares’s recent film Street, which has captivated audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes the digital aesthetic as far as technology will allow.
ANTHONY PEARSON
By Taney RonigerOccasionally one finds works whose internal demands extend beyond the confines of the frame or pedestal to encompass their entire context.
JANE FREILICHER Painter Among Poets
By David RhodesJane Freilicher remains an important figure when considering the New York poets that emerged in the mid 20th century.
DENNIS CONGDON
By William CorwinDennis Congdon’s palette may lay claim to the fresco aesthetic of Latium, but his subject matter inhabits the coffee houses and bars (and psychoanalytic offices) of late 19th century Vienna and Paris.
Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui
By Desi GonzalezThe artist investigates the blurring between the local and the global, Africa and the Western world—a tension that is equally evident in his biography.
RETO PULFER Zustandseffekte
By Matthew Shen GoodmanSwiss-born and based now out of Berlin, Reto Pulfer embraces equal parts sculpture, installation, and performance for his multidisciplinary output.
GEDI SIBONY
By Pac PobricGedi Sibony’s third solo show at Greene Naftali was a relatively conservative one, though not in any political sense of the term.
JULIE MEHRETU Liminal Squared
By Grant Klarich JohnsonWhen the revolution comes, what will it look like? The paintings in Liminal Squared refuse to settle either formally or conceptually, evoking the flux of revolution.
JO BAER
By David RhodesJo Baer remains one of the foremost practitioners of Minimalism, having contributed to the movement many paintings and drawings, as well as writings that fueled the theoretical debates of the time.
Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections and Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
By Alana Shilling-JanoffHis graphite seems enchanted: the simultaneous embrace of two-dimensionality and rejection of linear perspective unfolds sentiment without sentimentality.
KEITH HARING The political Line
By Mara HobermanNearly 30 years after the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris introduced Keith Haring in Figuration Libre: France/USA (1984) alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, and Kenny Scharf, the museum’s current Haring retrospective delivers the artist well beyond this neo-Expressionist context.
Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of MATTHEW BARNEY
By Ann McCoySubliming Vessel is the first major exhibition devoted to Matthew Barney’s drawings. “Vessel” references the alchemist’s flask, a container for the incubation of images and processes rooted in the unconscious.
SUSAN BEE Criss Cross: New Paintings
By Alexander ShulanIn the opening shot of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 B-noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, a barefoot woman runs frantically down a dark road in the middle of the night. She’s nearly struck by a beige convertible.
TOM SHANNON Nothing
By Darren JonesTom Shannon’s recent exhibition elicited a long-lasting shift in this viewer’s perception of the metaphysical realm. Shannon takes as his subject, and medium, the elemental forces of the universe that define the basis of our existence, and presents them on a scale perceptible to the human mind.
CARL PALAZZOLO New Paintings
By Robert BerlindIconographic indications of loss and life’s frailty set the tone in Carl Palazzolo’s recent paintings.
JOE BRADLEY Lotus Beaters
By Gail Victoria Braddock QuagliataJoe Bradley’s solo exhibition features an array of the divisive New York artist’s drawings and monumentally large paintings. One could separate the show into three distinct movements, delineated by the confines of each room in the exhibition space.
JASON MIDDLEBROOK My Landscape
By Jessica HolmesInterconnections lie at the heart of artist Jason Middlebrook’s work. The uneasy coexistence between natural phenomena and human-made objects, art’s grappling with the places it inhabits, and the collisions of disparate facets of art history all surface in Middlebrook’s paintings, sculpture, and installations.
LIU ZHENG Dream Shock
By Jonathan GoodmanAbout 15 years ago, Beijing-based photographer Liu Zheng was in the midst of a project of epic proportions: a photographic survey of the Chinese people that took him to morgues and nunneries, among other places.
Mushroom Hunter
By Jessica HolmesAmong the small and passionate subculture of mycophiles, it is well known that there is much joy to be found in methodically combing a damp forest in order to unearth rare fungi. In much the same way, art, like mushrooms, rarely lays bare its secrets.
Vanishing Point
By Collin SundtIn the decades since William Gibson first imagined his globe–spanning computer network, where computer cowboys jockeyed for corporate secrets amid kinetic swirls of abstracted data, the virtual frontier has transformed.
do it (outside)
By Kara L. RooneyFor Revoir’s interpretation of Bader’s work, a rectangular wooden table with four legs was upended and secured with tar, at a 45-degree angle, to a five square-foot mirrored base, also set at a 45-degree angle and supported by four structural beams.
![Instruction by Darren Bader, “Glue a [rectangular] table to the sky [table top up, somewhere not too close to the sky’s zenith]” 2012. Interpreted by Grayson Revoir. 12 x 8 x 8’, Wood, plexi mirror, tar. Photo: Nate Dorr.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/11532/rooney-socrates-web1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
SUSPENDED TURNS
On Philip Taaffe’s “Sardica II” (2013)
By Jarrett Earnest
Philip Taaffe’s new paintings press your face up against a fence, and, like the first line of The Sound and the Fury, leave you looking “between curling flower spaces.”
RICHARD SERRA Early Work
By Terry R. MyersIs the bracing clarity of Richard Serra’s early work capable of speaking to—if not against—the slippery ambiguity of today? More than usual, the relationship between the work and site of this exhibition set up a then-versus-now situation that it never resolved, leaving me split, but not in the material way that Serra so emphatically had in mind back in the day.
G.T. PELLIZZI The Red and the Black
By Margaret GrahamIntimate or no, the relationship that artist, architect, and philosopher G.T. Pellizzi shares with his tiger—that is, the art world—is not dissimilar from the one conveyed in Stendhal’s aphorism: Pellizzi, ever eager to engage in a play date, never steps on the scene without wisely packing plenty of heat.
NANCY LUPO Hats & Balls
By Chloé RossettiLupo made the sculptures for Hats & Balls in her father-in-law’s pool house in Los Angeles, where she and her husband live. A lot of the pieces in the show rest atop custom-trimmed towels, as Lupo placed her sculptures on the abundance of pool house towels after making them; after a while a strange symbiosis took place.
“JACK... JACK... JACK...”
Jack Goldstein X 10,000
By Rachael M. Wilson
“Jack,” (1973): a man faces the camera, standing against a backdrop of low mountains in a wide-open desert landscape. It’s late in the day. He cries, “Jack”, in a strangely plaintive monotone while looking straight ahead.
Cai Jin: Return to the Source
By Jonathan GoodmanCai Jin, famous for a 20-year-long obsession with the banana plant, has changed her focus. In her recent show with the Beijing satellite gallery of New York’s Chambers Fine Art, she has concentrated on what she calls landscape paintings.
