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Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism

Both born in 1494, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino were apprenticed to the High Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto, and yet their careers proceeded very differently.

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN: Flamme éternelle (Eternal Flame)

One rarely perceives the olfactory imprint of an artwork before seeing it. And yet, the powerful smell of rubber grasps you right at the threshold of the Palais de Tokyo, where the Swiss born, Paris-based artist Thomas Hirschhorn has been invited to unfold his monumental installation, Flamme éternelle (Eternal Flame).

CLINT JUKKALA Cosmic Trigger

Clint Jukkala’s new paintings call to mind René Magritte’s “False Mirror” (1928): a close-up look into an eye that opens out into clouds and sky. Jukkala’s circular shapes, outlined in bright colors, also become both eyes and windows, and pose similar perceptual conundrums.

HOWARDENA PINDELL Paintings, 1974-1980

Howardena Pindell has been making work steadily since the late 1960s, when she arrived in New York after receiving her M.F.A. at Yale. A founding member of the landmark feminist artists collective A.I.R. Gallery in 1972, she has taught at SUNY Stony Brook since 1979, all the while consistently producing bodies of work both complex and multifarious.

LEBBEUS WOODS Architect

Lebbeus Woods’s death in 2012 was a considerable loss to the architectural world, as the fine new show of his drawings and maquettes at The Drawing Center demonstrates. Woods’s capacity as a gifted technician and radical theorist of contemporary architecture resulted in a singular body of work that undermined current notions of how to successfully create places in which to live and work.

JORINDE VOIGT Codification of Intimacy: Works on Nikolas Luhmann

It is a curious matter when an exhibition engages the mind with dexterity and arouses an emotional response not at all. That, at least, is the predicament countenanced by German-born artist Jorinde Voigt’s current exhibition.

ISA GENZKEN Retrospective

At first, this retrospective of Isa Genzken’s career seemed to come together as a heterogeneous yet unyielding portrait of the artist. Later, however, I realized that portraiture is a limitation that this work refuses without regret, as piece by piece, I came to the complicated conclusion that Genzken’s works are full-bodied recreations of herself, not mere symbolic representations, and definitely not depictions of anything autobiographical.

KIM JONES mountain girl door

Kim Jones’s most recent show at Pierogi opens with a small acrylic on Xerox piece “Untitled, (Kim as Boy)” (1955 – 99). It presents a Xeroxed childhood photograph of the artist in boxer shorts or  swim trunks overdrawn with intestines that stretch out to form an angular superstructure surrounding the artist’s head and shoulders, like the truss work of a Byzantine halo.

KATIE HOLTEN and MARIATERESA SARTORI Linea

Randy Williams, my teacher for a high school drawing class that I attended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told the students decisively during an exercise that there are no lines in real life; he may even have said it multiple times.

ADRIANA VAREJÃO

Long recognized for her grotesque representations of colonialism, her ability to evoke a constancy between past and present, and her anthropologically inspired explorations of race, Adriana Varejão’s latest exhibition, Polvo, feels contemplative, even hopeful—especially for an artist who has spent much of her career lamenting historical atrocities, tragedies, and disparities.

LISI RASKIN Recuperative Tactics

Kim Charles Kay’s exhibition you know it when you feel it, nested within Lisi Raskin’s installation Recuperative Tactics, is well named; its title being an apt descriptor of Raskin’s piece, which takes up the entirety of Art in General’s sixth floor.

HED: FRAGMENTED HISTORY
ZHANG HUAN Evoking Tradition

Walk down the southern slope of Storm King Art Center and you might feel as though you’ve discovered the ruins of an ancient Buddhist temple. In the distance, an ornate copper Buddha’s head peaks out from the dirt.


STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN!
MEL BOCHNER Strong Language

Mel Bochner, one of the founders of the Conceptual Art movement of the mid-’60s, and quite possibly the most inventive, clear-headed, and thought-provoking artist of that group, is showing his language-based paintings and drawings this spring and summer at the Jewish Museum.

GUILLERMO KUITCA This Way

In the narrow selection of Guillermo Kuitca’s new paintings on display at Sperone Westwater, the artist seems to have lost all desire for grounding points of reference.

LYGIA CLARK
The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988

This review has been retracted.

Martin Kippenberger Raft of the Medusa

In Raft of the Medusa, all three floors of Skarstedt’s townhouse-turned-gallery exhibit Martin Kippenberger’s fervent study of Theodore Gericault’s infamous 1819 painting, occasioned through a series of photographs, sketches, lithographs, paintings, and even a rug.

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The Brooklyn Rail

JUNE 2014

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