ArtSeen
Gut Feeling
Martha Friedman Dancing Around Things
By Erin Sweeny
In negotiating the space between body and object, we rely on the memory of use and familiar patterns in a world where binary assumptions are common: in versus out, hard versus soft, resistance versus flow.
TM DAVY Horses
By Stephen Truax“They were dead at my age,” remarked TM Davy (36) with an honest tone, to his friends Nicole Eisenman and Ellen Altfest in a panel discussion at his current show, Horses. Davy looks to great, queer artists, all of whom succumbed to AIDS—Hujar (died at age 53), Gonzalez-Torres (39), and Morrisroe (30)—to give himself permission.
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975
By David RhodesThis exhibition brings together fourteen oil paintings by David Reed first collectively shown in 1975 in a solo exhibition at Susan Caldwell Gallery.
PETER CAMPUS
By Hearne PardeeAs video ergo sum, a new retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, tracks Campus’s investigation of the self from early interactive installations into recent “videographs” of landscapes, key mid-career works are concurrently featured in circa 1987 at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York.
Man-o Man-ifesto!
By Alexandra JuhaszJulian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, which recently screened at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, is a cynical spectacular celebrating men’s ideas about modern Western art by way of a starlet’s heroic virtuosity.
Alice Neel, Collector of Souls
By Jurriaan BenschopIn the first room of Alice Neel, Collector of Souls at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, displaying a dozen or so small-sized early paintings from the 1930s, one already can apprehend Neel’s legacy as a portraitist. Her asymmetrical portrait of a woman, Elenka (1936), and the calm and frontal Gerhard Yensch (1935) bring you close to her subjects.
Vel Minimum
By Tom McGlynnIn discussing Dan Walsh’s work here, perhaps it’s best to get the term “post-minimalism” figured from the beginning. There is an undeniable link in Walsh’s work to what artists and critics ranging from Mel Bochner to Rosalind Krauss helped to define in Minimalism’s 1960s heyday.
Marilyn Minter Pretty/Dirty
By Hannah StamlerThe capacity of images to shift in charge and meaning is a central, and under-explored, strand of Marilyn Minter’s survey exhibition, mounted as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s “A Year of Yes” celebrating feminist art.
Kader Attia Reason’s Oxymorons
By Osman Can YerebakanKader Attia’s recurring themes, such as repair, trauma, and loss, occupy Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location in his ambitious exhibition Reason’s Oxymorons.
Dispatches
By Samuel FeldblumAt the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, in the old Hanes family mansion in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Dispatches offers thirty-four artists and photojournalists a chance to “redefine the world issues of our time.”
Bhupen Khakhar You Can’t Please All
By Michelle StandleyBhupen Khakhar was a true original. An iconoclast. Born in 1934 in Bombay (now Mumbai) to a middle-class family, Khakhar earned a degree in economics at the urging of his widowed mother, working for most of his life as an accountant.
A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde
By Mary Ann CawsRevolution has not been, at least recently and in my view, so colorfully demonstrated as here, in this staggering exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde
By Hovey BrockFor those still wandering around in shock wondering what the next four years will bring, this survey from the museum’s collection of early 20th-century Russian art packs in so much energy, verve, and optimism that it may come as a welcome massage to furrowed brows.
Bearing Witness, Mendieta Now
By Vanessa ThillDeath is palpable in Ana Mendieta’s work, as a body undergoes elemental transformation. Grave-like pits, gushing blood, and gunpowder silhouettes operate on a symbolic and primordial level, but it’s important to note that some of her earliest work was a direct response to the rape and murder of a nursing student on her college campus in 1973 at University of Iowa.
Lenore Malen Scenes from Paradise
By Ann McCoyCreation myths provide blueprints for their respective societies, on both a conscious and unconscious level. Lenore Malen, whose past work on utopian societies traverses history, in this exhibition takes us back to biblical Eden to ascertain where things went off the rails.
Popped from Life (for E. M.)
By Phong BuiLeaping from a bent table into three-dimensional form, / She swiftly excavates a formidable void.
Colonization of Space
By Phong BuiSelf-contained “microcosm,” illuminated on paper in Pre-Eyckian splendor. Simultaneously mitigated by Anomalous septa, debonair syncopation, Place and space seem to migrate fluidly to unexpected orbits.
