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The Enigma of Arrival:
On Gonzalo Fonseca’s Timeless Vista

True to my first encounter of Fonseca’s work, it has remained enigmatic, allusive, and mysterious decades later.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN:
Kinetic Painting

Carolee Schneemann’s art has radically re-oriented preconceptions about painting away from the primacy of the visual to the primacy of the haptic.

Walter De Maria and The Lightning Field at Forty:
Art as Symbiosis

Land Art now helps us see the very best of the planet more resolutely: its innate drama and its benign disregard.

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon

A focus on the multivalent nature of gender, neither fixed nor constant, suggests and produces responses that might flood any inquisitive mind or mapmaker.

RICHARD SERRA:
Sculpture and Drawings

The works that make up Serra’s current show reveal an approachability that’s surprising for a figure commonly associated with aggressive, even overwhelming, effects.

ELIZABETH MURRAY:
Painting in the ’80s

The acquaintance with whom I viewed Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ’80s remarked that it appeared two artists were at work creating the paintings on view.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO:
Gates of Paradise

His dramatic camerawork draws out the luster of the bronze panels, and the audience is treated to an opportunity to examine their delicate detail in an intimate way.

JOSEPHINE HALVORSON:
As I Went Walking

While her earlier paintings consisted mainly of close-up renderings of man-made surfaces, her concern here is with measurement.

JONATHAN MONAGHAN:
The Disco Beast

Monaghan’s show investigates the unicorn as a symbolic being, demonstrating in surprising ways its historical richness, multivalence, and relevance to the digital age.

THOMAS BANGSTED
JEANNE SILVERTHORNE

While the divergences between their works, in genre, medium, and scale are huge, they are inextricably linked by a primal human need to keep alive memories—to say, “I was here and this is the way I remember how things were.”

BENJAMIN KRESS:
New Paintings

Strange Muses I (2017) is remarkable on multiple levels. It was created not to show the here and now, but to take us into what could best be described as a liminal space...

The Internal Machine

The modern book is the product of a mechanical operation, the printing press, but as Internal Machine suggests, it can be considered a mechanism in and of itself.

Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943-47

Curator Saskia Spender, Gorky’s granddaughter, has installed over fifty landscapes, including paintings and works on paper from 1943 to 1947.

ANTOINE CATALA:
Everything is Okay

It would be difficult to come up with a more oblivious statement than “everything is okay.” We can read it as either a provocation—an offensively false assertion—or an expression of denial.

Nuvolo and Post-War Materiality 1950-1965

In his most characteristic works, Nuvolo stitched fragments of fabric together with a sewing machine to form an asymmetrical but carefully balanced grid.

MIKE KELLEY:
Kandors 1999-2011

By magnifying the stylistic, architectural, and compositional inconsistencies present within the original comic frames, Kelley highlights the vagaries and mythologies of memory—the tendency to forget and invent a (new) past.

SETH PRICE:
Circa 1981

The title of Seth Price’s solo show at the ICA, Circa 1981, suggests that Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which began that year, provides the thematic framework of the exhibition as a whole.

DUNCAN HANNAH:
Adrift in the 21st Century

For nearly forty years, Hannah has worked in the figurative, narrative tradition of Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper.

MARTÍN RAMÍREZ:
A Journey

Certainly, the drawings construct a visual world of specificity and independence. As time goes on, they may possibly be understood as efforts to sustain a cultural heritage that was not easy to keep alive.

DUKE RILEY:
Now Those Days Are Gone

Duke Riley has been cultivating a dialogue with a very specific nonhuman population for decades—pigeons.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985

The show serves as a genealogy of radical and feminist Latin American and Chicana art practices, and seeks to dismantle the received stereotypes of women in art through a meticulous deconstruction of a male-dominated sociolinguistic system.

London Painters

For painters of this generation the war allowed for a break from the gravitational influences of Picasso and the School of Paris, the same break that would lend lift to the Abstract Expressionist ascendancy in New York.

LIN YAN:
Gateway

Lin Yan, an established sculptor who has been living in New York since 1993, comes from a well-known artist family based in Beijing.

JUDITH BERNSTEIN:
Cabinet of Horrors

Sidelined for centuries, the voices of women strengthen. And protesting for decades, a former Guerilla Girl’s work finds new relevance.

Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico

Below the Underground, one of the many exhibitions included in the robust and multifaceted Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA series of programs supported by the Getty Foundation, stands out for its emphasis on feminist and anti-corporate strategies explored by artists in Mexico in the 1990s.

The Oscar Wilde Temple

The Oscar Wilde Temple, a public installation work, is the latest in a vein of exhibitions that posthumously indemnify Oscar Wilde and commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of homosexuality’s decriminalization in the United Kingdom.

ELLEN HARVEY:
Nostalgia

Every era has a gadget that speaks to the spirit of the times.

HOWARDENA PINDELL:
Recent Paintings

It’s amazing what a complete game-change results when the stretcher bars for painting go missing.

AGNIESZKA KURANT:
Collective Intelligence

The spectre of collective labor haunts Agnieszka Kurant’s striking, timely exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art.

Golden Eyes:
Alex Katz at Ninety

This show is so right that it effortlessly hits the note of happiness and celebration, the major key Katz means to reach every time out.

Deep in the Static:
Raghubir Singh’s Photographs

This generous retrospective traces the development of an extraordinary career in color photography, from the late sixties until Singh’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1999.

MARK DION:
Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist

Rather than an outright duel between fact and fiction, Dion demonstrates that the judgment more at stake has always been between truth and value and how we balance the two.

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer

You really have got the old man,” Kenneth Clark told John Pope-Hennessy upon reading his study of Michelangelo. The “old man” (1475–1564, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet) seems always to have been the old man, always at the top.

RICHARD SERRA: Sculpture and Drawings

The most remarkable artwork in Richard Serra’s recent exhibition, which included dense paint stick drawings and sculpture, is Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017).

Measuring the Weight with Richard Serra

You walk around, you compare the weight of the sculptures with the density of the black in his drawings, the way the curves fit into one another, the way it has an impact on your mind, and physical state.

Dalí/Duchamp

The exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts reveals strong affinities and a surprisingly deep friendship between the two 20th century artistic legends.

Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983

Club 57 maps a set of underground attitudes and practices that have now gone mainstream.

MINOUK LIM:
Mamour

Minouk Lim’s first solo exhibition in New York introduces the South Korean artist’s equally haunting and inquisitive practice with three bodies of work intertwined into a eulogy on loss and the consequential search for the missing.

HASSEL SMITH:
The Ferus Years

The paintings in color and surface recall the American West, not as landscape painting, but as abstractions of light, heat, and surface.

JOSÉ LEONILSON:
Empty Man

In addition to Leonilson’s long-overdue re-recognition, the exhibition is especially appropriate given the many comparisons to be drawn between the present and the darker moments of the 1980s.

NINA CHANEL ABNEY:
Safe House/Seized the Imagination

The title of Nina Chanel Abney’s exhibition at Mary Boone, Safe House, caught my attention almost instantly. In such politically charged times, not making a statement is often a statement in itself.

KATE GROOBEY:
I'm Made of Milk

Kate Groobey has rehabilitated the zany. Not that she is personally zany or that her wonderful large-scale paintings are zany, but that she has brought back to artistic life the zany, the clown, the zanni or Gianni or Giovanni of the Commedia dell'Arte.

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 17-JAN 18

All Issues