ArtSeen
Wangechi Mutu Ndoro Na Miti
By Ilka ScobieIn our age of contradictions—with globalization on one end, yet swelling xenophobia on the other—transnational art challenges long-held cultural stereotypes. Nairobi born and raised, Wangechi Mutu is one of the most vital artists of her generation.
Lynn Hershman Leeson Remote Controls
By Lara Atallah“The patriarchy has no gender,” writes A.L. Steiner in the latest issue of Aperture. Linking that system of society to neoliberal values, stressing ideas put forth by critical theorist Nancy Fraser, she describes mainstream Eurocentric feminism as an inherent adage to capitalism—an economic system that is in and of itself founded on, and sustained through, the oppression of women and minority groups.
Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change
By Alexandra JuhaszPerpetual Revolution, currently at the ICP, makes powerful use of the museum’s walls, paint, institutional power, and curatorial competencies, to create a holding environment for images of social change.
Gut Feeling
By Erin SweenyIn 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.
Marisa Merz The Sky Is a Great Space
By Tom McGlynnThe blatant poetry and phenomenological politics of the Arte Povera group in post-World War II Italy offered a corrective to what art historian Jaleh Mansoor has termed “Marshall Plan Modernism 1” or the encroachment of hyper-realized American financial and cultural capital into war-torn Europe.
Johan Grimonprez | blue orchids |
By Sara ChristophIn describing the indomitable corporations that shape the global arms trade, Riccardo Privitera, star of Johan Grimonprez’s film blue orchids (2017), takes a long draw from his Merit cigarette, and shapes his stout fingers into a claw.
Raymond Pettibon A Pen of All Work
By Terence TrouillotYet again, the New Museum has fashioned an exhibition with a nearly limitless collection of work. Encapsulating absurdly prodigious and outrageously stimulating works, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work is a blistering retrospective of Pettibon’s over five-decade career, and is the artist’s first major survey in New York City.
Meditations on Time: Tacita Dean in Mexico City
By Lucía HinojosaTacita Dean’s retrospective exhibition at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City traces the artist’s career from 1986 to 2016. Showcasing large and small-scale paintings and photographs, manipulated postcards, found objects, installations, and a series of 16mm films, the exhibition is in dialogue with the architecture of the space, illuminating the artist’s perceptive sensibility of Mexico, and stressing her interest on the ephemeral—the microcosm of life.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Figures, Grounds and Studies
By Phillip GriffithThe relational spaces opened by the images in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Figures, Grounds and Studies are a happy disturbance to the homogenizing squares and grids of social media and dating app profile photos.
Fast Forward: Painting From the 1980s
By Jason RosenfeldDrawn from the museum’s collection, this welcome forty-work reappraisal of a decade still warily regarded is not meant to be comprehensive, but well lays the groundwork for a fuller consideration.
Jackson Mac Low Lines‑Letters‑Words
By Rabia AshfaqueWhile the beginning of the First World War is perhaps the most politically significant event associated with the year 1914, an intriguing and rather unconventional book of poems called Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein began making a lot of noise around the same time.
One And One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers
By Tim BarryA forgotten 19th-century poet, the sad-sack hack writer, James Thomson, struggled against the grave until the age of forty-seven, eking out a living in a presumably squalid East London garret, writing copy for whatever miserable periodical would underwrite his diet of warm gin, fish and finger pies, and no dessert.
Jack Whitten
By David RhodesJack Whitten’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth presents works from several series—“Quantum Walls”, “Portals”, lenticular works from the “Third Entity”, one piece from the continuing Black Monolith Project, and a sculpture (all dated 2015 – 17)—continuing a five-decade-long investigation of passions vis-à-vis a testing exploration of painting itself.
EJ HAUSER Me + You
By Phong BuiDowntempo skating, unhurried kissing, slow dancing With broken rhythm like Surfing on Finnegans Wake. Incremental footsteps breeding images that perch So proudly on the horizons like imaging delphi.
A.K. BURNS Shabby but Thriving
By Connor HammShabby but Thriving, a solo show at the New Museum by artist inresidence A.K. Burns, might have this season’s most resonant exhibition title. The two seemingly competing adjectives suggest the odd condition in which many of us find ourselves: being pushed and pulled between outrage and despair, action and inaction, impoverishment and nourishment.
AGNIESZKA POLSKA Little Planet
By Anthony HawleyDevoid of emotion or inflection, the speaker calls to mind computers and androids such as HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner’s chief replicant Rachel, or even Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Morgan O'Hara Live Transmissions
By Joan GrubinConceptual art gets a new, invigorating twist in the current gem of a show featuring Morgan O’Hara’s drawings at the Mitchell Algus Gallery. Unveiling a lavish selection from a major body of work traversing thirty-six years, this exhibition offers New York audiences the opportunity to get acquainted with the work of an American artist little known in the U.S., yet enormously active internationally; she’s been performing, teaching, and exhibiting around the globe for decades.
RYAN MCGINLEY Early
By Timothy Francis BarryIn Ramsey, New Jersey at the tender age of five, little Ryan McGinley had no idea that his future aesthetic was being shaped by a ghost-faced man from Pittsburgh wearing a wig.
Robert Mangold: A Survey, 1965 – 2003
By David CarrierMangold works in series, reworking a visual motif in varied colors and, sometimes, in paintings of various sizes until he has exhausted its potential.
JOANNA MALINOWSKA Not a Metaphorical Forest
By Parker Henry“I was just walking by a food shop, and saw this potato,” she said. “I thought it fit into the theme of throwing things at people.”
