ArtSeen
MIDTOWN
By Rabia AshfaqueIn her essay “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America,” tracing the spread of the international movement from Europe to the U.S., Monica Obniski¹ draws connections between the movement’s emergence and the birth of industrialization in England, outlining the socialist leanings, artistic breakthroughs, and global impact on associated art communities over the years.
All the Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another
By Magdalyn AsimakisIn Édouard Glissant’s book Poetics of Relation, first published in 1990, he considers the idea of opacity as something that can nurture relations between “all the threatened and delicious things.”
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
By Phillip Griffith“It is a sacrilege,” bell hooks wrote in a 1994 essay about the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “to reserve this beauty solely for art.” The latest exhibition of his work, and the first at David Zwirner Gallery, arrives on the occasion of the artist's longtime gallerist and estate executor Andrea Rosen’s recently announced co-representation of Gonzales-Torres’s estate with David Zwirner.
The Longest Journey
By Tim BarryIt starts with a murmur. Morphs, grows, extends, searches, unfolds. Doesn’t become a statement. Then, a scream, shock-corridor, cover your eyes, say it isn’t so. There’s no going back.
When An Image Works, Words Don’t Need To
By Will FenstermakerOne way to measure the importance of Louise Lawler and her work is to look outside the Museum of Modern Art at what is showing concurrently in the city. A number of exhibitions extend the central question of the museum’s retrospective, Why Pictures Now.
MARTIN BOYCE Sleeping Chimneys. Dead Stars.
By Stephen TruaxThe title of Martin Boyce’s current show is two sentence fragments—four words, two nouns activated by one adjective each: one on human endeavor, the other a natural phenomenon—pared down to the most essential elements required to animate nature and architecture into a sullen narrative.
Rachel Harrison Prasine
By Jane CavalierDeciphering Rachel Harrison’s sculptures is like playing charades, except that in Harrison’s version of the game, there’s never one answer. Her sculptures pantomime the failure of discourse to fully wrap words around art.
Florine Stettheimer Painting Poetry
By Michelle StandleyNot long after Columbus landed on Hispaniola, a new word entered the English language: “whim-wham,” to refer to “a quaint or decorative object or trinket.”
Ridley Howard Travel Pictures
By Jason RosenfeldAthens, Georgia and Brooklyn-based painter Ridley Howard’s first show at Marinaro Gallery is consistently compelling and abundantly aware of the history of art—strengths of a painter in his mid-forties with his own fully developed style.
Myths of the Marble
By Leah GallantA double vanity appears in your left hand; a giant wineglass appears in your right. With the press of a button, both are released into a floating black orb, to be replaced by a length of gutter and a plywood crescent.
Making Space: Women Artists in Postwar Abstraction
By Ann McCoyMaking Space: Women Artists in Postwar Abstraction has work by many of the same artists as its 1995 predecessor Elizabeth Murray, Modern Women (1914 – 73)—work by seventy women from the MoMA collection.
Robert Bordo Back Flip
By David RhodesThe National Exemplar has a distinct program that focuses on artists of different generations, as well as on bodies of work that may have been overlooked relative to an artists’ better-known works.
Head Over Heels
By Amy DenesonWhen I experience Kay Rosen’s text-based work, she tickles my inner word-nerd in the mind and heart, oftentimes coaxing a belly laugh. Her current solo exhibition, H Is for House, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum once again draws out such delight.
Tales of Transformation
By Jurriaan BenschopDuring the opening days of the Venice Biennale, in a classic hotel on the Grand Canal, U.S. artist Mark Bradford was reflecting on the issue of inclusive art history. An interesting conversation evolved about how an artist can, against his will, be stereotypically tied to a generalized identity, and be excluded from institutions, or included in discourses where he does not feel at home.
Exhibition 1
By Osman Can YerebakanOnly a few months following the revoked prohibition of citizens of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries to enter the United States, and amidst gradually worsening political relationships with the Middle East, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art opened its doors at a ground floor space in SoHo, in close vicinity to peer institutions such as Swiss Institute and Goethe-Institut’s Ludlow 38.
A Fable of A Time Traveler
By Phong BuiGenesis tells of the sacred grove: / Roots soaked in cool water of astral seas, branches bathed by / Silvery moonlight. I stand firmly here on a durable plinth of earth.
Luke Diiorio nine paintings
By Alex BaconOver the past four or so years Luke Diiorio has been advancing a unique statement about the possibilities of both non-objective painting and object-oriented art in our present moment.
Venice Biennial: At a Glance, 2017
By Barbara LondonLast week I flew to Europe for the opening of the Venice Biennial. On the way, I stopped by the Kunstmuseum Bern to see “Elemental Gestures,” a survey featuring projects by the anti-disciplinarian Terry Fox (1943-2008).
![<em>in Pursuit of Venus [infected</em>], 2015–17, Lisa Reihana: Emissaries, Biennale Arte 2017. Photo: Michael Hall. Image courtesy of New Zealand at Venice.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/18731/London-web1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Tobias Pils
By Ilka ScobieTobias Pils paints passionately. His exhibition, which inaugurates the gallery’s New York space, is made up of mixed media works on canvas that shift between the loosely representational, the fantastic and the utterly abstract—often in a single work.
Roxy Paine Farewell Transmission
By Hovey BrockRoxy Paine’s first show of his sculptures at Paul Kasmin spans two adjacent spaces in Chelsea. The 293 10th Avenue space has two mordantly funny dioramas and a very disturbing installation of a burnt-out forest floor. The 297 10th Avenue space has eight of his signature Dendroids, stainless steel imitation tree constructions.
Alex Katz Subway Drawings
By Tom McGlynnIf Alex Katz hadn’t so deftly invented himself, New York would have had to. Born in the city in 1927, he belongs to a remarkably self-creative generation, which has included such singular individuals as Frank O’Hara and Edwin Denby, whose urbane voices and visions became inextricably identified with the realigning echelons of post-war American upward mobility.
