ArtSeen
JAMES HYDE:
West
By Hovey Brock
James Hyde has spent the better part of his career investigating the conventions of painting. That inquiry has followed several paths. On one, he has a practice of using non-traditional materials to create two-dimensional compositions, such as chair webbing tacked to the wall, or painting on Styrofoam, glass sheets, metal, and more.
TERRY WINTERS:
Facts & Fictions
By William Whitney
Featuring seventy-eighty drawings spanning from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition examines Winters’s history, his belief in linking abstraction with the real world, and challenging the perceptions around the two. However, rather than presenting the drawings as a retrospective, Claire Gilman’s curation emphasizes the morphological relationships between the works across time.
Refiguring The Future
By Eleanor HeartneyIs there any way to mitigate the pernicious impact of the algorithmic takeover of life? Refiguring the Future, a conference held this May in Chicago, positioned artists as a first line of defense against Big Tech.
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today
By Will FenstermakerThere can never be a complete history of the internet because the internet is, to a degree, atemporal—like culture or consciousness, it either exists (in one form or another) or it does not. This places it fundamentally at odds with linear narratives.
Ziggy's Reliquaries
By Mark DeryCrepuscule with Bowie, I thought, not quite groping my way through the perpetual twilight of David Bowie is at the Brooklyn Museum. The 400 artifacts in this blockbuster show—costumes (stage and offstage, because when wasn’t Bowie onstage?), handwritten lyrics, record-cover art, stage-set designs and maquettes, personal effects (including, fabulously, the Great Man’s coke spoon from the dissolute mid-seventies)—are displayed in vitrines or mounted on stagelike platforms and spotlit.
David Bowie Is
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesHaving opened in London five years ago, this final presentation of David Bowie Is is the most comprehensive, and by far one of the Museum’s largest shows to date. From Brixton to Berlin to Blackstar, the ambitious exhibition—now an immersive eulogy—meticulously navigates the wild diversity of influences that shaped David Bowie, including David Robert Jones himself.
SEAN SHIM-BOYLE: Jack
By Swagato ChakravortyTo walk into Jack, Sean Shim-Boyle’s first exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, is to walk into a space where things are off-kilter, amiss, just slightly wrong.
Harlem Perspectives: Decolonizing the Gaze & Refiguring the Local
By Nico WheadonWith the launch of their second exhibition Harlem Perspectives, FACTION Art Projects—a Bristol-based arts collective who recently opened Gallery 8 in the historic Strivers’ Row district of Harlem—chimed in as a new, local voice invested in reinforcing the perception of Harlem as a hotbed for social innovation and cultural entrepreneurship.
GETA BRĂTESCU:
The Leaps of Aesop
By Grant Klarich Johnson
Romania’s presentation of Geta Brātescu last year at the Venice Biennale felt like a retrospective in miniature. A trove brimming with variety, from small abstractions, lyrical figuration, to taped performances, and their associated sculptural sets, Brātescu’s protean energies were a welcome surprise.
DARREN WATERSTON:
Ecstatic Landscape
By Alex A. Jones
These paintings invited the joy that is particular to landscapes, allowing us to experience the panel not as a mere decorated surface, but as an imagined place.
SUE WILLIAMS
By Grant Klarich JohnsonFor those used to Williams’s graphic precision, these newer works may take some getting used to; but as paintings go, they are ultimately more naked, more brazen, shameless, and unabashed than those older more clarified works.
Klimt and Schiele: Drawn
By Steven PestanaUpon entering the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s exhibition Klimt and Schiele: Drawn, visitors can choose between two paths. One offers an airy journey through delicate preparatory sketches by Gustav Klimt, and the other, a more agitated excursion into the wiry tangles of his younger contemporary, Egon Schiele.
Painting After Postmodernism:
Belgium-USA-Italy
By Tom McGlynn
Barbara Rose’s conception of Painting After Postmodernism (PAP) seems to want to address, in Owen’s terms, the “static, ritualistic and repetitive” aspect of the postmodernist turn.
DOUG AITKEN:
New Era
By David Carrier
In 1973 Martin Cooper made the first public cell phone call from the street in mid-town Manhattan. New Era, a continuous ten minute, fifty-six second loop video by Doug Aitken responds to that event and the present consequences of this new technology.
ARLENE SHECHET:
Some Truths
By Phong Bui
I vaguely remember Picasso whispering to Casagemas, / Social conservatives deprive themselves the pleasure of / Fumbling, stumping, bumbling, wobbling, wavering / Through the magic of “la fée verte.”
KELTIE FERRIS:
(F(U(T()U)R)E)
By David Rhodes
This exhibition of paintings and drawings marks a bold and confident change in the working methods of Keltie Ferris. A significant departure has been made from the characteristically fuzzy and pixelated images taken and transformed from screens present in previous paintings.
The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García
By Benjamin CliffordAcquavella’s The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García is a wide-ranging and substantial look at the Uruguayan master’s career, drawing on material executed as early as the artist’s youth in the late nineteenth century and as late as 1949, the year of his death.
DANIEL RICH:
Never Forever
By Barbara A. MacAdam
Clear, bright, and crisp, Daniel Rich’s recent paintings might also be viewed as eerie and unstable.
MARY REID KELLEY and PATRICK KELLEY:
We are Ghosts
By Alex A. Jones
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s films This is Offal (2016) and In the Body of the Sturgeon (2017) approach the grim mysteries of death with madcap humor.
Being: New Photography
By Phillip GriffithBeing, MoMA’s current iteration of the “New Photography” exhibition series, assumes an unwieldy, ambitious title but offers work often in portraiture, that appeals to our intimate understandings of our selves.
HANK WILLIS THOMAS:
Black Archival Memory & Its Conceits
By Nico Wheadon
Over the past decade, the community of artists of color who retell American history by remixing and repurposing its archives has reached fever pitch.
JANE CORRIGAN:
Ma Paw
By Alfred Mac Adam
Much of Corrigan’s work until now has been charged with narrative, her paintings often episodes from untold tales she invited viewers to invent and complete. In these eighteen works, she attenuates narrative to focus on specific scenes from her forest-garden borderland.
GEDI SIBONY:
The King and the Corpse
By William Corwin
The King and the Corpse is a room-within-a-room and fills the main gallery to such an extent—from floor-to-ceiling with a walk-able, but not too capacious path around—that it’s impossible to get far enough away from the sculpture to gauge its true nature as a structure. It’s all sides and angles, but no sense of a whole.
Visions of Order and Chaos: The Enlightened Eye
By Steven PestanaWith construction materials such as mahogany and oak originating in far-flung corners of imperial reach, at a time when long-distance travel was still an extraordinary undertaking, the cabinet itself is as much a document of empire as any of its contents. Yet, as tremors of the French Revolution rumbled to the surface, these sorts of extravagances would soon find themselves on the chopping block like so many of the period’s doomed aristocrats.
Visions of Order and Chaos: The Enlightened Eye
By David Carrier and Graham ShearingIn his late, short book St. Mark’s Rest (1877), John Ruskin says that nations compose their autobiographies in three ways: in “the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.”
ADRIAN PIPER:
From Passing to Purple
By Nico Wheadon
Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 is not the systematic web of blunt perceptions the exhibition’s title would have you believe.
ADRIAN PIPER:
A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965—2016
By Nicole Miller
“I would like people to sit in the bleachers,” Adrian Piper tells us, “and think of where they are sitting as an amphitheater of the sort that one would sit in to watch Christians being devoured by the lions.”
PABLO HELGUERA & SUZANNE LACY:
The Schoolhouse and The Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy, and Engagement
By Vijay Masharani
Both the works in The Schoolhouse and The Bus are over; in this exhibition, we are presented with an archive.
SPENCER FINCH:
Me, Myself and I (A Group Show)
By Hearne Pardee
Like an athlete bent on extreme challenges, Spencer Finch tests the limits of visibility. Here, in works on paper from the past ten years, he applies his observational powers to the colors of the Pacific Ocean or California darkness.
EDUARDO NAVARRO:
Into Ourselves
By Osman Can Yerebakan
‘Delicious’ rarely defines a work of art. Out of the five senses, tasting is a relatively new tool for experiencing art; an inclusive spectacle employed by contemporary artists for social engagement.
SADE: Artists Under the Influence
By Mary Ann CawsSaying that the divine Marquis had something to do with eroticism is a bit like saying Donald Trump has a little something not to do with truth. Beloved for every brick literally there in the face of Man Ray’s imaginary portrait of 1970 with his baleful and fleshy stare, the Marquis de Sade has haunted every subsequent surrealist discoverer of his works and perpetually-imprisoned self.
THEODORE DARST & COLLIN LEITCH:
Not Every Place You Fit In Is Where You Belong
By Ida Pruitt
A bone that Collin Leitch carved from soapstone—Linger at the edge of the woods for a fixed amount of time (2018)—rests horizontally on a wall in front of two vinyl-printed video stills.
ROBIN WINTERS:
The Thrum and The Thrall
By Hovey Brock
In The Thrum and The Thrall, writing desks, drawings, taxidermy dogs, hatboxes, glass heads, and other sundry artworks crowd the viewing room at Marlborough Contemporary.
MOYRA DAVEY:
1943
By Jan Avgikos
The history of art is written, first, by organizing the chaos of myriad forms of artistic practice into neat parcels, and then, policing those territories forever more.
DAVID AUSTEN:
the stars above the ocean the ocean beneath the stars
By Hovey Brock
For his first solo exhibition in the United States, London-based artist David Austen presents film, painting, watercolor, and collage made over the period of a decade.
The Sun Teaches Us That History Is Not Everything
By Vivian LiWhen you enter The Sun Teaches Us That History Is Not Everything, one of the first works you might overlook amongst the other more colorful installations is a large suspended orb slowly spinning in the center of the room.
Hours and Places
By J CIt’s hard to feel alone in Hours and Places, as Constance DeJong’s voice echoes from more than one place in Bureau’s two rooms.
Stories of Almost Everyone
By Hannah Sage KayLegibility varies greatly in the work of over thirty international artists exhibited in Stories of Almost Everyone at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.