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JAMES HYDE:
West

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

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

Is 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

There 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

Crepuscule 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

Having 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

To 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

With 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

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

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

For 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

Upon 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

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

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

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)

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

Acquavella’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

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

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

Being, 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

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

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

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

With 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

In 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

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

“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

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)

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

‘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

Saying 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

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

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

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

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

When 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

It’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

Legibility varies greatly in the work of over thirty international artists exhibited in Stories of Almost Everyone at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

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The Brooklyn Rail

MAY 2018

All Issues