ArtSeen
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933
By Daniel PatemanCommemorating the centenary of the armistice of the First World War, the Tate Modern presents Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933. Comprised substantially of loans from The George Economou Collection, the show attempts to revive the overlooked artistic term Magic Realism, while also exploring the changing fortunes of the short-lived Weimar Republic.
West By Midwest
By Elliot J. ReichertThis exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago takes up the Westward expansion of the art world in three generations of Midwesterners, tracing the lesser-known histories of a now well-established artistic milieu in an effort to set the art historical record straight.
Ella Kruglyanskaya: Fenix
By Alex A. JonesThe most revealing painting in Ella Kruglyanskaya's show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise is Painter, Discontented (2018). The seven-foot-tall oil depicts a painter in messy negligee sitting before a canvas, onto which a few marks have been splashed from the brush in her hand.
Cameron Rowland: D37
By Alex JenCameron Rowland's exhibition, D37, is bookended by two slowly searing works that rewrite how we look at art and public policy. Using artwork budgets and legal research, Rowland reveals the city of Los Angeles's role in the violent displacement of the poor and people of color.
Raha Raissnia: Galvanization
By Benjamin CliffordRaha Raissnia’s atmospheric new paintings, drawings, and projections share much with the work she exhibited at The Drawing Center last winter.
Imagined Communities: Photographs by Mila Teshaieva
By Vivian LiThough her first East Coast solo exhibition is formally promoted as featuring three of her recent photographic series that explore the complexities of national identities and memories in former USSR territories, the brilliance of photographer Mila Teshaieva's show lies not in the expansive and consciously composed photographs alone but in their total installation.
Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Boy: Witness and Marker 2003 – 2018
By Lilly WeiBoyhood is the theme of this elegantly installed show although whether or not it is that of the artist Enrique Martínez Celaya is unclear—purposefully so.
The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night
By Alex JenDepending on who you ask, when the sun goes down, it's time to head home or hit the streets. The nighttime is for resting up for tomorrow, seeing a loved one, working late or dancing until daybreak. It's also for delinquents to slink around casing a joint, and for bigots to hide as they carry out hate crimes.
Erik Parker: New Soul
By Robert C. MorganNew Soul is Erik Parker's second exhibition with Mary Boone. Once again we may experience the artist's penchant for bright flaming colors and zany surfaces.
Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950
By Nico WheadonIf Wright’s “new tide” embodies the wave of social change that engulfed a segregated 1940’s America, Gordon Parks was an essential gravity that washed the revolution ashore.
Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist
By A.V. RyanThis traveling retrospective, which recently left the Barnes Foundation, focuses on Morisot’s portraits of women and girls. They are some of the most remarkable portraits ever painted.
Gaylen Gerber
By Lori WaxmanRarely has an exhibition left me feeling equal parts incredulous, awestruck, anxious, melancholic, nauseated, and peaceful. Perhaps never, actually, until this past December, when I saw 60 of Gaylen Gerber’s “Supports” at the Arts Club of Chicago.
Viktor Timofeev: God Room
By Rudy NatanzonIn the story of the Tower of Babel, God punishes the Babylonians for pridefully attempting to build a tower tall enough to grasp Heaven. He fatally confuses them by introducing varied language to a homogenous global tongue—
Viktor Timofeev: God Room
By Alex A. JonesUpon entering the apartment gallery, the resonant sound of a slowed-down clock pendulum conjures a sensation of time slipping slowly away, similar to the attenuated experience we may associate with waiting.
Richard Artschwager: Primary Sources and Self-Portraits and the American Southwest
By Robert C. MorganWhile critics have argued that Richard Artschwager was an artist whose works alternated between Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, there was little doubt he possessed his own singularity removed from the fray.
Jeanne Silverthorne: From Darkness
By William CorwinIn the exhibition Jeanne Silverthorne: From Darkness the top floor of the Marc Straus gallery is dominated by a singular object: Untitled (Chandelier) (1994), cast in resin.
Archie Rand: Misfits
By Ann McCoyArchie Rand glides onto the scene, part mystical rebbe, part Diogenes, carrying a lamp, by day, which he shines in our faces, in his search for an honest man.
Torey Thornton: Sustenance Traversing Foundational Urgencies (STFU [some])(Re-Faux Outing)
By Vijay MasharaniThough he pays careful attention their formal qualities, sourcing objects based on their color, surface quality, or other aesthetic affinities, Thornton also chooses objects according to more specific criteria, tending to favor those that are quite cheap, and have some kind of subcultural connotation.
![Torey Thornton, <em>Sustenance Traversing Foundational Urgencies (STFU [some])(Re-Faux Outing)</em>, installation view, ESSEX STREET, New York, 2019. Courtesy the artist and ESSEX STREET.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/23254/Masharani-Thornton-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin
By Amber Jamilla MusserThe sound of James Baldwin’s voice greets visitors first. It originates from a Victrola record player, unceremoniously placed on the floor in the back of the first room, which plays a 1932 recording on vinyl of Baldwin singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning
By McKenzie WarkKathy Acker is a writer whose readership has never gone away, even after her death at age 50 in 1997. There’s some strange margin of the literary world where queers, punks, riot girls and avant-gardists have found reasons to keep turning to her.
Venceremos: Resisting the Rise of the Far-right in Brazil
By Tatiane Santa RosaIn October 2018 fifty-five percent of Brazil’s voters chose to elect a far-right president. It is unsurprising that a country shaped by colonial thinking, marked by a horrific history of slavery, and mostly controlled by white oligarchies would adhere once again to such forces.
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt
By Will FenstermakerMany years from now, but surely fewer than one wants to think, those of us who survive ecological collapse and the technocratic reformation of the global economy will remember Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris).
Forest Law
By Lisa E. Bloom, Iris Morrell, and Ariel HoageForest Law is a groundbreaking exhibition on imagining altering our course as we face runaway global warming and unprecedented environmental destruction.
Francesco Clemente: Works 1978-2018
By Alan GilbertWilliam Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” describes the destructive power of a “dark secret love” on a flower’s “crimson joy.” This nefarious force is both eroticized and made phallic in being depicted as an “invisible worm.”
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
By Swagato ChakravortySome artists and exhibitions can be summarized into a set of statements, the fundamentals of the work distilled. Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is not among those.
Dana Schutz: Imagine Me and You
By Alfred Mac AdamDana Schutz apparently found the title for this splendid show in the Turtles’ 1967 saccharine hymn to togetherness of the same name. No one is likely to become enraged over this appropriation. But it reminds us of the absurdity entailed in the very idea of appropriation, that somehow subjects are the exclusive property of some artists but not others.
Nancy Holt
By Ann McCoyIn his doctrine of anámnēsis, or recollection, Plato makes a distinction between eternal Forms and their resemblances in human perceptions.
James Siena: Painting
By Tom McGlynnThe most radical aspect of James Siena’s aesthetics, extending from his earliest works, is that he foregrounds the empirical impulse.
Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera
By Benjamin CliffordThe title of the Met’s new ongoing installation, Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera, suggests a revisionist take on the history of abstraction since World War II. However, the show is drawn almost entirely from the permanent collection, which is simply not broad enough in this area to fulfill such an ambitious promise.
Maya Lin: A River Is a Drawing
By Taney RonigerLast fall, the United Nations issued a grave pronouncement: If we don’t act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we risk crossing the point of no return by 2030.
Max Kozloff: The Atmospherics of Interruption: Paintings 1966-2018
By Hovey BrockPerhaps best known for his canonical essay linking Abstract Expressionism to America’s postwar hegemony, Max Kozloff has left an indelible mark on art history and art criticism, informed by his own practice as a photographer and painter.
David Rabinowitch: Périgord Construction of Vision Drawings
By Marcia E. VetrocqIn the course of fifty years of exhibiting his art, David Rabinowitch has come to be known for his rigorous empiricism, flinty intelligence, and serial investigations into the organizing operations of perception.
EJ Hauser: Barn Spirits
By Louis BlockIn this show of nine canvases, all painted in 2018, EJ Hauser mines an ever-shifting vocabulary of form. The language here lies somewhere between literal and mythological, spoken and remembered.
Rochelle Feinstein: Image of an Image
By David CarrierWhat can an abstract painting represent? Rochelle Feinstein offers a plenitude of answers. Image of an Image is the most challenging retrospective that I have recently had the pleasure of viewing.
Maria Antelman: Disassembler
By Ann C. CollinsOn a bleak, late December afternoon in late December, the heavy door to Pioneer Works in Red Hook gives way to a dark stairwell that serves as the gallery’s vestibule. Overhead, an imposing video monitor holds a silent black-and-white image of a hand, palm open, fingertips twitching in and out.
Robert Janitz: Uptown Campus / College Robert Janitz
By David RhodesNonchalance and elegance, speed and subtlety, all come together in Janitz’s work.
Caroline Larsen: Kaleidoscopic & Mathew Zefeldt: Customizable Realities
By Nina WolpowThe point of painting in a digital age is not to rehash what’s already been done, or what a camera or computer can do better, but to twerk reality at the behest of curious, exploratory minds.
Lyle Ashton Harris: Flash of the Spirit
By Jan AvgikosLyle Ashton Harris has channeled many memorable personas over the course of his thirty year practice.
Max Neumann: Specter
By Will FenstermakerA few years ago, I found myself hunting in a bookstore for the last copy of Wolfgang Hilbig’s latest translation.
Under Erasure
By William CorwinUnder Erasure is a timely, wise, and expansive exploration of the idea of erasure from all angles in visual art and textual practice, particularly poetry.
