Amanda Gluibizzi
Amanda Gluibizzi is an art editor at the Rail. An art historian, she is the Co-Director of the New Foundation for Art History and the author of Art and Design in 1960s New York.
On Edge(s)
By Amanda GluibizziIn 2009 the Museum of Modern Art made a major announcement concerning its displays that was dutifully reported by the New York Times: the chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, had decided to remove the frames from the museums collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, thus freeing the paintings from the domestication of the gallery space.
In Conversation
JO BAER with Amanda Gluibizzi
Artist Jo Baer speaks with Rail ArtSeen editor Amanda Gluibizzi about her two exhibitions at Pace Gallery, The Risen and Originals, playing with space, and how she wants her work shown.
In Conversation
Derrick Adams with Amanda Gluibizzi
Derrick Adamss new show at The FLAG Art Foundation, I Can Show You Better than I Can Tell You, is a tribute to the artists commitment to color, pattern, and the conditions that make up everyday moments of Black life in America: an expressive melding of form and content.
In Conversation
Ghada Amer with Amanda Gluibizzi
Amanda Gluibizzi talks with Ghada Amer about her new body of work on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery.
In Conversation
MICHAEL JOO with Amanda Gluibizzi
Michael Joo speaks with Amanda Gluibizzi about liminal space, the physicality of his performance works, and his scientific research methods.
In Conversation
Alex Hay with Amanda Gluibizzi
An artist with an eye resolutely toward possibility, Hay has been omnivorous, taking advantage of opportunities as theyve presented themselves, whether in terms of subject matter or medium. As Hay tells us, the genesis of my work is circumstances.
In Conversation
Dan Colen with Amanda Gluibizzi
This fall, the artist Dan Colen will revisit and expand upon themes that have long preoccupied him in venues as diverse as Gagosian Gallerys West 21st Street space, the Donald Judd Foundations Soho building, and United Nations Plaza. Gagosian will be displaying paintings from Colens Mother and Woodworker series, billboard-sized images that continue his exploration of ideas of home, the development of artists and artistic pursuits, and familiar cartoons as springboards to compositional questions and narratival complexity.
In Conversation
Tavares Strachan with Amanda Gluibizzi
Tavares Strachans current exhibition at Marian Goodmans New York gallery leads its viewers through experiences that refute passive contemplation. Installed in several interlocking rooms, The Awakening continues Strachans project of uncovering the lives and achievements of forgottenin his words, invisiblepeople that Western history books regularly overlook. The major character here is Marcus Garvey, an early 20th-century orator and entrepreneur, but figures such as United States congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and the astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. also make appearances, either directly by being represented by Strachan in paint or objects or obliquely through suggestive iconography such as depictions of the night sky.
In Conversation
Emily Mae Smith with Amanda Gluibizzi
The possibilities of painting are on full display at Emily Mae Smiths current exhibition, Heretic Lace, installed at Petzels new Chelsea space. This concise show of eleven paintings demonstrates Smiths command of her medium in strategies such as bravura brushwork, naturalism verging on trompe-lil, seamlessly liquid gradients, and backlit contre-jour effects.
In Conversation
Cinga Samson with Amanda Gluibizzi
Cinga Samson was born in South Africa and spent his early life traveling back and forth between the Eastern and Western Capes. He received his art education from fellow artists, moving into a studio shared by the artists Gerald Tabata, Xolile Mtakatya, and Luthando Laphuwano who helped him to develop and hone his craft.
Reframed: The Woman in the Window
By Amanda GluibizziThroughout the Dulwich Picture Gallerys wide-ranging Reframed: The Woman in the Window, thoughtfully curated by Jennifer Sliwka, we are reminded of that binarywho has agency and who may not?and the roles that we then assume as viewers of the women represented.
Ursula von Rydingsvard: LUBA
By Amanda GluibizziWhen the cedar is fresh and you first cut into it, Ursula von Rydingsvard has said, the wood inside is pink, like flesh. Perhaps this is part of the reason why von Rydingsvard has long referred to her sculptures as she (though GÒRKA [2021], with its central, vertical lingam may be a he)theyre alive and soft and individual, even as she works within her own aesthetic parameters.
Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work
By Amanda GluibizziJust as youre about to step into Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, you might notice a short, high-pitched sound underlying the other noises that occupy museum galleries. Its the chirping of crickets, and because it emanates from a speaker hung near the ceiling, it seems to envelop the vestibule, both placeable and unlocatable.
Christian Marclay
By Amanda GluibizziAppearing simultaneously at the 2019 edition of the Venice Biennale and this fall at Paula Cooper Gallery, Christian Marclays 48 War Movies (2019) and an accompanying series of woodblock prints called Screams (all 2018 or 2019) testify to the strangely complex relationship we have with war and its imagery.
Joanna Pousette-Dart
By Amanda GluibizziIn her first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Pousette-Dart has included larger-scale paintings alongside vivid 12-inch square gouache and acrylic studies that at first glance look like they mimic the paintings, before going their own ways, and similarly-sized fuzzy sumi ink sketches that have seeped into the weave of their rice paper grounds.
Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses
By Amanda GluibizziThe installation at Kordansky provides something that fans of Eversleys sculptures have long desired: the chance to see more of them. For, like his California peers in the Light and Space movement and who developed finish fetish, the ways he plays with and exploits optical effects compound when his work is seen in quantity.
Amy Sillman: Temporary Object
By Amanda GluibizziWe could compare it to storyboards, as indeed, the gallery does, but Sillman allows us more control than were given when watching a movie. Were not simply passive viewers; through our agency the objects are activated. In this way, though monochromatic and hard and made after the moves of paintingand therefore unlike Sillmans limpid drawings, with their transparent medium and evident switchbacksTemporary Object bears an important resemblance to the drawings included throughout and testifies to the artists process.
Adam McEwen: Execute
By Amanda GluibizziAs I walked through Adam McEwen’s latest show at Gagosian, I was surprised to find my hands clenching. Normally I’m an alert art-viewer, of course, but with this exhibition everything felt taut, from the tightly stretched canvases to the tips of Bic pens painted barely to touch the corners of the pictures’ surfaces, and my body responded in-kind.
Three Christs, Sleeping Mime, and the Last Supper; Pagan Paradise
By Amanda GluibizziMateriality, finish, the artists hand or lack thereof, and the imitative potential of sculpture: Ray is, in this installation of his work and its important bronze precedents, presenting a philosophical discussion of sculptural possibility. In his essay, Ray asks, Does my mime sleep, or does he mime sleep? and his question is justified: sculpture can only ever mime the real.
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
By Amanda GluibizziAt the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror starts off with such a strong installation that its nearly impossible to pick a favorite piece.
Suzanne Bocanegra: Wardrobe Test
By Amanda GluibizziThroughout Wardrobe Test, we encounter women trying things on: costumes, other voices, new or different personae. And yet despite, or even through, this garb, we also witness glimpses of what we have to assume or hope to believe is the person within, the compassionate collaborator and mourner, the artist as empath, the woman of faith above all else.
No W here: Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, Toni Ross
By Amanda GluibizziAs they were planning their joint exhibition at Ricco/Maresca, Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, and Toni Ross agreed to choose an evocative object from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would serve as an organizing principle for each artists portion of the show. To their surprise, all of them chose the same piece.
Bayne Peterson: Mirage
By Amanda GluibizziThese things are BANANAS, commented another visitor to Bayne Petersons Mirage on view at Kristen Lorello. He wasnt wrong.
Robert Grosvenor and David Novros
By Amanda GluibizziTaking advantage of Paula Cooper Gallerys West 26th Street double storefront windows, Robert Grosvenor has placed a floor-bound sculpture in each space.
Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Nepantla
By Amanda GluibizziIn his first solo exhibition with Garth Greenan, Esteban Cabeza de Baca shows paintings and ceramic sculptures that flicker with the colors of Southwest border towns: turquoise and marine blue, dusty terracotta, and the bloody hues of open sky sunsets.
Larry Bell: Still Standing
By Amanda GluibizziThe best decision Bell has made is to bevel his edges. Throughout, the bevels bisect fields, color, and visitors, acting as zips that direct the eye and project us around the room. Perhaps most important of all, they let Bells contours be sharp, soft to the touch but sharper than glass has ever been.
Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous
By Amanda GluibizziEvery time I see a Lisa Yuskavage exhibition, Im excited to discover the passages of pure painting that the artist permits herself. In Rendez-vous, Yuskavages first solo show in Paris, there are such moments in the striped-and-scraped socks that the artist-model wears in The Artists Studio (2022), in the dollops of pigment lined up on a wheeled work table in Big Flesh Studio (2022), andmost delectablyin the lick of an apple that curls up toward a listless model in the lower right-hand corner of the same painting.
Bruce Nauman
By Amanda GluibizziHaving spent time with the newer works currently on display at Sperone Westwater, I suspect that they might be his most searching philosophical inquiries. That they were undertaken at moments of career retrospection, recovery from illness, and the care of and mourning for a partner make the underlying melancholy that I somehow always feel when reading Wittgenstein that much more palpable.
Adriana Varejão: Talavera
By Amanda GluibizziTalavera, reveals a somewhat different direction for Varejão, who made her name by referencing the look of azulejo tiles.
Michael Rakowitz: The invisible enemy should not exist
By Amanda GluibizziThe visitor enters the gallery and is immediately confronted not by Rakowitzs recreations of Nimruds sculptures but with the backs of their supports. Each of the five panels is displayed in a surround made of wooden two-by-fours, the material recalling nothing so much as shipping or storage crates, the temporary housing of artifacts unearthed (or stolen) from their archaeological environments to be removed to new homes for study or display.
Wilhelm Sasnal: New Paintings and One Film
By Amanda GluibizziWilhelm Sasnals paintings are sometimes described as photorealistic, but thats not strictly the case. As his film Paintings and Bikes (2019) makes clear, the images in paintings occupy their own spaces and are preoccupied with their own concerns, not ours.
No Tears: In Conversation with Horace Pippin
By Amanda GluibizziBy sheer coincidence, I visited No Tears: In Conversation with Horace Pippin, which situates Pippins John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) in the context of critical texts and Dean Mosss video johnbrown (2014), on December 2, the 162nd anniversary of John Browns hanging. It was my second encounter with the abolitionist that week, having visited Kara Walkers exhibitionwhere Brown made an appearance in the artists video Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021)at Sikkema Jenkins just a few days earlier.
Souvenirs: Cornell Duchamp Johns Rauschenberg
By Amanda GluibizziSouvenirs at Craig F. Starr Gallery brings together six works by Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
tree filling window, 2002
By Amanda Gluibizzi
In Conversation
SQUEAK CARNWATH with Amanda Gluibizzi
Carnwaths large-scale paintings feature her personal vocabulary of faces, vases, candlesticks, sinking ships, blocks of color, and constellations, while placing written messages squarely in front of her viewers. Notably, Carnwath also scrawls the titles of her paintings down the left and right edges of her canvases which she always displays unframed, something I wanted to learn more about.