Richard Pousette-Dart’s Geometry of Summer marks a significant moment in the artist’s life and work. The seventeen works represented in the show span across the artist’s last twenty years of his practice, and together provide evidence of the virtuosity of his mature style and the techniques that he developed to exceed the limits of the grid.

Rob Pruitt began making work as a rebellious art student in the mid-eighties, beginning a professionally successful, albeit brief, collaboration with his then-partner Jack Early. Together the two made sculptures and paintings that in turn interrogated and showcased the masculinity which had policed and persecuted them each throughout young adulthood. After a controversial exhibition and a subsequent hiatus from the art world, Pruitt returned solo in 1998 with Cocaine Buffet—a 16-foot-long mirror laid flat on the floor of the exhibition space with a coordinating 16-foot-long line of cocaine down the middle. Since then, his career has run the gamut from daily portraits of Obama to his trademark panda paintings. The artist spoke with Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright to discuss his latest exhibition at 303 Gallery—a series of spectral watercolor gradients that deal in time past and passing, constantly in flux. 

Beset on all sides by this abyss, the painter Louis Jacquot, for his exhibition Tántalo at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, has suspended his works within the floating racks and aisles of the library.

At Galerie Sardine, Materia: Memoria exhibits the work of Justin Bradshaw and Maria Robledo: two artists who treat their respective disciplines as a way of settling and sieving the elusiveness of the memories of others and the places we once knew.

Archie Rand’s Sons, now on view at Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA) in Berlin, continues the anthology painting the artist has become known for.

Tom Friedman’s sculptural practice has established many ideas to the broader discourse, but perhaps most meaningfully, he has advanced the studio past traditional notions of production and into a zone of material grammar; a syntax of ingredients that collectively question what makes an object a thing. 

Aaron Fowler’s RELEASE at Anton Kern Gallery clarifies the motivation that underlies the artist’s inveterate use of materials.

In his current exhibition with David Kordansky in LA, Jason Fox reshuffles the deck of sixties counterculture with the immediate present. What is depicted is not nostalgia, or a memorabilia of history. Instead, the rigor mortis of American celebrities are resuscitated into new context—the dead images cast as new characters. Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright sat down with him to discuss the archetypical nature of his characters, the humiliation of being an artist within our violent American culture, and the body as a drape or re-skin—a shadowed dream of intellectual property and the celebrities of the American hegemon.

Marcus Jahmal’s two exhibitions at Will Shott and Market Gallery find themselves suspended, transfigured, between the leather jacket and the cross. Together, they are the drape of attitude and reflection, a disposition that suggests that the artist strikes between immolation and sacrifice.

Mark Leckey’s 3 Songs from the Liver at Gladstone shows us that we are lost in a Warburgian maze of images and the scopic regimes that they suggest, constructing a palace of mirrors and screens that we are unable to escape.

The artists included in this exhibition are invested in practices that pull new forms of research into visibility and point to more extensive archives, or what James Voorhies might describe as adjacent forms of “postsensual aesthetics.”

What is worldbuilding a reflection on and what is it a symptom of? Is worldbuilding an act of avoidance? A way of engaging with the methods left to artists by Dada and Surrealism without evoking their histories? And maybe most urgently, how then can we develop language for when worldbuilding produces unnecessary escapism, and when it critically is used to better understand the world we are left with?

I find myself approaching the destruction of Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture in Houston as a contemporary ruin. Since the work’s desecration, Sikander’s Witness (2023) is now an unintended monument through ruin—a space to consider what is severed and what, in this moment, seems to be impossible to mend.

The point is to attempt to recognize what is at the edge of things; to see if there’s a language to be found in the glow of its aurora. The term avant-garde undermines its own capability. It implies a linear progression of time while also invoking the thin posturing of a guilty bourgeoisie. Avoiding the question has been rendered its own cliché. As far back as the 1960s, it has been dismissed as something dead and gone. 

It feels appropriate to have an exhibition at this scale come off as more of a question—something less declarative. The interventions of the artists fight to keep their edge in a place where everything is drawn into comparison. The space is so expressive. The Campus wants to be a scene, or a milieu; or wants to be, at the very least, visible and uncontained.

Joseph Brock’s paintings in his exhibition Every Asterism at Foreign & Domestic clear out space to explore soft architectures, fragile colors, and the light of afterimages.