Madeleine Seidel

Madeleine Seidel is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn. She has previously worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Atlanta Contemporary. Her writing on film, performance, and the art of the American South has been published in Art Papers, Frieze, and others.

New York-based artist Josh Kline’s work is often heralded as “prescient,” espousing a foreboding version of the near-future in which America is destroyed by fascism, climate change, or technological dependency—whatever takes hold first.

Josh Kline, Professional Default Swaps, 2024. 3D-printed sculptures in acrylic-based photopolymer resin; steel, low-iron tempered glass, plywood, custom tinted polyurethane paint, tinted acrylic enamel paint, UV protective coating, and museum wax, 37 1/2 x 50 x 30 inches. © Josh Kline. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.
In his new show, Todd Bienvenu takes FOMO and turns it into JOMO: the joy of missing out.
Todd Bienvenu, Tiny Wedgie, 2022. Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 x 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech.
Loot Sweets, on view at Bridget Donahue in New York until September 25, is a heady collage of found objects, paper scraps, and nostalgia that transforms into an uneasy meditation on consumption as a performance—on the things we buy, make, and throw away as an extension of self and culture.
Installation view: Martine Syms: Loot Sweets, Bridget Donahue, New York, 2021. Courtesy Bridget Donahue. Photo: Gregory Carideo.
The readymade has long been one of the art world’s most misunderstood tropes.
Installation view: fetch fiddle fidget, La Mama Galleria, New York, 2021. Photo: Etienne Frossard.
In L’INCONNUE’s exhibition, Emily Ludwig Schaffer and Françoise Grossen demonstrate an understanding of the body and its discontents through space, medium, and surface texture. Their intertwined and intergenerational discourse on women, craft, and the act of creation comes to life through their immaculate use of materials, giving the term “body of work” an exciting and vital new meaning.
Emily Ludwig Shaffer, Care and Maintenance, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 42 x 52 inches. Courtesy L'INCONNUE.
For Of Beauty and Consolation, Rico—who is currently based in Guadalajara—explores mortality and meaning in the modern era through large sculptural pieces that incorporate scientific motifs and found objects such as neon lights, antlers, and horseshoes.
Installation view: Gabriel Rico: Of Beauty and Consolation, Perrotin New York, 2021. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin.
David Fincher's latest, Mank, an iconoclastic biopic of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, proves that courageous, subtle, and smart filmmaking about Hollywood is still possible—and still able to expose the rot at the core of the industry.
David Fincher's Mank. Courtesy Netflix.
McQueen’s heartfelt and righteous Small Axe anthology explores the vitality of the UK’s Windrush generation of immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other Carribean nations against the backdrop of a changing Britain from the 1960s to the ’80s.
Steve McQueen's Mangrove. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
For this MoMA exhibition, Gulliver and curator Sophie Cavoulacos bring Ginza to Manhattan, translating this vibrant installation to the museum space with intoxicating and transformative effect.
Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, Cinematic Illumination. 1968–69. 1,350 black-and-white slides, 108 color gels, disco ball, and sound, 114:45 min., looped. Installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, 2020. Video: Oresti Tsonopoulos. © 2020 The Museum of Modern Art.
Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler’s omnibus film project examines filmmakers’ experiences in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some films facing the challenge head on and others through less conspicuous means.
Mila Zuo and William Brown's Coyote. Courtesy Usama Alshaibi & Adam Sekuler.
The selection of video art included here explores our digitally-driven moment by highlighting the fact that privacy and leisure are privileges not often extended to women, queer people, and people of color. Even though the exhibition is framed as an exploration of intimacy and technology, intimacy is not often afforded to these artists, whose emotional labor and identities are still contested within the domestic sphere.
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013. Seen as part of MoMA's Virtual Views: Video Lives, 2020.
A 2019 Whitney Biennial participant and professional choreographer, Madeline Hollander uses her impressive conceptual dance practice to analyze the ways in which humans interact within the mechanical trappings of modern society and urban landscapes.
Installation view: Madeline Hollander, Heads/Tails, Bortolami, New York. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photo: by Kristian Laudrup.
You are hit first by the contrast. The clinical white of the gallery walls behind the black leather and paint draw in and repel—equal and opposite forces. Within the freeing constraints of the gallery space, we are invited to explore an artistic vision of other types of freeing constraint: physical and psychological kinds, based off leather and trust and, most importantly, balance in pain and pleasure.
Installation view, Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Hold on, let me take the safety off, Company Gallery, New York, 2019.
In the early 1980s, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha coined the term “fixity” to describe the motifs and symbols visual discourse has used to craft harmful stereotypes and establish the “difference” of minoritized communities. Usually involving references to supposed violence or sexual deviance by highlighting the physical body and its flesh, this covert language of images perpetuates prejudice against the Other. It is this visual lexicon that the Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra explores, parodies, and reclaims in her exhibition Forever Sidepiece, showing at Queens’s Knockdown Center through October 27.
Installation view: Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece, Knockdown Center, New York, 2019. Photo: © Alexander Perrelli.

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