Brooklyn Rail Contributor

Pac Pobric

Pac Pobric is a frequent contributor to Artseen and an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



DON VOISINE

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

The paintings in Don Voisine’s latest show at McKenzie Fine Art follow guidelines already established in his earlier work.

MATTHEW CRAVEN Oblivious Path

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

A review of Matthew Craven’s recent show at DCKT Contemporary.

Criticism After Utopian Politics

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

There has been no lack of talk, for the past 10 or so years, of some kind of “crisis” in art criticism.

WILLIAM WEGMAN: Dressed and Undressed

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

It’s amazing what happens when you dress up a dog. Put a blonde wig on a Weimaraner. Give it a top hat, dress it in elegant furs or a Hawaiian shirt, step back for a moment, and take a look.

ROBERT GOBER:
Tick Tock

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

The framing device Gober offers for his quiet new exhibition at Matthew Marks, his first since the MoMA show, is time, which is a recognition of the long gestation period of many of these thirty-nine objects.

peter campus: pause

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

Few artists understand the potential of the moving image as well as Peter Campus does. For fifty years, he has been training his eye on film and video, concentrating on how small breaks can make for big differences that bend our perspectives.

KIKI SMITH:
Below the Horizon

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

One hundred and thirty-two years ago, the leaders of Kihal Adath Jeshurun (“People’s Congregation of the Just”) bought three lots on a narrow street in lower Manhattan surrounded by tenements crowded with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The lots contained only a humble group of wooden row houses, but standing on that street in 1886, they imagined the space filled by a synagogue worthy of the shuls of Paris or Berlin—one that could inspire the impoverished Jews of New York and offer them a place for respite and reflection. Less than a year later, on a budget of $92,000, they completed the synagogue at Eldridge Street, a soaring, neo-Moorish temple and at once the tallest building in the neighborhood, capped by finials with the Star of David.

Rona Pondick

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

The distended head that rests on a small rectangular base on the floor is polished and smooth. From behind, the elongated form and vaguely twisted neck look entirely alien but for two clipped human ears that perch on either side, just where they should be. Slip around to the front, and now it’s a human head for sure, with a closed mouth and eyes and a sharp nose that cuts into a slot below the brow.

GEDI SIBONY

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

Gedi Sibony’s third solo show at Greene Naftali was a relatively conservative one, though not in any political sense of the term.

KATHARINA FRITSCH

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

How big is a cotton spinning wheel supposed to be? That was the question that bothered me most walking out of Katharina Fritsch’s recent exhibition at Matthew Marks.

WALTER SWENNEN: Bewtie

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

Delights and Frustrations: that could have been the title of the Belgian painter Walter Swennen’s recent exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery.

Julian Pretto Gallery

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

On May 24, 1995, a short obituary appeared in the New York Times for an art dealer named Julian Pretto. He had died two days earlier, at the age of 50, from AIDS-related complications.

MEL KENDRICK Water Drawings

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

Mel Kendrick was fresh out of Hartford, Connecticut, when he came to New York in the fall of 1971 to study sculpture at Hunter College. Already armed with an undergraduate degree, Kendrick came looking for the conversations that only New York could offer.

TED STAMM Paintings

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

It’s no longer popular to believe that art follows a single trajectory, but the truth is that certain artists follow clear paths. The painter Ted Stamm is a good example.

Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971

By Pac Pobric

| ArtSeen

Perhaps, as Singerman suggests in the catalogue, the curator disliked her works “because he saw himself portrayed in them”—as (in the words of Michele Wallace) “white, old, decadent, empty and dead.” This is largely speculation. But there is no such thing as pristine vision, as Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 makes so clear.

Table of Contents

ArtSeen

ADVERTISEMENTS
close

SEPT 2019

All Issues