The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

ETEL ADNAN & SIMONE FATTAL with Sara Roffino & Anna Tome

Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal met in Beirut in the 1970s. They have since lived between Paris, Beirut, and northern California, working in different media—Adnan is a poet and painter while Fattal is a sculptor and the founder and publisher of the Post-Apollo Press—to explore and reconfigure notions of history, politics, freedom, and feminism.

In Conversation

Ebecho Muslimova with Anna Tome

Ebecho Muslimova is a Russian-born, New York-based artist known for ever-evolving depictions of her illustrated character, Fatebe (Fah-tee-bee), who overflows with physicality and impropriety, free of the anxieties of a socially conscious being.

For Marian

By Anna Tome

For Marian, a group show at FiveMyles* in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is a posthumous homage to the Sculpture Center’s late director, Marion Griffiths.

Alberto Burri, The Trauma of Painting

By Anna Tome

Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting chronicles the career of Italian doctor, prisoner of war, and artist Alberto Burri.

NANCY HAYNES anomalies and non-sequiturs

By Anna Tome

There are countless under-recognized—but nonetheless exceptional—artists working quietly away in our midst here in New York: Nancy Haynes is choice among them.

A SPECIFIC IMAGINATION
SHIRIN NESHAT Our House is on Fire

By Anna Tome

Despite the portrayal of such extreme emotion, the works are not in the least literal or heavy-handed. Rather, they seem to have been constructed this way, like much of Neshat’s work, to translate a cultural experience we in the West naturally misunderstand.

Alex Da Corte: Marigolds

By Anna Tome

A vase of orange marigolds adorns a ledge at the entrance of Alex Da Corte’s second solo show at Karma. Like the artist’s work, this little detail cloaks meaning in layers of wit. The marigolds’ striking golden hue symbolizes both fortune and grief. Known for captivating films and installations that probe popular American culture, Da Corte is acutely sensitive to the myriad signifying effects of both color and cultural imagery and uses them to penetrate our individual experiences and collective associations.

Martin Kippenberger Raft of the Medusa

By Anna Tome

In Raft of the Medusa, all three floors of Skarstedt’s townhouse-turned-gallery exhibit Martin Kippenberger’s fervent study of Theodore Gericault’s infamous 1819 painting, occasioned through a series of photographs, sketches, lithographs, paintings, and even a rug.

Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine

By Anna Tome

On view at Paul Kasmin this past June was the under-represented Belarusian master Chaim Soutine.  Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine featured 16 paintings of dead animals, landscapes, and a few portraits, giving a limited but nuanced look into the painter’s oeuvre.