Darragh McNicholas
TWENTY YEARS OF APEXART
A Profile of Founder Steven Rand
By Darragh McNicholas
Two decades ago, the artist Steven Rand founded apexart as an experimental space for independent curators as an alternative to New York’s commercial galleries.
No Room for Artists
By Darragh McNicholasArt and capital have a long and complicated history, but rarely do they combine so problematically as in the figure of Aby Rosen. In 2005, the controversial art collector and co-founder of RFR Holdings told the New York Times that life is about “melting art and commerce all together.”
Nora Griffin: Modern Love
By Darragh McNicholasIn 1962, the American film critic and painter Manny Farber remarked that the idea of a painting as an “expensive hunk of well-regulated area both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter.” In the half century since Farber’s critique, the grip of this idea has hardly loosened.
MATTHEW BARNEY Facility of Decline
By Darragh McNicholasIn a photograph from 1899, a twenty-five-year-old Houdini looks toward the camera with a calm but teasing smile. He is naked save for a loincloth, and his body is trussed with chains weighted by padlocks.
TIM CLIFFORD Threat Assessment
By Darragh McNicholasOne might expect an exhibit about fear, gun culture, and violence by an artist who attended Sandy Hook Elementary School to be a meditation on trauma and mourning.
ALEXIS SMITH History in the Making
By Darragh McNicholasIn “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell claimed that cliché and “stale imagery” not only marred writing, but the very capacity for clear thought.
Seeds from DiDonna
By Darragh McNicholasWith the advantage of being mounted, the 6-foot-tall Untitled (pdn63) (1976) dwarfs me. It’s a dark and unyielding expanse of blue-green, with thousands of miniscule dots horizontally positioned along an invisible grid, each dot the amber color of a sun setting behind viscous pollution. I stand for a minute in alienated silence before I have any verbal thoughts at all about the work. The scale speaks of grandiosity, the form of objectivity and restraint.
LEE KRASNER
By Darragh McNicholasIn the mid-’50s, Lee Krasner walked into a studio hung floor to ceiling with drawings. In a decisive moment of self-criticism, she tore her works from the walls until the floor was covered in fragments.
