Grant Klarich Johnson
Grant Klarich Johnson is a critic and curator based in New York, and a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Southern California.
JULIE MEHRETU Liminal Squared
By Grant Klarich JohnsonWhen the revolution comes, what will it look like? The paintings in Liminal Squared refuse to settle either formally or conceptually, evoking the flux of revolution.
GETA BRĂTESCU:
The Leaps of Aesop
By Grant Klarich Johnson
Romania’s presentation of Geta Brātescu last year at the Venice Biennale felt like a retrospective in miniature. A trove brimming with variety, from small abstractions, lyrical figuration, to taped performances, and their associated sculptural sets, Brātescu’s protean energies were a welcome surprise.
SUE WILLIAMS
By Grant Klarich JohnsonFor those used to Williams’s graphic precision, these newer works may take some getting used to; but as paintings go, they are ultimately more naked, more brazen, shameless, and unabashed than those older more clarified works.
Suzanne Bocanegra: Poorly Watched Girls
By Grant Klarich JohnsonActive since the late 1980s, Suzanne Bocanegra is possibly best known for her “artist lectures,” where the well-worn, sober ritual of the professional artist is set on its ear by conscripting a professional actor (for example, Frances McDormand and Lili Taylor) to stand in for Bocanegra in front of a live audience while the ‘real’ Bocanegra feeds them lines in real time from the side.
SHEILA HICKS:
Free Threads, The Textile and its Prehispanic Roots 1954-2017 & Lifelines
By Grant Klarich Johnson
Today, as a rising tide of isolationist nationalism challenges globalism’s utopian promise, Lifelines, a concise retrospective of greatest hits at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Free Threads, a quixotic excavation of more obscure works, at Mexico’s Museo Amparo, surveyed Sheila Hicks’s cross-cultural ambitions.
Amanda Valdez: First Might
By Grant Klarich JohnsonIn Amanda Valdez’s First Might, passages of quilting, oil painting, and embroidery floss combine to create canvases in which craft and art's textures synthetically blend.
