Hrag Vartanian
Hrag Vartanian is a writer, critic, and designer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night
By Robert C. Morgan, Hrag Vartanian, Stephanie Buhmann, William Powhida, and Ellen PearlmanThe 2006 Whitney Biennial had the potential to harness a subversive undercurrent with only a slight (if radical) reinterpretation of its curatorial premise, Day for Night.
Anthony Caro: New Galvanized Steel Sculptures
By Hrag VartanianFew sculptors have the range of Brit maestro Sir Anthony Caro, and fewer artists can consistently create three-dimensional forms that feel original yet rooted firmly in the ideals of modern sculpture.
Mala Iqbal
By Hrag VartanianIn Bellwether’s pristine space on Grand Street, Mala Iqbal’s paintings are alluring and even titillating. A Staten Island native, she says in her artist statement that her work is partly a product of her childhood environment.
Evan Lintermans
By Hrag VartanianEvan Lintermans’s New Paintings show at *sixtyseven is a winterfresh whiff of arctic air consisting of three acrylic paintings on Plexiglas produced after an Alaskan trip. The subject perfectly suits Lintermans’s technique and offers him the chance to show off his surfaces as his forms oscillate in shimmering waves.
Evan Lintermans
By Hrag VartanianA native Angeleno, Evan Lintermans constructs a series of slick panels in Generica, a show named for a Sanford Kwinters and Daniela Fabricius essay in Mutations (2000). Lintermans has created six works in oil, latex, and enamel on panel, titled with cutesy names that suggest forms, "Puzzle" (2002), or locations, "Burbank" (2001).
Curating on the Margin
By Yasmeen Siddiqui and Hrag VartanianThe challenges of dialoguing with subjects or spaces on the fringe, for better or for worse, are fragile endeavors that deserve a close examination of curatorial agendas and theoretical framing. Looking to the recently closed Williamsburg Bridges Palestine 2002 and the soon to open exhibition The Same Sky we can examine the success and failures of the margin, where things that traditionally escape our view are placed in the foreground for careful scrutiny.
Flip: Rachel Beach and Nora Herting
By Hrag VartanianIts latest show, Flip, brings together two artists, Rachel Beach and Nora Herting, who are completely immersed in a world of decoration and design. While they share some commonalities, they diverge in their approach and success. Beach is a sculptor who excels in fashioning art out of the seemingly superficial world of veneers, but shallow her objects are not.
The Breakaway Republic of Bushwick
By Hrag VartanianIn last month’s Rail, artist/critic James Kalm shined a bright light on the long history of Brooklyn, and Williamsburg in particular, as a creative force in the city’s artistic life.
Pedestrian
By Hrag VartanianThe ghosts of 14th Street must have been happy in October, when Art in Odd Places (AiOP) chose the thoroughfare as the site for its month-long exhibition/intervention/performance/festival—the choice seemed as much symbolic as aesthetic.
Nicholas Baker-Maffei
By Hrag VartanianCouched in the artist’s pleasure, Baker-Maffei’s eight paintings, spanning from 2000 to the present, are testaments to the creator’s mood—whether sexual, intellectual, or technical.
Portraying Gorky at Gagosian
By Hrag VartanianLarry Gagosian’s fixation on Gorky is not surprising considering the cultural and personality traits the two figures share.
Elusive Boundaries
By Hrag VartanianWhen I visited Michal Rovner at her studio on Broadway near Bleecker, she told me one of those New York cabbie stories people tend to share over drinks.
KEITH HARING: 20TH ANNIVERSARY
By Hrag VartanianIf Keith Haring seems more ubiquitous today than ever before, a walk through the Miami Basel art fair last December would have been proof positive. This year was considered a “safe” year for blue-chip art galleries in Miami and stashed everywhere amidst the mid-century abstractionists, early modernist masters, and more recent art stars, was Haring.
Histories of Violence
By Yasmeen Siddiqui, Hrag Vartanian, Thomas Micchelli, and Dore AshtonTwo concurrent Chelsea exhibitions tackle the aesthetics of violence within the context of war: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Superficial Engagement at the Gladstone Gallery and the projects of Walid Raad/The Atlas Group at The Kitchen under the title The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs.
Andrew Demirjian
By Hrag VartanianIn his first solo Williamsburg show, Andrew Demirjian exhibited two video works at LMAK Projects that grapple with the American media’s manipulation of everyday reality: “Scenes from Next Week” (2005) and “Unpromised Water” (2004). It is a process we, as consumers, according to Demirjian, accept uncritically, even passively.
Stuart Hawkins
By Hrag VartanianIn the hands of an artist like Stuart Hawkins, photography sings with a global voice. The New York/Nepal-based artist has taken a Technicolor look at the uneasy relationship between foreigner and native—a binary reality at the core of identity politics, but one that is increasingly about imagined narratives rather than facts.
Art in the Shadow of Katrina: Exploring Prospect New Orleans
By Hrag VartanianWhen Mark Bradford built his ark, “Mithra” (2008), in the middle of New Orleans’ devastated Lower Ninth Ward, I don’t know if he envisioned it as a monument to futility or a symbolic cry for salvation but it reads as a little bit of both. Bradford’s ship sculpture is composed of large sheets of plywood and covered with advertisements that, even in New Orleans’s rather temperate climate, peeled and washed away.
Homomuseum: Heroes and Moments
By Hrag VartanianThis year marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, and no one can argue that the world has not changed for the better for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Once characterized as the love that dare not speak its name, today gay issues are discussed during Presidential debates and regularly featured on network newscasts.
Out of Place: Summer 2002 Picks
By Hrag VartanianIn 1989, painter R.B. Kitaj’s wrote about a Diasporist art. Something that came out of an artist that “paints in two or more societies at once.” A flexible position that was “…as old as the hills (or caves) but new enough to react to today’s newspapers or last week’s aesthetic musing or tomorrow’s terror.”
Cheryl Molnar
By Hrag VartanianOver the last twenty years, north Brooklyn has endured one crisis after another: crack, gentrification, homesteading dot-comers, more gentrification, destination restaurants, luxury lofts, the closing of Engine 212, a new power station and now development of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront.
The Male Gaze
By Hrag VartanianWhen I was in college in the 1990s, there was an emerging movement called Gay Art; it was akin to Feminist Art, but focused on radical Queer Theory and its impact on male gay identity.
Shirin Neshat
By Hrag VartanianIn her latest exhibition, Shirin Neshat continues her cinematic translation of Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour’s Women Without Men. Her latest filmic installation lingers on a prostitute, named Zarin, in an Iranian brothel, a place saturated with color and languid characters that frame the protagonist’s psychological breakdown.
Harriet Shorr
By Hrag VartanianHarriet Shorr’s new exhibit is filled with difficult images. They mark a new direction for Shorr, who is known for her more straightforward still lifes. Here, she has attempted radically new works that wrestle with allegory in the guise of porcelain figurines, textiles, flowers, branches and reflective surfaces.
Garbage Collection
By Hrag VartanianGreenjeans, a small craft shop slowly morphing into a makeshift gallery in Brooklyn’s South Slope, is becoming a destination for new American craft. Their latest show, Garbage Collection, is their first foray into a gallery-like exhibition.
John Lurie
By Hrag VartanianA founding member of the musical group Lounge Lizards, John Lurie isn’t well known as an artist, but his latest show at Roebling Hall’s small Chelsea space showcases a rich style that is also infused with irony.
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939
By Hrag VartanianAccustomed to discussing the masterpieces of Modernism, it is easy to forget that Modernism in fact constituted an explosion of visionary movements that changed history forever.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
By Hrag VartanianHiroshi Sugimoto’s seems at the brink of a brave new world in his latest exhibition, Colors of Shadow, which is also his first foray into color photography—though looking at these virtually monochromic images you’d hardly know it. What he presents in this show shoots straight to the origins of art and hints at a new direction for the artist.
Andrew Ohanesian and Tescia Seufferlein Blind Spot
By Hrag VartanianFor those who oppose the Iraq War, its unfolding tragedy has colonized a repository of dark motivations and actions that represent the nadir of American ideals, a shadow realm of places like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Manhattan’s Pier 57 (used to house RNC 2004 protesters) that scares the shit out of us.
Open Air
By Hrag VartanianFor four days, curators Alyssa Natches and Lou Auguste welcomed a slew of street artists to paste, paint and stencil to their heart’s desire on plywood walls constructed in the rented Stay Gold gallery space on Brooklyn’s Grand Street. Tiki Jay from LA was in town for his first New York showing, while New York diehards Michael De Feo, Dan Witz, the artistic pair Skewville, and FAILE—among others—packed the space to capacity.
LONGTIME EXPOSURE: Considering Street Art Photography
By Hrag VartanianKatherine Lorimer (aka Luna Park) is a Brooklyn-based street art photographer. People outside the world of street art and graffiti probably don’t know what that means, but then again most street art photographers are figuring it out themselves. A librarian by day, she spends her free time scouring the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn looking for the best street art and capturing images which she will post online.
Is Contemporary Architecture a PR Panacea for Autocrats? Western Architectural Ethics & Undemocratic Nations
By Hrag VartanianThe recent Beijing Olympics has highlighted a crisis in contemporary Western architecture and some of us are worried. Earlier this year, Thomas Micchelli penned an insightful essay in the Rail entitled “Monumental Squalor,” which indicted architect Robert A.M. Stern for his complicity in the George W. Bush Presidential Library, a project that is planned to perpetuate the bankrupt beliefs of a presidency that has destroyed the ideals of America.
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50 years of Helvetica
By Hrag VartanianThe entry of Helvetica as the first canonized typeface into the hallowed halls of MoMA is a great moment for typographers and design enthusiasts everywhere. The museum has acquired a set of original 36” Helvetica Bold lead plates (1956-57) into its collection, and has organized an exhibit entitled 50 Years of Helvetica to mark the occasion and display its influence in context.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
By Hrag VartanianFew art museums have the luxury of acquiring masterpieces one by one and then mounting an exhibition with an accompanying catalogue for each artwork, unless you are the Upper East Side’s Neue Galerie of Austrian and German Modern Art.
Engaging Ephemera
By Hrag VartanianSometimes I encounter an artist whose work provokes a visceral reaction that haunts me for days. Cal Lane in Engaging Ephemera instigated exactly that response, and while she is one of three artists on display, she undoubtedly dominates the show.
Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer
By Hrag VartanianIn one fell swoop Ronald Lauder’s $135 million purchase in June of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” bestowed Manhattan’s Neue Galerie with a destination artwork and a steady flow of tourists gawking at the most expensive painting in the world. Even hype-resistant New Yorkers stopped by to take a look.
Virtually an Art Market? Artfully Living a Second Life
By Hrag VartanianNow that the Internet is ubiquitous and many of us prefer email, instant messaging and online chat rooms to live conversation, it was only a matter of time before our cultural pursuits followed us online as well. Now, a “virtual world” known as Second Life (www.secondlife.com), is offering a venue for the art world to expand its terrestrial (aka offline) presence into an online terra incognita.
The Very Public Life of Street Art
By Hrag VartanianEveryone dreams about having it both ways and street artists are no different. On one hand they are rebellious lawbreakers exerting their right to public space, and on the other they are the ultimate capitalists monetizing their talents into commodities that sell increasing well.
Love/War/Sex
By Hrag VartanianExit Art is an oasis, one of the only professional alternative spaces in New York that takes a chance with carefully curated new work, effortlessly interspersing established and emerging talents. Saying that, their current show is a mixed bag of ideas about the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their resulting impact and their mind-numbing role in our lives.
Bushwick Open Studios Continues to Grow but at What Cost?
By Hrag VartanianWhat a difference five years makes. From a scrappy and dispersed open studios festival, Brooklyn’s—if not New York’s—largest such event, Bushwick Open Studios (BOS), has grown to 161 locations, including 16 information hubs and hundreds of artists over a three-mile stretch of the nebulous neighborhood known as Bushwick.
Who’s Afraid of Atom Egoyan
By Hrag VartanianWhen I interviewed Atom Egoyan in 1999, he hesitated to tell me about Ararat, the new project he was poised to announce, which addresses the Turkish Empire’s genocide of Armenians in 1915.
