Recent visitors to the Andrea Rosen Gallery may have sensed an uncanny edge in the air. Although everything was very still, there was an underlying flurry—a calm sea as it were—that pervaded the space.

For Nancy de Holl’s debut solo show at Taxter & Spengemann Gallery, she presents a group of still-life photographs. Spare and understated, each image is composed of three or four objects clustered together. The items are domestic, more or less, and evoke a kind of late-midcentury nostalgia.

I first saw Tamara Gonzales’s new show the night of the winter solstice. It was an appropriately blustery evening, and by the time I arrived, the gallery doors were fogged over from the warm breath of conversation.

Dannielle Tegeder’s art has very long titles.

In Kutluğ Ataman’s fourth show at Lehmann Maupin he constructs a dynamic video portrait of Stefan Naumann, a young German man obsessed with moths.

A piercing bell breaks the silence in the gallery. It sounds like a fire alarm or a high-pitched human scream, startling, warning, terrifying, a harbinger of destruction.

For over twenty years, Andrea Fraser has drawn on psychoanalysis, postmodern sociology, and feminist theory to create work based on incisive critique and analysis of the art world.

Sick fox is Berlin-based artist Klaus Weber’s New York debut: an introduction to some of the essential themes and variations in the multifarious artist’s oeuvre, with works in a range of media.

Worldscapes is the first major American exhibition of the Icelandic artist Erró, a joint endeavor between NYU, the Reykjavik Art Museum, and the Goethe-Institut. Along with the mini-retrospective at Grey, a series of paintings titled Femme Fatales is uptown at Goethe, and the lithographs Mao’s Last Visit to Venice are at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs.

Mahalchick’s work fills Canada Gallery in a panoply of forms: wall pieces, free standing sculptures, leaning sculptures, and hung tapestries.

Yuh-Shioh Wong’s first solo exhibition in New York, Spirits Gone Astray is a landscape of myriad forms that eloquently displays Wong’s multifaceted and prodigious talents as a draftsman, painter, and sculptor.

Steven Thompson’s second exhibition at Kenny Schachter conTEMPorary is made up of six new works.

For the first time in New York, the Queens Museum of Art is presenting a large-scale exhibition of the artist Joan Jonas.

The current show at the Knoedler Gallery is a concise version of a larger exhibition at the Fogg Museum, Harvard: The collection of Lois Orswell, a patron of the arts who died in 1998 at 94. The collection as a whole was primarily amassed during two intense periods. From 1944-46, Orswell looked to Europe and purchased a superb collection of brightly colored, emotive pieces from the first half of the century, including works by Klee, Rodin, Cézanne, Moore, and Calder. The second phase of collecting took place during the 1950s when Orswell turned her attention to contemporary American sculptors and Abstract Expressionists.

For the past few weeks I have been debating what exhibitions to review for the Rail. London is abloom with exceptional art—Eva Hesse and Barnett Newman at Tate Modern, Rodney Graham at Whitechapel, Douglas Gordon at the Hayward, David LaChapelle at Barbican—to name just a few that fall into the category of absolutely outstanding.

Damien Hirst at White Cube


Franko B is an artist most well known for his performance art. I saw one, I Miss You, last year at Tate Modern. In it, Franko walked down a catwalk of white canvas bleeding from both arms. His rotund, short frame was painted completely white and as he walked, drips of red fell down his side, dappling his body, and creating, on the ground beneath, a magical pattern of footprints and spots.

Wandering through Belgrade in late June, I had little hope of actually finding the two contemporary photography shows I had spied listings for. While the city has a discernible order, my flimsy tourist map with Latin spelling held little resemblance to the ubiquitous Cyrillic street signs around me.

Conrad Shawcross is 25. The Nervous Systems is his first show out of art school (2001, Slade School M.F.A.) and it is at Entwistle, a very posh gallery on the poshest of streets (Cork).

Blah, blah, blah, blah, moon, Blah, blah blah, above; Blah blah, blah, blah, croon, Blah, blah, blah, blah, love, is part two of Roni Horn’s solo show at the Dia Center.