Brooklyn Rail Contributor

Simone Krug



SARAH CHARLESWORTH Doubleworld

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

They descend from the sky, soaring—captured mid air—in oversize grisaille panels, caught in the brief moments before hitting ground. The clipped, cropped, and expanded newspaper cutouts of suicide and accident victims that comprise Sarah Charlesworth’s fourteen life-size “Stills” series (1980, printed in 2012) transcend time and penetrate a space beyond. Gravity pauses here.

Salon Style

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

Braids, wisps, tufts, and beads are combed, coiled, and stacked in Salon Style, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibition on African and African American hair and fingernails as sites of creative expression.

FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

Working at a painting conservation studio, I encountered a strange motif of jealousy and rage. The conservator recounted a trope in stabbed paintings, wherein spurned lovers and wrathful kin took their rage to the art collection, thrusting knives into Keith Harings, Lucian Freuds, Mark Rothkos, and other auction house darlings.

Analog Currency

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

Oversize pixels flash on the screen, rearranging shapes to resemble faces. John Houck’s Portrait Landscape (2017) applies custom facial-recognition software to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up, in which a fashion photographer examines the grainy exposures on his contact sheet only to notice he has inadvertently recorded a murder.

In Practice: Under Foundations

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

In Practice: Under Foundations surveys diverse media through the lens of foundations and other raw, basic, and structural forms. The exhibition was curated by Jess Wilcox, the 2014-15 SculptureCenter Curatorial Fellow. Wilcox commissioned 11 artists to present pieces that analyze what lies beneath a work’s exterior.

LUCIE STAHL: End of Tales

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

Lucie Stahl drags her viewers onto the battlefield. An ideological war is being waged, and refuge is a remote, idyllic conceit.

SHARON LOCKHART Milena Milena

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

In the final scenes of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), twelve-year-old Antoine Doinel escapes from a reform school soccer field in the middle of a game. While his fellow delinquent peers tread up and down the demarcated terrain, Doinel cuts loose.

Storylines

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

The Guggenheim’s powerful group show of over 100 recent contemporary acquisitions examines narrative in myriad forms. The exhibition deftly extends beyond the realm of visual art—pairing sculpture, photography, film, performance, etc. with writers’ responses that encompass short form essay and poetry.

Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film

by Simone Krug

| ArtSeen

Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros are remembered as the giants of 20th-century Mexican murals. Their visual disciple, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (1907 – 97), likewise portrayed the grandeur of the Mexican landscape and its people, expanding the distinctly Mexican oeuvre beyond painting to photography, film, and television.

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