Simone Krug
SARAH CHARLESWORTH Doubleworld
By Simone KrugThey 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.
LUCIE STAHL: End of Tales
By Simone KrugLucie Stahl drags her viewers onto the battlefield. An ideological war is being waged, and refuge is a remote, idyllic conceit.
Salon Style
By Simone KrugBraids, 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.
SHARON LOCKHART Milena Milena
By Simone KrugIn 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.
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY
By Simone KrugWorking 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.
Storylines
By Simone KrugThe 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.
Analog Currency
By Simone KrugOversize 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.
Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film
By Simone KrugDiego 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.
In Practice: Under Foundations
By Simone KrugIn 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.
