The Brooklyn Rail

Who is in control of the image? This question is at home in the work of Thomas Demand (1964). The German artist spends meticulous attention to the execution of his sculptural and photographic work. But also as a viewer, while looking at the public images in news- and other feeds, he is interested in the decisions that have been made before we get to see a photo. The two worlds are not unrelated.

From the first moment we see Allison Katz’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s SoHo location, we’re ushered into the world she has established for her work, encompassing in one glance all the different tactics she deploys. The show’s title, Outta the Bag, activates a pun on her name (the “Katz” is implied). Katz walked me through the exhibition a day before its official opening, generously speaking about each painting in turn. 

Markus Lüpertz is a legend of German painting. A member of the Neue Wilde, Lüpertz was a part of a generation that brought expressionist painting back into global relevance, and his time as rector of the Düsseldorf Art Academy has become its own lore. Our interview was conducted over several sessions, with the help of our interpreter Christopher Lochmann.

William Kent has been on my mind for the better part of fifteen years. I have lived with many of his artworks and tried in various ways to draw attention to his art. But the occasion for me writing about him now is the marvelous show of his work that was mounted at the Ricco/Maresca gallery earlier this spring—the first gallery show Kent has had in New York since the 1960s.

Hearne Pardee talks with painter April Gornik about her latest show at Miles McEnery Gallery. Under the title Liminal States, her new work generates clouds and skies that viscerally engage viewers in cosmic turning points—an eclipse or the Annunciation—rooted intuitively in the scale of her body.

If one were to make a tally of artists who have the longevity to work for more than half a century, it would be a short list. Dorothea Rockburne would be on it. She’d also be the first to say, “Who cares?”

In Listening All Night To The Rain, Sir John Akomfrah presents the US premiere of the critically acclaimed eight-canto work first unveiled at the British Pavilion during the sixtieth Venice Biennale. For its New York presentation, Akomfrah introduces a focused iteration of the project, debuting the central multi-channel film, Canto VI (2024), and reshaping the work’s structural inheritance into a cinematic experience tailored to this context. Here, the canto becomes an audiovisual vessel organizing colonial archives, diasporic memory, Black Atlantic and climate histories. 

Kathy Butterly has been making artworks using the vessel form since 1986, when she was an undergraduate student at the Moore College of Art. Since then, her vessels have been shown in more than thirty solo exhibitions—most recently High Vibration at James Cohan Gallery, and currently at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs. On the occasion of these exhibitions, Butterly sat down for a conversation with the artist EJ Hauser. Here they discuss the trajectory of Butterly’s practice, finding beauty in reality and destruction, and the artist’s newfound mantra in art and life: “see me now.”

Pat Oleszko was born on May 19, 1947. At the age of seven, she dreamed of “being a puppeteer, or maybe Ferdinand the Bull.” Those dreams came true: she has created puppets, elaborate costumes, props, larger-than-life inflatables, and more public spectacles than an archivist can count. As she discussed with Rail Editor-at-Large Dan Cameron on the New Social Environment in early February, everybody has a thing, and hers is sculpture. Hers just happens “to walk and talk and fart and fuck.”

Rob Pruitt began making work as a rebellious art student in the mid-eighties, beginning a professionally successful, albeit brief, collaboration with his then-partner Jack Early. Together the two made sculptures and paintings that in turn interrogated and showcased the masculinity which had policed and persecuted them each throughout young adulthood. After a controversial exhibition and a subsequent hiatus from the art world, Pruitt returned solo in 1998 with Cocaine Buffet—a 16-foot-long mirror laid flat on the floor of the exhibition space with a coordinating 16-foot-long line of cocaine down the middle. Since then, his career has run the gamut from daily portraits of Obama to his trademark panda paintings. The artist spoke with Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright to discuss his latest exhibition at 303 Gallery—a series of spectral watercolor gradients that deal in time past and passing, constantly in flux. 

On the occasion of Anselm Kiefer’s recent survey at the Saint Louis Art Museum and site-specific installation of monumental paintings in the museum’s 1904 Cass Gilbert-designed grand hall, Michael Auping visited the museum and spoke to Kiefer about the artist's history with the St. Louis museum, the significance of the Rhine river to his oeuvre, and what it means to be an artist “exploring his context and time.”

The great classical archeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann once said to Jeff Koons that if the ancients had the technology that we do today, they’d be doing exactly what Koons is doing. This is particularly apt when one considers the paintings and sculptures in Porcelain Series, Koons's new exhibition at Gagosian. Joachim Pissarro visited the artist at his studio in the lead-up to the installation to discuss the visual power of art, how that power stimulates a viewer’s sensations and arouses emotion, as well as our noetic faculties.