‘The Work Is Never Done’ at MoMA: enacting and obscuring archives

By Benedict Nguyen

DEC 18-JAN 19 | Dance

Beyond the title itself, there’s something about the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, running from mid-September 2018 to early February 2019, that brought up meta thoughts about what work I’m doing. What could this writing, this work, do?

Simone Fattal: Works and Days

By Valentina Di Liscia

JUL-AUG 2019 | ArtSeen

The sculptures in Simone Fattal’s exhibition Works and Days at MoMA PS1 appear freshly dusted off from an archaeological dig, artifacts or parts thereof wrested from history. The retrospective, curated by Ruba Katrib, is the artist’s first in the United States and presents more than 200 works including paintings, works on paper, and sculptures from the last five decades of Fattal’s production.

Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting

By Lyle Rexer

DEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen

It was upsetting and exhilarating in equal measure to see a selection of those paintings extracted from the detritus of Kelley’s sprawling artistic career and made to stand for something important in the cold confines of Hauser & Wirth. Separated from the stuffed animals, videos, sculptures, and architectural models that crowded MoMA PS1 a few years ago, Kelley’s paintings become an uncomfortable retrospective, inevitably shadowed by the artist’s suicide in 2012.

De Kooning: Five Decades

By Tom McGlynn

JUNE 2019 | ArtSeen

It’s been 22 years since Willem de Kooning’s death at 93. His long and prodigiously productive career was lately most fully examined in a retrospective held between 2011–12 at MoMA.