ArtSeen
Davina Semo
By Noah DillonDavina Semo’s sculptures have recently been shown in three concurrent New York exhibitions. Marlborough Chelsea’s extended public art installation, Broadway Morey Boogie, is on view through April. A solo show of the artist’s work, called HOLDING THE BAG, was at Rawson Projects through February 1st, and a two-person show with David Flaugher opened at Greenpoint’s U.S. Blues Gallery February 7th to March 8th.
Olivier Mosset
By Tom McGlynnOlivier Mosset isn’t really an abstract painter, because his paintings aren’t abstractly real. This might seem like a tautological game, but it is actually at the root of Mosset’s raison d’être.
A Panel on Painting
See the video of A Panel on Painting, hosted by Hunter College and the Brooklyn Rail.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
By Phyllis TuchmanLaura Hoptman is an old hand at finding new talent. Time and again, Hoptman has shown that she has a good eye, a searching intelligence, and a sense of history. Years ago, during her first stint at the Museum of Modern Art, she introduced many of us to Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, and Luc Tuymans.
Forever Now Tomorrow
By Barbara RoseNothing sums up the ephemeral nature of MoMA’s attempt to make a statement about painting today better than its title, The Forever Now. The phrase implies no history and no future, no past and no evolution.
Seeing It Now
By Mary Ann CawsKerstin Brätsch, “Blocked Radiant.”Before you even go in, on either side of the doors, you encounter this oxymoron: the doors are not blocked, but they are surrounded by panels designated as “blocked.” Wow.
The Forever Now vs. Recombinant DNA
By Amei WallachIn an instance of spectacularly unfortunate programming, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World shared the first two months of its exhibition life on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor with Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs.
RYDER RIPPS Ho
By Taylor DafoeI’ve now written two reviews of Ho, Ryder Ripps’s debut show at Postmasters. The first, in which I discussed the merits of the canvases, and how and why they were created, I chose to rewrite after I discovered that many pieces of information available about the show online (some of which factored into my original evaluation of the work), were fabricated by Ripps himself. More on this later.
OYSTER PERPETUAL
Mathias Poledna
By Aren K. Yama
Mathias Poledna’s 35mm film about a watch has no meaning. No clues are planted in our path to prompt the busywork of iconographic analysis. No personal mythology is affixed to the watch.
ROBIN PECK
By Ben La RoccoIn his book, Sculpture: A Journey to the Circumference of the Earth (Broken Jaw Press Inc, 2004), sculptor Robin Peck travels far and wide, immersing himself and his readers in foreign landscapes to ruminate on the nature of sculptural experience.
PICTURE/THING
Curated by Sasha Rudensky and Jeffrey Schiff
By Joyce Beckenstein
The 10 artists featured in Picture/Thing, an exhibition exploring the relationships between photography and sculpture, unleash art history’s most beguiling trickster: The Photograph.
MARIAH DEKKENGA
By Tyler AkersChinatown is a harsh place in winter. The bitter wind rushes sidewalkers to their destinations without letting them breathe the permanent funk of raw fish markets or linger in the charming complexity of the souvenir shops.
Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art
By Aaron RichmondWhen the 2013 Moscow Biennale staged a conversation between Ilya Kabakov and John Baldessari, there was a residual gravitas that accompanied their situation. Here sitting beside one another were two pivotal figures in the conceptual turn of 20th-century art, each one straining to understand the other through an oversized handheld telephone.
HEIDI HOWARD
By Kate LiebmanRecently graduated from Columbia’s illustrious M.F.A. program, Heidi Howard has made a suite of beautiful, delicate paintings for her first solo show at Nancy Margolis Gallery.
JOHN ZURIER
By Eleanor RayJohn Zurier’s work has been moving toward a sturdier sense of individuality, complicating his frequent categorization as a monochromatic painter. The works in his current show—the Berkeley-based artist’s fourth at Peter Blum—assert themselves as a cast of characters.
DAN WALSH
By David RhodesDan Walsh’s exhibition at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street gallery presents a two-decade overview (1994 – 2014) that includes paintings, works on paper, mixed media pieces, and artist books.
Ross Bleckner and Volker Eichelmann
By Shana Beth MasonConvenience demands that a 65 year-old American artist with more than 30 years of exhibition history, bolstered by one of the longest-operating contemporary galleries in the world, would overpower (in visual and literal modes) a 36 year-old German academic and painter who has never shown in New York before (with San Francisco being his only other American host city).
LORIS GRÉAUD The Unplayed Notes Museum
By Hunter BraithwaiteOn the opening night of The Unplayed Notes Museum, Loris Gréaud’s first solo museum show in the United States, guests sauntered around the Dallas Contemporary until a group of people, up to that moment hiding in the crowd, descended upon the art, ripping it from the walls, breaking it into pieces.
![Loris Gréaud, “[1] and [1] and [1] Riot” (2014.) Series of unique work. White marble pedestal, cast aluminum hand sculpture, stainless steel. Dimensions, each work: 190 × 20 × 20 cm. Courtesy Loris Gréaud and the Gréaudstudio.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/14881/Braithwaite-web1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
DANIELLE MYSLIWIEC Harbinger
By Taney RonigerIf the power of contemporary art lies in its propensity to both reflect and give shape to the consciousness of our times, one might expect to find it laden with signs of cultural transformation.
MERLIN JAMES Genre Paintings
By Phong BuiImaginary boat floating above a still life. / Concavity pressures the space of / What appears to be a cloud-like form, provides / A dry hot day to its absence.
The Great Debate About Art
By Lynn MaliszewskiExhibition making is far from rocket science, yet books, master’s programs, and magazines suggest a genius in curation. GDA1–anonymous, the current exhibition at Envoy Enterprises, exemplifies the pitfalls of the craft’s recent glorification.
ENTANG WIHARSO
By Jonathan GoodmanThe flurry of reviews accompanying the opening of Indonesian artist Entang Wiharso’s solo show indicates that the New York art world is now ready for an influx of culture from Southeast Asia.
Lands' End
By Jody GrafWith a shift of one apostrophe—an almost unmentionably minor mistake—we move from the precipice of the wild to a land of “no iron” slacks.
FRANCESCA WOODMAN
By Sara ChristophIn 1978, when Francesca Woodman was 20 years old and beginning a life as an artist, John Berger wrote “Uses of Photography.” In the essay, Berger distinguishes between two functions of the medium: private and public.
Madame Cézanne
By Adele Tutter and David CarrierThis exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s images of his most frequently portrayed model, his wife, Hortense Fiquet (1850 – 1922), includes 24 of the 29 known paintings of her, three watercolors, fourteen drawings, and three sketchbooks.
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.
Ron Cooper
By Michael StrausSpaced at generous distances along the walls of Franklin Parrasch’s cleanly-renovated Upper East Side townhouse, nine of Ron Cooper’s lacquered Plexiglas Vertical Bars, each 8’ x 3 5/8” x 3 5/8”, stand guard over the mute transmission of light passing through the gallery’s lavishly open space.
Robert Barry: All the things I know ... 1962 to present
By Alexandra NicolaidesAn early explorer and originator of Conceptual art, Robert Barry has been making artwork that probes absence, or what we perceive to be absence. The exhibition’s title speaks directly to this notion. It comes from a penciled wall piece, “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36p.m.; June 15, 1969” (1969).
Someday We Will Draw Lions Together: Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume
By William CorwinThe Paleolithic caves of the Dordogne, clustered around the town of Eyzies-de-Tayac, are still accessible to the general public, with the exception of Lascaux, which has been replaced with an exact reproduction, Lascaux II. In January, there are no lines.
