ArtSeen
CAROL RAMA: Antibodies
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesThese pictures remind us of society’s compartmentalization of madness, and the gendered “hysteria” prominent in the late 19th century yet employed even today, albeit under different names.
WILLIAM POPE.L: Proto-Skin Set
By Alan GilbertWhen Kendrick Lamar performed at the 2015 BET Awards in front of William Pope.L’s massive, frayed American flag, it was a spectacular display of a work by an artist who for decades has explored the hyper-visibility and simultaneous inscrutability of “blackness” as a racial category.
LEO VILLAREAL
By Taney RonigerIn his new show at Pace—his first with the gallery—Villareal delivers a tour de force that transcends the work’s optical appeal, offering a poetic meditation on the inner workings of nature.
VINCENZO AGNETTI: Territories
By Jonathan GoodmanVincenzo Agnetti (1926 – 1981) was a major figure during the post-war period of Italian avant-garde art. A member of the artist collective that ran the gallery and journal Azimut(h), Agnetti worked with such Italian luminaries as Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.
CLIFFORD ROSS: Wood Waves
By Hovey BrockThe wave images harbor their own contradictions, or rather multiplicities, as they speak to the double edge of nature’s power—its majesty and its destructive potential, now exacerbated by climate change.
Garden Dwellers
By Alexandra HammondDescribed as “an Eden in the city,” the exhibition has little time for the shame of a disobedient Eve—nor the perpetuation of the Cartesian split between mind and body used by Western thought to subjugate women, colonized peoples, and nature.
Unto each other, a new thing
By Colin EdgingtonVisual Notes for an Upside-down World at P∙P∙O∙W gallery aims to upend. The totality of the show offers understandings and explanations of the conditions we are in and reminds us that the guerrilla tactics of our forebears have resounding effects far beyond the historically determined periods of their respective disruptions and oppression.
VOICE=SURVIVAL
By JESSE BANDLER FIRESTONEIn the back gallery of VOICE = SURVIVAL, curated by Claudia Maria Carrera and Adrian Geraldo Saldana, one finds Kiki Smith’s Tongue in Ear (1983-93).
THE 57TH VENICE BIENNALE: Viva arte Viva
By David CarrierIn his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel says that in art, the unfolding of truth and the revelations of world history are interlinked.
JO NIGOGHOSSIAN: Exotica
By Phong BuiPoise. Fiercely built by A cohesive assembly of points, lines, and planes
JO SPENCE: Memory Cards
By Nicole MillerIn these images, Spence provides a first-person account of the female body and interrogates the ideological systems that govern and extend outside the self.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ: French Bashing
By Seth CameronTaken as a work of spatial theater, French Bashing is brutishly unsubtle.
DOCUMENTA 14
By Timothy Francis Barry….the manicured lawns of Kassel, oddly unpeopled, trashless streets, taxis that arrive to pick you up at your hotel for your early train at 2:30 a.m.—not 2:31, 2, or 3—Prussian efficiency, Teutonic rigor, the burghers icily friendly, helpful….
Works on Water
By Nicole MillerWorks on Water is the inaugural triennial devoted to works made on, in, or with water.
DAVID MICHALEK: SlowDancing/TrioA
By Vered EngelhardHe filled Danspace in St. Marks Church (a historical landmark for the Judson generation) with a unique deconstruction of Trio A, one centered on its relationship to time.
ALEXANDER CALDER: Hypermobility
By Jason RosenfeldAlexander Calder (1898–1976) redefined and expanded an entire medium, while fulfilling the purported prime directive of mid-century modernism: abstraction.
ALI BANISADR: Trust in the Future
By Jessica HolmesA convergence of influences is at play across painter Ali Banisadr’s body of work. In writing dedicated to his paintings a reader will find frequent reference to Northern Renaissance and Venetian art, Persian miniatures, as well as more modern touchstones like Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. Banisadr has acknowledged the effects of literature and cinema upon his thinking, and although these influences are apparent in his recent exhibition, Trust in the Future, certain paintings achieve something different—and more exciting.
MARTIN ROTH: In May 2017 I cultivated a piece of land in Midtown Manhattan nurtured by tweets
By Jonathan GoodmanMartin Roth, an artist who has often worked with nature—in 2009 one of his projects, I lived with sheep in Europe, consisted of living with a herd of sheep in Europe—excels at combining the outside world with sophisticated insights into politics and its relations with art and life. At his midtown exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum, In May 2017 I cultivated a piece of land in Midtown Manhattan nurtured by tweets, the pungent scent of more than two hundred lavender plants leads the viewer down two flights of stairs, into the basement of the Forum’s building on East 52nd Street near Fifth Avenue.
Artists Rising
By Kathy BrewArt Rising took place at the Trump Tower Public Garden on June 14th, which happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday and Flag Day.
SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD: Summer and Winter
By David RhodesIn the first room of Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s exhibition, the visitor encounters the summer section of the exhibition’s title. Later, on moving through to the second room, the winter section. The cyclical progression of the seasons defines the rhythm of life in a climate that sees weather changing through the months, as well as vegetal and animal response. It’s impossible not to think concurrently of mortality and a celebration or acknowledgement of transformation.
Disappearing, Inc.
By Tom McGlynnThe Times is a cleverly capacious title for this large group exhibition, referring simultaneously to a multiplicity of historical periodizations and to a colloquial condensation of the New York Times. The works, like the title, encompass the specificity of individual perspectives, as well as the generalized verbal semantics and visual syntax of the printed commons.
The Uptown Triennial
By Magdalyn AsimakisThe intermittent curatorial interest in location and organizing works according to the places in which they are made, has been most recently explored in New York through exhibitions such as Hilton Als’s curation of Alice Neel at David Zwirner, and currently at the Uptown triennial at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. The use of location as an organizing strategy, in the case of the triennial, gestures to “uptown” as a contemporary situating that is both deliberate and circumstantial. This common spatial orientation points to the varied modes of access to, and experience of, the city. The density and breadth of the work in Uptown poetically counters the view of the city looking towards midtown Manhattan.
ROBERT MANGOLD: Paintings and Works on Paper 2013–2017
By David RhodesSince the mid 1960s, Robert Mangold has consistently examined the possibilities of support shape, surface, color, and drawing, in dynamic and equal relation. This exhibition of recent work is no exception.
MATISSE/DIEBENKORN
By Hearne PardeeJust as Matisse once commented that he was fascinated by window views because they allowed distant things to share the space of objects in his studio, the relationship between these two artists rests on surprising connections across space and time.
PHILIP PEARLSTEIN: Facing You
By Jonathan GoodmanThe exhibition is proof that—as a nonagenarian—Pearlstein continues to paint remarkably well, reasserting his decades-long stature as a major American realist.
MARINELLA SENATORE: Piazza Universale/Social Stages
By Yasi AlipourPiazza Universale/Social Stages is the first major exhibition of the Italian artist Marinella Senatore, whose work deals deep with themes important to the mission of the Queens Museum, namely: self-examination, community orientation, and political responsibility.
MARKUS LÜPERTZ: New Paintings
By Hovey BrockMaybe Lüpertz is executing a kind of aesthetic Judo throw, redirecting Classicism’s colossal influence on Western painting’s canon into an open, subjective space of a paradoxically “felt” Classicism, something embodied rather than intellectual.
RICO GATSON: Icons 2007-2017
By William CorwinRico Gatson’s exhibition Icons 2007–2017 is an exercise in catapulting the human into the supernatural realm. We are watching an artist doing what artists do best: rendering the unimaginable into the visual and the unspeakable into human terms.
IVANA BAŠIĆ: Through the Hum of Black Velvet Sleep
By William CorwinIvana Bašić presents a dire vision of the not-too-distant future in her exhibition Through the hum of black velvet sleep (2017).
CORDY RYMAN: Freefall
By Colin EdgingtonSeen from the street, color breaks through the facade of an office building to mingle with the dynamism of the city. Sectioned lines of pinks, greens, whites, oranges, blues, and their pastel counterparts weave between the reflections of cars, pedestrians, foliage, buildings, and skylight.
KATE HARDING: Uphill Downhill Conversation, (Sister)
By Alexandra HammondHarding’s work is about the spirit of things, and the ways that things and beings communicate amongst each other in the spaces between and beyond language. For her, landscapes, animals, and even light are full of information that is available to us if we listen and look. Harding’s current installation asks occupants of the space to sit down and take part in this expanded conversation.
MERRILL WAGNER: Works from the 70s
By Will FenstermakerWhat is often named an interest in “materialism” seems to be, in fact, a desire to uphold its natural link and allow the earth itself to reduce her paintings to a base state, a process she merely expedites.
CHANTAL JOFFE
By David CarrierJoffe doesn’t repeat herself—she doesn’t need to because she is consistently, magnificently inventive.
KAARI UPSON: Good Thing You Are Not Alone
By Rabia AshfaqueThe interlinked projects of Kaari Upson’s first major museum show in New York, Good Thing You Are Not Alone, methodologically explore various facets of an individual’s existence within both physical and phantasmagorical realms.
Future Library
By Lucía HinojosaFuture Library is a public artwork as well as a conceptual art piece comprising literature and time. In 2014, a thousand trees were planted in Nordmarka, a forest in Oslo. The trees will eventually become the paper for an anthology of books to be printed in a hundred years time.
