ArtSeen
Tamar Ettun: Jubilation Inflation
By Nicole Miller“Do you get vertigo?” the curator of the exhibition asks me as she pulls open the Velcro seam of the inflated blob. Inside, the nylon fabric lifts around me, plumped by an air stream pumped in near the floor.
Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963 – 2017
By William CorwinEschewing the criticality of the minimalist sculpture around him in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Jack Whitten, primarily known as a painter, embarked on a course of aesthetic discovery aimed at producing sculpture that radiated the energy of collective memory and reflected the power of various individuals, living and dead, to whom he chose to pay tribute through his work.
Ai Weiwei: Cao / Humanity
By Vivian LiAlthough this grouping of cast objects demonstrates the artist’s long-standing fascination with materials and reproduction, a room full of them can feel like monuments—anonymous and easy to dismiss. But maybe that is the point, to look closely past surface meanings.
Miguel Trelles
By Jonathan GoodmanMiguel Trelles’s paintings are an amalgam of strikingly different cultures and traditions. Inevitably, the work concerns the borrowing of other painting histories. The subject matter is the Caribbean landscape and the indigenous culture of Trelles’ native Puerto Rico, as well as the Chinese landscape legacy of mountains, streams, and trees.
Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
By Hannah StamlerOn the day I visited Arthur Jafa’s exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, there was a woman dancing in the gallery. She hugged the left-hand wall of the second room, jerking her hips from side to side as if she were in one of the city’s many nightclubs.
Jaimie Warren: One Moment in Time
By Nina WolpowWarren’s work is overwhelming, eccentric, outside the bounds of the normal, but it is not crazy. In fact, Warren performs carnivalesque realities no less insane than our own.
Thinking Collections: Telling Tales: A Survey Exhibition of Kyzyl Tractor Art Collective
By Osman Can YerebakanThinking Collections: Telling Tales is the first U.S. survey dedicated to the Kazakh art collective Kyzyl Tractor. Kyzyl Tractor is an avant-garde art collective established in the mid ’90s in the wake of the liberating reformations of Perestroika.
John Bock: Dead + Juicy
By Jessica HolmesThe lobby of Anton Kern’s Upper East Side townhouse gallery has been transformed into a dimly lit room housing a dilapidated shack made from corrugated tin; a floor to ceiling curtain onto which a looped fragment of film is projected hangs opposite the shack.
LOL Cats: In Marx For Cats the Internet Confronts Its Favorite Meme
By G Douglas Barrett and Mr. Love Bunny, Sailor Boy, Mr. Big Stuff, and Little MooMarx for Cats, a new collaboration by Caroline Woolard, Or Zubalsky, and Leigh Claire La Berge, is taking the relation between the internet and its favorite species, the cat, to the next level.
Hew Locke: Patriots
By Marcia E. VetrocqThere are two statues of Peter Stuyvesant—one in Jersey City and one in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square—among the seven monuments photographed by Hew Locke for his 2018 “Patriots” series.
Juan Pablo Langlois: Afterwards no one will remember
By Colin EdgingtonWalking into Juan Pablo Langlois’s exhibition Afterwards no one will remember, at Cindy Rucker gallery, was like entering a box of Dantean episodes.
Suzanne Bocanegra: Poorly Watched Girls
By Grant Klarich JohnsonActive since the late 1980s, Suzanne Bocanegra is possibly best known for her “artist lectures,” where the well-worn, sober ritual of the professional artist is set on its ear by conscripting a professional actor (for example, Frances McDormand and Lili Taylor) to stand in for Bocanegra in front of a live audience while the ‘real’ Bocanegra feeds them lines in real time from the side.
Ann McCoy: The Procession of the Invisible College
By Hovey BrockAnn McCoy is a passionate defender of the spiritual in art, particularly what Henry Corbin, in his treatise on the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi, called creative imagination, or, as Ibn Arabi would have put it, “seeing with the heart.”
Beverly Fishman
By David RhodesBeverly Fishman’s high gloss surfaces have an inscrutable beauty. The shape and color of each work looks both estranging and familiar, and whilst the combinations of sometimes acidic or synthetic color entrance, they do not comfort.
Umber Majeed: In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present
By Julie NelsonIn her show at the Rubber Factory, In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present, Umber Majeed employs a deft mixture of sly humor and wry critique to imagine a revisionist, feminist version of Pakistan’s development as a nuclear power.
The Safarani Sisters: Reincarnation
By Jonathan GoodmanThe fourteen works on view are paintings with small videos projected onto them. The paintings are of interiors, usually a bit dark and slightly melancholic in atmosphere, that are illuminated by bright windows with curtains.
Indian Ceramics Triennale: Breaking Ground
By Romain MaitraAlthough lacking the transparency of a blown glass or the tensile strength of a metal, clay has many unique qualities of its own—for example, a pliability that makes it responsive to a maneuvering touch that can render its texture both rough and smooth.
Rhys Lee: Good Boy and Kevin Bourgeois: Wall of Sound
By Jonathan GoodmanIn these two shows gallery visitors have the opportunity to view two very different, but very gifted artists.
Minoru Yoshida: Performance in New York
By George KanIt isn’t often that new works emerge from the depths of artists’ archives, but when they do, viewers are offered new perspectives on an artist’s work. This is the case with never-before exhibited video documentations of Minoru Yoshida’s New York performances, at Ulterior Gallery.
Mahmoud Khaled: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you
By Shehab AwadMahmoud Khaled’s debut U.S. exhibition at Helena Anthrather Gallery is littered with personal confessions hiding in plain sight.
Frank Bowling: Make It New
By Nicole MillerStanding in front of Frank Bowling’s Regatta (2017), I want to wade into its hazy expanse, shimmering with electric pink, marine blue, tangerine, and flecks of silver, and to tongue the lozenges of beeswax dropped on the canvas like a line of boats.
Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy
By Hovey BrockIn his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the historian Richard Hofstader labeled entire groups as pathological based on their inclinations to see events through the lens of conspiracy.
Carnegie International, 57th Edition
By David Carrier and Graham ShearingNo curatorial task is more difficult than assembling an international survey exhibition. If in Pittsburgh, the task is further complicated by the history of the Carnegie Museum and its Internationals.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
By Ann McCoyWith this first American large-scale exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s profoundly moving art, it is as though a needle has been lifted from a well-worn record called “the entrenched history of abstraction,” and any attempts to place the needle back into the grove will henceforth prove difficult.
John Ashbery: The Construction of Fiction
By Phillip GriffithAfter the death of the artist and poet Joe Brainard in 1994, his friend, the poet John Ashbery, recovered an envelope of paper cuttings Brainard had collected for use in collages. The envelope was a posthumous message for Ashbery and reminded him of the collages he had made while spending time with Brainard and the poet James Schuyler in the 1970s. For Ashbery, who died in September 2017, the envelope was a fond reminder of his friend and signaled a return to his work as a collagist.
Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971
By Pac PobricPerhaps, as Singerman suggests in the catalogue, the curator disliked her works “because he saw himself portrayed in them”—as (in the words of Michele Wallace) “white, old, decadent, empty and dead.” This is largely speculation. But there is no such thing as pristine vision, as Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 makes so clear.
James Hyde: Western Painting—Magnasco
By Alfred Mac AdamIn Western Painting--Magnasco James Hyde makes a brilliant case for abstraction—as long as we understand what he means by that idea.
Gillian Wearing: Life
By Osman Can YerebakanThe word “life” is a fine title for any exhibition because, in the end, isn’t everything surrounding us simply life? But in the case of Gillian Wearing’s Life, which is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work by a U.S. institution, it proves to be a perfectly fitting title right from the beginning.
Dismantling the Master’s House: The Color Curtain Dinner
By Nicole KaackThe invitation to the Color Curtain Project’s inaugural dinner featured a photograph of the Jakarta, Indonesia airport in 1955, with a crowd of bodies standing on an airfield festooned with flags unfurling into agitated, electric air.
Hiwa K: Blind as the Mother Tongue
By Yasi AlipourHiwa K’s experimental art meditates on everyday life of his hometown, Sulaymaniya, a Kurdish city that is stuck by the border of Iran and Iraq—historically burdened by the turmoil of two oppressive nation-states yet robbed of its own nationhood.
Speculative Color: 100 lines for Stephen Mueller
By Anthony HawleyFew canvases contain so much quiet dazed-out playful drift with such attention to minutia.
A Void
By Maddie KlettRamirez Jonas’s artwork and essay shape this exhibitionary exploration of loss—how artists reckon with it, or even attempt to restore or repair it.
Peter Moore: 1968
By Mark BlochCoinciding with MoMA’s Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done and Paula Cooper Gallery’s 50 Years: An Anniversary exhibition, Peter Moore: 1968 is just that: a collection of photographs taken in a single remarkable year by the ubiquitous Moore (1932 – 1993) of Judson artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton as well as a number of their downtown bohemian peers ranging from Philip Glass to Charlotte Moorman and others.
The Women Behind
By Naomi LevIf one were to choose one central theme of the show it would be silence and its more active partner, silencing.
Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair
By Osman Can YerebakanA bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched,” explained Robert Smithson in his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.”
Delacroix
By Jason RosenfeldThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is giving the French Romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) the full historical treatment accorded an old master: generously sized, darkened galleries; deep, jewel-tone walls; and over 150 spot lit works.
Hugh Hayden: Border States
By Eliza BarryHugh Hayden’s Border States brings America’s domestic architecture to life in a series of seven painstakingly carved and pointedly macabre wooden sculptures.
AES+F, Inverso Mundus
By Katy Diamond HamerThe four-person artist collective AES+F creates universes that are as familiar as they are foreign and as appealing as they are grotesque. Having actively exhibited since solidifying as a collective in 1995, the Moscow-based Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes use actors, models, and a narrative often rife with political and sexual innuendo in their work. They aggregate content for what ultimately results in an engaging, cinematic experience.
