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Sarah Trigg: Territorial Expansion of the Innermost Continent

Sarah Trigg’s small assemblages of aluminum, resin, acrylic, and other media, combine a painter’s command of color and surface with a sculptor’s penchant for innovative shapes and materials.

Aria Dean: (meta)models or how i got my groove back

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes our contemporary political and economic regime, in which physical movements and online social relations are carefully tracked in order to mine activities related to consumer choices and habits.

Saul Steinberg: Untitled

Steinberg’s paintings run the gamut in associations, from the lyricism of Paul Klee to the political satire of Thomas Rowlandson, to the elegantly limned Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico.

Metaphysical Masterpieces 1916—1920: Morandi, Sironi and Carra

A general mood of melancholy isolation prevails. Dynamic exuberance is replaced by methodical composition, as though fastidious fabrication could generate visions.

Paul Fägerskiöld: Flatlands

In Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, Mr. A Square, living in a two-dimensional plane, has an oracular vision when a three-dimensional sphere intercepts his world.

Kour Pour: Manzareh/Keshiki/Landscape

Pour sources his inspiration primarily from Persian and Japanese traditions, as indicated by his title—Manzareh and Keshiki both mean something close to Landscape, in Farsi and Japanese (they are often translated as “view” or “scenery”), though India and China are present, too. The result, though culturally variegated, is esthetically and chromatically coherent—and quite breathtaking.

Julia Rommel: Candy Jail

Light purple, the sort of purple that is a touch too confectionary to be called lavender or lilac or violet, the chalk-ish pastel kind that is more often found in the manes of unicorns and the most delicate sunrises, is a color I don’t often encounter as the centerpiece of serious art.

Alec Soth: I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating

There is something different about this Alec Soth. Something subtly more open. The thread is still there, his poetry still visible, but something else is flowing from these works as if waves beyond human perception were brought into the visible spectrum to commingle with one another.

Jia Aili: Combustion

Like the tattered cover of a 1980s science fiction novel, thrown into a particle accelerator with the catalogue raisonnés of Neo Rauch and Hans Holbein

Frida Orupabo & Arthur Jafa: Medicine for a Nightmare

The first work a viewer might be drawn to upon entering Medicine for a Nightmare, the small, two-artist exhibition featuring Nigerian-Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo and the critically acclaimed filmmaker Arthur Jafa, at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway, is an untitled video installation by Orupabo mounted on a wall in the center of the exhibition space.

Derrick Adams: New Icons

Derrick Adams's critical commentaries on Black identity are stylized in idioms of pop culture.

Christina Forrer

In medieval Europe, tapestries were hung in castle rooms to keep out drafts and cold. Richly decorated with religious scenes or myths, these woven lengths of cloth provided the household occupants, even those who were illiterate, pictorial stories that engaged and enlightened.

Mimi Gross: Art as Social Entanglement

Among Friends: 1958–63, the exhibition of Mimi Gross's paintings and drawings from the early 1960s at Eric Firestone Gallery, is not only a sheer visual pleasure, it also adds to our understanding of American modern art.

Sanford Wurmfeld: Variations

It is curious that with all the critical verbiage given to color in the recent past—Color Field painting, for example—relatively little attention has been given to the function of hue, value, and saturation by painters working within the chromatic spectrum.

Joe Andoe: Jubilee City

Painter and writer Joe Andoe offers another glimpse into this alternate reality. In his 2007 memoir Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed, Andoe draws on memories of an unsupervised childhood and drug-fueled adolescence in Tulsa, Oklahoma filled with car wrecks, petty crimes, and maniacal substance abuse.

Refiguring Binaries

Billed as an exhibition, Refiguring Binaries offers a looping selection of 18 screen-based works by ten non-male-identifying artists, who engage with digital technologies as old as animation and GIFs, and as new as the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.

Don McCullin

Few photographers have taken as many iconic photographs as Don McCullin (b. 1935). Think of the Vietnam War, and Shellshocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue (1968) will very likely pop up.

Hockney-Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature

Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature is unabashedly a David Hockney (b. 1937) exhibition but with a twist, it winds the modern master's works around his lifelong fascination with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

Günther Förg: Works from 1986 – 2007

Hauser & Wirth's exhibition Günther Förg: Works from 1986 – 2007 presents painting, sculpture, and photography by the German artist, whose estate is now represented by the gallery, in a new institutional setting.

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

The exhibition's focus is on how Kahlo became a global icon through art and fashion, and as such, it neglects Kahlo's role as a painter, with only 11 paintings featured in a show of over 300 objects.

Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn's Modification Paintings

In the pit of the post-war Modern European Theater lay the ruins of the School of Paris. Its various painterly edifices, a formerly fruitful mélange of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism had been shaken loose from their avant garde foundations by cataclysmic world events. This pit would, in part, become dominated by an aesthetic pendulum swinging between the capriciously whimsical and the patently absurd—between the promise of revived joy and the depressing reality of modern alienation.

American Artist: I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die)

If you assign no sound to the redaction in I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die), it has the same amount of syllables as its referent, the first line of the chorus from Eiffel 65's 1999 chart-topping single, I'm Blue. The last word in that line is spelled out "da," but when you listen to Jeffrey Jey's compressed scatting, it sounds more like "die." But the redacted word is there, as an absolute pretext to death.

Dorothea Tanning

On the threshold of "a dream of countless doors," Dorothea Tanning looks out towards us bare-chested and forlorn, standing behind a strange winged-lemur and wearing a theatrical jacket from which a profusion of roots descends.

Katy Moran: I want to live in the afternoon of that day

If one were tasked with coming up with a phrase that would roughly characterize Katy Moran's way of painting, then "aggressive diffidence" might suit. In her case, however, it's a stance that projects a deeply powerful, perhaps even anarchic, energy.

Arakawa: Diagrams for the Imagination

Important to so many poets and thinkers and theorists, this brilliant Japanese erstwhile neo-Dada painter and thought-provoker has to be read (seen, but more fittingly, read) with enough leisure to have the visual-verbal complications, as beautiful as they are diagrammatic, permeate your imagination.

YARITJI YOUNG + TJALA ARTS: APY LANDS

This group show features the work of women indigenous artists who belong to the artistic collective Tjala Arts, located in south Australia in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, the full name of the acronym “APY” used in the title of the exhibition.

Merrill Wagner: Works from the ’80s

One of the most intriguing aspects of Merrill Wagner's work from the 1980s is its emphasis on painting from the perspective of three-dimensional space.

Jeffrey Cheung

Jeffrey Cheung's drawings of many-sexed and ambiguously gendered characters in various states of sexual play deliver an answer to cis people's apparent confusion about how post-gendered fucking works. Cheung's first solo-show at Muddguts is hung salon style—crowded, nearly floor to ceiling, with little to no space between the works.

Linnea Kniaz: Running Bond

Through a restrained yet expressive vocabulary, the young New York artist Linnea Kniaz draws on carefully measured elements to create quiet variations and subtleties in her abstract paintings and sculptures.

Don Dudley: Early Work

Don Dudley integrated tendencies from L.A. Finish Fetish art and New York Minimalism, with his own inventive material sensibilities and formal interests, creating austere yet ethereal paintings that elude geographical groupings.

Jasper Johns: Recent Paintings & Works on Paper

This old dog can teach you more tricks than you can ever learn. Jasper Johns (b. May 15, 1930) fills Matthew Marks's gallery with 37 works and a 24-piece suite of drawings in ink on paper or plastic.

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The Brooklyn Rail

APR 2019

All Issues