Louis Block
LOUIS BLOCK is a painter based in Brooklyn.
In Conversation
MARCUS JAHMAL with Louis Block
"They seem to be going somewhere, leaving you in a state of questioning, very similar to a film still."
In Conversation
MERLIN JAMES with Louis Block
Louis Block speaks with painter and writer Merlin James in his Glasgow studio in the lead up to his forthcoming show, River at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery.
Ed Clark
By Louis BlockFor the past half-century or so, Ed Clark has been making plastic paintings that live up to the name.
Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space
By Louis BlockShaun Leonardo’s current exhibition posits a simple act of resistance: to excavate these optical memories, sifting through their noise. In his repeated drawings of news photographs surrounding violence against Black men, Leonardo builds a system that questions a singular image’s capacity for truth-telling.
THOMAS DEMAND
By Louis BlockIt is this immeasurable space between visual belief and betrayal that Thomas Demand mines in his intricate photographs. For his new show at Matthew Marks, Demand combines stills, animations, and sound to consider the textures themselves of experience.
Vivian Suter
By Louis BlockSuter’s work feels both settled in place and open to the possibility of change. Painted both indoors and outdoors, her canvases are subject to the unstoppable forces of nature—hurricanes, flooding, critters—but do not resist their effects.
Anne Truitt: Paintings
By Louis BlockThese paintings insist on the meditative quality of their content. Truitt intensifies the resonance of these fields of color not by doing away with form and line, but by pushing it to the periphery.
ANDY CAHILL: Home
By Louis BlockThe largest painting in Andy Cahill’s new show spans over thirteen feet wide. In it, an androgynous creature points a finger-gun at a man crawling up an increasingly vertiginous path toward a house already out of reach, lost to the inevitability of one-point perspective.
Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey
By Louis BlockThis exhibition at the Met gathers over 100 of his daguerreotypes, less than a tenth of his total production, focusing on his extensive travels east through the Mediterranean from 1842 to 1845. Though it only occupies a few small galleries of the museum’s photography wing, the collection is filled with small pictures of a vast geographic scope.
Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo
By Louis BlockGoya’s prints and Eisenstein’s 35mm films serve as an introduction to Longo’s massive charcoal drawings.
Purvis Young and Édouard Vuillard: Prophets and Angels
By Louis BlockThat these two pieces join subject and form through a harmony of image and support is not proof of any substantial connection between their author’s oeuvres, and the pair may not warrant extended consideration. But, faced with the work’s current proximity, why not revel in its strange, absorbing links?
Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet
By Louis BlockThe Metropolitan’s concise retrospective—an abbreviated version of what was shown at London’s Royal Academy—presents the printmaker and painter as a merciless interpreter of his environment and its characters.
Ralston Crawford: Torn Signs
By Louis BlockThe exhibition foregrounds Crawford’s projects in other media (photography, printmaking, and film) alongside the larger scale oil paintings for which he is known.
Deep in the Static:
Raghubir Singh’s Photographs
By Louis Block
This generous retrospective traces the development of an extraordinary career in color photography, from the late sixties until Singh’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1999.
Sinéad Breslin
By Louis BlockSeeing and remembering are at odds. Memories—if they are to be shared with others—are packaged in a specific way: flat, rectilinear, still. This fact is not contingent on photography; we have a natural tendency to break narratives up into stills.
EJ Hauser: Barn Spirits
By Louis BlockIn this show of nine canvases, all painted in 2018, EJ Hauser mines an ever-shifting vocabulary of form. The language here lies somewhere between literal and mythological, spoken and remembered.
JULIA PHILLIPS:
Fixator (#2) (2017)
By Louis Block
What is most disconcerting about Fixator is what it lacks. The voids between its structural elements seem to weigh more than the solid ceramic and metal structures making up the imaginary body now resident in PS1’s creaky galleries.
