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Ericka Beckman at MIT List Visual Arts Center
24 May to 28 July 2019
Survey exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colors. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. Emerging out of the fertile environment of CalArts in the 1970s, Beckman developed the cornerstones of her vocabulary in her early Super-8 films, which are distinguished by their energetic pacing, the performers’ repetitive, ritualistic actions, deceptively simple special effects, and chanted and percussive soundtracks. Her milestone film You the Better (1983) draws on casino games and the consumerist principles undergirding them. In the film, a group of men are engaged in a series of enigmatic ball games, futilely competing against a house that always wins. Over the course of the 1980s, Beckman shifted from the emphasis on social dynamics towards exploring issues of representation and mediatization. The List Center exhibition will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman’s career, providing the first opportunity to more fully survey her contribution in a US museum...
Will Cotton, Laurie SImmons at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum
9 February to 9 June 2019
Included in group exhibition Like Sugar at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.
Our taste for sweetness is a powerful force. It is one of the foundations of empires; of slavery; of ecological devastation; and of modern health epidemics and food injustice. Even knowing this, we love it. Flowers and fruits seduce birds and insects with their nectars; for human beings, sugar starts as cane, beets, or corn, and people have harvested and manipulated and packaged it to suit consumers’ fancies. We continually construct and reconstruct its meanings. Like Sugar will explore both the problematic and the joyful aspects of sugar, complicating our view of how this multi-layered substance affects us. Through artwork by contemporary artists such as Vik Muniz, Julia Jacquette, Zineb Sedira, Laurie Simmons, and others; historical materials such as maps, prints, and books; and material culture such as cane-cutting tools and sugar dishes, the show will raise questions and provide a space for dialogue about sugar in our lives.
Ericka Beckman at KANAL - Centre Pompidou
23 January to 19 May 2019
Solo exhibition Ericka Beckman: The Super-8 Trilogy at KANAL - Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium.
Invited for the first time to present her work in Brussels, the American artist Ericka Beckman (b. 1951) occupies an entire floor of the KANAL Showroom with The Super-8 Trilogy.
Made between 1978 and 1981, this trilogy, inspired by her reading of the Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980), is not unlike an enchanted and critical reading of the theories of cognitive development.
Exhibited on this occasion in the form of an installation overflowing the frame of the screen, this new configuration turns over the exhibition space like a playful environment scattered with set pieces and punctuated by colourful lights.
Echoing the themes of identity and otherness, the artist here questions the resonances of play in the various social and psychological constructions of Western, post-industrial societies. She revisits the forms of popular and technological cultural productions in order to institute them as the aesthetic principles of a work that is at once critical and playful...
Dawoud Bey at the Art Institute of Chicago
10 January to 14 April 2019
Solo exhibition Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Photographer Dawoud Bey, the recent recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, decided to make a fresh start soon after his 60th birthday. Already renowned as a portraitist, he turned his camera on architecture and landscapes; accustomed to urban scenes, he decided to photograph thickets, a picket fence, and Lake Erie. Bey also returned to black-and-white printing, and more particularly to gelatin silver prints, which he had not used since the early 1990s. Through these choices Bey wanted to make a far greater shift: from pictures of the here and now to the vast, historical subject of the Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses that aided enslaved African Americans on their path to freedom.
Bey also wished to pay homage to photographer Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) and poet Langston Hughes (1901–1967), who each addressed the African American experience in their work in part by foregrounding what DeCarava called “a world shaped by blackness.” DeCarava’s mastery of even the darkest tones gave Bey a model for depicting the twilight uncertainty that those fleeing slavery confronted as they traveled northward. Meanwhile, the closing couplet of Hughes’s short poem “Dream Variations”—“Night coming tenderly / Black like me.”—inspired the exhibition title. Bey has said that he wanted to hold darkness itself in a tender embrace...
Erik Parker on HYPEBEAST
9 January 2019
Profile by Keith Estiler Erik Parker on Making the Familiar Strange on HYPEBEAST.
Delicate guitar licks from a Hawaiian blues song by Gabby Pahinui pulls us into a studio that’s one part entryway, one part kitchen space, and two parts work space. Through a slit in a wall, we’re confronted with a row of large-scale tondos — circular canvases that were popular during Italy’s Renaissance period in the 15th century — portraying surrealist landscapes filled with decomposing flora and collages made from vintage Playboy magazines. Although there’s a sense of chaos in the visuals, the soothing Pahinui tune puts us at ease as we observe the works — a kind of magic one can only get at Erik Parker’s Brooklyn workspace.
“Gabby Pahinui is the shit man, anyone who disagrees is lying,” Parker remarks as he paces around his studio in a pair of YEEZY 500s. The artist, known for his psychedelic face paintings, invites us to take a closer look at a few in-progress tondos, which will be displayed at his upcoming solo exhibition “New Soul” at Mary Boone Gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Although Parker reveals it’s his first time working with the round canvas, he has already masterfully crafted a few compositions on the material -- packed with details that invoke his life story and artistic journey...
Erik Parker in JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE
January 2019
Article by Sasha Bogojev Erik Parker's A New Soul to Start a New Year in JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE.
Erik Parker is kicking off the new year with his 2nd solo show with Mary Boone Gallery which will open on January 10, 2019 at their Fifth Avenue location. Following the New Mood exhibition presented last March, where his "plank" paintings and pyramid-shaped canvases dominated the space, New Soul will be presenting a new series of mostly tondo paintings.
We've visited Erik Parker's studio in Williamsburg recently, just one month after opening his big retrospective show Millennial’s Dilemma at Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, and one month ahead of the opening of this new solo exhibition. With some of the works barely sketched on the primed canvases and some almost entirely completed, we got a great insight into artist's intricate creative process. Hidden behind the mountains of hand-labeled cans of paint, the vibrant new body of work is divided between landscape and figurative images.
Using intensively vibrant hues, the artist composes surreal landscapes usually appearing over a pool of water. Creating a lush setting filled with impossible vegetation, from unbelievable flowers or leaves to tentacle-like ground-creeping lifeforms, Parker's psychedelic landscapes regularly feature lone islands or heavenly waterfalls. Completely unrestrained with the rules of dimension, perspective, light, or accurate depiction, it's the choice of colors and the incredible shapes of the flora that makes these alluring images both complex and irresistible. The use of a round tondo format for these paintings is giving an illusion that the scene is unveiled through the telescope of a distant explorer, adding to the romantic and dreamy feel of the work...
Francesco Clemente at The Brant Foundation
12 November 2018 to 1 April 2019
Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: 1978-2018 at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.
The Brant Foundation Art Study Center is pleased to announce a survey of works by Francesco Clemente, on view from November 12, 2018 through March 2019. The exhibition brings together a concise but comprehensive selection spanning 40 years of the artist’s work including self-portraits and portraits, works on paper, frescoes, monumental oil and watercolor paintings, and one of the artist’s notable hand painted tents. Executed in Rome, New York, Taos, Varanasi, Jodhpur, Orissa, Pondicherry, and Madras, the works have traveled far and been dispersed among museum collections and art patrons. They now come together for Francesco Clemente: Works 1978–2018, each with its own story to tell. Non-chronological in nature, the exhibition interweaves threads that have been a constant in Clemente’s long-spanning oeuvre, and presents ideas and questions that persist throughout his various transformations in medium.
“Ideas divide, forms unite. In the search for form painters encounter beauty. If they are lucky,” says Clemente.
Francesco Clemente is a contemporary artist known for exploring metaphysical questions of spirituality, mysticism, and the nature of the self. Often erotic, and at times violent in its subject matter, Clemente’s lyrical, emotional approach is expressed by his unique sense of color. Strongly influenced by literature and poetry, Clemente is a poet in his own right, with a vast lexicon of symbolic and metaphorical imagery that expands and transforms to tell an open-ended story...
Julia Wachtel in The New York Times
4 November 2018
Article by Antwaun Sargent His Example Helped Them Find a Voice, in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
I remember going to MoMA and seeing his “Campbell Soup Cans” [1962], and it was at that moment I decided to become an artist. What makes Warhol the gold standard is the utter elegance, simplicity and directness of his paintings — his ability to distill a world of information out of a picture through minimal but brilliant intervention. It reveals a profound social and technological complexity. He deals with the deepest of human emotions: desire, fear, voyeurism, how the individual intersects with culture, and the fabric of meaning.
Like Warhol, I use silk-screen, a technology made for seriality and reproduction. Unlike Warhol I always pair the silk-screen panels with at least one hand-painted panel. I sometimes duplicate the hand-painted panels, shifting the logic so that the hand-painted panel becomes the repeated image. They are nearly identical but it is their difference, and failure of perfection, that interests me.
There is an incredible sense of longing, loss and desire in Warhol’s attachment to the world of culture. He couldn’t be Marilyn Monroe but he wanted to be. Those images of her, I think, are a displacement of his own desire. Painting for me has been the format to address deeply negative, culturally constructed ideas like racism and sexism, as well as desire...
Keith Sonnier in ARTFORUM
November 2018
Review by Barry Schwabsky in ARTFORUM.
It comes as a surprise that "Keith Sonnier: Until Today," a selection of thirty-nine works made between 1967 and this year, really is "the first comprehensive museum survey to consider the arc of this iconic artist's achievement," as curator Jeffrey Grove writes in the catalogue. After all, Sonnier has been a renowned figure for five decades; by thirty he'd exhibited at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also participated in legendary shows such as Lucy Lippard's "Eccentric Abstraction" at New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966; "9 at Leo Castelli" (organized by Robert Morris) at New York's Castelli Warehouse in 1968; and, in 1969, both Harald Szeemann's "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and James Monte and Marcia Tucker's "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Sonnier was a protagonist of the burgeoning post-Minimal or "anti-form" trend then widely seen, in Lippard's words, as "opening up new areas of materials, shape, color, and sensual experience" in sculpture—casual and imprecise and unemphasized." This was the milieu in which such now-canonical figures as Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra emerged. Why hasn't Sonnier been accorded similar prestige?...
Laurie Simmons at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
14 October 2018 to 27 January 2019
Solo survey exhibition Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents a major survey of works by Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949), organized by Andrea Karnes, senior curator, with full support of the artist. This exhibition will showcase the artist’s photographs spanning the last four decades, from 1976 to the present, a small selection of sculpture, and two films.
Simmons’s career-long exploration of archetypal gender roles, especially women in domestic settings, is the primary subject of this exhibition and is a topic as poignant today as it was in the late 1970s, when she began to develop her mature style by using props and dolls as stand-ins for people and places. Often isolating the dolls and photographing them situated in tiny, austere settings, Simmons uses fictional scenes to make observations about real life. These works are now iconic of her career. “Simmons’s imagery takes into account her own experience of coming of age in the 1950s,” says Andrea Karnes. “Without being autobiographical or spelling out specific narratives, however, the work strikes a psychological chord, seeming to underscore the difficulties of living the American dream, or in a larger context, any dream of domestic bliss.”
The namesake image for this exhibition, Big Camera/Little Camera, 1976, from the series Early Black & White, shows an actual camera juxtaposed with a miniature camera, which exemplifies Simmons’s other central interest: manipulating scale. “I put the two cameras together for scale,” Simmons explains, “and as a metaphor—real life versus fiction. It was also a statement about what I intended to do with the camera.”...
Keith Sonnier in The Brooklyn Rail
3 October 2018
Interview with Michael Straus Art in Conversation: Keith Sonnier with Michael Straus for THE BROOKLYN RAIL.
I first met Keith Sonnier several years ago on a party ship that was hired to follow a tugboat around Manhattan as it towed the first realization of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island. So it was a great privilege to spend some time with Keith at his home and studio in Bridgehampton recently and hear him reflect (as he does in this interview) on his friendships with Smithson, Nancy Holt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and many others, all while interweaving memories and stories of his childhood on the Louisiana bayou together with multiple insights into his own pioneering, original and joyful work in neon and other materials. I was accompanied by the Rail’s Publisher, Phong Bui, and Keith’s long time associate, Lesley Raeside. The interview concides with an expansive retrospective of Keith’s work at the Parrish Museum as well as a brilliant installation at the Dan Flavin Institute...
Ai Weiwei in the Los Angeles Times
28 September 2018
Review by Christopher Knight Review: ‘Ai Weiwei: Life Cycle’ brings tradition and transformation to the Marciano Art Foundation in the LOS ANGELES TIMES.
Seedbed, boneyard, vessel.
The three primary elements of a new, somewhat imbalanced exhibition by sculptor and Conceptual artist Ai Weiwei speak to fundamentals of birth, death and transformation. “Life Cycle,” as the show is titled, opens Friday at the Marciano Art Foundation. With one new large-scale work and two earlier installations, it is, remarkably, the celebrated Berlin-based Chinese artist’s first major Los Angeles show.
The seedbed, “Sunflower Seeds,” is a vast field composed of tons of black, white and gray seeds, spread smooth and flat in an enormous, 4,000 square-foot rectangle with thickly beveled edges. Shown in the foundation’s cavernous Theater Gallery, it is a version of the work Ai showed in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern in 2010. Each tiny seed, actually a bit of porcelain hand-formed and painted, is a kind of surrogate for the individuals who collectively form the mass of humanity.
Together they bristle with energy – actual and potential...
Elizabeth Neel in The New York Times
28 September 2018
Review by Roberta Smith The Paint Remains The Point: Elizabeth Neel in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Like Mary Weatherford, Elizabeth Neel adds unexpected elements to her painterly abstractions: hard-edge geometric shapes in black or white as well as textured rubbing-like silhouettes of insects. These added elements accent the methodical way the paintings are built up, for example with mirroring Rorschach-like motifs. The paintings have a new clarity that makes them Ms. Neel’s most impressive efforts so far. The show’s title — “Tangled on a Serpent Chair” — suggests an artist on the hot seat, which may, creatively speaking, be a good place to work from.
Peter Saul at the Met Breuer
18 September 2018 to 6 January 2019
Included in group exhibition Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy at the Met Breuer, NYC, NY.
For the last fifty years, artists have explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between the government and its citizens that haunts Western democracies. Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy will be the first major exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic. It will trace the simultaneous development of two kinds of art about conspiracy.
The first half of the exhibition will comprise works by artists who hew strictly to the public record, uncovering hidden webs of deceit—from the shell corporations used by New York's largest private landlord, interconnected networks encompassing politicians, businessmen, and arms dealers. In the second part, other artists will dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that nevertheless uncover uncomfortable truths in an age of information overload and weakened trust in institutions.
Featuring seventy works by thirty artists in media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, from 1969 to 2016, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy will present an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times.
Francesco Clemente in ARTFORUM
September 2018
Review by Ida Panicelli in ARTFORUM.
Accustomed to collaborating with poets and writers—among them Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Rene Ricard, and Salman Rushdie—Francesco Clemente allowed himself to be seduced by Poet in New York, the recently retranslated collection of poems that Frederico García Lorca wrote between 1929 and 1930 while a student at Columbia University. With a sort of foresight, Lorca saw the city as a merciless meat grinder that devours the most vulnerable, the destitute, and innocent children. His critique of the capitalist world led him to write of Wall Street: "There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit."
The poem from which Clemente has taken most of his paintings' titled, "El rey de Harlem" (The King of Harlem), overflows with grief like a funeral lament, yet also reflects the vital and creative energy of Harlem, where the poet's Mediterranean sensuality clashes with the harsher eroticism of New York...
Keith Sonnier in The New York Times
3 August 2018
Review by Jason Farago Artwork That Glows Under the Hamptons Sun in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
The New York artist Keith Sonnier, 77, is another pioneer — of a new, luminescent art, though where Flavin and Mr. Turrell preferred pared-down simplicity, Mr. Sonnier favors conjunctions of neon with panes of glass, found objects and technological instruments. He appeared in “When Attitudes Become Form,” Harald Szeemann’s famed 1969 exhibition of postminimal and conceptual art, as well as the epochal Documenta of 1972, and he has not stopped exhibiting since, though attention from American museums has been a few shreds thinner than for some other 1960s pioneers. Many of his most visible works of recent decades have been public commissions. (If you have ever been stuck waiting for your luggage at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., baggage claim, you will know Mr. Sonnier’s neon curves and straightaways.)
Now Mr. Sonnier is basking in the neon glow of a season devoted to his art on the East End of Long Island. “Keith Sonnier: Until Today,” at the Parrish Art Museum here in Water Mill, is his first American museum retrospective, with more than three dozen works (all that can fit in the museum’s difficult gallery spaces and central hallway), including not just neon works but intriguing sculptures in satin, rubber and bamboo. A few minutes away in Bridgehampton, the Dan Flavin Art Institute — a permanent installation administered by the Dia Art Foundation — has been supplemented with one of Mr. Sonnier’s most significant early works, uniting light, glass, objects and video-documented performance. Both are on view until next year, long after the Hamptons social scenesters will have decamped to New York or continued to Aspen...
Peter Saul on ARTSY.NET
17 July 2018
Editorial on Peter and Sally Saul by Scott Indrisek Peter and Sally Saul on How to Thrive as a Creative Couple on ARTSY.NET
In Sally Saul’s Together (2017), two happy polar bears stand side by side, holding hands. They look content (if a little befuddled), ready to face whatever the future might bring.
I couldn’t help but think of this perfect ceramic sculpture after meeting with Sally and her husband, the offbeat painting legend Peter Saul, to discuss their unique, lasting marriage—and what other artistic couples might be able to learn from it.
“They are both wonderful people and first-rate artists,” said Mary Boone, Peter’s New York gallerist since 1995. “It is great to see—and rare—that they help each other and share a lot creatively.”
I met the couple at their Upper East Side apartment, a small one-bedroom rental that they keep for occasional journeys into the city. They’re permanently based upstate in Germantown, New York, where they share a house (built in 1855) and a bi-level studio (redesigned in 2014 by the architect Stan Allen, a personal friend).
The living room of their Manhattan digs is cozy. Peter is dressed conservatively for a man who once painted Salvador Dalí urinating champagne into the ear of George W. Bush (only his bright teal sneakers hint at such a streak of eccentric wildness). Sally is likewise low-key, a calming presence, whether she’s discussing the daily anxiety of Trump’s America or her recent efforts to humanely trap gophers up in Germantown.
Spending an hour in their company makes it clear that—over the course of 43 years of marriage—they’ve settled into an admirably comfortable, supportive dynamic together. The Sauls, admittedly, are lucky. And any relationship—between artists or others—survives on a complex recipe of luck, compatibility, compromise, and trust. So what can we learn from Peter and Sally’s four decades of creative matrimony?...
Keith Sonnier at the Parrish Art Museum
1 July 2018 to 27 January 2019
Solo survey exhibition Keith Sonnier: Until Today at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
Keith Sonnier came of artistic age in the 1960s, part of a group of artists who created sculpture by experimenting with materials and techniques outside traditional art materials and forms. Sonnier, now recognized as one of America's most influential artists, was one of the first to incorporate light in sculpture—an innovation that forms the foundation of all his subsequent work. Sonnier, who lived and worked in Bridgehampton, Long Island, for more than two decades, has enjoyed broad exhibition exposure and critical attention to his work in Europe. However he has not had a substantial survey exhibition in a major American museum, nor has there been a significant publication addressing his career, his place in contemporary art history, and his contributions to the field. The exhibition is organized by Parrish guest curator Jeffrey Grove, who will also author the fully illustrated catalogue...
Ericka Beckman in Flash Art
May 2018
Interview with Atillia Fattori Franchini The Key Word Here is System in FLASH ART.
Over a career spanning more than forty years, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, US; lives in New York) has created pioneering works in film, sound, performance, and installation that engage game structures — as found in sports, arcade games, and casinos — to explore role playing, memory, and cultural values. Friends, artist peers, and art professionals often perform in these works, reducing the distance between art and everyday life. Beckman discusses with Atillia Fattori Franchini the use of digital technology as a political tool, and together they consider some of the main themes and subjects presented in her work.
Erik Parker in BLISSS MAGAZINE
May 2018
Interview with Liz Rice McCray Say Hello to… Erik Parker in BLISSS MAGAZINE.
Erik Parker is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He’s well known for his vividly colored paintings, otherworldly forms and distorted shapes. Speaking with Erik Parker we were struck with his positivity and charming personality. Erik has been awarded several honors throughout his career and has had solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world. We were excited to catch up with Erik and find out more about his current solo show, “New Mood,” at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY. Many thanks to Erik Parker for answering our questions, and dealing with all the crosstalk...
Erik Parker in Artforum
May 2018
Review by Jeff Gibson Erik Parker/Mary Boone Gallery in ARTFORUM.
Calibrated for maximum hallucinogenic effect, Erik Parker’s ultra-vivid, hyper-pictorial paintings go all out to grab and hold one’s attention. For this show, his first with Mary Boone, the artist’s hyperbolic solicitations came in three distinct forms—portraits, pyramids, and planks. The portrait paintings, of which there were five (three of solitary visages, one bearing two heads, and one comprising a group of four severely discombobulated busts), were either medium or large in scale, and constituted the most labor-intensive, complex, and accomplished works in the show. Each portrait was essentially a constellation of crisply rendered cartoon eyes, ears, mouths, and noses dispersed across vaguely face-shaped masses fashioned from geometric and biomorphic forms. These contours delineated vignette- or portal-like spaces that were then filled in with decorative patterning...
Laurie Simmons on VULTURE.COM
1 May 2018
Interview with Amy Larocca How Laurie Simmons’s Photographs (Including Pictures of Her Daughters in Body Paint) Ended Up in Two Galleries at Once on VULTURE.COM.
This week, the artist Laurie Simmons finds herself in the unusual position of having two prominent galleries showing her work at the same time. At the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea is “Cafe of the Inner Mind,” a body of work she created in the 1990s that is centered around images of a group of six ventriloquist’s dummies. Across town, at Salon 94’s Bowery outpost, is “The Mess 2017,” a collection of portraits of live people (including Simmons’s daughters, Lena and Grace Dunham), accompanied by a rainbow-colored collection of plastic stuff. But according to Simmons, this is hardly the whole story of this moment. To consider her psyche fully, one must include the show of new work by Carroll Dunham, Simmons’s husband, that’s also up at the Gladstone Gallery...
Laurie Simmons in The New York Times
29 April 2018
Profile feature by Arthur Lubow Stepping Outside the Dollhouse in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
A housewife perched awkwardly on the edge of a sofa, three tourists transfixed by the Parthenon, a wistful man in evening clothes sitting cross-legged in a folding chair: the dolls that Laurie Simmons has photographed in a four-decade career evoke human emotions, even though they’re not human.
These mute surrogates — most of them female — seem trapped in their prescribed roles. Reaching maturity amid the uproar of second-wave feminism, Ms. Simmons, now 68, captured a mood that was in the air then and feels very timely now.
For Ms. Simmons, there was something reassuring about directing dolls. They follow instructions. They don’t talk back. But it was a desire to exit her comfort zone and explore new territory that motivated her latest work. “I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture,” she said recently, in the house in rural Connecticut that she shares with her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham...
Ericka Beckman on FRIEZE.COM
26 March 2018
Interview with Pablo Larios Ericka Beckman: The Game Changer for FRIEZE.COM.
“I was interested in using screens to form a coded system within a space. The rear-screen allows you to have multiple timestamps and timeframes coexisting and affecting each other. The film Hit and Run (1977) basically opened the door for me to work as a filmmaker. Here, I created juxtapositions through the superimposition of different activities: an equivalence between a word, a graphic and a performance. I can say now that it was based on performance; but more importantly it is based on gesture, and communicating physical and graphic directions, as well as temporal ones: rhythm.”...
Ericka Beckman at the Zabludowicz Collection
22 March to 8 July 2018
Solo exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, England.
In her first major solo exhibition in the UK, Zabludowicz Collection is pleased to present four seminal works from the Collection by American artist Ericka Beckman that span over 30 years of genre-defying filmmaking. Beckman’s work consistently treats film as a performance medium, and draws on the pioneering energy of her years at CalArts and the do-it-yourself sensibilities of New York’s Downtown Scene in the late 1970s and early 80s. It also astutely anticipates the social and cultural impact of video gaming and online networks over recent decades. Shot on 16mm, with all the animation and visual effects being constructed in camera through multiple exposures, Beckman’s films create narratives using the pedagogic and competitive structures of games. They playfully reveal the conditions of gender and identity formation in relation to labour, leisure, architecture and capital...
Laurie Simmons at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
9 March to 28 May 2018
Included in group exhibition Women House at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
Featuring work by thirty-six global artists, Women House challenges conventional ideas about gender and the domestic space. The exhibition is inspired by the landmark project Womanhouse, developed in 1972 by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. With works that disrupted traditional ideas about the home as a feminine realm, Womanhouse was the first female-centered art installation to appear in the Western world. In the new exhibition, Women House, women artists from the 1960s to today examine the persistence of stereotypes about the house as a feminine space.
Through photography, sculpture, installation and video works organized across eight themes, Women House emphasizes the plurality of women’s views on the home. In Walking House (1989), Laurie Simmons creates a playful yet disconcerting image of the female body being consumed by expectations and responsibilities. Laure Tixier’s series Plaid House (Maquette) (2005–11) explores domestic architecture from worldwide cultures in solid-colored felt sculptures that resemble miniature residential homes, tents, towers, or high-rise buildings. Zanele Muholi’s 2007 photograph of a young female couple in South Africa leaning into the warmth of their kitchen stove speaks to the possibility of domestic space as a place of both privacy and freedom...
Kathe Burkhart in ARTFORUM
March 2018
Review by Chloe Wyma in ARTFORUM.
Elizabeth Taylor’s penis dangles beneath her coattails in Cunt: from the Liz Taylor Series (Raintree County), 2010, one of eight bold, brassy paintings exhibited from Kathe Burkhart’s ongoing, decades-long series devoted to the superstar. The painting’s profane title is emblazoned across the top in red letters, polarizing the male member between Liz’s legs. Between the cock and cunt, an impertinent, flatly painted Taylor stands against a brick wall with her hands on her hips, her famous violet eyes gazing disaffectedly beyond the picture’s surface.
Burkhart has been painting Taylor since 1982, laying saucy, often expletive-filled phrases over tweaked film stills and publicity photographs. Rooted in the intertwined tendencies of brash, good-bad painting and Pictures appropriation, the “Liz Taylor Series” is also a sustained self-portraiture practice, with Taylor, the consummate sex symbol and ultimate survivor of her passions, cast as the artist's surrogate. The flamboyantly heterosexual, eight-times-married Taylor embodied feminine iconicity to the point of camp excess. Burkhart accelerates Liz's contradictions, painting her—in the artist's words—as "the perfect sexual rebel and the perfect victim."...
Peter Saul on VULTURE.COM
28 February 2018
Review by Jerry Saltz These Trump Paintings Are a Highlight of the ADAA Fair on VULTURE.COM.
At the beautiful uptown ADAA show a jarring standout is the great hell-raising storm-bird proto-Pop genius Peter Saul and two wildly colored Day-Glo abstract-figurative quasi-portraits — Abstract Expressionist Portrait of Donald Trump and The Little Guy Gets Angry — which the artist says is a portrait of “a Trump voter.”
In spite of claims otherwise, Saul does not make “political art.” That’s too small and specific a term for what he does — and has always done since his emergence in the late 1950s. These aren’t just highly colored screwball jokes. This is strong, serious, formally original work with the ability to entertain, annoy, place you on a stage, cast you in a morbid light, and let you glimpse the farther shores of painting.
The Trump painting is a corkscrewing field of Granny Smith apple green with asparagus-colored swaths and squiggles of paint over aerospace blocks of orange hair (11 heads of it) and radioactive orange skin. There are also four hands with paintbrushes, in the act of action-painting this de Kooning update. Saul has long poked admiring fun at the giganticism of capital-A abstract painting, always smiling as he kills; his subject matter has always been incendiary and his visual style go-for-the-throat. Like a modern-day Max Beckmann or George Gross, who attacked Nazism in their work, Saul has skewered racism, hate, the American war machine, and much else. In the past he has painted a black girl performing fellatio on Ronald Reagan, an American soldier performing cunnilingus on an Asian woman, and Martin Luther King as a devouring octopus. He and Benny Andrews — who always did this sort of thing, as well — deserve permanent places in the late-20th-century pantheon.
Saul describes the Trump painting as “sort of a bubbling mess of paint.” It is. But a controlled one. Saul knows the tenets of abstraction in his bones — how to occupy an entire graphic field while also controlling, never overloading it. The hands, he says, “are trying to paint Trump’s likeness but they’re not getting much further than his hair.” Right?! It’s almost like Hitler’s mustache being able sometimes to conjure the guttural consciousness of ominousness and political chaos. No one gets out of Saul’s visual and political world unaccosted. He’s a beast...
Tomoo Gokita in HYPEBEAST
28 January 2018
Interview with Nirvana Garreffa The Surreal Paintings of Tomoo Gokita Inspired by Vintage Playboys on HYPEBEAST.COM.
Where traditional art has spent hundreds of years coming to a refined balance of aesthetic and concept, conceptual art emerged as a sort of protest. It placed concept above all, with a major disregard for material and appearance. Think Marcel Duchamp and Jenny Holzer.
Tomoo Gokita’s art however, is unlike either of these.
Since labels help people understand the things they’re looking at, critics have called Gokita’s work Post-Conceptual — perhaps the most suiting genre since his paintings have no attributed meaning, aim to change no one’s minds about anything, and are not intended to make the viewers feel any particular way. This is something the artist has been entirely honest in acknowledging. When asked about it, he’ll tell you “people should be able to look at the work and feel or think whatever they like about it.”...
Peter Saul at Kunsthalle Emden
19 November 2017 to 27 May 2018
Included in group exhibition The American Dream: American Realism 1945-2017 at the Kunsthalle Emden, Emden, Germany.
The double exhibition, which will take place parallel in the Drents Museum Assen (NL) and in the Kunsthalle Emden, presents American realism from 1945 to the present, including works by Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Alice Neel, Richard Diebenkorn, Martha Rosler, Alex Katz and Chuck Close. It is the first great overview exhibition on American realism in Europe. The Drents Museum focuses on art from 1945 to 1965, while the Kunsthalle Emden focuses on the period from 1965 to the present.
After the Second World War, the abstraction of the New York School and subsequent generations of artists symbolizes the re-emergence and an apparent de-ideologization of art in the USA. This abstraction, supported by influential art critics, is opposed to American realism, which developed parallel to it. The various currents and artistic positions of American realism play a part in the development of American art, which is only partly appreciated by the art world. They show, for example, the real living conditions of the Americans, represent societal criticism and political positions, and focus on the human figure and human existence in the USA.
Ai Weiwei at the Public Art Fund
12 October 2017 to 11 February 2018
Solo exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors at the Public Art Fund, NYC, NY.
This October, as a highlight of its 40th anniversary in 2017, Public Art Fund presents Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, a timely new exhibition across multiple boroughs by world-renowned artist Ai Weiwei. Inspired by the international migration crisis and tense sociopolitical battles surrounding the issue in the United States and worldwide, the artist has conceived of this ambitious, multi-site project as a way of transforming the metal wire security fence into a powerful artistic symbol. By installing fences in varying, site-specific forms at locations across the city […], Ai will create striking installations that draw attention to the role of the fence as both a physical manifestation and metaphorical expression of division. In this way, he will explore one of society’s most urgent issues, namely the psychic and physical barriers that divide us, which is at the heart of debates about immigration and refugees today...
Peter Schuyff at Le Consortium
7 October 2017 to 7 January 2018
Solo exhibition Has Been at Le Consortium, Dijon, France.
Has Been is a selection of works created by Dutch painter Peter Schuyff between 1981 and 1991. This exhibition, organised jointly with the Consortium in Dijon, is the first retrospective look at the artist’s career. Arriving in New York in the early 1980s, Schuyff brought into play the countless stories of abstraction by drawing on a vocabulary then considered exhausted...
Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
6 October 2017 to 7 January 2018
Included in group exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC, NY.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World is a major exhibition of contemporary art from China spanning 1989 to 2008, arguably the most transformative period of modern Chinese and recent world history. The largest show of this subject ever mounted in North America, it offers an interpretative survey of Chinese experimental art framed by the geopolitical dynamics attending the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization, and the rise of China...
Peter Saul at Deichtorhallen Hamburg
30 September 2017 to 28 January 2018
Solo exhibition at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
From 30 September 2017 to 28 January 2018, Deichtorhallen Hamburg is presenting an extensive survey exhibition of the work of the American painter PETER SAUL (*1934 in San Francisco, California) at the Falckenberg Collection. The exhibition will show some sixty works by this hitherto little noticed “artists’ artist”, including groundbreaking series such as his Ice Box Paintings, his comics narratives and Vietnam paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as never-before-exhibited drawings and selected late works from the 1980s to the 2000s...
Sadie Benning, Leidy Churchman at the New Museum
27 September 2017 to 21 January 2018
Included in group exhibtion Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, NYC, NY.
The New Museum has been committed to urgent ideas since its inception, devoting many exhibitions and programs over the years to issues of representation with regard to gender and sexuality: “Extended Sensibilities” (1982), “Difference” (1984–85), “Homo Video” (1986–87), and “Bad Girls” (1994) are just four notable examples. Following in this tradition, and in the Museum’s 40th anniversary year, “Trigger” extends the conversation around identity, considering how even a fluid conception of gender is nonetheless marked by ongoing negotiations of power and cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability. The exhibition’s title, “Trigger,” takes into account that word’s range of meanings, variously problematic and potent; the term evokes both traumatic recall and mechanisms that, set into motion, are capable of igniting radical change...
Peter Saul in NYR Daily
27 September 2017
Review by J. Hoberman A Carnival of Desecration in NYR Daily.
With his imposing paunch, outsized neckties, and pompadour as pointy as Woody Woodpecker’s beak, Donald Trump has the most recognizable profile of any American president since Richard Nixon. Yet, as a cartoonist of my acquaintance has complained, artists are having a hard time caricaturing Trump, mostly likely because he already is a caricature—one reflected in mass culture’s fun-house mirror for close to forty years.
We’re sick of Trump and we’re sick of being sick of him. Well-populated by images of the president, Peter Saul’s new show “Fake News,” at Mary Boone Gallery through October 28, is hardly a palliative, but it does illustrate the crass absurdity of the current moment. [...]Saul, now eighty-three, has been categorized as a political pop artist and a proto-punk neo-surrealist, although he has as much in common with the grotesque Mad magazine cartoonist Basil Wolverton as with any American painters. He’s done Nixon and Reagan (both as governor and president) as well as George W. With candy colors placed in the service of gross physical distortion and blandly offensive savagery—crucifixions are common, the electric chair is a frequent prop—his unnaturally festive work would scarcely seem out of place on the wall of a Venice Beach tattoo emporium. “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture,” he once said. Still, Saul’s portraits of Trump are relatively naturalistic—though the impossible settings in which the president is placed are not...
Peter Saul on HYPERALLERGIC.COM
17 September 2017
Article by John Yau Peter Saul Knows What to Do with the President and a Hamburger on HYPERALLERGIC.COM.
Madcap Peter Saul is our William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, Hieronymus Bosch, and Basil Wolverton rolled into one glorious, outrageous, nutty, rambunctious painter. Some artists get the honor of having their work displayed in the White House, but chances are Saul will never be one of them, no matter who the occupant is. You know he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but will never get it.
Saul’s recurring subject is pain and abuse of all kinds — what we inflict on others and do to ourselves. It seems that the only way he can embrace these often monstrous subjects, and whatever they stir up in him, is with scandalous humor. This is why such distinctions as tasteful and tasteless seem beside the point when looking at and thinking about Saul’s garish work, which is just one reason why he is such an important artist. He also happens to be an amazing colorist and terrific caricaturist. More than socially conscious, he is a formally inventive artist with a deep love for toppling sacred cows and pushing everyone’s buttons. In his hands, painting and paint become a platform for preposterous visual proposals...
Peter Saul at the Met Breuer
13 September 2017 to 14 January 2018
Included in group show Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1985 at the Met Breuer, NYC, NY.
Delirious times demand delirious art, or so this exhibition proposes. The years between 1950 and 1980 were beset by upheaval. Around the globe, military conflict proliferated and social and political unrest flared. Disenchantment with an oppressive rationalism mounted, as did a corollary interest in fantastic, hallucinatory experiences. Artists responded to these developments by incorporating absurdity, disorder, nonsense, disorientation, and repetition into their work. In the process, they destabilize space and perception, give form to extreme mental, emotional, and physical states, and derange otherwise logical structures and techniques. Delirious explores the embrace of irrationality among American, Latin American, and European artists...
Judith Bernstein at Venus Over Los Angeles
15 July to 2 September 2017
Included in group exhibition CUNT at Venus Over Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
On view in the gallery is an expansive selection of work in diverse media by six artists who unapologetically create representations of female sexuality. Bound by a dedication to alter the ways in which women’s bodies are represented in both fine art and media, these artists worked independently of one another to create images that unabashedly portray the vagina as a locus of power. The exhibition features works produced between 1964 and the present, in order to situate these artists’ practices as in part a reaction against the misogyny present in the art world in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to celebrate the fortitude and dogged artistic activism that these artists have shared for nearly five decades...
Ericka Beckman at Secession
6 July to 3 September 2017
Solo exhibition Game Mechanics at Secession, Vienna, Austria.
The American artist Ericka Beckman’s films and videos focus on games and sport competitions and their rules and structures, featuring the underlying playing fields as an allegory for the development and maintenance of socio-cultural norms. In her exhibition Game Mechanics, Beckman presents the film installation You the Better (1983/2015) and her most recent film Tension Building (2016) as well as drawings.
Beckman makes cinematography itself a medium of performance art in order to address fundamental questions such as the construction of movement and gestures, the regulation of space and time, and the joining of the imaginary and the real. For the recently completed version of Tension Building, which makes its debut at the Secession, the artist has updated her filmic investigation against the backdrop of the last U.S. election to bring critical pressure to bear on the prominent role of athletics and spectacle in American culture. She created a film ending that depicts the U.S. Capitol as the final moment to the game. Beckman found this image on the Internet of the inauguration of the Harvard Stadium in 1910, which featured a model of the Capitol on the playing field. The final image tethers the stadium to its underlying structure that engages all national, militaristic and corporate interests into play...
Ericka Beckman in Mousse Magazine
6 July 2017
Interview by Emily Watlington Ericka Beckman "Game Mechanics" at Secession, Vienna in Mousse Magazine.
Spectacle sports have been the subject of Ericka Beckman’s work since the 1980s, but the recent US election has reemphasized their troubling place in American culture. Here she discusses this political reframing of her work as part of the current rediscovery of her 1980s films, which are displayed at Vienna Secession...
Leidy Churchman in The New York Times
23 June 2017
Review by Will Heinrich in The New York Times.
Leidy Churchman’s response to the existential threat of the internet looks like the protective mimicry that a lot of contemporary painters have adopted. His latest show, “Kindly Bent to Ease Us,” at Mary Boone’s gallery on the southern edge of the Upper East Side, is a riot of reproduction, repurposing and appropriation, with oil paintings of a friend’s family Christmas card; of a panel discussion (“Is the Universe a Simulation, Moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson”); and of works by Richard Prince, the sculptor Frank Benson and the artist Eric Drooker, who is known for his New Yorker covers. The painting of the Benson sculpture, moreover, was a collaboration with TM Davy, and the painting of the Drooker cover includes a copy of Mr. Drooker’s signature...
Jacob Hashimoto at Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art
9 June to 24 September 2017
Solo exhibition Jacob Hashimoto: Gas Giants and Uncertain Atmospheres at Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland.
Hashimoto's art blur the line between the works and the spaces that they occupy. This is the first time Hashimoto's art is extensively displayed in Finland. He is best known for working with light, kite-like elements, from which he contructs large-scale, minimalistic and colourful tapestries and installations.
Ross Bleckner at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
9 June to 7 October 2017
Included in group exhibition Blue Black at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri.
Renowned artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) guest-curates a lyrical meditation on blue and black. Inspired by the Pulitzer’s monumental Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture, Blue Black, Ligon will expand Kelly’s exploration of the two colors with a diverse selection of more than forty works spanning almost a century and touching upon notions of language, identity, and memory. With work ranging from Abstract Expressionist canvases to experimental film, and including pieces by Ligon, the exhibition resists fixed interpretations, instead enlisting color as a means to pose timely and nuanced questions.
Ai Weiwei at the Park Avenue Armory
7 June to 6 August 2017
Installation with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Hansel & Gretel at Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Park Avenue Armory, NYC, NY.
In a new commission that is both object and environment, Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron with artist/activist Ai Weiwei explore the meaning of public space in our surveillance-laden world, referencing the story of Hansel and Gretel in which the children lose their way and feel a sense of menace in a space they know and trust. The artists take advantage of the vast openness of the Drill Hall, creating a 21st century public place in which the environment is disconcerting, the entrance is unexpected, and every movement is tracked and surveyed by drones and communicated to an unknown public...
Peter Saul at Schirn Kunsthalle
2 June to 3 September 2017
Solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany.
Peter Saul deliberately broke the rules of good taste long before “Bad Painting” became a central focus of contemporary art. Working with his own unique language beginning in the late 1950s, the American painter developed a blend of Pop Art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, San Francisco Funk, and cartoon culture in which he addressed social and political issues. Saul shared Pop Art’s focus on the commonplace, consumer society, and the lighthearted imagery of comics and clothed it in appealing, radiant colors. Yet his art is also associated with the aesthetic strategies of California counterculture. Viewers are confronted with an almost angry style of painting when Saul addresses the dark side of the American Dream, revealing the simultaneity of exaggerated humor and playful yet harsh criticism of the prevailing system. Wit, slapstick, word plays, comedy, satire, and often earthy humor are the means he employs in his caricature-style attacks on American high culture. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the first comprehensive survey of the previously neglected oeuvre of this great “artist’s artist” in Europe.
Ai Weiwei at The Israel Museum
2 June to 28 October 2017
Solo exhibition Ai Weiwei: Maybe, Maybe Not at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.
“Ai’s profoundly metaphorical body of work links contemporary Chinese culture with its past in ways that take on even deeper meaning in the setting of Israel, with its similarly ancient heritage. By shifting contexts—from China to Jerusalem—these installations reflect commonalities between these two civilizations, whose cultures developed concurrently over several thousand years on the eastern and western edges of Asia,” said James S. Snyder, Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum. “Our collections, covering a million and a half years of human creativity from around the globe, also offer a resonant setting for the universality of Ai’s work, centered on interconnections among history, place, and human experience.”...
Peter Saul at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center
14 May to 15 September 2017
Included in group exhibition Animal Farm at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut.
Animal Farm is a show of works revolving around this sense of spiritual dislocation and eternal return. Since the advent of print displaced its representational function, fine art has existed as a history of perverted exchanges between subcultures and mass media. Mickey becomes Andy; Andy becomes a bright t-shirt. A selection of works by Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean Michel Basquiat, Katherine Bernhardt, Tyson Reeder, Joe Bradley, Chris Martin, Sarah Braman and many others, sketch a story that slides from figurative iconography to totemic abstraction, charting a world in churn; in print, in space, and on canvas. Animal Farm reminds us that color is as material as culture, and that fantasy has long been a way to resist: identity, oppression, boredom. Freak out, or don’t...
Kaws at the Contemporary Art Museum
5 May to 13 August 2017
Solo exhibition KAWS: FAR FAR DOWN at the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri.
The multifaceted artist KAWS is renowned for his inspired manipulations of pop-culture imagery, a practice that began in the early 1990s when the artist painted over existing advertisements in cities around the world. Since that time KAWS’s practice has encompassed realms of both art and design, extending into collaborations with such global brands as Comme des Garçons, Nike, Supreme, and Uniqlo.
For FAR FAR DOWN, the artist creates a site-specific painting on CAM’s 60-foot long Project Wall, the large-scale work serving as a backdrop for three new major paintings. In the Museum’s courtyard, KAWS debuts the most recent permutation from his sculpture series, TOGETHER—bronze painted figures in a consoling embrace. TOGETHER is immediately endearing, and at the same time evokes pathos and contemplation. The paintings on view on the Project Wall deliver a sustained visual display of clashing patterns and vibrant colors, with barely recognizable popular figures inlaid within the scenes as deceptively as camouflage. The title of the exhibition and the eponymous painting implies physical or emotional descent, although the status of the concealed forms within the work are open to conjecture...
Fia Backström in The New York Times
21 April 2017
Review by Roberta Smith in The New York Times.
As you move among the stands, similar images recur. Laura Aguilar’s photographs capture a heavyset woman partly visible in a desert landscape; Lee Miller’s images capture wartime loss. Emila Medkova shows natural details evocative of human bodies or faces. Ms. Backstrom also finds nature in the details — some mold in full bloom, for example. And Simryn Gill’s “Channel” images feature nature absorbing human interference with mournful grace. On the wall, a large color photograph by Deana Lawson goes to the bloody center of a Haitian Voodoo rite...
Judith Bernstein in ARTNEWS
4 April 2017
Article by Barbara Pollack You've Gotta See This! in ARTnews Magazine.
Beyond the economy of galleries, fairs, and auction rooms, there is an alternative artist-to-artist network rooted in relationships based on aesthetic influences and mutual appreciation. In recent years, artists with some degree of success and visibility have gone out of their way to bring attention to lesser known peers and predecessors. Through these efforts, the art world has been introduced and reintroduced to a host of important figures, many of whom have worked for decades in obscurity. Now, with fresh attention focused on their work, these underappreciated artists can assume the spotlight, overcoming obstacles and prejudices that may have stood in their way earlier in their careers...
Will Cotton on ARTSY.NET
29 March 2017
Editorial by Casey Lesser I Baked a Cake in Will Cotton's Candyland Studio on ARTSY.NET.
For the past two decades, cakes, candies, macarons, and other desserts have been omnipresent in Cotton’s work. In realistic portrayals of beautiful women, he’s employed sweets for their seductive allure and symbolic associations, whether to embellish a fantastical candy queen or to emphasize the advertising industry’s keen ability to provoke desire.
Next week, he will be honored at the New York Academy of Art’s annual Tribeca Ball, an event that will dole out “Will Cotton Cotton Candy” to salute the sweet-toothed artist...
Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery in Prague
17 March 2017 to 7 January 2018
Solo exhibition Ai Weiwei. Law of the Journey at the National Gallery in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic.
After having presented the acclaimed set of sculptures, Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads in 2016, the National Gallery in Prague is proud to host the Law of the Journey, the first exhibition in the Czech Republic (and in Central-Eastern Europe) of the distinguished Chinese contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei. Himself a refugee, Ai has almost entirely focused his work on advocating the refugees’ human rights and documenting their tragic condition throughout the past two years.
The exhibition Law of the Journey is Ai Weiwei’s multi-layered, epic statement on the human condition: an artist’s expression of empathy and moral concern in the face of continuous, uncontrolled destruction and carnage. Hosted in a building of symbolic historical charge – a former 1928 Trade Fair Palace which in 1939–1941 served as an assembly point for Jews before their deportation to the concentration camp in Terezín – it works as a site-specific parable, a form of (public) speech, carrying a transgressive power of cathartic experience, but also a rhetoric of failure, paradox and resignation...
KAWS at the Yuz Museum
28 March to 13 August 2017
Major survey exhibition KAWS at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.
Judith Bernstein at The Box
11 February to 18 March 2017
Solo exhibition Cock in the Box at The Box, Los Angeles, California.
Peter Schuyff at Fri Art Kunsthalle
11 February to 18 June 2017
Solo exhibition Has Been at Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Has Been gathers a selection of works made between 1981 and 1991 by the Dutch painter Peter Schuyff. This exhibition, organized jointly with the Consortium in Dijon, is the first retrospective look at the artist's career. Arriving in New York in the early 1980s, Schuyff brought into play the countless stories of abstraction by drawing on a vocabulary then considered exhausted.
Silke Otto-Knapp in The New York Times
3 February 2017
Review by Jason Farago in The New York Times.
Two years ago, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto presented an assured, challenging midcareer retrospective of the German painter Silke Otto-Knapp, whose landscapes and interior scenes are rendered in whispering shades of gray and silver. Ms. Otto-Knapp’s first North American exhibition since then, at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, is smaller but, in its way, quietly rebellious.
The artist, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, paints unadorned coastal scenes, pared down to pale washes over carbon-dark backgrounds, as well as figures drawn from dance: in this case, the works of the British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She renders the Ashton moves in repeated elementary sequences across multiple canvases, sometimes by the seaside, sometimes in empty space...
Hilary Harkness, Peter Saul on ARTNET.COM
31 January 2017
Review by Laura van Straaten A Generational Battle of Subversive Wit at Tribeca's "Piss and Vinegar" on ARTNET.COM.
“Piss and Vinegar: Two Generations of Provocateurs,” now showing at the New York Academy of Art in Tribeca, is totally worth it, even if just for one artwork: a painting by artist Hilary Harkness.
First, the show. The exhibition aims to contrast an earlier generation of artists who use shock in their work with a younger generation of contemporary artists who use shock to different ends. As the show was being assembled, the curators realized the older generation was all men and the second, all women...
Ross Bleckner at the Whitney Museum of American Art
27 January to 29 May 2017
Included in group exhibition Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s takes a focused look at painting from a decade associated with the arrival of new media and the rapid growth of the contemporary art world. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s deep holdings of this period, this exhibition presents work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Elizabeth Murray, David Salle, and Terry Winters, alongside work by less-familiar artists such as Moira Dryer, Joyce Pensato, and Julia Wachtel. While considerable attention has been given to the decade through artists’ use of appropriated imagery and photographic sources, the exhibition examines this moment specifically through the lens of painting, considering the ways in which the medium was reinvigorated throughout the decade at a time when its relevance was fundamentally challenged...
Hilary Harkness, Peter Saul at the New York Academy of Art
19 January to 5 March 2017
Included in group exhibition Piss and Vinegar at the New York Academy of Art, NYC, NY.
Curated by Peter Drake, Dean of the Academy, and gallerist George Adams, Piss and Vinegar unites two generations of provocateurs: five men who came of age in the 1960s and five contemporary female artists. Robert Arneson, Robert Colescott, R. Crumb, Peter Saul, and Robert Williams, whose satirical, sarcastic prints and paintings demonstrate influences from psychedelia to MAD Magazine, will be shown with Nina Chanel Abney, Sue Coe, Nicole Eisenman, Natalie Frank, and Hilary Harkness, whose work explores the same subversive wit and dark, maniacal spirit. Each artist moreover brings to the table serious technical skill and art historical fluency, in the service of pushing the boundaries of “good taste.” No one subject or affiliation unites the two groups, but the exhibition particularly highlights the choice these artists made to pursue uncomfortable and ostensibly unpopular themes, and to risk having their work called vulgar or grotesque...
Judith Bernstein on ARTSY.NET
18 January 2017
Editorial by Alexxa Gotthardt Judith Bernstein's Penis Paintings Stick It to the Man on ARTSY.NET.
Judith Bernstein has drawn or painted at least 500 phalluses—of all shapes and sizes—over the course of her 50-year career. And that’s just the number I could count across the pages of the artist’s new tome, Dicks of Death, which is released in the U.S. this week.
The timing for the book’s launch is auspicious. Bernstein’s titular “dicks” have served as a form of protest—against sexism, against war, against oppression of every stripe—for the feminist art pioneer since her days in Yale’s MFA program during the 1960s. At the time, she was propelled by the burgeoning momentum of the feminist art movement and her frustration with the chauvinism of the art world and American society at large...
Rebecca Morris in The New Yorker
16 January 2017
Solo exhibition #24 at Mary Boone Gallery in The New Yorker.
The L.A. abstractionist layers decorative references, loosely patterning her paintings with spray-painted grids or whimsical shapes. Morris’s surfaces summon the world of craft: ceramics, faux finishes, summer-camp T-shirts. One commanding big square is reminiscent of a chunky pendant, with a raised, canvas-spanning, metallic-gold circle, excised with squiggles...
Ross Bleckner at Dallas Contemporary
14 January to 12 March 2017
Solo exhibition Find a peaceful place where you can make plans for the future at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas.
Ross Bleckner is known for painting a spectrum of subjects—from pulsating lines in his resurrection of Op art in the 1980s to the magnified cellular structures of autoimmune diseases in the 1990s and newer contemplative works from the past few years. Bleckner’s Dallas Contemporary exhibition takes its title from a fortune cookie. Under this prophetic umbrella, the artist presents paintings of landscapes, crowds, flowers, architecture, and birds, all from the last two years. Together they function as memento mori—a meditation on memory and loss...
Judith Bernstein at Jablonka Maruani Mercier
12 January to 25 February 2017
Included in group exhibition Man Alive! at Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium.
Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition Man Alive, curated by gallery artist Wendy White. The exhibition includes works by Nina Chanel Abney, Judith Bernstein, Jordan Casteel, Rosson Crow, Rochelle Feinstein, Keltie Ferris, Joanne Greenbaum, Liz Markus, Marilyn Minter, Nathlie Provosty, Ruth Root, Pat Steir, Mickalene Thomas, Kaari Upson, Wendy White, Sue Williams, Brenna Youngblood, Lisa Yuskavage, and Julia Wachtel...
Sadie Benning at the Kunsthalle Basel
10 February to 30 April 2017
Solo exhibition Shared Eye at the Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
Sadie Benning (born 1973, USA) shows a group of new works, somewhere between sculpture, painting and photography. Each work consists of colorful plastic, re-drawn digital photos, found images, objects, shelf-like projections and painted elements, reflecting American politics, immediate experiences, and the poetics of everyday life.
Shared Eye is organized in collaboration with The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois.
Ai Weiwei in The Brooklyn Rail
December 2016/January 2017
Interview with Phong Bui Art in Conversation: Ai Weiwei with Phong Bui for The Brooklyn Rail.
In tracing Weiwei’s complex and prolific career since mid-1995, we all felt his work embodied breadth and ambition, which compelled questions regarding social and political issues including the legacy of the long rule of China’s communist party. The undeniable scale and world-wide visibility of his work has sparked expressions of freedom and safeguarded individual expression to such degree that, whatever the differences in ideology between capitalism and communism are, China is straddling to maintain this precarious balance between old traditional values and the new consumer culture...
Ross Bleckner at Alphawood Gallery
1 December 2016 to 2 April 2017
Included in group exhibition Art AIDS America at Alphawood Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.
This groundbreaking exhibition underscores the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in American art. It introduces and explores the whole spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present...
Sadie Benning at The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago
19 November 2016 to 22 January 2017
Solo exhibition Shared Eye at The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
The Renaissance Society presents Shared Eye, a new installation by artist Sadie Benning. In this series of mixed-media panels, images are layered and interpolated, suggesting the complexities of representation inherent in visual communications...
AI WEIWEI in The Wall Street Journal
2 November 2016
Ai Weiwei’s Triumphant Return by Tony Perrottet in The Wall Street Journal Magazine.
In 2011, the controversial artist Ai Weiwei was detained in Beijing and his passport was confiscated for four years by the Chinese government. This fall marks his return to New York City with two new gallery shows...
AI WEIWEI in The Wall Street Journal
2 November 2016
Ai Weiwei named as The Wall Street Journal Magazine's Art "Innovator of the Year".
Ai Weiwei does not have a signature style, but instead works across mediums, and has become one of the world's most influential and prolific contemporary artists...
Tomoo Gokita in Shikimei
November 2016
Interview with Tomoo Gokita in Shikimei.
Francesco Clemente at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
23 October 2016 to 23 April 2017
Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Dormiveglia at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present Francesco Clemente: Dormiveglia from October 23, 2016 through August 23, 2017. This exhibition includes a series of nine, majestic large-scale paintings by Francesco Clemente (born 1952 in Naples, Italy, lives and works in New York and India). Painted in New York in 1998, the Dormiveglia series takes its title from the Italian expression connoting the state between sleep and awakening and captures the state in which reality intrudes into the realm of dreams...
TOMOO GOKITA in The New York Times
20 October 2016
Review by Roberta Smith in The New York Times.
Tomoo Gokita, a polymath of drawing mediums and styles, turned to painting in 2005, basing his images on found photographs and working exclusively in the sharp whites, velvety blacks and myriad grays of gouache. They pack an unsettling visual punch.
In “Out of Sight,” at Mary Boone, the paintings’ neon glow and louche, vintage feel evoke the work of the Pop outlier Ed Paschke (1939-2004). Subjects include a pair of Playboy bunnies; nuclear families; couples out for the evening; a send-up of Manet’s “Olympia”; and “Madam,” a woman in a strapless, kaleidoscopically patterned cocktail dress. Faces are often disturbingly “out of sight,” masked with shaded curved visors suggestive of astronauts’ gear. They dehumanize, yet real emotions seep around their edges...
AI WEIWEI in The New York Times
20 October 2016
Article by Robin Pogrebin Ai Weiwei Melds Art and Activism in Shows About Displacement in The New York Times.
When migrants were forced to evacuate the Idomeni refugee camp along the Greek-Macedonian border, the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei came to gather what they left behind.
Mr. Ai did not haul back to his Berlin studio only the filthy clothes, shoes and blankets that would otherwise have been bulldozed away. He washed them. He ironed creases into the pants, brushed lint off the sweaters, scraped mud out of the sneaker treads...
KAWS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
20 October 2016 to 22 January 2017
Major survey exhibition KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts a major survey exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (American, born 1974) on view in Fort Worth through January 22, 2017, and traveling to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China, March through August 2017. Organized by Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Andrea Karnes in close collaboration with the artist, this presentation features key paintings, sculptures, drawings, toys, and street art interventions to examine KAWS’s prolific career in depth, revealing critical aspects of his formal, conceptual, and collaborative developments over the last twenty years...
Ericka Beckman in The Walker Art Center's Untitled (Blog)
18 October 2016
Interview with Victoria Sung Game On: Ericka Beckman's You The Better in The Walker Art Center's Untitled (Blog).
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has experimented with film as a medium for expanding the possibilities of performance, often creating set pieces and rule-based actions specifically for the camera. Presenting the original film in conjunction with animated props, the installation You The Better (1983/2015) implicates the viewer as an active participant in the game. You The Better is on view through December 31 in the Walker group exhibition Less Than One. Here, we talk about the spirit of easy collaboration in New York of the 1970s and ’80s, how the original film resonates with today’s plugged-in audiences, and the analogy between games of chance and life...
Alec Baldwin lawsuit is helping dealer sell more art
17 October 2016
Alec Baldwin’s lawsuit against art dealer Mary Boone over a Ross Bleckner painting is having unintended consequences — it’s helping Boone sell more Bleckner art.
Judith Bernstein in King Kong Magazine
October 2016
Interview with Susanne Prinz for King Kong Magazine, Issue 2.
For the Uncanny issue of KING KONG, we have fallen headfirst into a world of lucid dreams and strange fantasies, in the hope that, when we wake, things will be a little clearer and lighter than before.
For the second issue of King Kong, we have ventured into the shadowy recesses of the human experience, nearly losing our minds in disturbia.
448 pages, 6 alternate covers. Featuring the work of legends such as Cindy Sherman, AA Bronson, Kienholz, Judith Bernstein, Peter Saul, Laurie Simmons, Marilyn Minter, Isamaya Frrench, Shun Watanabe, Bob Recine, Oliverio Toscani, Nicola Formichetti, David Dunan and the late Anton Yelchin, the Uncanny Issue threatens to be even bigger and badder than our debut.
Hilary Harkness at the Bruce Museum
24 September 2016 to 2 January 2017
Included in group exhibition Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut.
Only yesterday, it seems, one was hard-pressed to name more than a handful of successful women artists; now the list would be extensive, and the choices rich and varied. Although numerous recent exhibitions have featured women’s art, scant attention has been paid to the collecting of art created by women. In fact, private collections are in the process of being dramatically transformed. Greenwich and nearby communities in Fairfield and Westchester counties are home to a number of the finest contemporary collections, and thus to some of the most exciting art being made today.
Her Crowd will offer the rare opportunity to see what some of America’s most influential collectors of contemporary art consider beautiful, important, and compelling...
Peter Saul at Michael Werner Gallery
23 September to 12 November 2016
Solo Exhibition Some Terrible Problems at Michael Werner Gallery, London, England.
In 1967, Saul said, “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture”. This statement outlines the exceptional attitude with which Saul gleefully skewers the conventions of world politics and culture. “Pictures with problems” are Peter Saul’s abiding interest. Some Terrible Problems features seven new large-scale canvases, each dissecting to humorous, gruesome and often offensive effect a range of subjects and attitudes. These remarkable new works revisit genres of history painting and portraiture while remaining thoroughly contemporary and visually unlike anything else in recent painting...
Ai Weiwei at Palazzo Strozzi
23 September 2016 to 22 January 2017
Solo exhibition Ai Weiwei. Libero at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy.
Running till 22 January 2017, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Italy’s first major retrospective dedicated to one of the world’s most celebrated and influential contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei. This outstanding retrospective showcasing both old and new works has received broad coverage and rave reviews in all the leading Italian and international media.
This major exhibition includes key monumental installations, sculptures and objects, as well as videos and photography series produced throughout his career. These range from his years living in New York 1980s and ’90s when he discovered his ‘masters’ Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, to the large iconic assemblages works from the early 2000s consisting of objects such as bicycles and stools, to his recent controversial and engaged works such as portraits of political dissidents built with LEGO bricks, and his projects on migration in the Mediterranean region...
Sadie Benning at Kaufmann Repetto
22 September to 10 November 2016
Solo exhibition “Excuse Me Ma’am” at Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, Italy.
Sadie Benning started making experimental videos as a teenager in 1988. The low-fi, black and white videos explored aspects of identity, language and memory. Improvising with materials that were immediately available at the time, Benning fragmentally constructed moving images from found objects, drawings, text, performance and personally shot footage. The form, content and poetics explored in the earlier video works has expanded over the past two decades, continuing to wrestle with evolving political, conceptual and material questions...
Judith Bernstein at The New Museum
22 September 2016
New York book launch for Judith Bernstein: Rising, published by Kunsthall Stavanger, at The New Museum, NYC, NY.
Join Kunsthall Stavanger and the New Museum on September 22 for the New York launch of Judith Bernstein Rising! Judith Bernstein and Johanna Fateman will hold a discussion during the event and will be available for book signing after the talk. Copies of the publication will be for sale during the event...
Liu Xiaodong at Chronus Art Center
18 September to 30 December 2016
Included in group exhibition Datumsoria: An Exhibition of Liu Xiaodong, Carsten Nicolai, and Nam June Paik at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China.
Chronus Art Center is pleased to present the much-anticipated presentation of Datumsoria: An Exhibition of LIU Xiaodong, Carsten Nicolai, and Nam June Paik. A neologism, Datumsoria conjugates datum and sensoria, denoting a new perceptual space immanent to the information age...
Sadie Benning at Air De Paris
17 September to 29 October 2016
Solo exhibition L'oeil de l'esprit at Air De Paris, Paris, France.
Francesco Clemente at Coro della Maddalena
15 September to 13 November 2016
Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: After Omeros at Coro della Maddalena, Alba, Italy.
The partnership between the Ceretto family, well-known wine makers, and the municipality of Alba (CN) goes on. Like every year, beginning in September and for most of the duration of the International Alba White Truffle Fair, the Coro della Maddalena of Alba is hosting a contemporary art exhibition featuring the most prestigious names in the international art scene.
This year it will be up to Francesco Clemente to combine contemporary art with the wonderful Baroque setting of the Choir. The artist, who was protagonist at the Siena exhibition "Fiori d’Inverno a New York” (winter flowers in NY), will bring to Alba his most recent works which were never displayed in Italy before...
Ross Bleckner in The Guardian
14 September 2016
Article by Jonathan Jones Someone Please Give Alec Baldwin a History of Art Lesson in The Guardian.
The actor’s ‘original’ artwork lawsuit exposes a basic misunderstanding – art glories in repetition, not least the luscious, lyrical paintings of Ross Bleckner...
Judith Bernstein at Maccarone
9 September to 16 October 2016
Included in group exhibition Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women at Maccarone, New York.
Maccarone Gallery, with Pati Hertling and Julie Tolentino, restage the landmark feminist exhibition COMING TO POWER: 25 Years Of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, curated by Ellen Cantor in 1993 at David Zwirner Gallery...
Francesco Clemente at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery
8 September to 20 October 2016
Solo exhibition at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium.
Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery is proud to present Francesco Clemente's body of work for the first time in Belgium. The exhibition will showcase three series : Fertility (painted in India), Portraits (painted in New York City), & Making Love in a Fleeting World (painted in St. Barts).
The oeuvre of the Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente (b. 1952) spans over four decades and has achieved international acclaim. Predominantly interested in themes of both religion and spirituality, Clemente's work for the most part depicts both the human form (in its entirety or metamorphosing between human and animal) or symbolic motifs...
Dawoud Bey at Stephen Daiter Gallery
8 September to 3 December 2016
Solo exhibition Dawoud Bey: Harlem Redux at Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.
Harlem Redux marks photographer Dawoud Bey’s return to the community that was the site of his first completed project Harlem, USA (1975-1979). Before he was born, Bey’s parents met and lived in Harlem – this family history served as the inspiration for this work. Some forty years later, the artist returned to photograph the neighborhood, a response to a sense that its unique character and identity are in flux. In these new images Bey shows Harlem in transition, once vibrant and celebrated, giving way to a more gentrified and homogenized present. Intent on depicting this change as it takes place, Harlem Redux seeks to answer the question – What does a community look like while undergoing such a dramatic transformation?
Francesco Clemente at Springs Art Center
3 September to 31 October 2016
Solo exhibition A Nomadic Life: Francesco Clemente in China at Springs Art Center, Beijing, China.
Rather than just being a user of the concept, Clemente is a true nomad. His understanding of the nomadic life is thinking globally and acting locally. In the artist’s view, nomadic space is based on national space. He integrates a truly nomadic life into his art practice with the intention of expanding its vitality and adopts a “reproduction” which redefines cultural attributes. Clemente continues to use repetition and displacement in these ink paintings, executing the various figures in wonderful and meaningful renditions. Clemente adopts the somewhat satirical and humorous style of a monologue and his approach seems to unveil the ominous contemporary circumstances while the addition of a poetic, metaphysical tone expresses freedom of choice and has the appeal of an enigma...
Peter Schuyff at Galerie Gabriel Rolt
2 September to 8 October 2016
Solo exhibition at Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam.
Galerie Gabriel Rolt is delighted to announce PETER SCHUYFF, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Peter Schuyff has been key to the abstract art landscape for over more than 30 years. Rooted in the concepts of the 80’s artistic movement Neo- Geo, the typical patterns of Schuyff’s canvasses, consisting of geometrical and tridimensional shapes, persist in what seems to be an eternal movement. The use of primary forms, like squares and circles, suggests the existence of a primordial world, made by pure geometry. It’s here, in this indefinable dimension, that these different lines and shapes meet light, the essential element which initiate their calm mobility...
Jacob Hashimoto in The New York Times’s T Magazine
31 August 2016
Article by Hilary Moss Creating Order in the Universe With Thousands of Kites in The New York Times’s T Magazine online.
In late 2006, Mary Boone phoned the artist Jacob Hashimoto several months ahead of his first show at her venerable gallery to ask about his progress. “She said, ‘I heard that you haven’t finished any of the work,’ and she explained that when she does a show of six or seven pieces, she hopes to choose from 15,” he remembers. “I told her that my studio is like a sourdough bread bakery — you have the mother, which is the dough that you’re growing, and you feed it flour and water, and the mother gets bigger and keeps leavening. And, eventually, you take off chunks and make your biscuits, but most of the time, you’re feeding the mother...”
Ross Bleckner at the Parrish Art Museum in The New York Times
19 August 2016
Article by Ken Johnson Searching for Light in the Darkness of the '80s in The New York Times.
For contemporary art in America, the 1980s was an exciting if not lovable decade. Arguably it was second only to the 1960s for ambitious innovations of style and thought. Consider Julian Schnabel’s brawny Neo-Expressionist paintings, Cindy Sherman’s canny, staged self-portraits, Jeff Koons’s sumptuous sculptures of kitschy objects and Barbara Kruger’s suavely designed leftist agitprop: The ’80s abounded in eye- and mind-grabbing work.
In contrast to the future-oriented euphoria of the ’60s, however, the mood of art in the ’80s was retrospective and darkly rueful. With AIDS taking the lives of many in the art community and a conservative president, Ronald Reagan, in the White House, reasons for optimism apparently were few.
That downbeat feeling is stirringly conveyed by “Unfinished Business: Paintings From the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and David Salle,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by three artists who rose to stardom in the ’80s, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y...
Ai Weiwei in The New York Times
18 August 2016
Interview with Masha Goncharova for The New York Times online, On Instagram, the Artist Ai Weiwei Focuses on Refugees.
Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, is known for his films, sculptures and photography. Last July, the Chinese government returned Mr. Ai his passport after four years of detainment in Beijing. Since sharing the moment on his Instagram, Mr. Ai has been traveling — first moving to Germany, where he settled with his family, then to London in September for his single-artist show at the Royal Academy of Arts, and in January to Paris for an atrium and window display inside the Bon Marché department store.
Featured most prominently on Mr. Ai’s Instagram after his release from China were not the shows, but rather his extensive travels to the Greek island of Lesbos, which he has visited frequently since late December. Each time he went, Mr. Ai posted many (a handful a day was not uncommon) poignant photos of refugees...
Ross Bleckner at the Parrish Art Museum
7 August to 16 October 2016
Included in group exhibition Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle features the work of three artists who met in the early 1970s at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles before moving to New York in the 1980s, where they immediately established careers as influential painters. At a time when painting was thought to have passed its prime, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and David Salle discovered, in its materials and conventions, a medium rife with possibilities—particularly for artists interested in doing something original, and ambitious, with its history. Unfinished Business explores the distinct styles, philosophies, and convictions of the three painters. Featuring 23 large-scale canvases and 17 works on paper, the exhibition outlines the development of each painter’s formal vocabulary while suggesting deep connections between and among the works of all three...
Joseph Beuys in the Financial Times
5 August 2016
Review by Rachel Spence Joseph Beuys at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in the Financial Times, London.
Joseph Beuys at the Demarco Gallery
4 August to 30 September 2016
Solo exhibition Joseph Beuys x 1000 at the Demarco Gallery at Summerhall, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Joseph Beuys, one of the great artistic geniuses of the 20th century died in 1986, thirty years ago. To this day he is exhibited more than any living artist and there continue to be hundreds of exhibitions dedicated to featuring Beuys across the world.
Richard Demarco introduced Joseph Beuys and many others of the international avant garde to Scotland. 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Demarco Gallery, an appropriate time at which to celebrate Richard Demarco and his artistic collaborations, friendships and critical dialogues through exhibitions which also acknowledge the 40th anniversary of Edinburgh Arts (exploration programme) and the 25th anniversary of the Demarco European Art Foundation, based at Summerhall...
Joseph Beuys at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
30 July to 30 October 2016
Solo exhibition Artist Rooms: Joseph Beuys A Language of Drawing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland.
The German artist, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), is perhaps best known for his ‘actions’, installations and sculpture, but first and foremost he was an artist who was interested in ideas: ideas about how the world, both natural and social, functioned and how the latter could be improved. And the way that he expressed these ideas most readily was in his drawings.
This exhibition will bring together, for the first time, the extraordinary group of over 110 drawings by Beuys held in the ARTIST ROOMS collection. The drawings cover the whole of the artist’s career from 1945 to the end of his life, reflecting his encyclopaedic interest in nature, science, philosophy, mythology, society, politics and religion.
Francesco Clemente at Carriageworks
30 July to 9 October 2016
Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Encampment at Carriageworks, Eveleigh, Australia.
The first major exhibition in Australia of work by acclaimed Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente, and second in the annual Schwartz Carriageworks series of major international visual arts projects, Encampment includes six of Clemente’s celebrated large-scale tents, transforming 30,000 square feet of the precinct into an opulent tented village.
Created in collaboration with a community of artists in Rajasthan, India, with exteriors that combine camouflaged fabric and golden embroidery, the tents in Encampment invite us into jewel-toned spaces populated by Byzantine angels...
Joseph Beuys at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
29 July to 16 October 2016.
Solo exhibition Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys – A Unique Partnership at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland.
This exhibition will look at the works, lectures and ‘actions’ Richard Demarco commissioned from Joseph Beuys, the innovative and inspirational German postwar artist, from 1970 until Beuys’ death in 1986. Demarco, an avant-garde gallerist in Edinburgh, recognized the visionary quality of Beuys’s work and visited him in Oberkassel in January 1970. Determined to focus Beuys’ attention on Scotland, he presented him with a set of postcards. Beuys responded with, ‘I see the land of Macbeth, so when shall we two meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?’ They reunited in stormy Edinburgh later that year and Demarco led him northwards along the ancient track he calls ‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’. This initial experience of the Scottish landscape inspired Beuys and laid the foundation for a remarkable artistic relationship...
Ericka Beckman in the Los Angeles Times
29 July 2016
Article in the Los Angeles Times online by Deborah Vankin, The Broad acquires 29 new works, keeping an eye on local artists.
Eli Broad has been a busy man this year overseeing his Broad museum, which is approaching its one-year-anniversary in September — but not too busy to buy new art.
The Broad has added 29 new works to its permanent collection, it announced on Friday, all acquired since the museum’s opening. A third of the new works come from local artists, further deepening the museum’s connection to Los Angeles...
Ai Weiwei at 21er Haus
14 July to 20 November 2016
Solo exhibition Ai Weiwei: translocation - transformation at 21er Haus, Vienna, Austria.
"Everything is art. Everything is politics", says Ai Weiwei (born in 1957), one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists. As a conceptual artist, documentarian and activist, his works deal not only critically with the history, culture and politics of his homeland China, they also react to social realities of migration between countries and continents. Through November 20, 2016, the 21er Haus presents his first major solo exhibition in Austria...
Ross Bleckner at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
13 July to 23 October 2016
Included in group exhibition Art AIDS America at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York.
This summer The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present Art AIDS America, the first exhibition to examine the deep and ongoing influence of the AIDS crisis on American art and culture. The exhibition will feature more than 125 works in a wide range of media dating from 1981 to the present day, by artists including Félix González-Torres, Derek Jackson, Kia Labeija, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Martin Wong. The exhibition, on view from July 13 through October 23, 2016, is organized by the Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts...
Dawoud Bey at the George Eastman Museum
9 July to 23 October 2016
Included in group exhibition A History of Photography at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York.
The George Eastman Museum photography collection is among the best and most comprehensive in the world. With holdings that include objects ranging in date from the announcement of the medium’s invention in 1839 to the present day, the collection represents the full history of photography. Works by renowned masters of the medium exist side-by-side with vernacular and scientific photographs. The collection also includes all applications of the medium, from artistic pursuit to commercial enterprise and from amateur pastime to documentary record, as well as all types of photographic processes, from daguerreotypes to digital prints...
Francesco Clemente at Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala
29 June to 2 October 2016
Solo exhibition Winter Flowers and the Tree of Life at Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy.
With this exhibition Francesco Clemente pays tribute to Siena, a city that already in 2012 has shown a keen interest in his art with the prestigious appointment to design the Great Banner of the Palio di Siena. As a result of this collaboration, the artist has created ten new works, divided into two distinct cycles, to be exhibited in the city at the invitation of Max Seidel...
Jim Isermann at Bloomberg SPACE
22 June to 10 September 2016
Solo exhibition Jim Isermann - Constituent Components at Bloomberg SPACE, London.
Constituent Components is an exhibition of six sculptures and one wall work that play out the possibilities of an isometric cube in order to create new forms. Applied to the walls as a graphic vinyl pattern and arranged across the gallery floor as double-stacked, modular cubes, these newly commissioned works explore Jim Isermann’s career-long conflation of industrial design, craft production and art. Performing a fragile balance between these modes of operation, the exhibition proposes a dialogue between high and low, hand and machine, analogue and digital creation...
Ryan McNamara in The New Yorker
20 June 2016
Article by Andrea K. Scott Ryan Mc Namara, The Artist Who Dances About the Internet in The New Yorker online.
Since the end of the aughts, the Brooklyn-based artist has become a darling of the art and fashion beaux mondes—Picasso’s granddaughter arranged an early performance at Art Basel Miami, and Louis Vuitton commissioned a live work for its flagship store on Fifth Avenue. At heart, though, McNamara is really a populist, whose audacious career might be summed up in the words of a reality-TV show: “So You Think You Can Dance.” In his performances, he has elevated the passionate enthusiasms of the amateur to the level of art. He’s also not above a dumb joke: he once staged a Whitney Houston karaoke night at the Whitney Museum...
G.T. Pellizzi in Wallpaper
17 June 2016
Review by Pei-Ru Keh Light beings: G.T. Pellizzi’s constellations of light at The Watermill Center in Wallpaper online.
This month, the space presents G.T. Pellizzi’s Constellation in Red, Yellow and Blue, a vivid installation of light sculptures that were created during his residency at Watermill. Created and sited specifically for the space, the works are inspired by invented cosmologies that take into account the many mythological, astrological and calendar symbols found in textiles at the centre’s own Watermill Collection – an accumulation of artefacts amassed by Robert Wilson himself...
Francesco Clemente at MASS MoCA
13 June 2015 to 3 January 2016
Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Encampment at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
“I’m told I am a nomadic artist,” artist Francesco Clemente once dryly noted. In Encampment — a multi-part 30,000 square foot installation occupying MASS MoCA’s largest gallery — Clemente’s transitory experience of changing geographies, diverse cultural climates, and indeed consciousness itself infuses his imagery and art with a particularly rich range of references and meaning. For the past three decades Clemente has traveled often, dividing his work and primary residences between Varanasi, India, and New York. Informed by the logistical realities and production opportunities of making art in wildly disparate locations, his aesthetic investigation of states of flux delves into the nature of passage itself. “I believe in this movement of generating and dissolving, and regenerating and dissolving again — this is a technique for the mind to become and remain awake,” Clemente explains. Passages between bodily pleasure and changing spiritual states, between acts of destruction and creation, and between the seen and unseen are all at the heart of Encampment, opening at MASS MoCA in North Adams on June 13, 2015, and remaining on view through early January 2016...
KAWS at More Gallery
12 June to 28 August 2016
Solo exhibition KAWS: GISWIL at More Gallery, Giswil, Switzerland.
G.T. Pellizzi at The Watermill Center
11 June to 10 July 2016
Solo exhibition G.T. Pellizzi: Constellation in Red, Yellow and Blue at The Watermill Center, Water Mill, New York.
Constellation in Red, Yellow and Blue is a monumental installation of light sculptures created for The Watermill Center by G.T. Pellizzi. The sculptures are derived from invented cosmologies inspired by the mythological, calendrical, and astronomical symbols found on many textiles in The Watermill Collection.
Keith Sonnier at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
10 June to 11 September 2016
Solo exhibition Keith Sonnier: Light Works, 1968-70 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England.
Making three-dimensional drawings with neon, American artist Keith Sonnier (b.1941) bathes spaces and bodies in the radiance of coloured light. Coming of age with a group of artists that included Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, he uses a post-minimalist language that is physically immediate yet associative...
Keith Sonnier at Pace Gallery
9 June to 23 June 2016
Solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, London, England.
Pace London is pleased to announce a presentation of two neon sculptures by Keith Sonnier in the first floor gallery at 6 Burlington Gardens from 9 to 23 June 2016. The presentation coincides with the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition Keith Sonnier: Light Works, which features early neon works by the artist and is on view from 10 June to 11 September 2016. Concurrently, the Tate Modern is exhibiting a 1969 flock piece by the artist in its permanent collection displays. These presentations offer a rare opportunity in London to see works by Sonnier, who is a seminal figure in post-minimalism...
Will Cotton at FLAG Art Foundation
9 June to 29 July 2016
Included in group exhibition Summer School at FLAG Art Foundation, NYC, NY.
The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Summer School, on its 9th floor gallery from June 9 – July 29, 2016. This expansive group exhibition highlights artists who ignite our imagination through fantasy, humor, and play. Accompanying educational programming will include artist-led workshops, tours, and events, created with and driven by the interests of children and their families...
Judith Bernstein at Kaufmann Repetto
7 June to 11 September 2016
Included in group exhibition Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions at Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, Italy.
In her last novel, The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt recounts the vicissitudes of a female artist who creates a series of male artist alter-egos to demonstrate that “All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.” The exhibition extends a dialogue exploring womanhood and femininity within the art world, developing this investigation through an all-encompassing approach to the natural coalescing and cross over of what has been conventionally designated as “masculine” or “feminine” in artistic practice...
Ai Weiwei at The Warhol Museum
4 June to 11 September 2016
Two-person exhibition Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei at The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei, developed by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and the National Gallery of Victoria, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, explores the significant influence of these two artists on modern and contemporary life, focusing on the parallels, intersections, and points of difference between their practices—Warhol representing 20th-century modernity and the “American century,” and Ai representing life in the 21st century and what has been called the “Chinese century” to come...
Sadie Benning in The Brooklyn Rail
3 June 2016
Review by Tom McGlynn of solo exhibition Green God at Mary Boone Gallery and Callicoon Fine Arts, NYC, NY, in The Brooklyn Rail online.
The first time I saw a grouping of Sadie Benning’s more recent paintings was at the Greater New York show at PS1 in 2015 – 16. Seen from afar they read loosely as geometric abstractions, residing formally somewhere between Mary Heilmann’s deadpan blocks of color and connective tissue, and brightly patterned, mid-20th century Naugahyde upholstery. Yet there was something quite different and unique about these works. Up close one could discern their jigsaw-like fabrication with each aqua resin and wood section carefully sanded to round each edge. Due in part to their asymmetry, these sections, painted in semi-gloss or matte colors, pulse gently together with a subtle, claylike vibration. Given the fairly reductive forms of these paintings, it was a surprise to discover a pictographic figuration popping up and boldly inhabiting the works at the artist’s concurrent shows at Callicoon Fine Arts and Mary Boone Gallery...
KAWS at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
2 June to 6 December 2016
Solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, England.
This was the first UK museum exhibition of work by the renowned American artist KAWS, whose wide ranging practice includes painting, sculpture, graphic design, toys and prints. The expansive Longside Gallery featured the artist’s large, bright, graphic canvases immaculately rendered in acrylic paint, alongside towering sculptures in fibreglass and wood. The historically designed landscape of YSP became home to a series of monumental and imposing sculptures in KAWS’s trademark style – nostalgic characters in the process of growing up...
Angela Bulloch at Simon Lee Gallery
28 May to 2 July 2016
Included in group exhibition Fractured at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to present Fractured a selected group exhibition exploring one of modernism’s most characteristic formal strategies, the fracturing of the picture plane. Just as the Renaissance development of perspective yielded the possibility of the representation of three dimensional space in a two dimensional plane, so the modernist device of splitting the picture plane by means of formal fault lines suggested the simultaneous presentation of multiple viewpoints, and opened the door to abstraction...
Olivier Mosset at Galerie Andrea Caratsch
27 May to 22 July 2016
Solo exhibition at Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich, Switzerland.
Liu Xiaodong at the Faurschou Foundation
26 May to 16 December 2016
Solo exhibition Liu Xiaodong – Painting as Shooting at the Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Painting as Shooting is conceived as an exhibition in three chapters, curated by Jérôme Sans and produced by Faurschou Foundation, in Venice, Beijing and Copenhagen. The first step, which took place at the Cini Foundation for the 56th Venice Biennale, was the first major European institutional exhibition to fully explore Liu Xiaodong’s unique practice, as one of China’s most influential painters of the last two decades. The second, presented by Faurschou Foundation in its Beijing space, presented the most recent series of works created by the artist during his stay in Ordos in Inner Mongolia. The last chapter, mixing the first two shows, represents the most updated survey on Liu Xiaodong’s work...
Will Cotton at the National Portrait Gallery
22 May 2015 to 10 July 2016
Included in group exhibition Eye Pop: The Celebrity Gaze at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.
Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Peter Dinklage, Eminem, Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Eva Longoria, Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant, are some of the people featured in "Eye Pop: The Celebrity Gaze." This exhibition features 53 portraits of luminaries who have been at the top of their fields. See them in drawings, paintings, video portraits, photographs, sculpture, and prints. Many of these works of art have never been publicly displayed and all recent additions to the museum's collection. Taken together, these portraits allow us to question celebrity and peel back its layers...
Ryan McNamara in The Globe and Mail
20 May 2016
Article by James Adams Evading genre, artist Ryan Mc Namara goes beyond mere performance in The Globe and Mail (Toronto) online.
Ryan McNamara doesn’t do pain. Strenuous? Most definitely. Challenging? Uh-huh. Time-consuming? For sure. Six years ago, when the New York-based performance artist was 30, he spent every day for almost five months taking dance lessons, in public, from various professionals at P.S. 1, an arts centre affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art. He called the whole thing Make Ryan a Dancer, the finale being a marathon of choreography in which McNamara, who at the time was finishing MFA studies in photography and sculpture at Hunter College, busted moves in every room at P.S. 1...
Ai Weiwei at Hall Art Foundation
14 May to 27 November 2016
Included in group exhibition Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime at Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont.
The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by American artist Joel Sternfeld to be held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 14 May – 27 November 2016. Over fifty artists are represented in Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime, which includes paintings, photographs and sculptures selected by Sternfeld from the Hall Collection. The exhibition will also feature the world debut of Sternfeld’s video work, London Bridge (2016)...
Liu Xiaodong at Eslite Gallery
14 May to 5 June 2016
Solo exhibition Liu Xiaodong in South Africa at Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
“Liu Xiaodong in South Africa” will be opened at ESLITE GALLERY on 14 May, exhibiting his life drawings resulted from his project in South Africa (commissioned by LV) in August 2014. During the one month, LIU Xiaodong visited many places: he sketched the wild lives in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park and Blyde River Canyon and portrayed the ordinary people in Cape Town and Cape of Good Hope, to name just a few spots. 50 paintings on xuan paper and on photos present the robust people and landscapes in South Africa. They are so powerfully contagious that the viewers can lay aside the differences of ethnicity and culture, observing their lands and lives via the lens of shared humanity...
Sadie Benning in W MAGAZINE
13 May 2016
Interview with Diane Solway in W Magazine online, Transgender Artist Sadie Benning Is Not Afraid.
Sadie Benning began making videos at age 15, using the PixelVision toy camera the artist got for Christmas that year from Dad, a filmmaking teacher. On New Year’s Eve, Benning sat down in front of the camera for the first time, prompted by the events of a terrible night during which a friend was hit by a drunk driver and Benning witnessed a drive-by shooting while walking home from the hospital...
Keith Sonnier at The National Exemplar
10 May to 18 June 2016
Two-person exhibition Aaron Aujla & Keith Sonnier at The National Exemplar, NYC, NY.
Peter Saul at Sheldon Museum of Art
6 May to 31 July 2016
Included in group exhibition It Was Never Linear: Recent Painting at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska.
This summer, Sheldon Museum of Art will celebrate abstraction in contemporary painting. Twelve artists have been invited to participate in It Was Never Linear, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings. Each of the selected works demonstrates a primacy of the act of painting—gestural mark making and attention to surface materiality—over any true representation of form or figure. The participating artists span generations and include Robert Bordo, JoAnne Carson, Dawn Clements, Lois Dodd, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Loren Munk, Joyce Pensato, Colin Prahl, Peter Saul, Barbara Takenaga, and Stanley Whitney.
Ryan McNamara in The New York Times
4 May 2016
Review of performance Battleground by Siobhan Burke, Color Wars That Evoke A Party, in The New York Times.
Have you ever noticed that the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Guggenheim Museum looks like a ’60s sci-fi spaceship or, alternatively, a European parliamentary room? That’s how the artist Ryan McNamara (accurately) characterized it at the premiere of his “Battleground” on Monday night, while smartly shaking up the format of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series and redefining the term “dance battle.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright did a great job designing my set,” he said during a midshow conversation with Nancy Spector, a former chief curator at the museum, as though the architect had envisioned it, back in 1959, with this very occasion in mind...
Ryan McNamara at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
2 May to 4 May 2016
Performance of Works & Process commissioned work Battleground at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
On May 2, 3, and 4 at 7:30 pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents the premiere of Battleground, a Works & Process-commissioned work by artist Ryan McNamara. Utilizing a rare residency opportunity spanning five months in Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Peter B. Lewis Theater, McNamara, collaborating with a community of nine dancers—including Reid Bartelme, Jason Collins, Dylan Crossman, Fana Fraser, John Hoobyar, Kyli Kleven, Sigrid Lauren, Mickey Mahar, and Brandon Washington—will create a one-of-a-kind “Cosplay-Battle-Ballet” made for the unique architecture of the theater...
Ross Bleckner at Böhm Chapel
1 May to 31 October 2016
Solo exhibition Ross Bleckner: Architecture of the Sky at Böhm Chapel, Hürth-Kalscheuren, Germany.
Ericka Beckman in Artforum
May 2016
Review by Catherine Taft of Cinderella at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, California, in Artforum.
Ericka Beckman’s Cinderella, 1986, a 16-mm rendering of the fairy tale, is an Atari-like musical in which the title character staggers through various levels of narrative as if in a video game. As the centerpiece of a spellbinding exhibition, this rarely screened film demonstrated the staying power of Beckman’s work thirty years on...
Ross Bleckner at Leila Heller Gallery
29 April to 15 June 2016
Solo exhibition Ross Bleckner: Forever Overhead at Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Leila Heller Gallery Dubai is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Ross Bleckner from April 29th to June 15th, 2016. The artist’s first major exhibition in the region features ten large-scale paintings as well as smaller canvases, wherein according to the artist, “the architecture of place meets the architecture of the sky”, revealing phenomena of paint and light, in an oeuvre teetering between a call for salvation and a silent abyss...
Liu Xiaodong at the Palazzo Strozzi
22 April to 19 June 2016
Solo exhibition Liu Xiaodong: Migrations at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy.
The exhibition, devised and produced by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, showcases a broad selection of paintings, drawings and photographs on which the artist has created during a spell in Tuscany lasting from the autumn of 2015 through to the spring of 2016. The main themes of the work on display are the cities of Florence and Prato and the Sienese countryside, which the artist has observed and experienced through direct contact with the local people, but with a special focus on the local Chinese communities...
Ericka Beckman at the Walker Art Center
7 April to 31 December 2016
Included in group exhibition Less Than One at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Less Than One is an international, multigenerational group show offering in-depth presentations of work from the 1960s to the present by 16 artists central to the Walker’s collection. Included alongside such signature artworks as Sigmar Polke’s Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters (1991) are major acquisitions on view here for the first time, including Ericka Beckman’s You The Better, Film Installation (1983/2015), Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being: Sol’s Drawing #1–5 (1974), and Renée Green’s Bequest (1991), among other featured pieces...
Peter Saul at Musée d’Art Contemporain
8 April 2016 to 10 January 2017
Included in group exhibition Zoo Machine at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France.
Ai Weiwei at Museum of Fine Arts
3 April to 17 July 2016
Included in group exhibition Megacities Asia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.
The accelerated rise of megacities—those with populations of more than ten million—over the last 50 years has profoundly affected the lives of their inhabitants. Asia is home to more megacities than any other continent: the works by the 11 artists in this exhibition respond to the political, environmental, and social conditions of their home cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai, and Seoul, conveying their textures, proportions, and striking material and visual juxtapositions...
Francesco Clemente in Harper’s Bazaar
April 2016
Article by Laura Brown Francesco Clemente: Model as Muse in Harper’s Bazaar.
Liya Kebede has been modeling for more than 20 years, but she had never before sat for an artist. It was a particular thrill to sit for Clemente. "I didn't know his work specifically, but when I found out that he had painted the portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow in [the 1998 film] Great Expectations, I was so excited," she says. "I remember when I watched that movie, the portrait really touched me. I don't know why. Then to suddenly see my portrait done in the same way, it meant a lot to me."...
Judith Bernstein in Artforum
April 2016
Review by Johanna Fateman of solo exhibition DICKS OF DEATH at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in Artforum.
Judith Bernstein doesn’t mince words—or symbols. Her solo exhibition “Dicks of Death” at Mary Boone Gallery, curated by Piper Marshall, featured a wealth of phallic imagery, from scatological cock-faces and engorged missiles to handsomely forbidding screws...
Ross Bleckner on Artnet.com
31 March 2016
Article by Laura van Straaten 80s Art World “It Boy” Ross Bleckner Is Having a New York Moment on Artnet.com.
New York artist Ross Bleckner has work in six new shows on now or opening soon, including his first solo show in the Middle East, opening in April at Leila Heller Dubai, followed by what is sure to be the art happening of the Hamptons this summer, a group show that unites him with his fellow 80s art-world it-boys David Salle and Eric Fischl at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island...
Peter Saul at Gary Tatintsian Gallery
22 March to 31 August 2016
Solo exhibition You Better Call Saul! at Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
Peter Saul has been deemed the father of Pop Art and a successor to Surrealism. He is one of the most important artists of our time and a consistent “violator of good taste” in art. He is the founder of the unique style of Bad Painting, which is characterized by a bright palette of colors and exaggerated distortion of images – a jubilant depiction of lawlessness and violence in society, which the artist sarcastically criticizes through his “indictments”...
Will Cotton at the Orlando Museum of Art
12 March to 5 June 2016
Solo exhibition InFlux Exhibition Series: Will Cotton at the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida.
Presented here is the first ever exhibition examining artist Will Cotton’s entire working process, from concept sketch, to costumes, to prints and paintings. Cotton is known for depicting an astonishing world, composed of an abundance of sugary sweets. Figures pose languidly in settings where landscapes are cakes and icing, seas are whipped cream and clouds are cotton candy. These appear to be utopian realms where all desires are indulged without guilt or consequence. The flawless naturalism with which Cotton renders this idealized world makes it both more seductive and more remote from ordinary experience...
Angela Bulloch at the Sharjah Art Museum
9 March to 31 May 2016
Included in two-person exhibition Considering Dynamics & The Forms of Chaos at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
“Considering Dynamics & the Forms of Chaos” is an exhibition showcasing the work of two artists: Angela Bulloch and Maria Zerres. Their practice is brought together under one title and framed by the notion of entropy. Entropy is commonly understood as a measure of disorder. It is a key term that characterises the movement towards chaos, and it appears in a variety of fields such as physics, probability theory, sociology and information technology. Entropy is that which structures chaos. Within contemporary art, entropy has emerged to refer to installations often associated with entropic states or with representations of order, disorder and information, and their homogeneity. Through Angela Bulloch’s (b. 1966, Canada) and Maria Zerres’ (b. 1961, Germany) works, suggestions of entropy transpire in different ways and through their respective artistic forms. Inherent to both artists’ practices is a congruous representation of the idea of a movement towards chaos.
Sadie Benning in BOMB Magazine
March 2016
Interview with Lia Gangitano in BOMB Magazine.
If Minimal Art was a response to the implicit power relations that surrounded art production in the '60s—against which practitioners of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Institutional Critique sought to delineate their work—Sadie Benning has analogously sought to depart from a reliance on the self-obsolescing, corporate tools associated with video (equipment, technology, manufacturing), instead exploring the handmade through materials that maintain a longer, more independent history. Benning's at times geometric, at times figurative-leaning, work in painting and sculpture represents a parallel to visual and auditory storytelling through video and music. It posits an engagement with abstraction as a performance-based exchange, in both its production and reception...
Tomoo Gokita in Collaboration with Stüssy
March 2016
Collaboration with Stüssy for Spring 2016 Artist Series Collection.
It was about a year and half ago when I made the trip out to Tomoo’s studio. We were picked up from our hotel and drove for about thirty minutes from Shibuya, to an area that must have been Tokyo’s version of a suburb. I’d been a fan of Tomoo’s work for some time, so I was psyched to finally meet him. I didn’t really know what to expect. There’s a certain cinematic feel to Tomoo’s work: dark and slightly twisted. It always reminded me of a David Lynch films, or the Twilight Zone. Mainly black and white and super moody, but the subject matter is often pin up girls and wrestlers. The mixture of those things is what I was drawn to. Highs and lows...
Olivier Mosset at Hunter College 205 Hudson Street Gallery
27 February to 10 April 2016
Included in group exhibition Buren, Mosset, Permentier, Toroni at Hunter College 205 Hudson Street Gallery, NYC, NY.
This exhibition marks the first critical examination of the significant, albeit brief, work of the BMPT Group, composed of Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni in 1967. On Christmas night, 1966, Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni drafted their first declaration, inviting the public to attend a demonstration at the 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, stating: “For the first time, on January 3, 1967, something will happen.” This event became the first in a series of “Manifestations”—events in various formats, at various locations in Paris. These events criticized the institutionalization and spectacularization of art as well as the public’s passivity, encouraging new modes of critical engagement that defied and denied older exhibition models. Coming out of the political tumult of France in the 1960s, the activities of the group were not hermetic, isolated occurrences, but rather a response to the particular intellectual moment, one defined by radical philosophy and social unrest. While the legacy of each artist has fallen under the rubric of painting, this strict classification ignores the conceptual, political, and performative impetus in deference to medium. This exhibition seeks to reexamine the BMPT group by placing its work in context with the broader conversations surrounding institutional critique, performance, and the role of painting as a political medium...
Keith Sonnier in the Los Angeles Times
26 February 2016
Review by Christopher Knight Keith Sonnier’s neon drawings open portals to another place in the Los Angeles Times online.
Keith Sonnier calls his new wall drawings in neon, wire and electrical transformers “portals,” and their design motifs and titles do refer to forms from ancient Roman and medieval architecture, often ecclesiastical. Elegant and deceptively simple, they display a masterful hand. Humor is part of the reason why. In 13 recent works at Maccarone Gallery, Sonnier stirs it in with a subtle hand. In these sculptures, the white wall is an idealized plane separating space and metaphorically opened by the glowing illumination of neon color. The shapes are drawn in bent glass tubing and draped wire and they often protrude, sometimes at oblique angles, into the room...
Angela Bulloch at Galerie Eva Presenhuber
20 February to 2 April 2016
Solo exhibition Space Fiction Object at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland.
In her latest works Angela Bulloch studies how the interaction with objects structures and motivates our movement in space, as well as the differences in our perception of digital and real space. In doing so, she continues her preoccupation with control systems and the need to decipher them. Her new works include lights that go on and off, thus forcing the viewer to interact with them. Like all of Angela Bulloch‘s control systems, they constantly scrutinize the way we interact with pre-existing sign systems...
Keith Sonnier at Maccarone
13 February to 7 May 2016
Solo exhibition Keith Sonnier: Portals at Maccarone, Los Angeles, California.
Sonnier’s by-now iconic work is emblematic of a generation of artists who sought to liberate the artistic encounter from the formal constraints of Modernism to produce a sensory and emotional experience that also extended beyond the Spartan affect of Minimalism. The omnibus category of “post-Minimalism,” however, does not adequately describe both the unique wit and visceral impact that his work evinces...
G.T. Pellizzi at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
4 February to 15 May 2016
Solo exhibition I Transport at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City, Mexico.
For his first individual exhibition in Mexico, G.T Pellizzi has proposed to transform the main gallery at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros into a monumental art shipping crate, using the aesthetics of art packaging as his model. I Transport measures 9.5 x 8 x 3.5 m, with the peculiar feature that it is subdivided into 171 separate and unique pieces. I Transport (translated from the greek ¨metaphero), alludes to the ontological construction of knowledge, history, memory and aesthetics. The piece strives to sublimate the creative act into one of the most commonplace processes by which the globalization of art occurs: the transportation of artwork, artists, discourse and cultural experience...
Judith Bernstein at the Kunsthall Stavanger
4 February to 15 May 2016
Solo exhibition Judith Bernstein at the Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway.
Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to present the first exhibition in Norway by the prolific New York-based feminist artist Judith Bernstein. Since the 1960s, Bernstein has brazenly provoked audiences and institutions alike with her furious visceral paintings and drawings addressing themes of warfare, sexual aggression, and gender politics – often under the guise of outrageous humor.
Bernstein’s work has been called unrepentant, defined as obscene, and has been the subject of numerous controversies and debates including censorship from the exhibition FOCUS: Women’s Work— American Art in 1974. Often described by the artist herself as “a sledgehammer” and simultaneously “funny and dead-serious,” the artworks are psychologically overpowering and undeniably in your face...
Liu Xiaodong at Fondation Louis Vuitton
27 January to 2 May 2016
Included in group exhibition Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France.
This exhibition will present a limited selection of twelve very different artists, twelve strong individualities. They share not only the ability to live and work in what is a particularly fast-moving world of "turbulence and transformation," but also a tendency to use multiple means of expression, combining tools supplied by local traditions with the latest sophisticated technologies. Responding with striking swiftness, their work mirrors the new realities of today's China, as manifested in the economy, the environment, cities and international relations, showing a strong awareness of the changing relations between town and country and the great rural exodus...
Peter Schuyff at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
9 January to 20 February 2016
Solo exhibition Twenty One Watercolors and a Painting at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NYC, NY.
A hallmark of Schuyff’s remarkable output since the 1980s has been the interplay of surface pattern and optically convincing geometry, achieved through what Richard Hell has called “masses of color and shades of form.” Drawing fluidly upon modernist and postmodernist approaches to abstraction, Schuyff uses the language of paint to marry seemingly irreconcilable elements: biomorphic shape and algorithmic repetition, allover flatness and tightly rendered drop shadows...
Will Cotton at Baldwin Gallery
27 December 2015 to 7 February 2016
Solo exhibition at Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado.
Ed Paschke at the Museum of Contemporary Art
19 December 2015 to 27 March 2016
Included in group exhibition The Street, the Store, and the Silver Screen: Pop Art from the MCA Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
The exhibition is organized around three separate themes that illustrate many artists’ interests during the 1960s and 1970s: the bustling energy of the street, with its preening passersby, garish signage, and automobile-centric organization; the commercialism that supported and surrounded mass produced consumer products; and the allure of Hollywood glamour and celebrity. Drawn from the MCA Collection and a handful of local loans, these works reveal patterns and preoccupations that connect artists working in otherwise distinct styles and approaches...
Peter Saul in the The New York Observer
9 December 2015
Article by Ryan Steadman Peter Saul & Mary: a Classic Gallery Champions an Old-School Artist in The New York Observer online.
Life is long. Just ask Peter Saul and Mary Boone. Combined they have more lives than a crazy cat lady’s Alphabet City apartment can hold, but they’ve each learned from their mistakes—and their successes. The pairing seemed almost inevitable: the glamorous dealer who launched art stars with big dreams and a healthy disrespect for decorum (like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat), and the ultimate outsider painter who stubbornly fought off categorization...
Peter Saul at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts
2 December 2015 to 20 March 2016
Included in group exhibition Mystifiers at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia.
The Mystifiers exhibition at NCCA is built on the representation of a select series of works by different generation artists, whose art is characterized by the transformation of reality and creation of models of the non-existent. Demonstrating the mutations of the contemporary world, artists underline the importance of the legacy of the main 20th century trends – Dadaism, surrealism, conceptualism, simulationism – for art practices in the 21st century. By using various art techniques, the art works presented in this project immerse the viewer in a surreal space of fantasy illusions, wonderful or terrible dreams, imaginary worlds and other-worldly “civilizations”...
Peter Saul in Tablet Magazine
December 2015
Article by Jeremy Sigler Peter Saul Sabotages Everything, Including Himself in Tablet Magazine.
Imagine a painter who shoots himself in the foot and then puts his foot in his mouth. That's how I'd sum up Peter Saul. His paintings are always the opposite of whatever is considered to be right. And they continue to earn him a reputation as one of the most brutally honest storytellers in postwar, comic-influenced American painting...
Will Cotton in Martha Stewart Living
December 2015
Cover painting for 25th Anniversary issue of Martha Stewart Living.
In his sweet heaven of a studio in downtown Manhattan, Will Cotton works not just with paint and paper and brushes, but with sugar, flour, and egg whites. He also, as artists are wont to do, brings in other materials -- in this case, a flexible and inedible substance with which he embellished my Valentino dress. He transformed it from a lacy summer linen frock into an object worthy of inclusion in his idea of a sugary-white winter wonderland, into which he painted me so artistically and beautifully...
Tomoo Gokita at Bill Brady Gallery
30 November 2015 to January 2016
Solo exhibition Damage Control at Bill Brady Gallery, Miami, Florida.
Tokyo-based Tomoo Gokita implements a black and white palette and acrylic gouache create uniquely even surfaces, which are beautiful and disquieting, yet incredibly seductive to the viewer. Gokita continues his monochromatic series that explores the traditional portrait format on a range of scales, using source material from vintage postcards, magazines, found photos, and classic film stills. His distinctive greyscale aesthetic combines deft tonal modeling of figures with a material flatness, both alluding to and obscuring characters appropriated from western popular culture and marginal countercultural sources...
KAWS, Peter Saul at Gary Tatintsian Gallery
27 November 2015 to 2 March 2016
Included in group exhibition Mutated Reality at Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
Art confuses the subject with the predicate and gets lost in the moment when something needs to be expressed triumphantly. Belief in the co-existence of the painting and man in a common dimension ceases. We, however, still believe in something. For example, we believe in the inevitability of mutations, improvements, and instability since the role of such transformations was recognized as a great science. The artists in “Mutated Reality” mix and stir nostalgia for the past with an unappealing present that is ready to burn any flesh to ashes and vice versa...
Joseph Beuys at Tate Modern
23 November 2015 to 31 December 2016
Solo exhibition Artist Rooms: Joseph Beuys at Tate Modern, London, England.
German artist Joseph Beuys saw creativity as central to all aspects of human existence. As well as sculpture and performance, his work as an artist came to encompass social theory and political action. Beuys’s activities became explicitly politicised in the 1970s. A series of confrontations with the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf over the number of students that he could admit to his class led to wider questions about access to education and the relationship between ordinary people and authority. In 1971 he founded a Free Academy and the more overtly political Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum. Beuys argued that social decision-making should be made by the people through referendums rather than elected political parties. It was this concept of ‘direct democracy’ that he explored in his Information Action at the Tate in 1972, from which three of the blackboards shown here are taken. Later he became involved in the German Green Party and organised the planting of 7,000 oak trees around the city of Kassel...
Peter Saul in Hyperallergic.com
22 November 2015
Article by John Yau The Necessary Insolence of Peter Saul on Hyperallergic.com.
Peter Saul has an uncanny ability to seamlessly combine the hilarious and the hideous to great effect. In the middle of chortling at one of his wacky, indecorous paintings, you are apt to suddenly notice an odd and even disturbing detail. Saul may come off as a jaunty humorist, but beneath this jolly lighthearted veneer seethes a volcano of well-honed gripes, peeves, impertinence, skepticism, and outrage, none of which are petty. His ability to transform fervent indignation into comical absurdity is amply evident when he takes on masterworks of French academic painting, as he does in his recent exhibition, Peter Saul: Six Classics, at Mary Boone...
Ed Paschke at the Museum of Contemporary Art
21 November 2015 to 5 June 2016
Included in group exhibition Surrealism: The Conjured Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
Surrealism: The Conjured Life presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate the deep currents that Surrealism sent through the international art world—and especially through Chicago—since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. A global movement that encompassed a wide number of art forms, including film, theater, poetry, and literature, Surrealism came of age with poet André Breton’s formal declaration in 1924. This deeply emotional and psychological art form flourished in the 1930s and 1940s—turbulent times of economic instability, rapidly changing social mores, and war...
Sadie Benning at the Museum Brandhorst
14 November 2015 to 30 April 2016
Included in group exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany.
‘Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age’ will be the first exhibition to tell the story of painting’s adaptation, absorption and transformation of information technologies in Western Europe and the United States since the 1960s. Its historical starting point in Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme’s programmatic appropriation and re-contextualization of commercial imagery precedes the advent of digitalization and the Internet by some thirty years. Painting’s capacity to absorb and transform other media became explicit at the same moment as its legitimacy was fundamentally challenged by cultural forms of mediation which Guy Debord theorizes in his influential critique as ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (1967)...
Judith Bernstein at the Museum Brandhorst
14 November 2015 to 30 April 2016
Included in group exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany.
‘Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age’ will be the first exhibition to tell the story of painting’s adaptation, absorption and transformation of information technologies in Western Europe and the United States since the 1960s. Its historical starting point in Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme’s programmatic appropriation and re-contextualization of commercial imagery precedes the advent of digitalization and the Internet by some thirty years. Painting’s capacity to absorb and transform other media became explicit at the same moment as its legitimacy was fundamentally challenged by cultural forms of mediation which Guy Debord theorizes in his influential critique as ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (1967)...
KAWS in W Magazine
November 2015
Cover artwork and featured in article by Diane Solway Artistic License: Five Takes on Superstar Rapper Drake in W Magazine.
The art world’s most visible populist, the artist Brian Donnelly, who is known as KAWS, has long mined mass consumer culture and its proliferating platforms for his own ends. Taking a page from his teen-hood hero, the Pop artist Keith Haring, KAWS works inside, outside, and well beyond the white cube, seeing art object and product, museum, shop, and street as part of his creative universe. In his hands, iconic cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and the Michelin Man are reimagined as Everymen you’re as likely to find in the form of a vinyl toy or a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon as you are to see in a gallery or museum. Meanwhile, his paintings, such as the cover image for this issue, nod to the zonked-out style of Peter Saul, with their exploding neon palette and graphic punch...
Jacob Hashimoto at Rhona Hoffman Gallery
30 October to 19 December 2015
Solo Exhibition In the Cosmic Fugue at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.
In the Cosmic Fugue is Rhona Hoffman Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of Jacob Hashimoto’s enormously imaginative and laboriously created work. The show will occupy the entire gallery with six new oil paintings and fourteen kite pieces, created from innumerable hand-painted and collaged rice paper and bamboo “kites,” Hashimoto’s signature medium. These visually striking, multi-dimensional works engross viewers through their organizational, geometric complexity, changing sight lines, and sheer beauty...
Jim Isermann at MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires
17 October 2015 to 6 March 2016
Included in group exhibition Geometric Obsession. American School 1965-2015 at MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Fifty years ago the curator William Seitz presented at the Museum of Modern Art of New York an exhibition of optical art entitled The Responsive Eye. With this proposal, he presented a panorama of contemporary pieces that globally brought together works by artists and groups from Italy, Argentina, the United States, England, and Poland among others. With the help of one of the most important experts of the period and of geometric art, gallery owner Denise René, the exhibition revealed perceptual investigations and retinal effects associated with pure form, color and line...
Sadie Benning at MoMA PS1
11 October 2015 to 7 March 2016
Included in group exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York.
MoMA PS1 presents the fourth iteration of its landmark exhibition series, begun as a collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art in 2000. Recurring every five years, the exhibition has traditionally showcased the work of emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. Greater New York arrives in a city and art community that has changed significantly since the first version of the survey. With the rise of a robust commercial art market and the proliferation of art fairs, opportunities for younger artists in the city have grown alongside a burgeoning interest in artists who may have been overlooked in the art histories of their time...
Peter Saul at MoMA PS1
11 October 2015 to 7 March 2016
Included in group exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1 Long Island City, New York.
MoMA PS1 presents the fourth iteration of its landmark exhibition series, begun as a collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art in 2000. Recurring every five years, the exhibition has traditionally showcased the work of emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. Greater New York arrives in a city and art community that has changed significantly since the first version of the survey. With the rise of a robust commercial art market and the proliferation of art fairs, opportunities for younger artists in the city have grown alongside a burgeoning interest in artists who may have been overlooked in the art histories of their time...
G.T. Pellizzi at The Watermill Center
26 September to 21 November 2015
Solo exhibition Visitations: G.T. Pellizzi at The Watermill Center, Water Mill, New York.
G.T. Pellizzi curates his work to function in dialogue with the existing Watermill Center Collection and its galleries. The survey of works on view, created by Pellizzi from 2011 to the present, features sculptures, installations, and paintings that engage audiences critically with political, educational, and financial market systems.
Tomoo Gokita at the Newcomb Art Museum
9 September 2015 to 3 January 2016
Included in group exhibition A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, at the Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.
While the three artists’ works in this exhibition have few formal associations, KAWS as the collector, sees commonalities underlying Wirsum’s whimsical and brightly colored figures, Gokita’s sleek grayscale faceless portraits, and his own meticulous, brightly-colored paintings. Ramirez-Montagut explains, “This exhibition is a lyrical exercise in exploring the works’ points of contact as perceived by KAWS, despite their seeming dissimilarities. The viewer comes to see these artists’ mutual appreciation for popular culture, irreverent iconographies, humor, and impeccable craftsmanship together with a shared use of strong graphic forms that evoke visceral reactions.”...
KAWS at the Newcomb Art Museum
9 September 2015 to 3 January 2016
Included in group exhibition A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, at the Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.
While the three artists’ works in this exhibition have few formal associations, KAWS as the collector, sees commonalities underlying Wirsum’s whimsical and brightly colored figures, Gokita’s sleek grayscale faceless portraits, and his own meticulous, brightly-colored paintings. Ramirez-Montagut explains, “This exhibition is a lyrical exercise in exploring the works’ points of contact as perceived by KAWS, despite their seeming dissimilarities. The viewer comes to see these artists’ mutual appreciation for popular culture, irreverent iconographies, humor, and impeccable craftsmanship together with a shared use of strong graphic forms that evoke visceral reactions.”...
Ai Weiwei at Royal Academy of Arts
19 September to 13 December 2015
Solo exhibition Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, England.
Ai became widely known in Britain after his sunflower seeds installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010 but this is the first major institutional survey of his work ever held in the UK and it bridges over two decades of his extraordinary career. Curated in collaboration with Ai Weiwei from his studio in Beijing, we present some of his most important works from the time he returned to China from the US in 1993 right up to present day. Among new works created specifically for our galleries and courtyard are a number of large-scale installations, as well as works showcasing everything from marble and steel to tea and glass. With typical boldness, the chosen works explore a multitude of challenging themes, drawing on his own experience to comment on creative freedom, censorship and human rights, as well as examining contemporary Chinese art and society...
Judith Bernstein in The New York Times
31 July 2015
Review by Roberta Smith of solo exhibition Voyeur at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in The New York Times.
Judith Bernstein’s art has never taken any prisoners. In the early 1970s, she satirized male domination and its failings with wall-size drawings of round-headed screws. They were rendered in hefty strokes of charcoal that gave them both hair and rotary motion. They were unforgettable images — cartoonish one-liners perhaps, but expressing a fury that many women felt. They became an indelible part of the history of feminist art...
Tomoo Gokita in Art Asia Pacific
July-August 2015
Feature article by Elaine W. Ng Tomoo Gokita: One Thousand Shades of Gray in Art Asia Pacific.
Tomoo Gokita is an outsider among Tokyo art insiders. With his boyish charm, he is sociable yet reticent. He regularly declares his love for beer and professional wrestling—particularly the 1976 match between Japan’s Antonio Inoki and American champion boxer Muhammad Ali. He studies record-album covers rather than art catalogs. So when the easygoing, 46-year-old painter of abstract-figurative canvases—more appreciated in the indie music and zine subcultures than by Tokyo-based curators and gallerists—was given a retrospective in August 2014, “The Great Circus,” at the prestigious Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, an hour’s train ride southeast of Tokyo, it caught Japan’s art community by surprise...
G.T. Pellizzi at the Kunsthalle Wien
26 June to 11 October 2015
Included in group exhibition Individual Stories. Collecting as Portrait and Methodology at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria.
Photographs, books and knick-knacks: artists collect a variety of objects. Their interest may lie in the formal, the aesthetic or the conceptual. While they generate personal collections regardless of their artistic practice, they also create collections based on artistic methods. The collection may itself reach the status of a work of art. Individual Stories considers the collection a portrait of its collector and also an artistic method, an expression of curiosity, transforming discovery, or a systematic approach to certain worlds of objects. The result is a compilation of individual collections that could not be more different.
KAWS at the Brooklyn Museum
10 June 2015 to 27 March 2016
Solo exhibition KAWS: “ALONG THE WAY” at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
Brooklyn-based artist KAWS straddles the line between fine art and popular culture in his large-scale sculptures and brightly colored paintings, thoughtfully playing with imagery associated with consumer products and global brands. ALONG THE WAY, KAWS’s colossal eighteen-foot-high wood sculpture, greets visitors in our Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion and Lobby. Portraying a pair of gigantic figures with their heads lowered and with one arm around each other in a gentle embrace, the sculpture alludes to familiar childhood toys and cartoon characters while at the same time transforming their identities with a radical shift in scale, presenting them as monumental cultural presences...
KAWS at ArtZuid 2015
22 May to 22 September 2015
Included in open-air group sculpture exhibition ArtZuid 2015 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Judith Bernstein at the Whitney Museum of American Art
1 May to 27 September 2015
Included in the inaugural group exhibition America Is Hard To See at the new building of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon...
Ericka Beckman at the Whitney Museum of American Art
1 May to 27 September 2015
Included in the inaugural group exhibition America Is Hard To See at the new building of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon...
Peter Saul at the Whitney Museum of American Art
1 May to 27 September 2015
Included in the inaugural group exhibition America Is Hard To See at the new building of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon...
Keith Sonnier at the Whitney Museum of American Art
1 May to 27 September 2015
Included in the inaugural group exhibition America Is Hard To See at the new building of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon...
Tomoo Gokita at Honor Fraser Gallery
11 April to 16 May 2015
Solo exhibition Bésame Mucho at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, California.
On view will be new works by Tokyo-based Tomoo Gokita, who is acclaimed for his black and white gouache canvases that incorporate exceptional draftsmanship with surreal imagery. Gokita continues his monochromatic series that explores the traditional portrait format on a range of scales, using source material from vintage postcards, magazines, found photos, and classic film stills. With a celebrated career in illustration and graphic design, Gokita first rose to prominence after creating a series of newsprint books. In 2005, he turned to painting, developing a distinctive greyscale aesthetic that combines deft tonal modeling of figures with a material flatness, both alluding to and obscuring characters appropriated from western popular culture and marginal countercultural sources. Alongside Gokita's intimate portraits of individuals, this exhibition will feature large-scale group compositions that are an evolution in the artist's oeuvre...
Jacob Hashimoto at Studio La Città
7 April to 15 May 2015
Solo exhibition Never Comes Tomorrow at Studio La Città in collaboration with Doubletrouble95, Milan, Italy.
On the occasion of the MiArt and Salone del Mobile fairs, Studio la Città will be transferring to a temporary venue in Milan, DOUBLETROUBLE95, to propose an installation by Jacob Hashimoto: Never Comes Tomorrow, already exhibited with great success in Verona last May. This installation will once again be a proof of Hashimoto's maniacal interest in architecture, space and time, and the astral dynamics of planets and constellations. Proportions, relationships, and surfaces will be closely interrelated with the building hosting the large-scale installation, in this was concretizing DOUBLETROUBLE95's dream: to host the site-specific work of an important international artist.
Ryan McNamara in Artforum
April 2015
Review by Michael Wilson of exhibition Gently Used at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in Artforum.
“This guy,” says Ryan McNamara, holding up a small black-and-white photographic cutout, “was a contestant in a dance contest I held in Buenos Aires. The entire dance floor was full of 150 people all melting on top of each other and rolling all over each other.” The fond recollection, and the frenetic clip that follows it, appears in a video on McNamara’s website...
Ryan McNamara in Art In America
April 2015
Review by Brian Droitcour of exhibition Gently Used at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in Art In America.
Galleries are where performance art goes to die. Ryan McNamara knows this, and does what he can to animate his work’s remains. His latest exhibition was full of what seemed like semi-monuments to past performances, as though they were commemorative gestures that got cut short halfway through, diverted to an alternate scenario. There were things that could have been statues, plaques or portraits honoring the live event that was, but dressed up with leftover costuming, they’ve become objects in performance drag...
Olivier Mosset in The Brooklyn Rail
5 March 2015
Review by Tom Mc Glynn in The Brooklyn Rail online.
Olivier 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. His recent show of monochrome works at Koenig & Clinton continues the artist’s longtime presentation of intimately actualized surfaces, proportional discretions, and subtle colorations that retain a fulsome sense of the real without being representational or subject to the burden of mimetic ventriloquism. His work is radically immanent in the best sense of the concept, a concept which states not only “what you see is what you see,” but, and more importantly, “what you sense is all that you will ever see.”...
Olivier Mosset at Koenig & Clinton
6 February to 14 March 2015
Solo exhibition at Koenig & Clinton, NYC, NY.
Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition with Olivier Mosset, featuring recent large-scale monochromes. For nearly 50 years, Mosset’s paintings have challenged conventional notions of artistic originality and production. The current exhibition groups paintings of varying shape and scale, emphasizing the artist’s continual consideration of surface, color, environment, and repetition...
Hilary Harkness in The Huffington Post
5 February 2015
Interview with David Galensen Inside New York’s Art World: An Interview with Hilary Harkness in The Huffington Post.
The art world is occupied by a huge range of artists - emerging and established - who are being captured by all forms of media, including social. Just as technology has given artists additional outlets for making and sharing work, it has provided writers with access to artists and artworks across the globe and expanded the dialogue. It can be overwhelming to keep track of it all, but it’s also an exhilarating moment...
Jim Isermann in Desert Magazine
February 2015
Article by Kimberly Nichols Beyond Modernism with artist Jim Isermann in Desert Magazine.
Isermann's three-plus decades of work chronicle the conflation of post-war industrial design and fine art through popular culture alongside an unflagging belief in the beauty of utilitarian design and a fervent experimentation with material. Early furniture pieces and tableaus were envisioned as prototypes for mass production. Thermal dies were created for large-scale vinyl decals. The decals in turn led to vacuum formed styrene wall panels. Stained glass works and fabric wall paintings continued his exploration of pattern and repetition. Many of his site-specific installations, like the façade of the Los Angeles' MTA Customer Center, referenced the vernacular solution of transforming out-of-date architecture into a dialogue within the community. In the past 15 years he has been utilizing digital technology to design elements for commercial manufacture. Overall, his work has matured from didactic representations of the failure of modernism to the physical embodiment of pure design...
Ed Paschke at the Ashmolean Museum
17 January to 5 July 2015
Solo exhibition Ed Paschke: Visionary from Chicago, 1968-2004 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England.
Ed Paschke: Visionary from Chicago, 1968–2004 is the third in the Ashmolean’s series of exhibitions of post-war and contemporary art presented in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation (USA). Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, a selection of paintings spanning Paschke’s artistic career from 1968 to 2004 will be on view.
Part of a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists who emerged in the 1960s, Paschke (1939–2004) was strongly influenced by media imagery and popular culture – newspapers, magazines, advertisements, film and television. In works like Hilda (1973) and Mannish Boy (1970), his brilliantly coloured, provocative and surreal paintings of circus freaks, tattooed ladies, transvestites, wrestlers and hairy wingtip shoes, explore the underbelly of urban life and a dark side of Pop Art...
Olivier Mosset at Christopher Grimes Gallery
17 January to 14 March 2015
Included in two–person exhibition Carlos Bunga & Olivier Mosset at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California.
Olivier Mosset emerged in the 1960s and has since been associated with a multitude of art historical movements, involving himself in both the European and American artistic and critical contexts. In anticipation of many artists, who in the 1980s would use appropriation to critique Modernist authority, Mosset called into question the painter’s gesture and signature by sharing styles and dissolving authorship to reach a “degree zero” of painting. This line of questioning continues in this exhibition where he will present a wall painting composed of four yellow and blue triangles in the form of a motif found from a mural discovered in Cuernavaca in Mexico. In addition, a horizontal grey and white wall painting will extend the length of the nearly 45-foot wall spanning the Main and South galleries. Mosset’s paintings possess a strong materialist sense that recalls Malevich, Reinhardt or Stella while simultaneously maintaining a subtle relationship to the readymade and appropriation...
Sadie Benning at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
10 January to 14 February 2015
Solo exhibition Fuzzy Math at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, California.
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with New York based artist, Sadie Benning, "Fuzzy Math," in all four gallery spaces. This new body of work marks our contemporary cultural moment; the genesis of a traumatic event and its aftershocks.
"Fuzzy Math," a phrase borrowed from set theory, has become a popular phrase in politics over the last fifteen years. Classical set theory operates on a binary function: either an element is included or not included in the set. The fuzzification of mathematics can be dated to the 1965 publication of Lotfi Asker Zadehs influential work "Fuzzy Sets". In the ensuing decades, this new set of operations expanded algebraic functions to account for uncertainty or incomplete information. In fuzzy math, elements are ambiguous and can exist in a state of becoming a part of a set. This math has been used to develop the truthy justifications and denials for events ranging from wars in the Middle East, global warming, speculative sub-prime mortgages, and election results. Benning's new body of work is a meta-examination of the anxiety produced by the fall-out of these fuzzy ideologies, the radically new world that they have created, and the many repercussions of making decisions based on incomplete information that are only beginning to come to light...
Jacob Hashimoto in Artforum
January 2015
Review by David Frankel of exhibition Skyfarm Fortress at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in Artforum.
To say that Jacob Hashimoto makes kites, then strings them together in the air, will do as a description of his process but gives no sense at all of the visual quality of Skyfarm Fortress, 2014, the installation that made up this show...
Hilary Harkness at FLAG Art Foundation
25 October 2014 to 31 January 2015
Included in group exhibition Disturbing Innocence at FLAG Art Foundation, NYC, NY.
Disturbing Innocence features over 50 historical and contemporary artists whose use of dolls, toys, mannequins, robots, and other surrogates forms a deep and powerfully expressive genre. The exhibition poses profound questions surrounding social constructs of youth, beauty, transformation, violence, sexuality, gender, identity, and loneliness. Inspired by Eric Fischl’s own childhood in suburban Long Island, NY, and his early career as an artist working in New York City in the 1980s, Disturbing Innocence presents a subversive and escapist world at odds with the values and pretensions of polite society.
Jacob Hashimoto at the Pizzuti Collection
6 September 2014 to 15 August 2015
Included in group exhibition NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio.
In one weird, hyphenated word, NOW-ISM insists that the works in it are both of the moment—particular to the circumstances in which they were made and attuned to the digital phase of the Information Age as it hurtles us through the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century—and outside of time: unshackled by the constraints of context and the restrictions of history because, as works of art, they are fully present in the moment and available to be intimately engaged by innumerable viewers, over and over again, in perpetuity. The beauty of now is that it never grows old. Its biggest drawback is that it doesn’t last: Constantly slipping away, now never lets anyone rest with what happened yesterday. To attend to the works in this exhibition, you have to be on your toes, at the top of your game, attentive to details, alive to subtlety, and in touch with the peculiar poetry of visual experience...
Ed Paschke in The New York Times
4 July 2014
Review by Roberta Smith of solo exhibition Ed Paschke at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in The New York Times.
Think of Ed Paschke, the great American painter who died in 2004, was a formalist in wolf’s clothing, or the most abstract of Photo Realists. His dystopic photo-based paintings depict the denizens of a lurid dark side, where crime, race, clubs and an eerie glamour mixed with intimations of violence. Yet equally important to the tamped-down electricity of these works is Paschke’s sense of allover tautness: the shallow space, the way his images are embedded in monochrome fields of color, and his finely wrought painting technique of tattoo-like filigrees and stippled textures...
Dawoud Bey in The New Yorker
2 June 2014
Review by of solo exhibition The Birmingham Project at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY, in The New Yorker.
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four young girls, the Chicago-based artist photographed black children in Alabama, who are the same age as the victims were. He also shows portraits of adults in their sixties, the age the girls would be if they’d lived. Formally posed, often in church pews, and seen here in pairs, Bey’s sitters regard us with sombre expressions. But the artist is not heavy-handed; the soulful concern that grounds his pictures also buoys them.
Peter Schuyff at the Whitney Museum of American Art
7 March to 25 May 2014
Included in the group exhibition Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.
Dawoud Bey at the Whitney Museum of American Art
7 March to 25 May 2014
Included in the group exhibition Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.
