Robert Zehnder: Ageless Machine

By Clare Gemima

OCT 2022 | ArtSeen

Robert Zehnder’s new paintings and sculptures all possess a strong visual symbology and psychologic indexicality, evocative of his most recent trip to Europe. Returning with a critical and philosophical attachment to the idea of hidden functions of certain architectures, namely those ecclesiastical in nature, Zehnder’s intrigue into how these ideas can influence one’s own spatiality, both internally and exteriorly, has produced Ageless Machine, the artist’s first solo-exhibition with Mrs.

Matthew Ritchie with Jason Rosenfeld

OCT 2022 | Art

Matthew Ritchie’s show, A Garden in the Machine, is at James Cohan at 48 Walker Street through October 15. It includes two series of paintings made in the past year, a suite of ten related drawings, each titled Leaves, a large sculpture, and a film. The artist’s major career survey, A Garden in the Flood, curated by Mark Scala, will open at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, on November 11. It will also include a collaboration with the composer Hanna Benn and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, with direction from their recently deceased leader, Dr. Paul T. Kwami. This is Ritchie’s first solo show at the gallery.

from Take What You Need

By Idra Novey

MARCH 2023 | Fiction

Deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a sixty-six year old woman named Jean welds scrap metal into massive sculptures. These works, which she dubs her “Manglements,” assert themselves into the foreground of the story with the same haunting force of Louise Bourgeois’s works—which makes sense given that Bourgeois is Jean’s greatest influence and the central source of reflection on the artistic impulse in Idra Novey’s superb new novel, Take What You Need. Amid the sawdust and machine oil, there’s a whiff of distrust. The novel deeply examines the intersection of art and trust, which is a central, if quiet, conversation often overlooked in the sensationalist depictions of art monsters in contemporary fiction. Novey relates an outsider artist’s life, and her step-daughter’s reckoning with that life, with resonance and connection to the broader world beyond the workshop.

Discovering Duchamp through the “Fourth Dimension” in 1971

By Linda Dalrymple Henderson

OCT 2022 | Critics Page

In 1970 the Stedelijk Museum’s first major Kazimir Malevich exhibition had revealed his use of “Fourth Dimension” in his titles. And, most importantly, there was a clue in the entry for Duchamp’s 1920 Rotary Glass Plates in the 1968 catalog of the MOMA exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.