ArtSeen
Naeem Mohaiemen: There is No Last Man
By Andreas Petrossiants
A man in a tidy beige linen suit, with hair neatly combed back and pants pressed, is alone in an airport; it is his 3,753rd day in the abandoned and desolate space.
THOMAS NOZKOWSKI:
16 x 20
By William Corbett
The prolific and consistently inventive Thomas Nozkowski celebrates a favorite format, 16” x 20” in this retrospective covering thirty-five years.
KATHARINA FRITSCH
By Pac PobricHow big is a cotton spinning wheel supposed to be? That was the question that bothered me most walking out of Katharina Fritsch’s recent exhibition at Matthew Marks.
Josef Albers in Mexico
By Benjamin CliffordThe Guggenheim’s concisely titled Josef Albers in Mexico explores Albers’s experience of the eponymous Latin American nation, focusing on his frequent visits to pre-Columbian monuments and archeological sites.
JIMMIE DURHAM: At the Center of the World & LAURA OWENS
By Hovey BrockThe Whitney Museum’s concurrent exhibitions for artists Jimmie Durham and Laura Owens make for a terrific conversation, a convergence definitely more than the sum of its parts.
MARTHA TUTTLE:
I long and seek after
By Alfred Mac Adam
In a lost play by Sophocles mentioned by Aristotle in the Poetics, the princess Philomela, having been raped and maimed, can only express the horror of what has happened by weaving a tapestry.
Inside and Outside:
Cady Noland and the Violence of the Everyday
By Andreas Petrossiants
Noland has specialized in assembling spare, highly symbolic objects of mass consumption, such as beer cans, American flags, and other (often nationalist) products into large indexical sculptures/installations that formally share much with post-minimalist practices that have become more common in the decades since.
Negotiating Gender, Labor, and Authorship:
Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989
By Banyi Huang
In what ways have machines reconfigured or reconsolidated pre-existing social hierarchies, human relations, and cultural production?
SERGIO PREGO:
Rose-colored Drift/To the Students
By Anthony Hawley
Be they in the air (a balloon), something that houses us on the ground (an encampment or inflatable castle), or something that assists us getting places (a tire, a boat), inflatables make membranes over and on our surfaces. They tent us, cushion us, carry us, soften our ground; they dwell in forms that feel unnaturally soft compared to our hard-edged houses and bring awareness to our own edges.
MARK DI SUVERO
By David RhodesIdentification between body and things is of central importance to Mark di Suvero’s sculpture and other works.
ALFREDO JAAR :
The Garden of Good and Evil
By Elizabeth Fullerton
New York-based Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar makes work that gets beneath the skin. While the content is taken from incidents of state oppression, genocide, famine and human rights abuse (and Jaar’s own experience of these atrocities), the force of his work is its poetry.
VINCENT DESIDERIO:
Theseus
By Jason Rosenfeld
The powerful and monumental paintings in Vincent Desiderio’s ninth show with Marlborough Gallery since 1993 reveal his continued fascination with the history of figurative art and a mucky pleasure in pushing copious amounts of oil around a surface.
EVE ACKROYD & KARA ROONEY: Group Motivation
By Kaitlyn A. KramerThe painting hangs in waiting. A woman’s seated body, snug within the frame, is cropped to reveal only a neck, torso, and arms that support her upper body in repose.
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CHANNA HORWITZ
By Ann McCoyLisson Gallery has mounted a stunning, historically important, museum quality first New York solo exhibition of the work of Channa Horwitz, an artist who died in 2013 at the age of eighty.
GORDON MATTA-CLARK:
Anarchitect
By Kaegan Sparks
Photographs of wreckage—buckling bridges, gas explosions, detritus bred by both neglect and natural disaster—line the ramp in the Bronx Museum’s lobby, offering a provocative if fleeting footnote to the subtitle of its current exhibition: Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect.
Unholding and other exhibitions of Native American art
By Alan GilbertOn November 16, 2017, an underground section of the Keystone Pipeline in northeastern South Dakota spilled over 200,000 gallons of oil. As part of the same pipeline network, the Dakota Access Pipeline had been deemed too hazardous to locate near the local water supply of Bismarck, North Dakota, and so was rerouted beneath the Missouri River upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Dream of Solentiname
By Madeline Murphy TurnerDream of Solentiname examines the subjective thoughts and images that emerged around the spiritual, artistic, and political community from which the exhibition takes its name.
GEORG BASELITZ:
1977-1992
By David Carrier
For more than three decades now, a great deal of contemporary German painting has been shown in New York. The leading artists have had gallery and museum exhibitions, and all of them have been much celebrated. And yet, as this exhibition shows, how exotic Georg Baselitz’s visual aesthetic remains.
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ & SUE COE: All Good Art is Political
By Jessica HolmesA woman, face blemished with grime, sleeps in a half-sitting position, her head propped in one hand. Her body curls protectively against those of two small children. One appears to be only an infant, and the other is wound into a thin blanket fast asleep, shadows encircling her eyes and mouth agape in an expression of utter exhaustion.
MIKA ROTTENBERG
By Emily WatlingtonReadings of Mika Rottenberg’s work nearly always herald it as Marxist (or at least anti-capitalist) critique. It’s undeniable that her works address issue of labor, and that such a topic is imperative. But such readings of Rottenberg’s work are too simplistic: taking on factory work does not a Marxist critique make, but moreover, such readings overlook her works’ strongest points.
The Everywhere Studio
By Steven PestanaThe works surveyed range from conventional depictions of the artist-at-work to products of more audacious hybrid studio practices. Jay DeFeo’s photos capture her highly sculptural paintings in various stages of completion, providing a straightforward view into the artist’s process.
CAROL SZYMANSKI:
Pareidolia
By Lynn Maliszewski
Carol Szymanski’s most recent Cibachrome prints float in their white frames, matted on white, looking sanctimonious as ever.
RICHARD HAWKINS:
Hotel Suicide
By Osman Can Yerebakan
Spearheading Richard Hawkins’s fifth exhibition at Greene Naftali is a painting titled, And then come the dawn (2017), which took Hawkins over a decade to complete. In an email conversation, the L.A.-based artist expressed his restored interest in this painting after a decade with the current socio-political climate. Hawkins re-imagined the story of a worn-out, gay, white liberal at a hotel room in Thailand where the protagonist “takes his indulgence a step too irrevocably far.
CATHERINE MURPHY: Recent Work
By Jason RosenfeldThere are nine oils and five graphite drawings in Catherine Murphy’s latest show. This includes everything the artist has made since 2013, the year of her last exhibition at the gallery. Everything. The meticulous Murphy, now in her early seventies, has honed her practice to the essentials, documenting the quotidian in her Poughkeepsie environs with more and more of a laser focus, and at an earned stately pace. Five of these works closed out her beautiful Skira Rizzoli monograph, published in 2016, but now they can all be seen together, hanging in generous spaces, and beautifully revealing the continued evolution of her inimitable practice, an exercise in concentration in two mediums.
HANS HARTUNG: A Constant Storm
By David RhodesHans Hartung (1904–1989) was born in Leipzig, Germany, into a family where paintings and music were always present. He was the son and grandson of physicians: his father involved in pharmaceutical research. Young Hans had a thing about lightning; he was captivated by the effects of energy as light, shadow, and space—sketchbooks filled with drawings of thunderbolts were known to his family as Hans’s Blitzbücker (Books of Lightning).
NANETTE CARTER:
An Act of Balance
By Jonathan Goodman
Nanette Carter’s first solo show at Skoto Gallery, An Act of Balance, comprises abstract paintings made with oil paints, oil sticks, and pencil on collaged mylar. Educated at Oberlin College and Pratt Institute (where she has been teaching for some time) Carter has developed a painting style that consists of abstract designs and effects superimposed on top of each other in ways that emphasize chance. The overall form of each work is deliberately eccentric; little regularity is found on the outside edges, which curve and veer and jut out, emphasizing idiosyncratic form over tightly considered composition.
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JAMES CASTLE:
People, Places & Things
By Jonathan Goodman
James Castle was deaf artist who lived much of his life on subsistence farms in rural Idaho and neither pursued nor received recognition for his remarkable art during his lifetime. Now recognized as a master—the subject of major shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008 and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2011—Castle made small, intimate works of art composed of soot and spit, materials he turned into agents of prodigious, if deeply personal, achievement.
To Signify Dreams on the Surface of the Body
By Michela MoscufoDigging through tattered piles of mass-produced garments Rivkah Barringer and Amanda McGowan, founders of the fashion collective Women’s History Museum (WHM), hungrily scavenge for evidence of past luxury.
Imperfect Tools for Navigation
By Vijay MasharaniCurated by the Philadelphia-based artist-run space High-Tide gallery and hosted by American Medium, Imperfect Tools for Navigation showcases the work of three intermedia artists working in disparate formats.
JOHN NEWMAN
By Tom McGlynnJohn Newman’s recent mini-retrospective of works presented at Safe Gallery is thickly populated with all sorts of biomorphic tropes but fortunately the assemble works escape the fate of the quick read of quirky stylizations offered in place of uncanny presence.
Spieltrieb: Polly Apfelbaum, Beverly Fishman, Ryan Mrozowski, Kathleen Ryan
By David RhodesGerman polymath Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) coined the term Spieltrieb in response to Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) text The Critique of Judgment.
BLINN & LAMBERT:
New Grey Planet
By Alex A. Jones
Blinn & Lambert’s multimedia exhibition New Grey Planet feels as much like a theoretical experiment as an aesthetic experience. Presenting still life and video works that juxtapose the effects of CGI and 3D imaging with material forms, the artists invite us to participate in exercises of perception that complicate the ontology of objects through technological vision.
VANESSA GERMAN
By David CarrierThere is a lot to see in each individual work, and there are many large works in this crowded exhibition. You need to take your time here. But ultimately the display works very nicely for German because she is an artist who deals in the stimulating pleasures of visual overload.
An Idea of a Boundary
By Emily WatlingtonLike all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
MICHAEL WELSH:
When Wishes Are Horses, Beggars Will Ride
By Allison Grimaldi-Donahue
When Wishes Are Horses, Beggars Will Ride, Michael Welsh’s solo show at Interstate Projects in Bushwick, is a world outside of time and beyond place, where past and future create an unsettling vision of the present.
ALVARO BARRINGTON & DAVID WEISS: A Different World
By Gabriella NugentIn A Different World, Barrington alters voyages already taken. Situated on the windowsills of the gallery, the series constructs an alternative vision onto the world.
SUSAN WIDES:
this:seasons
By Hearne Pardee
Just as Impressionists brought viewers into contact with the reception of light in the eye, Susan Wides immerses them in the more active process of focus.
Fragmenticos: Memories of Colombia.
By Adam BealWhen Colombian Security Forces shot down Pablo Escobar on the rooftops of his Medellín compound, Brooklyn-based artists Esteban Ocampo Giraldo was also in Medellín. He was five.
