Jan Avgikos
JAN AVGIKOS is a critic and historian who lives and works in NYC and the Hudson Valley.
Christopher Wilmarth: Sculpture and Drawings from the 1970s
By Jan AvgikosA new exhibition at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents a rare opportunity to revisit Christopher Wilmarth's serene glass and steel sculptures of the 1970s. No drama, no mess, no rough edges, nothing but the Apollonian perfection of flawless, hydrofluoric acid-etched translucent glass surfaces that attract and hold the light, reflecting in their layered depths tonal ranges from frosty white to pure aqua.
Jan Avgikos
on Leon Golub
We need this work now! We need to live with it, to see it more fully, and to understand more deeply what Golub discovered and never lost sight of: the power of representation to arrest the uninterrupted flow of the present, to interrogate the human condition, and to produce art as a lifelong act of resistance.
CHRIS OFILI: Paradise Lost
By Jan AvgikosThe viewer has a lot of heavy lifting to do in Chris Ofili’s new installation, enigmatically entitled Paradise Lost. Whose “paradise” is a matter of conjecture, but the experience of loss is triggered by our inability to fully see the four paintings and wrap-around wall mural that are the show’s star attractions.
Derrick Adams: New Icons
By Jan AvgikosDerrick Adams's critical commentaries on Black identity are stylized in idioms of pop culture.
LOUISE FISHMAN
By Jan AvgikosThe exhibition of new paintings by Louise Fishman sent me looking back through her previous catalogues. She’s been painting for more than fifty years. Are the paintings getting even better?
Renée Cox: Returned
By Jan AvgikosSometimes it takes years to fully appreciate the importance of a work of art, to evaluate what impact it might induce, and to see it in the context of a legacy that has yet to be realized. So it is with Renée Cox’s monumental black and white photo diptych, Origin, created in 1993. Initially only the left half, a towering nude full-length self-portrait entitled Yo Mama, was exhibited.
David Wojnarowicz
By Jan AvgikosAugust through September is Wojnarowicz’s season here in New York
Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes
By Jan AvgikosA funny coincidence happened on my way to see Cheyney Thompson’s exhibition of new Quantity Paintings, entitled Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes. First I stopped in at David Zwirner’s to see all the blue paintings that Ad Reinhardt ever painted.
HOWARDENA PINDELL:
Recent Paintings
By Jan Avgikos
It’s amazing what a complete game-change results when the stretcher bars for painting go missing.
MOYRA DAVEY:
1943
By Jan Avgikos
The history of art is written, first, by organizing the chaos of myriad forms of artistic practice into neat parcels, and then, policing those territories forever more.
Yuji Agematsu: 1995 & 2003
By Jan AvgikosIt’s debatable if walking, in and of itself, is art. But the “idea” of walking as art has a pedigree that stretches back to the heyday of Conceptual art.
Lyle Ashton Harris: Flash of the Spirit
By Jan AvgikosLyle Ashton Harris has channeled many memorable personas over the course of his thirty year practice.
ISA GENZKEN:
Sky Energy
By Jan Avgikos
There is lots of empty space in Isa Genzken’s art, which is odd given her propensity to create visual mayhem and to coax an overflow of detritus into messy collages that describe all manner of ruination.
Sarah Sze
By Jan AvgikosSarah Sze beguiles us with two new spectacularly wrought installations teeming with meticulously arranged objects, contraptions, photographs, plants, projectors that beam moving images, sound, and much more, all disposed in and around her signature scaffolding, itself a tour de force of improvisation and precarity.
