Sometimes an interview comes easily, and sometimes not: Rafał Bujnowski needed convincing. We smoked a cigarette together in Tarnow, Poland, where he was exhibiting work in Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity. I enthused about his work. He agreed to do it if I would email him the questions, and I gently refused. He claimed a poor grasp of English. I denied it. We smoked another[…..]
On view at SFMOMA and traveling to the Guggenheim in 2012, Francesca Woodman is a testament to the faithfulness of an artistic inquiry. In photo after photo Woodman experimented with formal elements, tested endless configurations, and explored feminine identity. Woodman’s self-discipline is evident in the multiple galleries hung with her photographs. Considering her age—she was in her late teens and early twenties when the work was[…..]
Katarzyna Przezwanska‘s work is both playful and serious: riotous colors precisely define spaces for objects on a desk or in a room, or grace the facade of a dour old concrete building. She is equally adept at using pop brights and cool, pensive tones to create moods or to reference a particular history or locale. Her installation in the most recent Frieze Art Fair elicited[…..]
With the work of over forty artists, History in Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow is a sizeable exhibition; but its scale is not only warranted, it is necessary. If the internet age ushered in a global culture of multiplicity, then History in Art demonstrates the contemporary attitude toward the formation of a historical record: individual voices make up a flexible, imaginative[…..]
Dwarves, videos, homemade t-shirts and cardboard tanks: this is what you’ll find in Happenings Against Communism by the Orange Alternative at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury in Krakow. It’s a multi-roomed tour of Polish protest in the 1980s, the retrospective of a social practice movement that swept an entire country. Although the tone of the exhibition is playfully iconoclastic—that’s the whole point—I often found myself[…..]
All of Aideen Barry’s work exists in a very fragile balance: a woman performs domestic tasks while levitating; a sculpture promises both the control of cleanliness and the chaos of an explosion; women in flowing red dresses dance on water in giant floating plastic balls, all the while falling comically—and using up the oxygen in the sealed sphere. At each viewing of her work I,[…..]
For the first time in 26 years, an overview of Kurt Schwitters’ work is touring the US, and the Berkeley Art Museum is the exhibition’s only west-coast venue. Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage spans the artist’s output between 1918 and 1947, and includes collages, assemblages, sculpture, and the reconstruction of the architectural/sculptural installation Merzbau, which was destroyed when the Allies bombed Hannover in 1943. Schwitters[…..]
