Tracey Emin’s work presents an unfiltered and often embarrassingly personal view of emotional pain. It reflects the kind of desperate or careless narcissism that is the territory of the depressed. Emin is concerned with the primacy of her own experience—and the narrative of her own sadness is the unabashed subject of her work. Emin’s oeuvre has always felt most valuable to me in terms of[…..]
Caitlin Cunningham’s current solo exhibition is on view at sophiajacob in Baltimore, Maryland, through May 25th. The show, informally titled Tan Penis Island, extends from a focused critique of the legacy of modernist painter Paul Gauguin’s exploitation of Tahiti to examine the ramifications of fantastic projection, the economy of colonization, and the production of white masculinity through the exotic Other. Cunningham integrates live plants and[…..]
A dominant feature of contemporary Asian art has always been the reflection of cultural and historical frameworks within which such works are produced: firmly entrenched in tradition, yet forward-looking thanks to the far-reaching changes – and homogenisation – brought about by the formidable impact of globalisation. Even though artistic production in South Korea seems to follow this trend, it is problematised by the emergence of[…..]
I once read that when we travel to new or strange places that a very interesting phenomenon occurs. Since we are a bit lost and disoriented, our brains miscalculate the faces of strangers in the crowd in an attempt to find the familiar. As synapses fire, a person on the sidewalk may look like an old lover—or we swear we glanced a family friend across[…..]
As a part of our ongoing partnership with the San Francisco-based arts publication Art Practical, today we bring you a review by Matt Stromberg of the exhibition Falling From Great Heights at Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles. Falling from Great Heights, the current exhibition at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, takes its title from a quotation by the astronomer Carl Sagan that addresses the sublime and ineffable nature of the universe: “The[…..]
Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty. With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart[…..]
In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is[…..]
