Hayv Kahraman’s current solo exhibition at Jack Shainman is captivating. A suite of large paintings, produced in 2014 and 2015, shows women in patterned garments interacting within simple architectural forms; Arabic script annotates the figures. The gallery text explains that the works depict “memories from Kahraman’s childhood in Baghdad and as a refugee in Sweden.” The women are suggestive, and refer to other artworks as diverse as Persian miniatures, ukiyo-e[…..]

In October 1997, Ewa Stackelberg’s husband died in a plane accident in Costa Rica. Among the belongings sent to her after the tragedy was her husband’s camera, which had been smashed to pieces in the crash—almost like a foreshadowing of the turn that Stackelberg’s life and practice would take in the years to come. In the search for a new artistic language to express her grief,[…..]

Surround Audience, the latest triennial exhibition at the New Museum, surveys fifty-one emerging artists, from twenty-five countries, whose practices are informed by their lived experience immersed in the digital landscape. The triennial has always billed itself as a predictive rather than reflective survey, and this iteration is no exception, with a focus on the culture of the immediate present and where it’s hurtling. Though the[…..]

Abstraction is dead! Long live abstraction! In Linear Abstraction, the SCAD Museum of Art negotiates the status of nonrepresentational work as it exists in the 21st century and includes work in various media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital formats. While the exhibition seeks to trace commonalities between contemporary practices by engaging somewhat diverse uses or ideas of lines, the resulting effect points succinctly to[…..]

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Miguel Arzabe reviews Jake Longstreth: Free Range at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco. For urban dwellers with the means and motivation to leave the city in[…..]

Today we bring you a review of Alec Soth: Songbook at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Writing for Art Practical, author Danica Willard Sachs notes that “The project marks a departure from [Soth’s] usual reliance on narrative annotations to explain his images; it’s a more free-flowing, less didactic viewing experience.” This article was originally published on March 26, 2015. In twenty-one black-and-white pigment prints from the larger photobook Songbook,[…..]

In the 21st-century lexicon of urban development, the term utopia has all but vanished from the descriptors of a contemporary city. It’s more comfortably consigned to the archaic vocabulary of 18th-century academia. Yet it remains a silent ideological underpinning of economic policies, an elusive goal that governments strive toward but leave unacknowledged—seen, for instance, in laws forbidding “transgressive” behavior, constant political entanglements, or even in perpetual urban[…..]