Landscape painting does not garner a lot of excitement these days, but the work of California-based Leslie Shows keeps viewers’ eyes and minds engaged. Her large-scale paintings—which also veer into sculptural forms—are meticulously and thoughtfully crafted, layering material and form into otherworldly interpretations of natural and synthetic landscapes. A survey of Shows’ recent works is currently on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art—the[…..]

Located more than nine miles west of Chicago’s city center, The Suburban is one of a number of alternative spaces that have caught on in the bordering village of Oak Park. It’s quiet, affluent, and easily accessed by public transit, yet Oak Park is an unlikely host to such alternative spaces as Terrain Exhibitions, The Franklin, and The Suburban, all of which locate innovative art[…..]

Passengers where are you going? from here to there? do you ever get there? i don’t know why not? i’m only a passenger—just like you (from an Egyptian tomb) As you round the corner of the entryway at Diane Rosenstein where this phrase is visible, the first works on view in Eleanor Antin’s Passengers are two massive photographs from her 2004 series Roman Allegories. Going[…..]

Today from our friends at Big Red & Shiny, we bring you a review of Arlene Shechet‘s new works in porcelain at the RISD Museum. Notes author Anya Ventura, “Shechet frees the medium from its servitude to the decorative, allows it to be matter again, draws it back to the body, and puts it in play as a sculptural element.” This article was originally published on April[…..]

The photographs of Malick Sidibé remind us how the political content of an image can shift and evolve under the unpredictable influences of time and the arrival of new contexts. Currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, Sidibé’s work is a mix of black-and-white portraits and candid shots of local people from his native Bamako, Mali. The artist first began his work in photography by[…..]

Is a glass of water just a glass of water? Consider it for a fraction of a second and suddenly the glass of water carries a lot of Kosuthian baggage—the mind attaches a label to it, compares it to an ideal, then judges its function, and its value changes. Deconstruct the contextual outcome of that mental layering, and the glass of water not only offers[…..]

For the first solo exhibition in his new Beverly Hills space, Marc Selwyn Fine Art has mounted a significant show of drawings by conceptual-art pioneer Allen Ruppersberg. Spanning almost two decades, from 1972 to 1989, these deceptively simple works on paper show Ruppersberg dealing with themes similar to those of his contemporaries—appropriation, language, identity, authenticity—but with a wry, nostalgic sensibility all his own. In these[…..]