Taking its name from a 2006 feature in National Geographic, Sprüth Magers’ latest London exhibition, From Wings to Fins, features the work of color-field painter Morris Louis and Cyprien Gaillard, a young French artist recently established within the international circuit. While Louis’ position is firmly mid-century, Cyprien Gaillard is a locus of tragic postmodernism. Drawn to modernism’s ideals, contradictions, and historical failures, Gaillard has risen on his[…..]

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, Marion Cousin reviews Citydance at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. The organizers chose not to reveal much beforehand; the only instruction was to meet at the[…..]

Premised on the obliquely hypothetical question “What if the world changed?”, the Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) is presented as a deconstructed entity centered on allusive keywords—or “tags” in internetspeak—such as “histories,” “intervention,” and “materiality” in order to highlight the transmutative and the transformative qualities of the art produced in the region. With a collaborative team of 27 curators instead of an artistic director helming the show,[…..]

Australian artist Andrew Nicholls dredges the queasy aesthetics of sentiment for its submerged ideological content. In an ongoing thread of his practice, he locates the ideals and practices of British imperialism in the kitsch, seemingly innocuous world of 19th- and 20th-century ceramics, disrupting this historical narrative with traces of the otherness otherwise repressed in the imperial worldview. He subsumes his viewers in an unsteady undertow[…..]

From our sister publication Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Facundo Argañaraz‘s solo exhibition Tonight Tonight at Highlight Gallery in San Francisco. Author Danica Willard Sachs notes that with the paintings in this new show, Argañaraz is “riffing on the monochrome… [and] grace is not found in presentness, but in confrontation.” This review was originally published on October 28, 2013. A traditional narrative of art[…..]

It would be easy to come to Li Songsong’s show at Pace London with certain assumptions, projections, and ideas about the last ten years of contemporary painting from China. Assumptions informed by how galleries have vulgarly packaged Chinese contemporary art as a struggle for freer (market) expression. Projections on what it means for an artist to make a painting in post-Deng Xiaoping‘s China. Ideas built[…..]

In the mid-2000s, Wynne Greenwood‘s video persona sparked an adolescent idolatry in me that really started everything. In Tracey + The Plastics, Greenwood’s three-person electro-pop band, she played all the characters, performing live shows in conversation with pre-recorded projections of herself. Watching Greenwood essentially talk to herself through Tracy, Nikki, and Cola, I was delivered a vision of the millennial queer future in which we[…..]