The leering white faces watch from the walls. They follow you from room to room, vacant eyes staring out from behind their grotesque masks. Though the lower part of their jaws are missing—unhinged—their slit-like eyes and upturned mouths indicate that the figures are consumed with mirth. We see the same white mask over and over, but from various angles: on its side, in three-quarter profile,[…..]

As a part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, today we bring you a review by Matt Sussman of the exhibition The Modern Monster at Queens Nail’s Gallery in San Francisco. “What kind of monster are you?” is the chorus from a single by the ’90s pop-punk group Slant 6.1 The question accuses the listener of being something other than human. However, the singer-guitarist Christina Billotte’s flat[…..]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[…..]

This, and then. It’s the title of Matt Phillips’ latest exhibition and a useful shorthand for the mental quick march a viewer undergoes when observing his work. Through his abstract oil and acrylic paintings, Phillips plays with color, form, and volume—the building blocks of our artistic experience—to create dynamic, shifting spatial relationships. His canvases evoke, simultaneously, the calm beauty of the natural world, the randomness[…..]

Windows of Opportunity (2013), Jiten Thukral’s and Sumir Tagra’s (branded as Thukral & Tagra) latest show at Art Plural gallery, gives expression to the cacophonous spectacle of hybridity that defines contemporary India, a site that they deem to be a hotbed of conflicted histories and global transactions. These issues of societal flux are explored in their oeuvre through an eclectic visual language composed of cartoonish[…..]

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is the New Museum’s crash course in the recent history of contemporary art in New York. The exhibition positions 1993 as a signifier for mass cultural change: the thesis being that the events of this year irrevocably directed culture towards its manifestation in 2013. NYC 1993 seems just as concerned, however, with the ways that we[…..]

When I think of Jackson Pollock, I picture him working alone in his studio in East Hampton slinging paint across a canvas on the ground, oblivious to the art world around him. It’s easy to forget that the personal lives and relationships of artists deeply influenced their work, a topic brought to the forefront in Angels, Demons and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet on view now[…..]