Mao Zedong once said that revolution is not a dinner party. Less famously, he said it is not embroidery, either. Interestingly, however, some female contemporary Chinese artists have chosen to work with thread and textiles—and embroidery—in experimental, maybe even revolutionary ways. From Lin Tianmiao’s overt exploration of sexuality, fecundity, and the aging and decay of the body, to Yin Xiuzhen’s use of the embodied memories[…..]

Nicola Hicks’ recent sculptural tableaux, depicting humans, animals, and frightful crossbreeds of towering stature, exemplify art’s ability to produce rich, nonverbal worlds. Though the works on view at Flowers Gallery are classified merely as plaster (to be cast in bronze upon purchase), they in fact begin with wire skeletons that the British artist then stuffs with a mélange of straw and dirt before coating. This[…..]

One imagines that Geoffrey Farmer must go through millions of X-Acto knives a year. The Vancouver-based artist is known for his cutouts of images culled from books, magazines, and other printed material, which have been exhibited at Documenta(13) and at the Tate. In his new work Boneyard (2013), currently on view at Mercer Union, Farmer adapts his signature technique—excising  any traces of context through the[…..]

Continuing our Best of 2013 series, Anuradha Vikram writes, “Camille Henrot’s work is global in the best sense of the word. Mining source material from around the world, she creates works that draw out commonalities between Enlightenment cultures and the cultures that they have historically Othered. She uses technology as is logical for an artist of her generation-yet the subjects she explores are ancient as[…..]

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pays homage to the quintessentially Surrealist decade in the career of Belgian painter Rene Magritte with Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-38. Surrealism flourished as the preeminent art movement between World Wars I and II in Europe. The MoMA exhibition, traveling to Houston and Chicago in 2014, showcases Magritte’s prolific Brussels and Paris years and proves the[…..]

From our San Francisco Bay Area partner Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Glass in the Garden, Jonathan Runcio‘s current solo show at Romer Young Gallery. Author Danica Willard Sachs explains that Runcio’s work “dismantles the architecture of the city, peeling back the glossy finish to show the viewer the raw substrate.” This article was originally published on November 25, 2013. In[…..]

The simply titled exhibition November 1 – December 21, on view at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, pairs works by artists Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler. Sharing the space of Kaplan’s Chelsea gallery, Gillick’s cut aluminum text pieces dangle from wires attached to the ceiling while Lawler’s almost filmic photographs cling neatly to the walls. Though they occupy the same space, the works of these[…..]