Over a lifetime of visiting museums, you learn that all souvenirs have a price point, from the dollar-fifty commemorative postcard to the pieces in the collection itself. These prized mementos, selected, brought home, catalogued and displayed, represent the collector’s forays to classical or far-flung sites. My favorite disruption to this cycle is a hall of life-sized plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman architecture at[…..]
There is a well-worn narrative of twentieth century painting that goes like this: From Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the illusionistic space of painting flattened more and more until the picture plane and the surface created by the paint itself became the primary subject matter, eliminating images altogether in favor of abstraction. While this teleology has some merit, the purity of the story is incomplete.[…..]
Is this a throwdown? It’s tempting to think so, since the title, Greater LA, is obviously a riff on the seminal P.S.1 survey Greater New York, and is installed in the same type of beat-up SoHo loft where major New York art history went down in the 1960s and ‘70s. But don’t get too excited. Any sense of bi-coastal competition erodes quickly when you realize[…..]
Like a newspaper in its matter of fact presentation of content, Cady Noland / Santiago Sierra at KOW Berlin, curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, appears purposefully removed of emotion. We never make eye contact with other humans, backs are often turned, or we find ourselves averting our eyes for our own protection. We stand on the outside looking in. No one makes a[…..]
With freedom of speech, artistic censorship and human rights at the centre of global concern with the arrest of Ai Weiwei, Huang Yong Ping’s show at Nottingham Contemporary, a young, highly influential contemporary art space run by Alex Farquharson just north of London, could not have come at a more pressing or pertinent time. Huang has been the target of protested censorship in the past,[…..]
How does meanwhile effect an artwork? British artist Anthony McCall’s exhibition at Luciana Brito in São Paulo suggests a retrospective of an artist who returned to art-making in the last decade after an over-20 year hiatus. McCall’s reemergence is marked by revisiting and further developing what began as his “solid light” films made in the early 1970s: installations of hazy, darkened rooms with slow-moving beams[…..]
Imagine what it would be like to step into someone else’s mind – to find yourself submerged within the physical manifestations of their memories, truths and dreams? It is this exact feeling that is elicited when stepping across the threshold of the sterile gallery space into the curious world that is Friedrich Kunath’s exhibition at the White Cube in London. Scent is the first unexpected[…..]
