William Powhida’s text-based drawings* skewer the contemporary art world with relish. From fake Rolling Stone magazine pages to charts explaining economic relationships, or trompe l’oeil pages torn from the notebook of an art-world malcontent, Powhida sticks his finger into the wounds of modern culture. For example, What Do Prices Reflect? pessimistically lists the rationale used to determine an artwork’s financial value: “Whether or not the work[…..]

Prior to this exhibition, I associated Jules Olitski with his stained color field canvases from the early 1960s. But like my experience of most solo exhibitions, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the dramatic range of paintings he produced throughout his nearly fifty-year career. Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski at American University Museum walks the viewer through Olitski’s creative evolution as an abstract artist,[…..]

Even fanatic football fans would be hard-pressed to remember a Glaswegian football team called Partick Thistle, a perpetual underdog in First Division Scottish Football League that’s oft-joked about because of their non-winning ways. Getting behind a team that tries every week but gets nowhere requires no small measure of faith, an action probably synonymous with holding out hope in the long term for that which[…..]

As Jia Aili grew up in the 1980s, it seemed as though post-Mao Zedong China was well on its way into transforming itself into a superpower, leaving in its wake the trauma of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, struggling more with material trappings and economic growth rather than ideological fulfilment. These reforms and attitudes quickly penetrated across China’s vast landscapes, accompanied by[…..]

Kim Dingle’s exhibition entitled still lives at Sperone Westwater portrays a series of calamities played out by children sitting at tables, whirling off of chairs and clinking wine glasses in roistering merriment. Clown-like in depiction with disproportionally large feet and nondescript faces, the toddlers she presents are more so dolls than human children. Dingle’s newest works are less crowded than older works and by virtue[…..]

The difficulty in viewing photographs of artwork is that the camera flattens the object in its focus, relinquishing subtleties in order to capture a whole. Because his oeuvre is very subtle indeed, Mark Bradford’s work requires a viewer’s presence to be fully appreciated. Very little of the slender lines of collage, delicate papers built up in thin layers or washes of paint almost completely sanded[…..]

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence. Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises[…..]