Owing to the success of her figurative work as well as her 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow is widely recognized for her uncanny mixed-media sculptures that incorporate cast body parts with everyday objects. Often overlooked, however, are her drawings of abstracted figures—erotic, restless, and vulnerable—though they are a central part of her practice. Human Landscape(s)[…..]

In 1527, Olas Magnus drew the Carta Marina, the first detailed account of Nordic geography and the perils plaguing it by land and sea. In the image, life seems threatened mainly by ongoing human conflict and a perpetual battle with weather, but what haunted imaginations for centuries was its depiction of the monsters inhabiting the northern seas. Their presence was a documentary mix of fact[…..]

From our friends at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, today we bring you a video of Clare Molloy in conversation with Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. They discuss Nkanga’s exhibition Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine, which was on view from September 27 through December 20, 2015. Nkanga says, explaining the title, “In a way, traveling and going through all these places, I had only the eyes of others.” 

James Bond: debonair hero of the British Secret Service, or Caribbean bird expert? The answer is both. Ian Fleming named his famous spy after an ornithologist who wrote the comprehensive Birds of the West Indies. At Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, artist Taryn Simon fuses the cosmos of 007 with the interests of the researcher to produce a field guide to the birds that appear[…..]

At 11 p.m. on a Friday night in Paris, I took advantage of the late hours at the Palais de Tokyo. Before entering the Julio Le Parc exhibit, I overheard a conversation that seems to exemplify a standing problem of contemporary art. A visitor answered his phone while looking at a conceptual piece and jokingly described it. It went something like this: “I’m looking at[…..]

San Francisco/Paris- based Kadist Art Foundation is launching a new and exciting project featuring a series of video books. The Kadist foundation, in San Francisco, is currently hosting Ooga Booga, a Los Angeles mixed media “bookstore” as a pop-up project. Ooga Booga was founded in 2004 by Wendy Yao as a broadly defined bookstore. “Bookstore” does not adequately describe the space as it not only[…..]