Ara H. Merjian
“In Search of Time”
March 2013
With ribbed sides flaring like the gills of some steely fish, Zaha Hadid’s new building for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University does anything but rest on its Grand River Avenue plot. This importunate assembly … READ ON
IN PRINT March 2013 [TOC]
Edmund Clark
Flowers | New York
December 2012
In Edmund Clark’s mixed-media evocation of imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, a photograph of a sour green isolation unit sits flanked by a few different images. On the left wall, Camp IV–Mobile Force-Feeding Chair (all works 2009) speaks… READ ON
PICKS
David Humphrey
Fredericks & Freiser Gallery
December 2012
David Humphrey’s new set of acrylic canvases trade in broad, raw brushstrokes and neatly delineated figures. Nonrepresentational forms alternate with elliptically narrative imagery—an overturned truck, churlish youths, a voyeuristic peeper.… READ ON
PICKS
“Fore”
The Studio Museum in Harlem
December 2012
Featuring work by twenty-nine different artists—many of them represented through multiple contributions—“Fore” continues in the vein of the Studio Museum’s previous group shows (the alliterative “Freestyle,” 2001, “Frequency,”… READ ON
PICKS
Bernd and Hilla Becher
December 2012
The photographic enterprise of Bernd and Hilla Becher is by now as seemingly archetypal as the structures it documents. Recording, over several decades, a range of building “typologies” around the globe—from water towers to grain … READ ON
IN PRINT December 2012 [TOC]
Domenico Gnoli
October 2012
Domenico Gnoli’s untimely death in 1970—just months after the widely anticipated show of his paintings at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York—cut short what had promised to be a prodigious career. This exhibition, a presentation of twenty-four… READ ON
IN PRINT October 2012 [TOC]
James Busby
Kravets Wehby Gallery
September 2012
James Busby’s working materials—from gesso on MDF and spray paint on polycast acrylic to ink on yupo paper and his recent panels made with oil, acrylic, and graphite—are as varied as his method is consistent: Over the past decade, he … READ ON
PICKS
Fever Dreams
Ara H. Merjian on “Giallo Fever!” at Anthology Film Archives
September 2012
DERIVING FROM the late 1920s yellow (“giallo”) covers of the Mondadori publishers’ crime series, the giallo literary and cinematic phenomenon comprises what in English is rendered roughly as “crime drama,” and in French, the roman… READ ON
FILM
Between Men
Ara H. Merjian on Keep the Lights On
September 2012
TRACING THE TURBULENT vicissitudes of a young New York couple over the arc of a decade, Keep the Lights On keeps the camera trained—almost unwaveringly—on the pair’s faces and physiognomies, arguments and intimacies, by turns steeped … READ ON
FILM
“La Tendenza: Italian Architectures, 1965–1985”
Centre Pompidou
August 2012
With 250 drawings, photographs, painting, maquettes, and photographs from one of the postwar period’s more influential architectural movements, “La Tendenza” foregrounds the prominence of visual imagery in architectural innovation in … READ ON