Courtney Fiske
Zilia Sánchez
Artists Space : Exhibitions
June 2013
Zilia Sánchez composes her paintings in a syntax of soft swells and fleshed incurves. Born in pre-Castro Cuba, she moved to New York in 1964, where she remained for nearly a decade before settling in Puerto Rico. Contra the heterodox waxes… READ ON
PICKS
Michele Abeles
47 Canal
May 2013
Michele Abeles’s ink-jet prints emerge through twin operations of building up and flattening out. In the nine compositions on view, Abeles permutes a stock vernacular of images—palm fronds, stippled skin, torn newspaper, a box of Abilify—that… READ ON
PICKS
Oedipal Complex
Courtney Fiske on three documentaries on Louise Bourgeois
April 2013
“EVERYTHING I DO WAS INSPIRED by my early life,” Louise Bourgeois divulged to Artforum on the occasion of her 1982 retrospective at MoMA, the venue’s first to fete a female artist. The statement, couched in bold cursive beside a photograph… READ ON
FILM
Joel Shapiro
Craig F. Starr Gallery
March 2013
Float Joel Shapiro’s name in an art-world crowd, and the images conjured will likely be of shrunken bronze houses and barely balanced sculptures. Spanning the period from 1969—the year of his inclusion in the Whitney’s pulse-taking … READ ON
PICKS
“Dieter Roth. Björn Roth”
Hauser & Wirth | Chelsea
February 2013
“Nonart,” wrote Allan Kaprow in a 1971 essay, “exists only fleetingly, like some subatomic particle, or perhaps only as a postulate.” Of any artist, Dieter Roth, whose 1969 US debut entailed staging suitcases of unwrapped cheese at … READ ON
PICKS
Shake, Rattle, and Roll
Courtney Fiske on Dan Graham and Peter Adair at Light Industry
February 2013
“IF ART IS ONLY A BUSINESS, AS WARHOL SUGGESTS,” scrolls boxy, yellow text down a black screen, “then music expresses a more communal, transcendental emotion which art now denies.” The words are Dan Graham’s, pronounced near the … READ ON
FILM
Gaylen Gerber
Wallspace
January 2013
Since the late 1980s, Chicago-based artist Gaylen Gerber has coated square canvases in a lusterless gray and lent them to fellow artists, inviting them to intervene atop his own intervention. In his latest show, Gerber continues his series … READ ON
PICKS
Worlds Apart
Courtney Fiske on Baraka and “See It in 70 mm!”
December 2012
RON FRICKE’S BARAKA is a curio of 1990s filmmaking. Part nature documentary, part animated panorama, the film and its epic, breathless ambitions failed to ramify. Viewed today, the singularity of Baraka’s style lends it the dated feel … READ ON
FILM
Leslie Hewitt
Leslie Hewitt talks about Untitled (Structures)
December 2012
Leslie Hewitt is an artist based in New York whose work engages with the ways in which photographs encode time and mediate historical understanding. Her dual-channel video installation Untitled (Structures), 2012, is a collaborative project… READ ON
500 WORDS
Diana Thater
David Zwirner
November 2012
Diana Thater’s intricate video installation Chernobyl, 2010, opens, on its backmost screen, with sunrise over the titular sarcophagus: a concrete tomb, ceaselessly shored, that contains the infamous reactor’s noxious remains. The image … READ ON