Alex Bacon

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  print November 2022

  N. Dash

  In “earth,” her first solo museum presentation in Europe, New York–based artist N. Dash continues to find room for innovation within a set of terms she established more than a decade ago. She still uses what could be considered common materials, such as jute, mud, and string, and over time has added more blatantly industrially produced detritus to her inventory: agricultural netting and plastic bottles, for example. But the earth referenced in the exhibition title is a constant, often used as a ground to which the artist sometimes adds pigments drawn from a palette composed of neutral whites,

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  picks February 09, 2022

  Grey Organisation

  On May 21, 1985, a group of young artists armed with buckets of gray paint doused the windows of the venerable galleries—including this one—that lined Cork Street, then the hub of London’s established commercial art scene. While no charges were ultimately levied, the vandals were banned from central London, provoking a move to New York City. This fascinating survey exhibition includes ephemera and printed matter related to that incident, the most infamous action of the Grey Organisation (GO), an important if too-little-known collective active in London and New York between 1983 and 1991. Besides

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  interviews April 24, 2019

  Christodoulos Panayiotou

  For the show “Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings,” artist Christodoulos Panayiotou performed a role somewhere between those of a curator and a collaborating artist. Here, he speaks about his interest in Kunz’s pioneering abstract work and the questions that arose for him while participating in the exhibition’s development. The show is on view at the Serpentine Galleries in London until May 19, 2019 and will travel to the Muzeum Susch in Zernez, Switzerland, from July 26 to November 10, 2019.

  I INTUITIVELY DEVELOPED a fascination with Emma Kunz’s mythology before ever seeing a single drawing. I heard

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  picks February 05, 2019

  K.r.m. Mooney

  “Näcre” is K.r.m. Mooney’s first solo exhibition at Altman Siegel. The show’s title is a stylization of a term for mother-of-pearl, the iridescent substance that covers pearls. Pearls form when irritants such as parasites enter a mollusk’s shell and are coated with layers of protein and minerals. This reference evokes the proximity that can exist between the beautiful and the abject, a dialectic that is central to Mooney’s Second Affordance II, 2017. For this work, the artist has partially submerged a minuscule, intricate tangle of wire and cast lavender in a narrow metal tray of water on the

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  interviews July 10, 2018

  Keith Sonnier

  This summer (and beyond), the East End of Long Island, New York, is a prime spot to experience the sculpture, installation, film, and drawing of Keith Sonnier. An extensive but not exhaustive survey, “Keith Sonnier: Until Today” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill runs through January 27, 2019. Concurrently, the Dia Art Foundation’s Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton has restaged, through May 29, 2019, Sonnier’s seminal environmental work Dis-Play II, 1970, which was first exhibited in the artist’s debut solo exhibition that year at the Leo Castelli Warehouse. Simultaneously, Tripoli

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  interviews February 13, 2018

  Rita McBride

  Since the 1980s, Rita McBride has examined the ramifications of modernism’s legacy for society, in everything from urban planning to the aesthetics of space. Her present project at Dia:Chelsea in New York, Particulates, 2017, involves a science fiction–inflected use of lasers to explore questions as wide-ranging as the proliferation of security barriers and the nuances of bodily experience in contemporary times. The installation is on view until June 2, 2018.

  I STARTED EXPLORING THE IDEAS in the installation at Dia:Chelsea while participating in the Liverpool Biennial in the summer of 2016.

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  picks May 12, 2017

  David Novros

  David Novros’s current exhibition comprises four paintings and four works on paper from the 1970s. All postdate his first site-specific fresco from 1970, which was commissioned by Donald Judd for his Spring Street residence in New York City. Novros, so much more than a Minimalist, is interested in continuing the tradition of painting as an immersive, site-specific experience—as it is in Paleolithic cave art, Byzantine mosaics, and Renaissance frescos—one that can profoundly alter its surrounding architecture.

  Untitled, 1975, is a large-scale work painted with luminescent monochromatic blocks

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  interviews May 02, 2017

  Doug Wheeler

  Doug Wheeler is an American artist based in New Mexico. In the 1960s he began working in Los Angeles, where he was one of the pioneering figures exploring how light and space could be used to establish experiential situations. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Wheeler is currently showing PSAD Synthetic Desert III, 1971, the first realization of a semi-anechoic chamber he originally conceived as a plan in 1968. The work is on view through August 2, 2017.

  TO ME, A WORKING DRAWING is about experimental spaces or thoughts. I used to do what I called “equation drawings,” which I started

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  picks April 07, 2017

  Ricky Swallow

  For his first solo exhibition in New York since his 2006 survey at MoMA PS1, Los Angeles–based Australian sculptor Ricky Swallow embraces an unprecedented degree of abstraction. The artist has made bronze casts of configurations of studio scraps—cardboard, rope, leather, wood—that could be called a kind of found or incidental abstraction. On several occasions, Swallow has talked about his “built-in moral resistance” to abstract modes, yet his folk version of the genre, for lack of a better term, complicates our understanding of what abstraction can do. Swallow is, above all, most interested in

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  interviews October 03, 2016

  Carmen Herrera

  Carmen Herrera is a Cuban-American painter who has been based in New York since 1954. Over the past seven decades, her practice has evolved in tandem with, but often separate from, the dominant aesthetic trends of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from post-Cubist abstraction to Minimalism. Herrera’s career is now being celebrated with a survey exhibition, focusing on her work from the years 1948 to 1978, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition is on view through January 2, 2017.

  SOMETIMES ways of working from fifty or sixty years ago return in my work. This is why I continue