Alison Hugill

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  picks April 14, 2020

  Marlon Wobst

  “SPA” is the second exhibition at this gallery for which Marlon Wobst, usually a painter and ceramicist, has experimented with felted wool. The thick, hanging textiles are brightly colored, an effect of the difficulty of mixing hues during the felt-making process, as well as the limits of sourcing a range of colors from a wool wholesaler. Inspired by a felted pillowcase made by a friend’s sons in kindergarten, Wobst was taken with the painterly qualities of the medium and was driven to explore it further. These childhood origins belie the effort that goes into this practice, for, unlike Wobst’s

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  picks January 23, 2020

  “Liminal States”

  The threatened breakdown caused by the loss of distinction between the self and other is what Julia Kristeva described as the abject. For “Liminal States,” the group show here featuring work by an intergenerational group of women artists, Kristeva’s interpretation seems fitting. Gallery visitors are met by the looming winged figure of Tau Lewis’ devil ray, 2019, a patchwork denim hybrid of an eel- and bat-like creature with a set of beige teeth housed inside a terrifyingly human face. Cathy Josefowitz’s pastel drawings from 1979–81, installed nearby, speak to the show’s interspecies dialogue by

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  picks November 25, 2019

  WangShui

  An energetic fluidity between species, regimes, materials, and genders courses through WangShui’s film and installation exhibition here, which marks their European debut. Pupating silkworms inhabit an elaborate insect-scale cityscape of chromed bath fixtures in Gardens of Perfect Exposure, 2018. Over the course of the exhibition’s run, the larvae will enact the process of first shedding their skin, then building a cocoon of raw silk, a metamorphosis that will be livestreamed and projected onto the walls of the gallery. It’s a useful metaphor for the exhibition and WangShui’s practice as a whole,

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  picks August 06, 2019

  Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo

  American artist Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo’s exhibition title, “GHOSTS,” may cause visitors to anticipate a house of horrors. But once inside, they’ll find that the one-room space situated on the wide GDR boulevard of Karl-Marx-Allee has been cast entirely in soft red lighting and contains a pair of silver, thigh-high boots encrusted with rhinestones (Heels for All, all works cited, 2019) and a larger-than-life butt plug affixed to tendrils of chains (As Long As You Remember Who’s Wearing the Trousers). At times, the ghosts referenced by the artist’s sculptures and video works—the still-palpable

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  picks May 12, 2019

  Asta Gröting

  Paramount to Asta Gröting’s current solo exhibition, “Not feeling too cheerful: reclining figures, facades and more,” is pace. The meeting of two exposed wires in a finger-size hole in the wall creates an intermittent electrical buzz in Einen Funken Leidenschaft (Spark of Passion), 2008: the soundtrack to a meditation on slowness and vulnerability. The series of white-wax-and-epoxy-resin-cast sleeping bags strewn across the gallery floor, facetiously titled “Reclining Figure,” 2018–19, suggests cocooned, slumped bodies and serves as an irreconcilably pristine monument to homelessness and