picks February 14, 2020

“Unexpected Encounters”

At least sixty tons of recyclable glass gravel cover the gallery floors of “Unexpected Encounters,” transforming the space into a veritable moonscape or postapocalyptic wasteland. Rarely exhibited graphic artworks by about a dozen Latvian artists from the 1970s and 1980s and a similar number of international contemporary pieces comingle in this uncanny tableau. Borrowing its name from a 1987 collection by the Soviet science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the exhibition highlights local and historical contributions to this genre, while opening onto broader themes of gender, sexuality,

print May 2019

Natvar Bhavsar

Natvar Bhavsar’s exhibition at Aicon Gallery, “Beginnings,” focused on seventeen numinous abstractions—paintings and works on paper—made between 1968 and 1978. The artist, born in 1934 in Gujarat, India, has been a New Yorker for more than fifty years. But the use of dry pigment in his work, often combined with acrylic and oil mediums, can be partially traced back to the ancient Indian spring festival known as Holi, where revelers douse themselves in a vivid spectrum of powdered colors to celebrate love and solidarity.

The front half of the gallery’s ground floor included eight of Bhavsar’s paper

diary April 03, 2019

From There and Back Again

THE WEEKEND BEFORE the seventh edition of Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK), a smattering of related exhibition openings and events lit up the city. On Friday night, at Para Site, executive director Cosmin Costinas, who just days earlier was announced as the new director of Kathmandu Triennale, greeted visitors with his characteristic good cheer and signature elegant scarf wrapped around his neck. On Saturday night, Mimi Chun, founder and director of Blindspot Gallery, opened a solo show by Lam Tung Pang. Chun told me she didn’t want the exhibition to be lost among the many offerings the following

print October 2018

Chitra Ganesh

As part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s yearlong exploration of the “future,” Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh took inspiration from the institution’s collection of Tibetan art to examine how the dystopic present can be changed for a better tomorrow in two separate, yet connected, exhibitions. The title of the core exhibition, “The Scorpion Gesture,” for which she created five animations (her first and, by my lights, rather successful foray into the medium) refers to a Tibetan Buddhist hand gesture, or mudra, that represents the endless possibilities of transformation embodied metaphorically in

picks February 08, 2018

Ser Serpas

In her first solo exhibition, Los Angeles– and New York–based artist Ser Serpas presents eleven works, many of which are amalgams of disparate objects. For instance, a glass tabletop, a vacuum cleaner, and a bookcase make up Load Bearing Allotment (all works cited, 2017), whereas In the Slightest comprises a carved door, a child’s tiny microphone stand, and a broom handle, among other items. To be clear, though, these works are not just formal experiments reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal combines.

Rather, the pieces speak to the precarity of categorization; they work against the

picks January 08, 2018

Christina Quarles

About half of Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles’s thirteen canvases here are horizontally arranged. All from this year, the works range in size from three to five feet in height and four to six feet in width, and each typically includes two largely abstract bodies, which seem to bend and twist improbably around various forms. While the figures are not gendered or raced, an exploration of identity politics forms an undercurrent in the works, perhaps most evident in their titles, such as Tell Me Tell Me Yull Be Alright, When Yer in Tha Shade. Like that of the exhibition itself, the title

picks December 05, 2017

Pepe Mar

In this modestly sized project gallery, Miami-based artist Pepe Mar manages to present a survey of colorful assemblages and collages made over the last fifteen years as well as new work. The past and present blur here. Mar’s approach to this compilation is not straightforward: He has digitally reconstructed images of his previous pieces and printed them onto large, irregular pieces of fabric that were then stitched together, stained, and often appliquéd. The overall composition becomes the installation’s walls, from which pipelike forms, also covered in fabric, intertwine and spill out onto the

picks August 28, 2017

Enrico Prampolini

In 1930, Italian Futurist artist Enrico Prampolini donated his painting Tarantella, 1920–22, to the Polish artist group a.r., which was amassing a collection of international avant-garde artworks that would become the foundation of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. It is perhaps fitting, then, that curator Przemysław Strożek uses the work as a symbolic point of departure for an exhibition that simultaneously serves as the first large-scale retrospective of Prampolini’s work since the early 1990s and as a portrait of the international character of the Polish avant-garde, the centenary of which is this

picks April 17, 2017

Cassils

In this solo exhibition comprising primarily live performances and installations, the Los Angeles–based and gender-nonconforming artist Cassils uses their naked body to explore the often pervasive violence against LGBTQI subjects. Their performance Becoming an Image, 2013–, pivots around the artist pummeling a 2,000-pound mass of clay in a pitch-black room. What the audience experiences, positioned around this main action, is chiefly aural: They hear Cassils breathing or the moments when their fists hit the clay. However, the artist has strategically positioned a photographer, whose camera’s

interviews June 07, 2016

Frank Stella

Frank Stella’s assemblage series “Polish Village,” 1970–74, is making its debut in Europe as part of the exhibition “Frank Stella and Synagogues of Historic Poland,” on view through June 20, 2016, at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw. Here Stella discusses the show as well as the genesis of the works, their exhibition history, and what it means to present his works in Poland, where the titular inspirational wooden synagogues once stood.

THIS SERIES has been exhibited before: at the Fort Worth Museum of Dallas in 1978, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987, and the Jewish Museum in New York in

slant November 30, 2015

On the Ground: Miami

SOUTH FLORIDA has always been friendly to topless beachgoers. This past year, though, the city’s art museums gave new meaning to being topless in Miami. Four were without directors at some point: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami); the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); the Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum; and the Wolfsonian-Florida International University Museum. All of the positions have now been filled, but it will be several years before it’s clear how the newbies’ visions will shape programming. Meanwhile, the Bass Museum of Art closed for renovations in mid-May (although it

picks November 05, 2015

Bik Van der Pol

Reports emerged in early 2015 that Florida government officials had unofficially banned state employees from using phrases such as “climate change” and “global warming” or words such as “sustainability” in their communications. Bik Van der Pol, the Rotterdam-based artistic team of Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol, took this curious censure, which the government denies, as a partial point of departure for their installation Speechless, 2015, the result of a residency at PAMM.

The work consists of a custom-made aviary, the walls of which contain letters that if unscrambled spell out the aforementioned

Alpesh Kantilal Patel