picks October 15, 2020

Rosemary Mayer

Between 1972 and 1973, Rosemary Mayer constructed a series of innovative cloth sculptures dedicated to both forgotten and celebrated women of history. Hung, draped, and suspended from the wall, the works took on increasingly ambitious designs, incorporating cheesecloth and satin. Although abstract and nonrepresentational in their composition and material facture, the sculptures were conceptualized to serve a commemorative function. Hroswitha, 1973, named after the German medieval poet, thrusts out from the wall as if it were a figurehead on the bow of a ship. Animated and awakened, the abstracted

picks July 10, 2020

Josephine Pryde

Stretched across the entire south facade of Galerie Neu like a second skin is Exterior, Night, Day, 2020, a large collage of photographs of Neolithic carvings taken by Josephine Pryde during walks in Northumberland, England, and Galicia, Spain. The etchings, which date to the first millennium BCE and can be found throughout the western stretch of Europe, have been exposed to the elements and appear worn, smooth to the touch. Some are covered with lichen, dirt, and dead leaves; others collect pools of rainwater. Just below Exterior, Night, Day, in a window display adjacent to the gallery’s

picks January 24, 2020

Christopher Williams

In Christopher Williams’s 2015 Whitechapel exhibition “The Production Line of Happiness,” the artist retained and incorporated the wall labels of the Malevich-inspired group exhibition “Adventures of the Black Square” that had immediately preceded his presentation. To further emphasize the reference to the previous exhibition, Williams fabricated wallpaper with lurid green stripes inspired by the French Conceptualist, Daniel Buren. The effect was surprising, incisive, and expedient, striking a dialogue between the historical legacies of abstraction and his own work. In their battered form, the

picks October 14, 2019

Senga Nengudi

When Senga Nengudi moved to New York in 1971, after completing her MFA at California State University, Los Angeles, she began shaping large sheets of durable, plastic flag fabric into figural silhouettes. Without a gallery to show her works, Nengudi installed her cutouts in the hallways and on the fire escapes of her apartment building in Harlem, and fastened them in alleyways, streets, and abandoned lots throughout the city. She called these forms “spirits,” or “souls,” and was drawn to how they would move and murmur when caught by a sudden breeze or a slight shift in the afternoon light. While

picks October 07, 2019

Evan Lee

Evan Lee’s series of paintings “Fortune Happiness,” 2018, is distinguished by long shadows and listless figures that might be found in Edward Hopper’s canvases. But in Lee’s work, these figures are placed in city sites not pictured by his predecessor: salons, food courts, Chinese restaurants. His figures seem isolated, but they are never really so—heads down, they are entirely absorbed in their work, or in the screens of their phones.

In Woman Under a Tree and Women with Umbrellas in the Sun, both 2019, Lee adopts a garish, almost Fauvist palette. In the former work, there is little chromatic

picks March 26, 2019

Hito Steyerl

A striking detail found at the margins of Hito Steyerl’s essay-film, Abstract, 2012, are the calluses that mark the tips of the artist’s fingers. These calluses are shown in a long countershot of Steyerl holding her phone in the sprawling Pariser Platz in Berlin. The artist is shown filming the severe facade of the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, whose bombs killed her childhood friend, Andrea Wolf, while she was fighting in the Kurdish resistance. The calluses index Steyerl’s obstinate presence and her determination to reanimate the residues of violence into a constellation of historical

picks December 03, 2018

Jill Mulleady

It is the twilight hour, a painter’s hour in Point Lobos (all works 2018). Bioluminescence creeps in at high tide as two women crouch at the water’s edge. What does the painter see then? A meeting place of strange currents. A body dries itself after skinny-dipping, another takes a long drag from a cigarette. Moments of respite glimpsed through a chain-link fence. In This Connection is Not Private, a man flips through his phone, while off in the distance the landscape burns, though Jill Mulleady’s figures express no concern for the disaster pictured on the horizon—they stare blankly, obstinately,

picks February 15, 2018

“Nature”

Rebecca Brewer’s wool felt collage Silent Running, 2018, is hung like a specimen stretched out for examination. The textile is organized through the interlacings of a grid in which the dead matter of nature has accumulated above and below the surface—suspended, ossified, floating. The work resembles a net that has trawled through the ocean, corralling what looks like flotsam and jetsam.

The closest sculptural equivalent to this hanging textile is Eva Hesse’s Contingent, 1969, a work whose fragility is counterbalanced by the associative violence of the hooks that hold the piece in place. Like

picks January 29, 2018

Brent Wadden

The surfaces of Brent Wadden’s large woven geometric abstractions repel one’s attention. The combination of chroma and line prevents one from becoming fully absorbed in either element, similar to the interaction of color and pattern in the compositions of Bridget Riley. Lines waver in the warp and weft of these works, which the artist calls paintings. Even though pieces such as Score 1 (Salt Spring) (all works cited, 2018) resemble the hard-edge abstractions of the previous century, and although the artist usually stretches the weavings around a support, that classification seems strangely

picks October 19, 2016

Marisa Merz

Ecstasy is a state that can push you outside of yourself. The eighty-five-year-old artist Marisa Merz offers up large- and small-scale drawings, paintings, and sculptures, all Untitled, of figures seemingly on the edge of such an experience. In one painting from 2016, disembodied hands swirl around a being in a chaotic spiral of energy. Merz uses color to channel its polymorphic magical properties (to paraphrase Michael Taussig), so that she may allude to, or even take us to the brink of, something rapturous. This experience—frenetic, stupor inducing—separates the psyche from the body, forcing

picks July 08, 2016

“Tears Shared: Marc Camille Chaimowicz Featuring Bruno Pélassy”

A beaded curtain that spells out “VIVA LA MUERTE,” (Sans Titre [Untitled],1995), hangs on the far wall from the entrance to this South London gallery. Alas, this is the final exhibition before the venue closes forever. The show—a sprawling display of ornaments, vessels, and fetishes—features glassware made and collected by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, as well as a group of works by Bruno Pélassy. It is Pélassy’s untitled sculptures, such as the aforementioned hanging, that truly stand out. The artist, who died in 2002 due to AIDS-related illnesses, is known for his bejeweled assemblages, objets that

picks May 19, 2016

Josh Bitelli

In Josh Bitelli’s recent exhibition, “A Partition,” the artist has compressed the gallery with a false ceiling, rendering the ample space compact, claustrophobic. Snaking throughout is a white antibacterial curtain that bisects the room. In the western corner, two monitors are stacked, showing Bitelli’s video All Doors and No Exits, 2016. The work’s script, performed by health-care professionals, borrows from generic medical diagnostic texts and determines a set of prescriptive actions. As the artist’s camera shows his actors rehearsing over and over again, both image and sound begin to lose

Andrew Witt