Andrianna Campbell

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  interviews January 31, 2015

  Barbara Kasten

  Barbara Kasten’s photographs are often discussed in relationship to Bauhaus aesthetics, particularly the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who advocated for Gesamtwerk, or, for working in multiple mediums, which has always been a critical part of her practice. “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” the first major survey of the Chicago-based artist’s work, presents a broad view of her oeuvre, including her early fiber sculptures, a video installation, and a selection of photographic works spanning throughout her career. Curated by Alex Klein, the exhibition will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in

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  picks January 29, 2015

  Lucy Kim

  Lucy Kim’s latest paintings operate between a fidelity to realist depiction and to dreamscapes that distort her deliberate verisimilitude. This is a departure for Kim, who previously molded in aluminum foil to achieve less representational and more abstract renderings of the body. Her new casts and relief paintings of friends’ hands, bodies, and teeth constitute a refreshing expansion on narrative with personal and metaphorical allusions. She eschews the hyperreal imagery and anodyne abstraction so frequently seen in painting today and drills into messy, literal reality, all the while bridging

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  picks January 07, 2015

  Martin Puryear

  As 2014 came to a close, several questions lingered: What happened to the radicality of abstract spirit, both in the formal sense and in its political import? Where can those two essential elements meet in order to reinvigorate traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture and veer away from the decorative and mediocre? Martin Puryear’s latest exhibition inscribes the political within the abstract without yielding ground on either side. His work evokes a tension between the intelligibility of his sculptures as revolutionary artifacts and as concurrently pleasurable experiments in

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  picks December 15, 2014

  Geoffrey Farmer

  Hundreds of cutouts from a 1960s Italian book series featuring masterpieces of sculpture have been propped up on a round table that spans eighteen feet in diameter in Geoffrey Farmer’s latest exhibition. There is Desiderio da Settignano’s Bust of a Young Woman, Giambologna’s Appennino, Constantin Brancusi’s Maiastra, Michelangelo’s David, and Antoine Le Moiturier’s hooded monks, nudes, medieval saints, small children, and tiny animals. Part of the installation Boneyard, 2013, the paper figurines stand as sculptures would, intimating the flatness of being Photoshopped in space—a slideshow

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  picks November 03, 2014

  Tatiana Kronberg and Anne Eastman

  “The Inside of the Outside,” an exhibition of Tatiana Kronberg and Anne Eastman, captures the tensions between the concrete and the immaterial inherent to the photographic medium in the context of our contemporary digital age. Kronberg’s large photograms of body parts and floral motifs have a visceral presence, and her unique prints echo the material turn back to traditional methods in photography. In contrast, Eastman nimbly displays her comfort in a wide range of media—from video to photography to installation—all engaged with the existence of the photographic image in a dematerialized format.

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  picks October 20, 2014

  David Hockney

  In recent years, David Hockney has turned to the walkways around his studio in East Yorkshire, England, where he has set his latest series, “The Arrival of Spring.” Hung according to medium, it begins with stark black-and-white charcoal drawings, which are followed by a multiscreen video installation that depicts winter in all its severity. The series culminates in vivid prints drawn on an iPad, illustrating the verdancy of spring. Pathways center every work, with the exception of 4 May 2011, in which a large tree halts our perambulation in an overgrown field populated by wildflowers.

  Though each

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  picks September 26, 2014

  Bill Lynch

  A lambent quality suffuses Bill Lynch’s mostly untitled and undated paintings on scavenged plywood, executed during the last thirty years of his life. A furtive incandescence hovers inside them. Euphorically ambiguous, in the same breath they celebrate Chinese Ming dynasty flower-and-bird compositions, which hold complex symbolization and interior resonance, and Mesoa-American shamanistic burial textiles. In the former case, heavy impasto eclipses the lyricism that we associate with the genre, likening them more to the Chinese modernist tradition of Zhao Shaoang, whom Lynch admired. Floral and

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  picks March 12, 2014

  “Witness”

  “Witness,” as its title proclaims, is a bold admixture of radical voices attesting to the spirit and conscience of the 1960s. The decade has often been revisited as a period when artistic earnestness and social efficacy prevailed in spite of an increasingly commercialized market. Rarely has the result been as intriguing as in this exhibit, which brings Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, neo-Dada, and the Black Arts Movement into conversation.

  Outliers of canonical movements command center stage, from Robert Indiana’s brash The Confederacy: Alabama, 1965, to Norman Lewis’s Double Cross, 1971. Sam