Àngels Miralda

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  picks February 01, 2023

  Giulia Cenci

  In his 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot describes an acute aridity: “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road.” Giulia Cenci channels this concurrence of dryness and death in an installation that takes its title from another Eliot reference: dry salvages, 2023. The central installation comprises various sculptural assemblages in a syncopated spread throughout a large garagelike space that gives the scene the semblance of an abattoir. Each structure deploys variations of similar elements—reclaimed shower cabins, animal mannequins, a sculpted human head, the

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  picks September 28, 2022

  “The Prompt”

  As part of the annual Curated By festival in Vienna, curator Adomas Narkevičius responded to the general theme of “Kelet” (Hungarian for “The East”) with “The Prompt,” a showcase of three Baltic artists hailing from different generations. Their works have a puckishness about them that rotates the gaze around to assume the position of a “West” that gets to pick and choose which other has the right to speak and when.

  Ola Vasiljeva bisects the space with En Rachâchant, 2015-22, a standing metal frame that loosely sketches out a portrait of the title character of Ah! Ernesto, a 1971 children’s book

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  picks August 17, 2022

  “Some of it Falls from the Belt and Lands on the Walkway Beside the Conveyor Belt”

  With this exhibition, the Madrid-based curatorial duo YABY parlay Middleburg’s Vleeshal into a lens through which to focus on the byproducts of industry in what was once a major port for the Dutch East India Company.

  Claudia Pagès’s Walking the Gerund Mountain (Montjuïc, bando del Port), 2022, is a sculptural video installation consisting of a single image fragmented across screens mounted on a circular armature. The action takes place on the sacred hill of Montjuïc, used by Spanish forces in 1842 to bomb Barcelona and later as an execution site for anarchists and Republican soldiers. Now the

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  picks May 18, 2022

  Grace Ndiritu

  Grace Ndiritu’s solo show “Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction” offers a glimpse into the artist’s allegorical teenage bedroom, revealing the references, experiences, and source material that have informed her large-scale projects on healing and togetherness. Postcards, collages, and elaborated fashion advertisements imbue the room with an air of innocence that is simultaneously undercut by the inclusion of clippings on recent wars, terrorist cells, and past pandemics. On closer inspection, the seemingly idyllic postcards turn out to be from natural areas pockmarked by resource extraction.

  In 2012,

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  picks April 01, 2022

  Cynthia Gutiérrez

  The eighteenth-century colonial hospice that houses the Museo Cabañas provides a rich backdrop for an artist who works with archaeology and material history. Guadalajara-born artist Cynthia Gutiérrez seizes on this context for her exhibition “Inhabiting the Collapse,” which presents fourteen recent projects that underscore the jarring contrasts among museological displays, modernism, and Indigenous history and pick apart the complex cultural bricolage that is contemporary Mexico.

  The installation Marcha de Tierra (March of Earth), 2019, is composed of pyramid-shaped mounds of broken pottery of

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  picks December 20, 2021

  Guillermo Ros

  Guillermo Ros’s solo exhibition “An exercise in violence” launches an attack on a two-level gallery using a multilayered sculptural installation that merges material concerns with references to pop culture, video games, and manga. Drawing on the gaming concept of “lore”—the details that prop up the principle narrative—Ros builds out a self-contained battle scenario in which overgrown rats take on institutional architecture.

  Within the lower gallery, the room’s original white columns have been perfectly duplicated and multiplied. Their usually smooth surfaces, however, are cracked and gnawed to

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  picks November 10, 2021

  Regina de Miguel

  The exhibition “Nerve Bushes Like Coral Forests” opens with the eponymous series of works on paper, which artist Regina de Miguel has been developing since the beginning of 2020. The meditative watercolors mimic old-fashioned biological illustrations of curious species. They depict elements that are often the protagonists of the artist’s films—birds, millipedes, kelp, fragments of ancient amulets—in assemblages that levitate over washes of soft color. A second selection of watercolors, Exvote, coral reefs, 2021, reads more like terrain maps, spelled out in sketches of organisms, runes, and

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  picks July 22, 2021

  Sarah Ksieska

  In the suite of nine oil paintings that comprise Sarah Ksieska’s “Phantoms,” pigment appears to levitate on the reflective surface of industrial aluminum, a material more akin to the backlit polished screens of handheld devices than to the rough woven texture of canvas. The resulting images seem almost luminescent, shifting and flickering depending on the light and the position of the viewer. They sooner suggest a brief hallucination than a fixed tableau.

  Ksieska focuses on still lifes and quiet interiors, moments of contemplation when the privacy of solitude allows the mind to wander. In Automat

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  picks May 03, 2021

  Lucía C. Pino

  Exploring materiality through processes of sculptural modification, Lucía C. Pino creates environments where fluid bodies and planetary kinships mingle with references to ancient pasts. For their installation Makebelieve Neuromancer (all works 2021), ceiling lights hover close to the floor, creating the hermetic ambience of a laboratory within the darkened fifteenth-century chapel. The antiquated walls are covered with an artificial skin—a fiberglass membrane that both protects and obscures. Below the low-hanging lights, objects punctuate the space in an asymmetrical arrangement. For Sabiħa

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  picks January 18, 2021

  “From the Volcano to the Sea. The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples”

  This display of archival material from the Italian feminist collective Le Nemesiache, curated by If I Can't Dance Fellow Giulia Damiani with the support of Sara Giannini and Arnisa Zeqo, situates the group’s practice in Naples, where iconic landscapes—Vesuvius, the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman temples in Campagna, and the city’s bay—render mythology omnipresent.

  Sequined costumes and flamboyant sunglasses from the 1989 theatre production Elagabulus, paraphernalia sourced from the collective’s founder Lina Mangiacapre, adorn the exhibition’s entrance. Though the group foresaw, in political

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  picks November 02, 2020

  Rosalind Nashashibi

  Rosalind Nashashibi’s newest series of paintings grew out of a residency at London’s National Gallery. Given a year with an on-site studio and invited to engage directly with the institution’s holdings of more than 2,300 objects, she has responded with nuanced interpretations not of central motifs of famous paintings, but of their marginalia. Here, under-considered details from the collection are remixed into nine of Nashashibi’s own small and vivid oil works, each a snippet from history always rendered intimately in uncannily recognizable and sometimes startling scenes. At a time in which the

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  picks October 15, 2020

  “The total scab-free solidarity...”

  During lockdown, curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto picked up the notoriously difficult 1996 novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The result is “The total scab-free solidarity and performative silence that struck floor-shows and soundstages from Desert to NJ coast for over half a year,” a group exhibition titled after a passage that describes the hippie past of the morally vacant Johnny Gentle, a crooner-turned-right-wing-US-president whom de Abreu Pinto sees as personifying our global political reality and its widening precarity. Here, six artists channel that economic vulnerability into