picks November 09, 2020

Antonietta Grassi

Overlaying candy-colored, geometric prisms with glimmering networks of lines that weave through and around them, painter Antonietta Grassi could easily be taken for the love child of Josef and Anni Albers. Yet while underscoring the contiguity of modernist composition and traditional craft, her exquisite abstractions also demonstrate the visual similarities between loom work and computer code. These are not idle comparisons, as this exhibition of her most recent paintings makes explicit: Nineteenth-century polymath Charles Babbage developed the prototype for the world’s first computer, the

print January 2020

Ronnie Landfield

His may not yet be a household name, but Ronnie Landfield is one of the best abstract painters in America. Since the late 1960s, Landfield’s paintings have been defined by billowing stains of color, poured and loosely brushed onto canvases of monumental size. Although nearly all of his images invoke the metaphysical, his approach nonetheless extends the vital dialogue between landscape and abstraction explored by midcentury pioneers such as Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. Filtered through Landfield’s optical unconscious, translucent swaths of color layered upon or

print January 2020

Janet Werner

Through painterly and conceptual ingenuity, Janet Werner has created a visual language to explore the multiplicity of the self. Her portraits revel in their provenance, explicitly referencing both fashion magazines and a range of precursors, including Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, Alice Neel, Francis Picabia, and the sculptor Allen Jones. Werner, who attended the MFA program at Yale in the late 1980s with John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, is a far more expressive painter than either, although she, too, strains the female figure through the sieve of popular culture, yielding a burlesque of

print December 2019

Sam Gilliam

LIKE A PAIR OF ENORMOUS PAINT-SOAKED WINGS, Sam Gilliam’s Double Merge, 1968, beckons viewers to enter into the fold. Consisting of two monumental swaths of raw canvas that have been stained, dyed, splattered, and encrusted with paint in a brilliant range of hues and then suspended from ceiling beams in an undulating, contiguous form, Double Merge is at once painting and sculpture, performance and installation, act and artifact. It is also an example of how Gilliam, a pioneer of postwar abstraction associated with the Washington Color School, expanded painting’s rectilinear frame and put pressure

passages Summer 2019

BARBARA HAMMER

OF THE MORE THAN EIGHTY moving-image works that Barbara Hammer created, her 1974 film Dyketactics remains her most iconic. A four-minute paean to lesbian sexuality, Dyketactics publicly announced Hammer’s blossoming sexual identity after the end of her heterosexual marriage and testified to the visionary power of a woman with a movie camera. The film is a revolutionary call for recognition, a how-to guide to sensuality, and a reflection of the utopian spirit that animated a generation of women in search of sexual pleasure and empowerment beyond heterosexuality. It is also one of the most joyful

print March 2019

CLOSE-UP: LA TIERRA TIEMBLA

COMPRISING NEARLY seven hundred miles of sand and felsic lava trapped in the twin rain shadows of the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth. It is also one of the most surreal. Within the larger geography of the Andean Altiplano—a massive plateau that reaches elevations of thirteen thousand feet—volcanic craters, salt flats, and lakes the color of blood stretch as far as the eye can see. It is no wonder that cinematographers and NASA scientists alike have used the region as a proxy for Mars.

In her 2018 film ALTIPLANO, the Chilean-born,

print January 2019

Lava Thomas

As is well known, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott began on December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger in a premeditated act of civil disobedience. The boycott lasted more than a year, until a federal court’s mandate that the state’s bus system be desegregated. Although celebrated as an icon of the movement, Parks was hardly the only African American woman to become a leader in the struggle against segregation, racial discrimination, and the injustices of Jim Crow. In spite of the focus on male leadership in sanctioned histories, women of

print December 2018

John Heward and Jean-François Lauda

The only mark I can vividly recall from Jean-François Lauda’s exhibition of nine identically sized paintings is a glare of canary-yellow paint scraped over a moody pink-hued stain. Like a mechanical wing, it artificially lifts the elegiac tone of the room, interrupting the intensity of Lauda’s more understated works. Though the work containing this mark is not the strongest painting in this series of untitled works, it is the loudest. Its afterimage overwhelms the elusive beauty of the other eight, whose quiet reckoning with the void stirred me in ways that most face-to-face encounters with

print September 2018

Bharti Kher

In 1993, Bharti Kher weighed moving to New Delhi versus moving to New York. For an artist born and raised in England, she chose the road less traveled and relocated to India. As her recent show attests, Kher’s decision has made all the difference in her choice of materials and motifs. In a series of sculptures made between 2012 and 2016, heavily lacquered saris draped on cast-concrete plinths create portraits of the absent bodies they reference. In The night she left, 2011, saris twist up and around an overturned chair on a set of reclaimed wooden stairs that dead-end into a wall. Who is “she,”

print Summer 2018

AT WIT’S END

LIKE A SCARECROW, Adrian Norvid abhors a match. That’s because everything the British Canadian artist creates is made of paper. But if you are thinking Thomas Demand, think again: Norvid indulges his material of choice to celebrate the lowbrow history of everyday detritus with operatic gusto. From his dilapidated “knocking shop” to his shit-splattered outhouse, Norvid’s 3-D installations evince his faith in minimal means of production; these homely structures are supported by little more than handmade paper tabs and interlocking beams. With the exception of the biscuit tins, rubber chickens,

print May 2018

Scott McFarland

Toronto-based artist Scott McFarland doesn’t represent reality—he cultivates it. He is best known for creating dense composite landscapes—often gardens—that conflate the temporal and spatial coordinates of the not-quite-natural world. McFarland’s images hinge on artificiality—or at least assemblage—as do the photographs of Jeff Wall, for whom he worked as an assistant. And like many post-Conceptualist artists nostalgic for modernism, McFarland probes the specific properties of his media, although the media in question make for a decidedly unmodernist mélange that includes

print April 2018

Nadia Myre

Entering a dark gallery, one encounters a handful of objects, or— as the French title of Nadia Myre’s show, “Tout ce qui reste,” suggests—“all that remains.” They are not so much scattered as deliberately placed, as if to evoke a sacred ritual. All are deeply symbolic: Whether offerings for trade or shrines to remember, each has undergone a meticulous process of handicraft that sanctifies or effaces it.

The atmosphere is one of quiet contemplation, but the histories of the indigenous peoples that these objects reference are violent. An oversize woven basket—large enough to contain

Ara Osterweil