print April 2023

“The Broken Pitcher”

“The Broken Pitcher,” a collaborative project by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian, employed its title as a metaphor for the empty promises of the banking system. The exhibition revolved around the negotiation of the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaca, Cyprus, in 2019. The arbitration arose after a woman was unable to repay an exponentially increasing business loan that her late ex-husband had, unbeknownst to her, added her name to shortly before canceling his life insurance policy. A reenactment of the conversation between the family in question, their

print March 2023

Gizela Mickiewicz

For her exhibition “Zaciemnienie wnętrz” (Interior Blackout), Gizela Mickiewicz sought to find material form for charged emotional responses such as dread, fear, anxiety, and stress. In Doświadczenia zrównujące (Equating Experiences; all works 2022), tubular chair legs support a stack of five galvanized steel-mesh forms that look like molds taken of people’s bottoms and upper thighs while seated; each smaller than the one below it, they awkwardly cradle each other, evoking a restless unease. Intencje rąk (Hands’ Intentions), is a pile of armlike appendages in textured fabric entangled in what

interviews February 17, 2023

Margaret Raspé

Margaret Raspé has explored and upended structures of perception in an oeuvre that spans five decades and encompasses film, performance, photography, and large-scale installation. She is perhaps best known for her “camera helmet,” with which she made a number of radically self-reflexive films in the 1970s and ’80s. Here, Raspé recalls the initial breakthrough that led to those early works and spurred her enduring interest in forms of automatic action in both art and everyday contexts. Her first retrospective, “Automatik,” is on view through May 29 at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, where the Wrocław-born

print February 2023

Carmen Calvo

A partial re-creation of Carmen Calvo’s studio in her survey show at IVAM seemed like an artwork itself, not only because the wooden shelves piled with small plaster pieces, racks lined with mannequin body parts, and drawers full of antique objects contained much of the material from which the artist makes her mixed-media sculptures, but also because the staged space reflected the taxonomizing impulse that characterizes much of her work. Born in 1950 in Valencia, where she has lived since, save some years in Paris, Calvo moves between assemblage and collage, combining objects accumulated from

print January 2023

Pietro Consagra

The shadow of art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi loomed large in “Immagini Vaganti” (Wandering Images), an exhibition of sculptures and other works by her longtime partner, Pietro Consagra (1920–2005). The show opened with two nearly life-size photographs of Lonzi taken by Ugo Mulas in a 1967 exhibition in Milan of Consagra’s cut-and-painted aluminum plates. A selection of the flat wall works depicted in the enlarged pictures were installed alongside them, including Alluminio rettangolo orizzontale (ocra) (Horizontal Aluminum Rectangle [Ocher]) and Alluminio spirale (grigio) (Aluminum

print December 2022

Frank Walter

“A couple of Oil-drums welded together, / A nozzle fussilage [sic]; and a rare fuel’s charge! / An Electronic Eye to see for it, / Radar to hear from it, / Velocity beyond the Acceleration of Gravity, / A Steering Mechanism; and a Spaceman’s Lot of Courage,” wrote late Antiguan artist Frank Walter in an undated typewritten text, Man on the Moon. This note was displayed alongside a small selection of other writings, including letters, manifestos, and part of a six-thousand-page autobiography, contextualizing the sixty or so paintings and handful of wooden sculptures that comprised “Frank Walter’s

picks November 24, 2022

Anna Ciba

The almost-emptiness of this exhibition eerily befits an artist who disappeared without a trace in 2018, nearly three decades after she stopped making art amid struggles with schizophrenia diagnosed in the mid-1980s. Titled “When you look into my eyes, you see what?,” the show includes documentation of Ciba’s brief output as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1982 to 1987, as well as a handful of photographs of her at the time and two pictures taken not long before she went missing. Most intriguing is a selection of exhibition shots displayed inside a vitrine: bold, glyphlike

interviews November 09, 2022

Fred Eversley

Fred Eversley has dedicated his five-decade career to abstract sculptural meditations on energy. Working in Venice Beach since the early 1970s, Eversley drew upon his experience as an engineer and elements of the Light and Space movement prevalent in Southern California at the time to develop the lens-like parabolic objects for which he is best known. The survey exhibition “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World),” on view through January 15, 2023, at the Orange County Museum of Art, provides an occasion to reflect on the work of the octogenarian artist, who recently relocated to New York

print November 2022

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

At the end of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s film Made in Hollywood, 1990, Patricia Arquette, who plays a Dorothy-like aspiring actress looking for Oz in Los Angeles, earnestly addresses the camera: “We’ve been lost, Matt, we’ve been trying to find our way home down the wrong path. I don’t want to be in movies. There’s only one place where I can find the world I’m looking for. . . . It’s the commercials!” This concluding punch line—suggesting that TV advertising is the place of “real families and real love”—is emblematic of the Yonemoto brothers’ campy and deadpan subversion of narrative structures,

picks October 11, 2022

Dadamaino

An orange plane stands apart from the array of black-and-white in this exhibition of mostly early works by Dadamaino. A rare foray into color for the late Italian artist, this piece from her 1960 series “Volume a moduli sfasati” (Volume of Displaced Modules) asks how a tangerine tone might inflect the tension between uniformity and contingency enacted by these wall works, each comprising two layers of stretched, hole-punched, translucent plastic. The orange plastic prompts associations with the hue’s stylishness throughout the 1960s—these sheets were repurposed shower curtains, after all—while

picks August 11, 2022

Maren Karlson

Maren Karlson uses Simone Weil’s concept of the void as a guiding principle for her exhibition “Cyphers” at Soft Opening, particularly the late French philosopher’s suggestion that “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” Tracing rounded orifices in shades of blue, green, and bone-gray oil on canvas, Karlson probes the potency of emptiness. Her visual language initially evokes something extraterrestrial, as constellations of oblong shapes reveal a strange affinity between automobile parts—such as a car

picks July 11, 2022

Whitney Claflin, Rochelle Feinstein

There was a strange solace in visiting Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein’s duo show on the Fourth of July. As the United States’ tragic devolution has ramped up in recent weeks, it felt apt to spend the country’s Independence Day amidst these New York-based artists enduring engagement—personal and political, abstract and hyper-specific—with living in America. Feinstein stitched worming lines of hand-dyed, rainbow yarn into a group of drop cloth paintings that include American Sampler / 2020 (all works 2022), in which she uses the threads to trace the contours of a puzzle of light-washed

Camila McHugh