picks July 05, 2022

Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape’s retrospective “The Skin of ALL” spans the late Brazilian artist’s five-decade career, homing in on her varied methods of abstraction and the evolving sociopolitical context from which they emerged. Pape employed angular shapes or intersecting lines not as geometric vehicles for transcendence or purity, but as modes of responding to the patterns that structured her surroundings. Attention to wood’s natural grain, for instance, instigated her woodcuts of the 1950s and ’60s, while the negative space between bodies was made tangible in Divisor (Divider), 1968. The exhibition’s title

interviews June 28, 2022

Frank Bowling

For six decades, Frank Bowling has experimented with how personal and political memory can be sustained within the constraints of late-modernist abstraction. A solo exhibition, “Penumbral Light,” is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich through August 20, and a major survey, “Frank Bowling’s Americas,” will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in October. Below, the Guyana-born, London-based artist discusses his abstraction as an encounter with something simultaneously familiar and unexpected, compelled by an enduring fascination with what a painted surface can be.

I’M WORKING THROUGH WATERY

print Summer 2022

Feliza Bursztyn

A frenzied jangling echoes intermittently throughout the Feliza Bursztyn retrospective in the converted twelfth-century monastery and brewery that houses the Muzeum Susch. The sounds made by the Colombian artist’s kinetic sculptures, which are activated on a timer for conservation purposes, seems to beckon one through the large-scale exhibition that spans Bursztyn’s oeuvre from 1964 through to her abrupt death in 1982 at the age of forty-eight. Propelled by electric motors attached to constructions in metal and fabric, this rattling encapsulates the drive to provoke that undergirded Bursztyn’s

print May 2022

Teresa Gierzyńska

“Women Live for Love,” announced the title to Teresa Gierzyńska’s exhibition, broadcasting an essentialist declaration in order to complicate it. Curator Joanna Kordjak offered a decidedly feminist take on Gierzyńska’s oeuvre, bringing together works from three series dating to the 1970s and ’80s consisting of photographs, photomontages, and press prints portraying women. At that time, the Warsaw-based artist was particularly interested in material experimentation, messing with mechanical reproducibility by tinting her black-and-white photographs with synthetic dyes or pressing images cut from

print April 2022

Fausto Melotti

“Fausto Melotti: Theatre” traces the prolific Italian artist’s marked affinity for the stage in works ranging from pencil-and-ink drawings of Orpheus dating to the 1920s and ’30s to delicate, quasi-scenographic sculptures in brass, wood, and fabric made beginning in the ’70s through 1986, the year of his death at the age of eighty-five. Though hints of allegory and allusions to storytelling are part of the dramaturgical dimension of Melotti’s work, the show suggests that he approached theater as a material rather than a narrative form. In Da Shakespeare (After Shakespeare), 1977, for instance,

picks March 18, 2022

Joanne Robertson

Joanne Robertson’s three large-format oil paintings hold the room at Sandy Brown, where the effusive quality of their bright, loping tangles seems to open up the Berlin gallery’s tiny storefront. Swathes of blue in subtly varied hues form a thread between Dawn, Howl, and Last Sun (all 2022), each of which conveys a state of tentatively resolved chaos. These are pretty paintings. There is something earnest about their attention to the emotive potential of complementary colors, as in the light orange and fainter purple that seem to rise to the surface against kinetic blue and yellow marks in Dawn

print March 2022

Caroline Bachmann

Caroline Bachmann started painting Lake Geneva and the surrounding mountains from the vantage point of her studio almost a decade ago, setting the landscape in frame-like openings within the composition. She lifted the device from the American painter “discovered” by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, Louis Michel Eilshemius, who often painted frames around his naturalistic scenes. Bachmann’s outlines are wonkier than Eilshemius’s, and those that contoured the depictions of ridge, lake, and sky in her exhibition “Nine Landscapes, Two Portraits, and One Candy Bar” resembled the windows of planes or trains,

print February 2022

Noah Davis

A girl clad in a wide-collared smock, knee-high socks, and black buckled shoes stands before a leafy green-and-black pattern, worked over in a thick impasto. Her dark skin and composed expression, by contrast, appear smooth, having been rendered in the artist’s characteristically dry paint application, which lends these figures their softness. Perhaps she’s posing on the first day of school. Just as the figure’s glinting gaze anchors the composition of this large-format work in oil and acrylic, the painting, titled Mary Jane, 2008, itself grounded the first London exhibition devoted to Noah

picks January 25, 2022

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw

So banal is the immediate impression of Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw’s “What Time Has Left” that you could almost fail to notice the exhibition’s three freestanding sculptures and series of wall reliefs, even as you stand before them. But it soon becomes evident that this kind of overlookable presence is the very sensibility the Berlin-based Canadian artist is after in his abstracted composites of urban architectural details like door buzzers, sewer grates, and window frames. These structures in MDF, plaster, and other materials eventually command attention as the precise lines of their rectangular forms

print January 2022

Sharona Franklin

IT AIN’T CARE IF IT AIN’T CAREFUL, read the black uppercase letters against lime-green shag in Sharona Franklin’s wool-carpet work If it ain’t careful, 2021. Stretching the length of the wood-paneled wall that faces the gallery entrance, alongside two other green-carpet text works, the piece functioned as a greeting—and an instruction of sorts—for visitors to Franklin’s exhibition “Axioms of Care.” (The show was curated by Laura Stellacci for the Pristina, Kosovo–based gallery LambdaLambdaLambda, which shares the Brussels space La Maison de Rendez-Vous with two other international galleries.)

print December 2021

Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal’s deft shifts among painterly styles and techniques are positioned in his exhibition “Such a Landscape” as ways to broach the inadequacy—the inevitable lapse—of representations of the Holocaust. Curated by Adam Szymczyk and marking Sasnal’s first solo foray in his native Poland since 2007, the show brings together some sixty works made between 1999 and the present, ranging from the almost abstract green landscape Shoah (A Forest), 2003, which takes Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film of the same name as a starting point, to a pair of photorealistic paintings, First of January (side) and

print November 2021

Paul Neagu

The Paul Neagu retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein opened with a leap—a looped clip of the artist’s repeated attempt to run up a wall from a film of his 1976 Hyphen-Ramp performance at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Neagu’s feet tapped the wall with each jump, as a blindfolded Perry Robinson, a student of his at the time, marked the end point of an invisible ramp delineated by his split-second ascent. The video introduced the exhibition’s emphasis on the way in which geometries mapped by and onto the body formed the core of Neagu’s abstraction as he moved between drawing, sculpture,

Camila McHugh