Camila McHugh

• 

  interviews October 12, 2021

  Lawrence Abu Hamdan

  Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition “The Witness-Machine Complex,” on view through November 14 at the Kunstverein Nuremberg, focuses on the system of simultaneous interpretation that facilitated the Nuremberg trials. Here, Abu Hamdan reflects on the absence of the translation from the official history of the trial and his understanding of interruptions as veracious moments.

  IN 2018, I was invited to respond to the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, which was exciting because I’ve been thinking about systems of simultaneous translation for a long time, and the very first use of such

• 

  print October 2021

  Céline Condorelli and Wendelien van Oldenborgh

  Céline Condorelli and Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s “Work, Work, Work (Work)” opened with Condorelli’s wall vinyl Credits, 2021, acknowledging the dozens of people involved in mounting the two-artist show. Also noting the time (sixty days), the space (476 square meters), and the materials (digital files, paper, paint, and so on) that went into the exhibition’s production, the piece was emblematic of the show’s ethos: a concern with orienting infrastructure to facilitate collectivity. Echoing film credits, the piece anticipated the way in which many of Condorelli’s sculptural works appeared to shape

• 

  print September 2021

  Rudolf Maeglin

  Among the earliest works of Swiss painter Rudolf Maeglin (1892–1971) are portraits of dye-factory workers in his native Basel. In the 1930s and ’40s, he painted these Farbarbeiter (literally “color workers”) with their lips tinted a pale green or bare chests stained a brilliant red by the toxic pigments they produced. With these fine-featured workers rendered crudely in oil on canvas and on board, Maeglin developed a characteristic style—simple shapes, bright colors, flat perspective—in which he painted Basel’s laborers and construction sites until his death. The recent Maeglin retrospective

• 

  interviews August 17, 2021

  Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki-Olivo)

  Jade Kuriki Olivo’s retrospective at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland brings together the Brooklyn-based artist’s work from the past decade. On view through August 22, the show maps the evolution of her practice as she transitioned from working under the guise of Puppies Puppies to living as an openly trans woman. Here, Olivo reflects on this transformation and discusses refusing to hide, the turning point represented by this exhibition, and the weekly Stonewall Protests for Black Trans Liberation that have kept her going over the past year.

  I WAS HIDING from the world for a long time. In

• 

  print Summer 2021

  “Henryk Streng/Marek Włodarski and Jewish-Polish Modernism”

  In 1942, painter Henryk Streng destroyed his identity documents, acquiring papers under the name Marek Włodarski, which he maintained for the rest of his life. In hiding in Lwów, Poland (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), over the next two years, he scraped the signature with his Jewish name from numerous canvases, which Janina Brosch, his future wife—and a member of the Polish underground resistance—regularly transported to her family home. Piotr Słodkowski, the curator of “Henryk Streng/Marek Włodarski and Jewish-Polish Modernism,” discovered the erased signatures in 2017 via infrared photography,

• 

  picks May 31, 2021

  Kara Walker

  Kara Walker reveals her archive for the first time in an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel, presenting a trove of works on paper that wrestle with representation in drawing and the written word. This accumulation of manifold narrative strategies—from storyboards to word webs, dream diaries to cartoons—lays bare the material process, and psychological processing, behind Walker’s silhouettes and monuments, excavating the inner workings of Walker’s mind and the annals of an abject American history. In The Welcoming Committee, 2018, a work alluding to the snatching, routine in the eighteenth and

• 

  print May 2021

  Dorothy Iannone and Juliette Blightman

  “The Köln Concert,” an exhibition of works by Dorothy Iannone and Juliette Blightman, curated by Nikola Dietrich, arose from an emotional connection between the artists across the nearly five decades that separate them, resonant with the vital role that love plays in both their practices. Their exchange was sparked by Blightman’s encounter with Iannone’s 1970 publication The Story of Bern (or) Showing Colors (exhibited here as a slideshow), which narrativized the censorship of her work from the 1969 group exhibition “Freunde” (Friends) at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. For that show, curator

• 

  print April 2021

  Mariola Przyjemska

  In the gouache-on-cardboard Little Cannons (One-Niners), 2005, Mariola Przyjemska painted tubes of lipstick that look like bullets, their pink points sharpened such that they recall both makeup and ammunition. The work is part of the artist’s 1997–2005 “Cosmetics” series, which was the focus of her recent exhibition “Avenue of the Winners.” The painting’s tilted tubes also form a bridge with her “Pistols” series, 2014–16, two works from which—Bolo and Čezetka, both 2014—punctuated the show. The first of these paintings depicts an early-twentieth-century Mauser, the second a Modern Czech gun,

• 

  print March 2021

  Jill Mulleady

  There was something feral about the figures in Jill Mulleady’s “Decline & Glory”: A woman pawed at her own face; a wolfish canine panted by a river; a ruddy-cheeked Marquis de Sade stared crazedly at the wall of his prison cell. Mulleady builds tension through the contrast between highly controlled composition and hints of disorder and decay; the image seems a thin and fragile surface over life’s unruliness. An elusive temporality moved across the works here, as a woman reappeared aged and flowers wilted, breaching painting’s attempt to hold a reality in suspension. An allegory for this failed

• 

  picks February 01, 2021

  Michael Armitage

  Michael Armitage’s paintings brim with vibrant fragments. Resembling allover paintings reinvigorated by a return to the figure, their power derives from unexpected resolution. This exhibition of the last six years of his work, with its curatorial groupings of animal, landscape, and figure-focused paintings, shares Armitage’s equalizing impulse; his motifs are less compelling when considered individually than when seen simultaneously, as conversant elements in of his painterly language.

  A considered layering is essential to Armitage’s project, as his material process offers a postcolonial intervention

• 

  picks January 05, 2021

  Jasmine Gregory

  Fluorescent green eyebrows arch across the ominously contented expressions of a Clifford-like big red dog and a woman with matching green nails in Jasmine Gregory’s “Trouble at Casa Amor.” It’s like they’re in on the same joke, perhaps the human condition—the clunkiness of being and performing a self—that is the show’s primary subject. The artist understands the stakes of figurative painting as essentially those of reality itself, homing in on its construction and deflating its pretensions by drawing on reality TV, including the show Love Island, from which Gregory’s exhibition title is lifted.

• 

  picks October 23, 2020

  Cezary Poniatowski

  Hung low around an assortment of dollhouse sculptures and other objects, Cezary Poniatowski’s black and brown pleather reliefs command the room in his exhibition “Welcome to Itchy Truths.” Poniatowski stands in a lineage of artists who work against painting’s norms, dismantling the integrity of its flat surface to enhance its fetishistic status. The effect recalls Steven Parrino’s jet-black misshaped canvases (the artists also share a palpable penchant for the noise-music scene and its gothic sensibilities), but here Poniatowski leaves canvas and paint behind, constructing his monochrome works