print April 2021

Julia Haft-Candell

In “Carrier Bag of Fiction” at Candice Madey, Julia Haft-Candell’s ceramic sculptures were imbued with language; they read as origin stories in a state of revision. The show was named after and inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” a 1986 essay in which the author interrogates the trope of the heroic journey and argues for an antidote to “the killer story” of the hunter protagonist who slays all. In her text, Le Guin shakes up this male monomyth, insisting that “the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd.” The author’s stance was the starting point for the

print January/February 2021

Andrew LaMar Hopkins

Maximalist splendor was in full effect across the thirty-two paintings in Andrew LaMar Hopkins’s solo exhibition here, “Créolité,” which was organized by art historian and curator Alison M. Gingeras. Hopkins, who lives in Alabama, creates fictionalized tableaux of America’s antebellum years that “[celebrate] the cultural mixing of European, African, and mixed-race peoples’ lives and material cultures . . . based on the histories of Creoles living in the South,” per the show’s press release. His works, set primarily in New Orleans, do not deny the reality of white supremacy or chattel slavery,

print December 2020

Zach Bruder

Zach Bruder’s thirteen acrylic-and-Flashe paintings formed a phantasmagoric time capsule of human endeavor, riddled with rupture. No matter how tidy or idealized, Bruder’s places are more haunting than they are enlivened, as in the truncated colonial home of Decorum (all works cited, 2020), its dark innards at odds with the affable peachy hue of its exterior. In each of the canvas’s four corners is a clock that features a well-heeled old-timey man captured midstride and looking purposeful. Not a leaf is amiss outdoors, and a brick wall behind the dwelling furthers a sense of stringency. Coffer

print October/November 2020

Michelangelo Lovelace

The vulnerable are vital across twenty-two drawings by Cleveland-based artist Michelangelo Lovelace, who has worked as a nursing-home aide for more than three decades while maintaining a dedicated studio practice. The works in this online presentation for Fort Gansevoort, made between 1993 and 2008, felt especially resonant when viewed during the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected people of color and the elderly. The artist reminds us that our responsibility to one another has never been more urgent.

Lovelace’s portraits, mostly done in either ink or marker on paper, bring warmth

print September 2020

“EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood”

“EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood” presents a collection of anonymous amateur drawings of women from the first half of the twentieth century—an archive of unsolved mysteries from an estate-liquidation sale in Southern California. They are unsigned and undated (although the names of legendary actresses, such as Lucille Ball, Yvonne De Carlo, and Vivien Leigh, are written on some). Forty-seven of these headshot-like portraits, from a set of more than one hundred, are exhibited by Shelter online. Researchers at the gallery have begun the process of trying to identify each face. They have located some source

print July/August 2020

Benjamin Degen

The paintings and drawings of “In Waves,” Benjamin Degen’s solo exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery, are affecting reminders of those commonplace pleasures that we frequently take for granted but that are always deserving of reverence, especially in light of our alienating present: intimacy and human touch. Whether he is depicting two people watching a sunset, or bare feet stepping between seashells, Degen’s mark-making vibrates with an ardor that transforms quotidian experiences into extraordinary events. This is the fleeting stuff that life is made of, the gossamer threads that connect us to

print May/June 2020

Becky Suss

In a series of new oil paintings at Jack Shainman Gallery, Becky Suss furthers her search for lost time by excavating children’s literature, interior decoration, the chimera of memory, and fictional homes. The show’s title originated in the writings of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a pioneer of early education, whose Here and Now Story Book (1921) promoted child-centered learning. Suss created fantasias of preservation, laboring to remake domiciles that echoed with the question Is anyone home? The answer was mostly no, but this body of work was concerned with lives lived, from the cradle to the grave.

print April 2020

Josep Grau-Garriga

Llum de febrer (February Light), 1978–81, was the centerpiece of this exhibition by the Catalan artist Josep Grau-Garriga (1929–2011) at Salon 94’s Bowery location. The tapestry, which took Grau-Garriga four years to complete, takes care with its undoing. More than twenty feet in length and majestically suspended from the ceiling, it cast a soft shadow on the wall; the result was an arresting spectacle, a secular reredos softly aglow in pink, cherry red, and earth tones. True to its name, the work deferred to space and air on powerful trapezes of string and fiber that swung across textural

print March 2020

Katsura Funakoshi

Sculptor Katsura Funakoshi’s exhibition at Van Doren Waxter, “A Tower in the Night Forest,” collected five humanoid forms fashioned from camphorwood, arranged like mannequins in a showroom. Each sculpture evinced an almost sentient presence that was just as much about absence. At approximately forty-two inches tall and mounted on pedestals that were roughly three feet high, these avatars were/are postlife, vaguely afterlife, and utterly deathless.

Somewhat resemblant of carved religious icons, they conjure the accidental melancholy of wooden millinery heads and seemingly wait for something to

print February 2020

Paul P.

Paul P.’s “Slim Volume” at Queer Thoughts was finely tailored, with an insistence upon grace. The show’s oil paintings, illustrations, two collages, and lone sculpture did not overwhelm the tiny exhibition space, thanks to the careful curatorial consideration of emptiness

and selectivity.

Histories are retold by Paul P. via slow processes and deliberate finesse. The Canadian artist has been working steadily with portraiture for at least ten years, repurposing images of men sourced from the archives of gay magazines. The artist photocopies decades-old photographs and reconstructs them as oil

print December 2019

Penny Davenport

Penny Davenport maps nebulous environments of waves, hills, curtains, rippling mountains, clouds, starscapes, and muted rainbows; the enigmatic denizens of these realms are sundry. “Silent Ancestors,” her solo exhibition at Fortnight Institute, spanned ten years of drawings in media such as ink, pencil, watercolor, and oil pastel. The works were unframed, inviting close inspection, and arranged in single rows along the length of two walls. Displayed in a vitrine were several pieces (some of which were treated with wax) that resembled antiquated, yellowy vellum.

The artist’s hand is apparent

print November 2019

Berta Fischer

Berta Fischer’s show at the James Fuentes gallery felt like the happy wreckage of a good party. The Berlin-based artist’s polychromatic acrylic-glass and neon-and-rope sculptures summoned a never-ending celebration for the sheer fun of it: an invitation to enjoy light and prismatic trickery in gestural forms that (un)furled and posed seemingly at whim. The effect was carefree but not careless—each thermoformed piece was expertly manipulated into a dynamic biomorph or watery, melty planes. Fluidity was achieved with rigor.

Petutula, 2019, was the host with the most, constructed of fraternal twin

Charity Coleman