picks May 31, 2005

Katarina Burin

Assembled with painstaking precision, Katarina Burin’s small-scale collages depict vacant, Bauhaus-style interiors. It is hard to suppress thoughts of what sort of people might inhabit these rooms—one could just as easily imagine either Sophia Loren reclining on the couch in Salon de Mme. B, 1, 2004, to give one example, or a hardy grandmother living in the Eastern Bloc. This is the Berlin-based artist’s first New York show, and, along with the collages, it also includes a large folding screen and a drawing on vellum meant to evoke a Soviet propaganda poster (with the oxymoronic title Room for

previews January 2005

Tim Hawkinson

Spanning nearly two decades, the diverse selection of works includes self-portraits cast from inflated latex balloons, tiny sculptures made from ground fingernails, and enormous wind instruments that mimic internal organs.

In 1995, curious crowds lined the block to see Tim Hawkinson's first New York solo show at Ace Gallery, and chances are the LA artist's loopy, tinkerer-in-the-basement aesthetic will generate similar enthusiasm for his first major museum survey. Hawkinson's carnivalesque approach and carnal subject matter are evidenced in the sixty works on view. Spanning nearly two decades, the diverse selection includes self-portraits cast from inflated latex balloons, tiny sculptures made from ground fingernails, and enormous wind instruments that mimic internal organs. Ancillary to

picks September 24, 2004

Jessica Stockholder

The art world could use more shag. Tactile, soft, and inviting, the yellow and red, extra-deep-pile rug cutting a jagged path through Jessica Stockholder’s new installation Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam is its crowning achievement. With the velocity of a Barnett Newman zip, it extends from the building’s main entrance and penetrates the large windowed wall separating the gallery from the foyer, ushering viewers down a makeshift corridor formed by a plasterboard wall on one side and, on the other, three large white blocks made of Styrofoam floating airily on plywood boards. The wall is

picks August 03, 2004

Miyoko Ito

In the 1950s, Miyoko Ito (1918–83) wore her clothing inside out to reveal the seams and rough undersides of her garments. Texture clearly mattered to the artist, who in the '40s moved from her birthplace in Berkeley to Chicago, where her iconoclastic abstractions exerted considerable influence, even on a local scene long dominated by the Imagists. The surfaces of her paintings come alive through a technique of underpainting—layering contrasting colors on top of one another—and in this exhibition, which focuses on the last decade of her career, the works bristle with the action of her

Claire Barliant