Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

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  picks September 08, 2021

  António Bolota

  On first glance, “Labor,” António Bolota’s first survey exhibition, presents a straightforward selection of the Sintra-based artist’s previous monumental outdoor and indoor projects (all works Untitled), imported to Culturgest in a museum-scale catalogue of his engineering prowess. Over time, however, each piece appears to grow in situ with the adaptivity of an invasive plant, made to last by the skilled hands of traditional master-builders.

  Installed disorientingly low to the ground in the first room is a massive fragment of a Mediterranean roof (2006/2021). It cuts the rectangular space

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  picks October 23, 2020

  Laurent Montaron

  French artist Laurent Montaron’s debut exhibition in Lisbon maps a threshold between nature and technology where belief systems and superstitions interfere with electronics. In installations, photographs, and a film that feel elusively inflected by the pandemic, various and complex overlapping fields of epistemological inquiry are explored with childlike curiosity. Grounded (all works 2020)—a wall-mounted fencing foil tethered to the checkerboard floor by a dangling cord—draws a parallel between electrical wiring and “earthing,” a therapy that encourages connection to the earth’s electrical

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  picks October 18, 2019

  Charles Benjamin

  Swedish-born painter Charles Benjamin’s cumbersome canvases balance on squat little legs, lined up against the walls of the gallery like pieces of oversize furniture. Minimally rendered in ocher oil stick, his works are sometimes figurative, as in New day opening (all works 2019), where the outlines of several glass bottles hint at wine-soaked festivities, and sometimes abstract, as in Diagonals for Manuela, with its five parallel stripes agitatedly slicing across the canvas’s surface. Benjamin’s forms resemble trivial doodles scribbled in the margins of a grocery list, but at the same time they

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  picks August 22, 2019

  “Weather Station”

  In the Azores, it is common to experience what feels like all four seasons in a single day. For “Weather Station,” Manuela Marques and Sandra Rocha inhabit the roles of artist, meteorologist, and geologist in order to explore the islands’ topography and history. In the exhibition’s first room is Rocha’s Escuta (Listen) (all works cited, 2019)—a wall-spanning grid of sixty photographs, taken during a three-minute window, of the white and blue swirls of coastal waters. Projected on the opposite wall is Marques’s R.A.S, a graphic projection based on seismic records registered by the local volcanology

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  picks June 10, 2019

  Paulo Brighenti

  For “Cascata” (Waterfall), Paulo Brighenti has convened encaustic paintings and roughly molded sculptures in variations of dark brown and sienna. Two somber paintings, Bacchus #1 and #2, 2019, show the face of a man sticking out his tongue. Bacchus #3 and #4, 2019, rendered in concrete, are installed on plinths nearby; what unrolls from the mouths of these disfigured, fossilized skulls are not tongues but gently perched copper leaves. The reference to the Roman god of wine and madness invites ritualistic associations, as does “Árvore” (Tree), 2019, a septet of oil sketches of forests, though in

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  picks April 07, 2019

  Francisco Tropa

  “The Pyrgus from Chaves,” Francisco Tropa’s latest exhibition, is set in a dark, vault-like gallery, where an eclectic array of small figurative sculptures is assembled on asymmetrically arranged tables. A selection of Tropa’s works since 2006 are featured alongside artifacts found in the Roman baths of Chaves in northern Portugal, a site exceptionally preserved by a landslide that buried it around the fourth century CE and rediscovered in 2016.

  Tropa collaborated with archaeologist Sérgio Carneiro, who was involved in the excavation of the Chaves baths, to create a natural history Wunderkammer

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  picks October 16, 2018

  Marcius Galan

  Entering Marcius Galan’s installation Exercício de divisão (Exercise of Division) (all works 2018) feels like stepping into a mirror. In the white industrial space of the gallery, various objects surround the visitor: minimal wooden frames slanted against the wall or arranged on the floor; glass; bent iron rods that hang from the ceiling’s beams or twist toward it from the floor. Galan’s symmetrical environment splits the hall in two, creating one big mirror in trompe l’oeil. Upon closer inspection, other optical illusions appear. There is no glass, only faint variations in the wall and floor

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  picks May 14, 2018

  “imannam”

  Three generations of Brazilian women are represented in “imannam,” an exhibition that is less a collaboration than a safe shelter of sound, site-specific installation, and film. Visitors are immediately encouraged to bow in the dark—for Snail, 2018, Laura Lima has lowered the ceiling to about five feet—before they reach the rest of the concrete curves of Oscar Niemeyer’s Copan building. Close by is Ana Linnemann’s The studio’s table, 2018, a long supply-chain-like construction of plywood and hinges furnished with books and repurposed objects, including those from her series “The world as an

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  diary April 09, 2018

  Star Light, Star Bright

  “CAN YOU MAKE IT DISAPPEAR?”

  “Impossible! It is exhibited in a gallery.”

  Yolanda Choy Tang, a former reporter, was talking to a friend who saw her in a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph, holding up a microphone in a meat market (Hong Kong TV Reporter, 1993). The photo was part of a solo show at David Zwirner’s new Hong Kong outpost in the H Queen’s Building. “It was twenty-five years ago!” said Tang to Tillmans, who came to greet her during the vernissage. Tillmans had just finished talking to the press about making one-of-a-kind images: “Many photographers have a sense of inferiority and feel the need

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  diary March 30, 2018

  What’s New Is New Again

  “IT IS THE SECOND EDITION, but really it feels as though it’s the first,” said Amber Wang, this year’s director of Gallery Weekend Beijing, or GWBJ. She’s eager to break the city’s recently uncharismatic relationship with the art world. And it seems to be working, as enthusiasm abounded across the participating twenty-two galleries in the 798 and Caochangdi arts districts as they welcomed an international crowd of curators, dealers, and collectors who came through, readying themselves for Art Basel Hong Kong. Shanghai is still on the rise, opening new museums and attracting artists fleeing an

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  picks January 09, 2018

  “Binet, Divola, & Stoerchle”

  Before he became an essential figure of the 1970s Southern California art scene and professor in the legendary Post-Studio program at CalArts, Wolfgang Stoerchle studied painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). There, he experimented with a series of performances and videotapes prior to receiving his MFA in 1970. Last year, Alice Dusapin, one of the founders of this cooperative space, unearthed from the artist’s effects a handful of 8-mm films he made during his time at UCSB. In one of the more notable works from this cache, Wolf’s Master of Fine Arts Show, 1970, he jumps

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  picks October 19, 2017

  Mika Tajima

  Central to Mika Tajima’s current exhibition is Force Touch (Manibus, 1) (all works 2017), a large wall facing the gallery’s street entrance and blowing air from several gold-chromed stainless-steel spa jets. Although these allude to the meridian points of the human body, it is their alternating gushes of air—irresistible to some visitors’ hands—that suggest life energy, in remarkable contrast with the sterile coldness of the white surface. Pranayama, D, a wooden bust reminiscent of a cervical collar and dotted with Jacuzzi jets, stands on a pedestal nearby. The sculpture’s tactile qualities come