Daniel Quiles

• previews May 2018

  “Teresa Burga:  Aleatory Structures”

  The international art world’s reappraisal of Peruvian artist Teresa Burga in the 2010s emphasized her Conceptualist approach in the 1970s. Her Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe, 9.6.1972 (Self-Portrait. Structure. Report, 9.6.1972), for example, provided physiological information about the artist in various media, and served as an allegory of biopolitics under Juan Velasco Alvarado’s left-wing dictatorship. Perfil de la mujer peruana (Portrait of the Peruvian Woman), 1980–81, was more ambitious in scale: a sociological survey of middle-class women in their late twenties.

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  print April 2018

  Lucas Simões

  “Corpos de Prova” (Bodies of Proof), Lucas Simões’s first exhibition at Patron, conjured a stark, almost antiseptic atmosphere, its compressive sculptures evenly spaced throughout the gallery. In pieces such as White Lies 14 (all works 2017),stacks of nonarchival computer paper—destined to curl and yellow over time—were pressed beneath or between rectangular or polygonal concrete slabs. Most of the unforgiving assemblages were in turn suspended on the wall or held aloft by empty metal rectangular prisms. These objects could be regarded as bravura meditations on interdependence, grounded

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  interviews March 16, 2018

  Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong

  Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s work The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility. The Opposite of Yellow is Not Gold, 2016, pairs vernacular photographs of the artists’ mothers with texts from 1970s-era US congressional hearings regarding Vietnamese refugees. It is featured in “Being: New Photography 2018,” which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 18 to August 19, 2018. Here, the artists discuss the political and personal impetuses behind their approach and how race, gender, and labor are often made invisible in cultural narratives.

  VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY speaks to

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  print January 2018

  Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985”

  ONE OF EIGHTY-SOME EXHIBITIONS in the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” explicitly endeavored, as curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta put it, “to write a new chapter in twentieth-century art history” by correcting the field’s long-standing obfuscation of women artists’ contributions. On this count, “Radical Women” was a triumph, introducing dozens of neglected artists (including some from such rarely represented nations as Panama, Paraguay, and Costa Rica) to new audiences. It was more a feminist curatorial

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  previews January 2018

  “Concrete Matters”

  Having long ago supplanted “fantastic” figuration as the face of Latin American modernism, Concrete art is now enjoying a victory lap of sorts, with recent shows at David Zwirner in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Matilda Olof-Ors is organizing this sampling of some seventy works by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Tomás Maldonado, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gego, and others, with an emphasis on Brazil’s Grupo Ruptura and Grupo Frente (based in 1950s São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively). A catalogue edited by María

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  print September 2017

  Tania Pérez Córdova

  For “Smoke, Nearby,” Mexican artist Tania Pérez Córdova’s first US retrospective, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago made the unusual decision of leaving one of its downstairs galleries clear of any dividing walls. The open expanse was bathed in a uniform white light, which lent a still, clinical appearance to the sculptures hanging from, leaning against, or tucked within a series of irregular wooden display structures. These constructions functioned as stations at which the viewer could pause, gradually building conceptual connections between the different sculptures as she navigated the

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  picks February 23, 2017

  “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger”

  In David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (One day this kid…), 1990, a photograph of the artist as a young boy is surrounded by descriptions of the violence he will someday suffer at the hands of a homophobic society. Curated by Danny Orendorff, this survey of contemporary North American artists’ responses to HIV and AIDS sets up similar relays between a “chronic disease” in the present, defined by unequal access to treatment, and a devastating epidemic in the past. For many younger artists, Wojnarowicz’s ominous future tense––what will happen––has shifted to what could have been, a sense of the possible

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  picks January 27, 2017

  Brian O’Doherty

  “The grid glides, stammers, and blurts with different lengths and colours,” Brian O’Doherty wrote regarding his use of Ogham, an ancient Irish linear alphabet, in his paintings and sculptures from between 1968 and 1979. In groupings of perpendicular lines, Ogham vowels mark O’Doherty’s quizzical, skinny wall sculptures from this period, tethering abstraction to both language and the body. These wooden constructions adapt Mondrian’s modernist lexicon: Primary colors and black decorate their sides. Mirrored aluminum forms a V-shaped depression in each of their centers, with the Ogham marks etched

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  print January 2017

  Harold Mendez

  Harold Mendez’s American Pictures, 2016, consists of one gridded industrial mat, sprayed with a fine layer of enamel paint and laid flat on the floor, against which another painted mat is propped at a perpendicular angle, creating a sort of stage for the work’s focal point: a tree trunk impaled on a wrought-iron rod. The gnarled trunk has been covered, almost beyond recognition, with wine-red powder made from the crushed bodies of cochineal insects, while white carnation petals have been sprinkled on the base of the construction. White carnations are used by indigenous Mexicans to commemorate

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  previews January 2017

  “Oscar Masotta: Theory as Action”

  A singular combination of cultural critic, teacher, occasional artist, and unrepentant Lacanian, Oscar Masotta was the key theorist of 1960s Buenos Aires’s fervent avant-garde. Fired from his university job by the dictatorship in ’66, he led workshops on structuralism and Marshall McLuhan from his apartment, ultimately yielding a wholly informational genre—“mass media art”—that marked one of the earliest instances of Conceptualism in Latin America. This exhibition will survey Masotta’s production and influence across multiple platforms: writing, teaching, his own

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  print December 2016

  Larry Achiampong

  THE LAST IMMIGRANT IS IN CAPTIVITY THE GALAXY IS AT PEACE reads one of the blackboards constituting Larry Achiampong’s #OPENSEASON, 2016, installed on the wall’s of the Logan’s main gallery. The words, furiously and repeatedly scrawled in chalk, may recall Adrian Piper’s Everything #21, 2010–13, but Achiampong is invoking the opening words of the 1990s Super Nintendo game Super Metroid. Substituting the word immigrant for Metroid (the game’s jellyfish-like aliens), the artist intermingles vintage gamer culture and Brexit-era xenophobia, in a gesture that encapsulates the oscillations between

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  passages November 14, 2016

  Jaime Davidovich (1936–2016)

  “AND ONE LAST THING: AVOID ASSHOLES,” Jaime Davidovich deadpanned, in a final piece of advice to my art students when, in the summer of 2015, we met him in his Bronx Museum retrospective, “Adventures of the Avant-Garde.” Coming from this singular Argentinean artist, who moved to New York in 1963 and participated in post-Minimalist and video-art experiments before becoming one of the pioneers of public-access cable in the late 1970s, this was no empty provocation or joke. It is a challenge to summarize the many twists and turns of Jaime’s career, but he was, above all, a profoundly ethical artist,