print May 2016

Sanford Biggers

Sanford Biggers’s video BAM (For Michael), 2015, ostensibly documents a series of mediations to a new series of bronze figurines based on colorful wooden statuettes that the artist originally purchased from street vendors in Harlem. The figures were dipped in wax, shot repeatedly with a rifle and a shotgun, and then cast in bronze and given a black patina. The video captures the bullets hitting a male figurine, sending shards of wood flying into the air. Shot in the leg, the figure inevitably falls over. Each crack of the gun elicits a cut—shot for shot, as it were—and a shift in

print May 2016

Mónica Mayer

“And all of this is a . . . work of art?” talk-show host Guillermo Ochoa asks artists Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer, the two members of Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen’s Powder), on an episode of Nuestro Mundo (Our World) that originally aired August 28, 1987, on Mexican television. Madre por un día (Mother for a Day), the artists’ intervention on the program, involved the temporary transformation of Ochoa into an expectant mother: The artists adorn him with a “pregnant” apron and a crown in honor of the “queen of her house—until the baby is born.” Initially he plays along, claiming

picks March 14, 2016

“Present Standard”

A showcase of twenty-five intensive studio-based practices, “Present Standard” casts welcome light on a core of Latin American and Latinx artists who have coalesced in Chicago over the past decade or so. Curators Edra Soto and Josué Pellot invoke the perennial question of identity—embodied by the normalizing measure of a “standard”—as a double-edged sword: a wellspring of distinctive content that risks becoming an essentializing, market-friendly limitation.

Expanded abstraction predominates, thanks in part to Cándida Alvarez and José Lerma, local professors and polar opposite in their approaches.

previews January 2016

“Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors”

Since the early 2000s, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz has made videos that interweave social engagement and speculative fiction. The artist works with nonprofessional actors from diverse backgrounds to collectively investigate economic, ecological, and political challenges within the Caribbean. Projects such as Archivo, 2001, involve the reenactment of personal and political crises, as if history could be altered or ameliorated. Others, such as the Creative Capital–funded Verano de mujeres (Summer of Women), 2015, make imaginative use of documentary footage of marginalized

previews January 2016

“Edgardo Antonio Vigo: Obras 1953–1997”

Based in La Plata, outside Buenos Aires, Edgardo Antonio Vigo played a key role in advancing Argentinean art from the 1950s until his death in 1997. Vigo explored a range of approaches, including neo-Dada sculpture, elaborate works on paper, mail art, visual poetry, and street-based actions. This show will feature some 230 objects and works on paper, including excerpts from the artist’s influential publications such as Diagonal cero and Hexágono ’71. A 250-page catalogue will publish elements of Biopsia, Vigo’s career-spanning autobiographical

print September 2015

Gordon Matta-Clark

“The first thing that one notices is that violence has been done,” Gordon Matta-Clark said of his “anarchitectures,” the series of geometric cuts into buildings slated for demolition that he realized in the 1970s. “You see that light enters places it otherwise couldn’t.” Produced in January 1978 in a three-story brownstone soon to be converted into an annex of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Circus or The Caribbean Orange was the last project Matta-Clark completed prior to his untimely death in August of that year. It was also the artist’s only site-specific museum commission, complete

previews September 2015

19th Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil: “Southern Panoramas”

The nineteenth iteration of Videobrasil will (like its predecessors) serve as a contemporary counterpoint to a recent surge of biennials devoted to historical networks of the Global South. The festival, founded by Farkas in 1983, has for the past two decades privileged what it calls “Southern Panoramas,” juxtaposing art production in Brazil with that of other nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Curated via open-call submissions, the show will present sixty-two artists and collectives, hailing from

print Summer 2015

Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo’s well-known “Untitled” series, 1989–2008, features pieces of domestic furniture—chairs, armoires, cabinets, and tables—that have been fused together with concrete and steel into haunting amalgams. That clothing is sometimes visible within the sections of concrete, its softness frozen and locked within the rigid horizontals and verticals of the intersecting objects, only reinforces the sense of the uncanny that pervades these works. Salcedo’s sculpture insists on decelerated, meticulous viewing: One must circumambulate the objects within the exhibition space to pinpoint

picks May 29, 2015

Gabriel Sierra

Gabriel Sierra’s “Assembly Instructions” requests that visitors enter “as slowly as possible while smiling softly” and then stop smiling once they step beyond a delimited area. The fourteen stations spread throughout the gallery space, ranging from subtle markings to quasi-architectural constructions, each feature similarly witty or melancholic directives describing its function. Some such as “Area for People Wearing Old Shoes” give purpose to spaces or objects rather than scripting behavior. All the stations are white, matching the walls of the institution’s polygonal space; the simple rectangular

print April 2015

Jesús Rafael Soto

Jesús Rafael Soto’s late works stage elaborate visual puzzles. Take Sans titre (Aléatoire 2) (Untitled [Random 2]), 1996, as an example. More than six feet high and thirteen across, this mural-scale construction features ultrathin white vertical stripes on a black ground. Superimposed on this surface is a grid of sixteen by thirty-two tiny squares, some raised off the plane and some lying flat. The majority of the squares have the same pattern of stripes set horizontally, so that these clash painfully with the verticals behind them, producing the signature “vibration” effect of Op art. Twenty-four

print October 2014

Tom Humphreys

At first glance, the six ceramic tile grids in Tom Humphreys’s exhibition “Tours”—all Untitled, 2014—looked like a return to the sort of 1980s postmodernism that superimposed contradictory styles. Each industrially produced tile was fired twice: first with an earthenware ceramic glaze, at roughly 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, and again at about 900 degrees, after a ceramic photographic transfer. The initial coat of glaze was applied either with hands or a cloth, sometimes liberally, resulting in complex imperfections such as minute spatters of black metallic globules. Before the second

print Summer 2014

Karthik Pandian

In life after life 1 (all works 2014), a silent, color 16-mm film that is Karthik Pandian’s first collaboration with Paige K. Johnston, fair-skinned arms hold a series of fruits and vegetables before the camera: cucumber, eggplant, mango, pineapple, tomato, walnut, and so on. While some are simply proffered for observation, others appear to be tested: squeezed or snapped, to bend or break. Still others, previously vivisected, are opened; our gazes linger on the innards. The setting is nondescript, a seemingly neutral studio space, with light entering from the right. The film oscillates between

print May 2014

Renata Har

Renata Har’s Podium, 2014, consists of a found section of green cardboard wallpaper that was damaged in a Berlin apartment fire and left in the street. Nailed to the wall, this tattered object clearly shows smoke damage on its bottom edge, which is folded up slightly, forming a precarious shelf for a pile of black glitter. But rather than sparkling, the glitter seems matted together, almost slimy, like wet ash. In the gallery, it has gradually accumulated on the floor below. In counterpoint to this fragile hanging object, In the Tall Grass Crickets Sing, 2012, offers a similarly folded and

previews May 2014

“Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988”

Now regarded as one of the postwar era’s most important artists, Lygia Clark produced a generative body of abstract painting in the 1950s, reinvented sculpture with her participatory objects of the ’60s, and later devised an altogether unique mode of ritualistic, collective quasi therapy. This long-overdue retrospective, the largest such presentation of Clark’s work in North America to date, will encompass some three hundred objects drawn from the Brazilian artist’s four-decade career. The crucial question will be how MoMA treats the legendary “Bichos

previews May 2014

“Beyond the Supersquare”

This exhibition—derived from a 2011 Bronx Museum symposium and accompanying volume of the same name—takes Lucio Costa’s idealized dwelling unit in Brasília, the superquadra, as a jumping-off point to explore the ways in which contemporary artists have addressed the contested legacy of Latin American and Caribbean architectural modernism. Twenty-plus artists contribute more than sixty works in diverse media—ranging from quasi-architectural interventions (Los Carpinteros) to incisive social critique (Daniela Ortiz and Alexander Apóstol)

print April 2014

Jef Geys

Twenty-one black-and-white photographs of cows, arranged in a vertical grid seven high and three across, adorn the front page of the special edition of KEMPENS Informatieblad (KEMPENS Information Journal)—a sort of personal newspaper named for the Belgian Campine region in which Jef Geys lives—published for his exhibition at Air de Paris. They correspond to the new entries in his series “Passeports de vaches”(Cow Passports), 1965–, arranged in the show in a different, horizontally oriented grid. Based on actual documents that Geys first saw in the Belgian countryside nearly fifty years

print March 2014

Stephen Willats

Stephen Willats's Super 8 film A Progression of Signs, one component of his mixed-media work In the Beginning, 2011, recalls Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, 1970. In both films, shots of public space click by in a steady rhythm: street signs, homemade posters, advertising, litter. Frampton gives each of his New York sites a linguistic equivalent, decontextualizing and ordering it as a letter of the alphabet. In contrast, the images in A Progression of Signs remain part and parcel of Lewisham, the London neighborhood in which they were filmed. A newly married couple recorded the footage in the

print February 2014

Duncan Hannah

In his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011), Simon Reynolds unpacks a less-discussed register of the Sex Pistols’ legendary exhortation “No Future.” In addition to its apocalyptic disregard for what was to come, Reynolds argues, punk valorized an outmoded past—the sound and fashion of 1950s American rock ’n’ roll—in opposition to hippie counterculture. Punk’s retrospective gaze figured in the interplay between past and present in “Duncan Hannah: Paris,” a sampling of the artist’s recent drawings, paintings, and collages, along with film clips and copies of

previews January 2014

“Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil”

With the Neo-concrete generation of the 1960s and ’70s now canonized, international attention has turned to Brazilian artists born during that heyday, for whom this past is now tradition and whose production takes up neo-Conceptualism’s many guises. “Cruzamentos” (“crossings” in Portuguese) will offer a broad sampling of works made in the past decade by thirty-four midcareer artists and several collectives. The late Alair Gomes’s photographs from the ’70s are the exception that serves as a bridge between past and present—locating

print December 2013

Artie Vierkant

The black square, once the triumphant “zero degree” of modern form, is now a screen—a window screen, to be exact. For “US 6318569 B1, US 8118919 B1; (Exploits),” his first solo exhibition in Paris, New Yorker Artie Vierkant secured licenses to fabricate seventy-five units of each of two United States patents—versions that adhere to the inventors’ guidelines within an established range of deviation. US 6318569 B1, Detachable Storage Rack for a Metallic Structure, is currently licensed as a commercial product: Magnarack, a spice rack that adheres to metal refrigerator doors via rare-earth

Daniel Quiles