David Frankel

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  print April 2014

  Moira Dryer

  When a cherished artist dies young—and Moira Dryer died at the age of thirty-four, in 1992, after a five-year struggle with cancer—it is unsurprising if the writing on her verges on hagiography. Everyone who met Dryer seems to have admired both her painting and the artist herself, and if there was anyone who didn’t, he apparently kept his opinions to himself. This recent exhibition, then—the first New York show of Dryer’s art in nearly twenty years—seemed to me something to be approached both eagerly and a little warily. The sadness of her early death could not but add its

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  print March 2014

  Dotty Attie

  Dotty Attie first began to exhibit in the early 1970s, a period often remembered as hostile to painting as a medium of significant art. Indeed, although she began her career as a painter, from 1970 onward Attie worked not in painting but in drawing, and when she started to paint again, around 1985, she leaned on the strategies of Minimal and Conceptual art, the schools that had displaced painting in the art world’s attention. Attie worked and continues to work serially, mostly on canvases of the same size, a small six inches square, and she shows her groups of pictures in grids or rows. In doing

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  print February 2014

  Helmut Federle

  Once again working in series, as he did for his last show at this gallery, in 2009–10, the Swiss artist Helmut Federle has produced a still more refined and concentrated group of paintings than he did then. As in those earlier works, whose overlapping planes admit a pentagonal shape toward the center of each picture, Federle is working with a single geometric form, this time a circle. But he has eliminated almost all color, and in fact has largely eliminated paint: The medium of most of the new works is no more than vegetable oil applied to unprimed canvas. To the extent that there is color, it

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  print January 2014

  Dan Walsh

  “My joke early on about how to describe myself was ‘Philip Guston paints an Agnes Martin,’” Dan Walsh told an interviewer recently, and he is an artist who knows both his art history and himself. The early works he was describing are more spare and less colorful than those he makes now, but his analogy from the interview holds: The paintings, drawings, and books in this show all have an underlying severity—some intimation of Martin-like system and rigor and more broadly of an understanding of the ambitions of modernist abstraction—but Walsh’s subtly humorous designs and color schemes

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  print November 2013

  Tim Hawkinson

  Looking at Tim Hawkinson’s work over the years, I’ve sometimes thought of François Truffaut’s famous book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, published first in 1967, then with an additive revision in 1984. Truffaut begins by asserting that “Hitchcock is universally acknowledged to be the world’s foremost technician; even his detractors willingly concede him this title.” Yet while making this concession, Truffaut complains, American audiences feel the title is empty, since the films have “no substance,” and for Truffaut substance is inseparable from technique—given all that technique,

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  print October 2013

  Philip Taaffe

  I’ve liked Philip Taaffe’s work since I first saw it, in the early to mid-1980s, but I’ve also been puzzled by its reception—by its considerable success and reputation. That puzzle was pointed up for me this summer, when this show of thirteen works mostly from 2013, all but one mixed media on canvas or linen, ran a few blocks away from a simultaneous exhibition by the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) artist Robert Zakanitch, which I wrote on here last month. P&D emerged in the 1970s, won a good deal of attention, then largely fell from critical grace; just a few years later, Taaffe’s early

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  print September 2013

  CLOSE-UP: SWAMP THING

  THE WORLD OF WILLIE DOHERTY’S Secretion, 2012, is entropic and still, a place where little moves. Set up visually as a sequence of views of woods, waters, and a deserted house, the video might perhaps have come off as pastoral if shot in breezy sunshine but speaks instead of stagnation and decay. Shooting on windless days of gray light, Doherty finds fungi, lichens, and damp leaf litter in the dank forest, and growths, molds, and creeping mildews in the crumbling house. The only thing in motion is running water, but running water spreading spores of algae, or screened by a milky film. Combining

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  print September 2013

  Robert Zakanitch

  A founding member of the P&D (Pattern and Decoration) movement of the 1970s, Robert Zakanitch made a series called “Hanging Gardens,” 2011–, for this exhibition, producing ten paintings in gouache on paper in the same large size, eight by five feet, as well as a handful of smaller pieces. In each work, a curtain of flowers—wisteria, honeysuckle, apricot—runs from top to bottom of the paper. At the top there is always some kind of architectural structure—a frieze, a scroll, an ironwork grid—that hides the flowers a little, sometimes blotting them out, sometimes just making

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  previews September 2013

  “Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer”

  Max Kozloff should be well known to longtime Artforum readers, as he has written for the magazine on and off since 1964 and most recently just last September. In the mid-1970s, when he spent some years as Artforum’s executive editor, he began to focus his writing on photography, and at around the same time he became a photographer himself. Now the Art Institute of Chicago is presenting a show of around eighty of his pictures. Also on hand will be a selection of Kozloff’s essays and a group of works by photographers about whom he has written, providing an unusual

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  passages Summer 2013

  Thomas McEvilley

  DAVID FRANKEL

  THOMAS MCEVILLEY’S most widely remembered appearances in Artforum, to which he contributed often between 1981 and 1997, must be his essay “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief” of November 1984 and his ensuing exchange of letters with William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, curators of the “Primitivism” show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that had been the essay’s subject. Anyone not around at the time, almost thirty years ago now, may find it hard to imagine how intense was the argument around those texts, and how wide the fallout, and how both outrageous and courageous they seemed in the

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  print Summer 2013

  Marisa Merz

  Marisa Merz’s name is better known than her work is, at least in the United States. A founding figure of Arte Povera and its only woman artist, she began to exhibit in Italy in the late 1960s, but her first solo show in New York—or anywhere in this country, for that matter—didn’t come until 1994 and was followed by a bare handful of repeats. Her last show in this city, in 2010, contained all of two pieces, and the one before that was back in 2006, so many in New York will have had little direct exposure to her. This may be in part her own doing: She has a reputation as an artist whose

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  print May 2013

  Tacita Dean

  Though best known as a filmmaker, Tacita Dean works in a variety of media, including chalk drawings executed on blackboards at large scale. Last year, after a ten-year pause in making such drawings, Dean decided to produce a suite of them as her contribution to the Documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel, where they were installed not in the show’s main exhibition halls but in an off-site space, a onetime bank building appropriated by the Documenta team for the occasion. These were the works Dean brought to New York for her recent show: six drawings of the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the storied