David Frankel

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  print March 2012

  “The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project)”

  At her foundation’s gallery space in Toronto and elsewhere, Ydessa Hendeles has organized exhibitions that set artworks and other objects, both everyday and extraordinary, in arrangements that blur the line between the curator’s discipline and the artist’s. Hendeles’s intensely thoughtful choices and placements involve intellectual and aesthetic processes of research and selection, as a curator’s do and an artist’s may, and each show responds to its site rather as installation art does, though it’s rare that installation artists give incisive attention to other artists’ work. Hendeles actually

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  print February 2012

  Walton Ford

  Walton Ford made his name in the late 1980s and early ’90s with work that had a political and ecological agenda. From early, folk-art-like paintings of nineteenth-century contacts between white settlers and Native Americans to the work for which he’s best known—large-scale, finely detailed watercolors of animals, derived in style from the prints of the ornithologist John James Audubon and similar naturalist art—Ford found ways to suggest realities hidden by his visual sources. Much as postcolonial scholars have read the novels of Jane Austen, for example, against the slave-trade economy

• previews January 2012

  “Mickalene Thomas: The Origin of the Universe”

  A kind of visual Vagina Monologues, Mickalene Thomas’s “The Origin of the Universe” will take as its starting point two images that even today are most often kept behind closed doors, metaphoric or literal: Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, 1866, and Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946–66.

  A kind of visual Vagina Monologues, Mickalene Thomas’s “The Origin of the Universe” will take as its starting point two images that even today are most often kept behind closed doors, metaphoric or literal: Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, 1866, and Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946–66. Thomas is known for paintings and collages that combine garish multi- patterned and beglittered decors, art- historical echoes and references, and racial and sexual debate, and here she will premiere more than a dozen paintings, conceived as a suite for the occasion, as well as her

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  print January 2012

  Karl Haendel

  Patriarchy shimmers in and out of focus in Karl Haendel’s Questions for My Father, 2011, being alternately constructed and deconstructed while remaining literally invisible. For this emotionally complex video, a collaboration with filmmaker Petter Ringbom (Haendel’s own best-known work takes the form of large-scale drawings), the artist asked a group of male friends to look one by one into the camera and pose questions they would have liked their fathers to answer but that they had never asked. No doubt many sons’ relationships with their fathers are jolly fun, but, as Tolstoy knew, happy families

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  print January 2012

  David Bates

  When David Bates began to show his paintings nationally, in the early 1980s, he emerged as a regional painter, the region in question being his native Texas. A Chicago reviewer wrote of his work back then, “In their celebration of small-town sights and customs, the paintings confirm all the old Regionalist values.” Indeed, Bates did tend to concentrate on the scenes and people of Texas and the Gulf Coast, and in doing so found a niche. There was a downside, though, expressed by the same Chicago reviewer: “Bates is by no means untutored, yet the way he draws the human figure often is quite

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  print December 2011

  Mickalene Thomas

  “We respond to beauty, its seduction and attraction, yet what that has done culturally to people that are subject to universal codes of beauty has been devastating.” So said Mickalene Thomas earlier this year, interviewed by the artist Sean Landers for Bomb magazine. She was talking about “codes of beauty” as they apply to people—to whether or not people are found beautiful, in their bodies, in their styles—but her remark seemed also to touch on a divide in American thinking about art, one that has played out quite virulently over the past thirty years. Should art be beautiful? Is its

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  print November 2011

  Daniele Tamagni/“Africolor”

  The man in the pink suit: That sounds like the name of an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, and indeed, in suitably English style, to go with his suit the man wears a bowler, though it’s bright red. Accessories include a patterned tie and a perfectly horizontal tie clip over a crisp pale-pink shirt. Yet the effect of the overall ensemble is less neat than fabulously extravagant, the kinks in the costume’s signifiers reinforced by the fact that its wearer is black-skinned, and by the clamp of his teeth around a very fat cigar. He seems more tycoon than British gentry, but is he? He is, in

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  print October 2011

  Richard Tuttle

  “What’s the Wind” was a little startling coming from Richard Tuttle, an artist famous for artmaking delicate enough to spark the story that people have walked in and out of a roomful of his work believing the space was empty. The critic Robert Storr once titled an essay on Tuttle “Touching Down Lightly”; in this show, the artist touched down pretty heavily, making six large, awkward conglomerations of bright-colored, often scrappy-looking components, all set solidly on the floor, all around eight or nine feet square, the tallest reaching to sixteen feet high. Tuttle is actually quite comfortable

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  print September 2011

  Louise Lawler

  By photographing artworks in situ, wherever that situ may be—collector’s home, museum hall, warehouse—and framing her photos to include careful slices of the surrounding environment, Louise Lawler has made a practice of severing art from the aesthetic and intellectual lineages in which artist, critics, historians, and certainly the dealers and auctioneers who sell the stuff fondly like to place it, and tying it firmly instead to places, passages, and existential circumstances that arguably act on its meaning. In doing so, we often say, she has established a critique of the artwork’s

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  print Summer 2011

  Rachel Whiteread

  Rachel Whiteread’s basic project—to give substance to the void and endurance to the transitory, to fill in the blank—is both realized and contradicted by the main group of works in this show, which put clarity and color to ethereal effect. Whiteread’s well-known earlier sculptural casts of anonymous spaces and objects (the little volume between the legs of a chair, the three-story interior of a nondescript house on a London street) materialized, even monumentalized, the unconsidered and unseen, but didn’t always beautify them. That house, for example, installed in 1993 in Mile End,

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  previews May 2011

  Alex Bag

  “I tend to be idealistic about ideas of the responsibility of the artist,” Alex Bag once told me, but the pleasure principle in her videos can be so very high, it’s easy to forget that she’s a satirist and that satire is finally moral.

  “I tend to be idealistic about ideas of the responsibility of the artist,” Alex Bag once told me, but the pleasure principle in her videos can be so very high, it’s easy to forget that she’s a satirist and that satire is finally moral. Art school–educated, inspired by Situationism and punk rock, Bag applies her paradoxical connoisseurship of television and the movies to subverting the society of the spectacle. This show will brings together twenty years of work in various formats, including the notorious and hard-to-find TV program, made with Patterson Beckwith, Cash from

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  print May 2011

  Marcel Dzama

  Marcel Dzama is one of a number of artists in their thirties and forties—such as Elizabeth Peyton and Amy Cutler in New York, Jockum Nordström in Europe, with Neo Rauch, perhaps, an elder statesman—whose work for varying purposes recalls the drawings of old-fashioned illustration, a word once considered toxic when applied to serious art. On top of that, Dzama has a cult following—actually a little too large and too glamorous, with its movie stars and rock musicians, to be called “cult”—and a healthy bibliography of coverage in the glossies. Even so, his recent show “Behind