picks August 19, 2013

Gary Stephan

The seven paintings and forty-five small-scale works on paper in Gary Stephan’s solo exhibition achieve a precise balance with the site, “T” Space, a tall rectangular structure situated within a woodland and designed by Steven Holl. The artworks have been hung to engage the dynamics of the architecture, particularly its asymmetrical windows, which articulate the length and shape of building. Take the mezzanine level of the interior: Two paintings on adjacent walls flank a window situated horizontally and close to the floor, above them is a skylight, a bright rectangle of firmament and foliage

picks July 19, 2013

Alice Mackler

A crowd of women, all ceramic, all less than a foot tall, all on plinths of various sizes, faces the entrance to Alice Mackler’s latest exhibition. The glazed color and lumpy, ovular form of the sculptures meld into each other, a tactile presence that would be—one imagines—as eventful to touch as to look at. Mackler has crafted each of the figures so that they lean, a posture that enhances the attitudes of surprise, fear, or mirth described in the tiny statues’ bulging eyes, open mouths, and smiles. The colors—glossy turquoises and mustard yellows, powder pinks and dusty oranges—are gorgeous,

picks June 21, 2013

Lawrence Weiner

For the first time, an exhibition on Lawrence Weiner’s work focuses on the artist’s drawings. “WRITTEN ON THE WIND” is an extensive survey of an essential part of Weiner’s oeuvre, and comprises nearly 300 drawings produced over a fifty-year period. Since 2009, Weiner’s seminal wall text, SOME OBJECTS OF DESIRE, 2004, has occupied the uninterrupted vertical wall of MACBA’s tall atrium; this work can now be viewed alongside the artist’s drawings, affording a new perspective into the thought process behind its creation.

Within the exhibition, the artist’s drawings are grouped in thematic series

picks May 13, 2013

Anne Hardy

As odd as it may sound, Anne Hardy’s obsessively detailed scenarios recall Joan Miró’s 1920s paintings of fields and farmhouses. Miró’s flattened picture planes are staged and artificial tableaux of signs and objects, which Hardy achieves with photography’s limited depth of field. Her peculiar type of precision, one that accounts for every inch of the composition of hand-made marks and found objects assembled and used, also recalls the fastidiousness of Andrei Tarkovsky's sets. So much of Tarkovsky’s obsessive perfectionism in choosing and arranging every object was aimed at building atmosphere

picks April 30, 2013

Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney’s paintings are not so easy to describe, because they foreground color, and color is not so easy to define. It routinely divides opinion and evades certainty, and so is available for infinite exegesis. It is both elemental—as seen here in its physicality as painted surface—and abstract in its potential to awake thoughts and feelings. Bodyheat, 2012, a ninety-six-by-ninety-six-inch painting, awaits visitors in the smaller, rear room in Team’s Grand Street gallery. Its impact is to double down on the already concentrated presence of color in seven paintings installed in the main

picks March 20, 2013

Alan Uglow

Doubles and doubling abound in this thoughtfully installed exhibition curated by Bob Nickas, who also contributes a fine text for the exhibition catalogue. Take the paintings Standard #8 (Blue), 1994, and Portrait of a Standard (Blue), 2000: An oblique photographic image of a nearly identical painting from the “Standard” series has been silk-screened onto a canvas, becoming its portrait, and is here positioned on an adjacent wall. The effect is of an image caught in a mirror, situating the real and its photographic other as equal rather than the photographic other as a straightforward reproduction.

picks February 11, 2013

Cordy Ryman

The twelve works in this exhibition hew to methods familiar to Cordy Ryman’s 2010 solo show at DCKT Contemporary in New York—though in the present gathering, greater success is achieved both by the installation as a whole and in the individual pieces, showing Ryman to be really hitting his stride. His fluent constructions are built, cut, painted, dismantled, and reassembled out of scraps of material including wood, glue, staples, sawdust, Velcro, and reused unsuccessful or even completed work; the result is painting made with a sculptor’s desire. Within only two years it has become possible to

picks January 06, 2013

Helmut Federle

This exhibition reiterates Helmut Federle’s position as an artist who rejects a formalist reading of abstract painting, insisting instead on the impossibility of separating formal properties from meaning. Small-scale paintings and drawings from the last thirty years, all restless meditations on the place of images and objects in culture, have been hung throughout ten rooms, each of which is thematically titled.

In Federle’s configurations of geometric form, black, acid yellow, and muted earth color are the core hues. The paintings both absorb light, sucking it into the strata of thin layers and

picks January 04, 2013

Juan Uslé

Within each of Juan Uslé’s paintings the artist’s hand seems always present—one can sense the speed and rhythm of his brush and whether purposeful or not, variety is endemic. Sometimes brushstrokes form a concentrated island of intensified activity without obvious regard for overall unity. This exhibition comprises paintings varying in size and emphasis—the smaller ones are compact, the larger ones expansive. In Vanguard Manthis, 2011, some six feet tall, the paint implies a movement of the brush that frequently stops and starts, heading impulsively in different directions. In Sone que revelabas

picks December 10, 2012

Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel has recycled the fragments of reflective Celotex insulation panels used to line the walls of his 2007 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum in New York and cast them in copper, then electroplated the surfaces with gold. Stingel chose this process for its ability to retain the fine surface detail of each fracture and indentation in the panels’ inscribed, poked, and scratched surfaces. The accumulation of marks and traces left by visitors to the exhibitions register time in an extravagant and exaggerated material form. The gold surface of

picks December 10, 2012

Lisa Oppenheim

For Lisa Oppenheim’s second solo show at Klosterfelde, the artist has presented three discrete groups of work in three separate rooms. Using techniques from photography’s early development together with shifts in subject and context, Oppenheim has invented images that reveal connections between past and present. In the first room, a single nineteenth-century photograph of the moon over the French countryside is displayed as the source for five silver-toned photographs, which the artist developed using available light from New York summer evenings.

In the second room, a group of photograms, Fish

picks November 14, 2012

Peter Doig

For his first exhibition at Michael Werner’s new Mayfair location, Peter Doig exhibits a group of new paintings, each of which depicts a quiet interim moment, such as an unoccupied balcony or a person walking by water. The relatively timeless nature of each causes the works to be both disquieting and contemplative. Rendered in stained and thinly applied colors, suggesting solid forms without overly defining them, Doig’s skeins and drips are as much a subject of interest as the people or things depicted.

In Cricket Painting (Paragrand), 2006–12, soft-edged zones are contiguous with each other,

David Rhodes