picks October 18, 2012

Miyoko Ito

Miyoko Ito’s paintings are compelling, and very quiet. In this first European exhibition of the undervalued artist, comprising sixteen canvases and one charcoal drawing, nothing seems arbitrary or ingratiating. Themes of landscape and interior architectures are brought together in an aggregate of spatial illusion and geometry; distinctions between inside and outside become obsolete. The works blend traditions of Eastern representation with Western modernist abstraction (Chinese landscape painting and Surrealist Picasso are specific influences). There is a dreamlike consciousness in these

picks October 11, 2012

Vincent Fecteau

In Vincent Fecteau’s first Berlin exhibition, formalist strategies are shanghaied; as in much of his recent work, techniques of casting, carving, and modeling are here deployed in ways that would be appreciated more by Jean Arp than Jeff Koons. Fecteau doesn’t want to do a sculpture’s thinking for it. In his commitment to finding form via pushing material around by hand, any conceptualism is reduced to a prompt—albeit an extremely important one, after which form does the talking. The four larger sculptures here, Fecteau’s largest to date, are made with papier-mâché, though for the first

picks October 07, 2012

Eran Schaerf

Everything seems suspended in Berlin-based Israeli artist Eran Schaerf’s latest exhibition: Found objects are threaded vertically onto chrome chains while, nearby, angular and empty speech bubbles have been drawn using black elastic cable from which other objects dangle, all coming together to create a room-scale bricolage. Scenario Data #50 (Mercedes, de-chromed), 2001/2012, includes a dechromed Mercedes hood ornament that the artist found in a Jerusalem market. During the 1970s, many such items were ripped from Mercedes cars as an anticapitalist gesture. Here, this one hangs from the cable

picks October 01, 2012

Joanne Greenbaum

These days, when should abstraction still be dismissed as retread? It is often possible that in the act of making, ideas are transcended and subsequently reinvented. Joanne Greenbaum’s exhibition has an exuberant velocity: staggered steps, carousing curves, and vibrant colors all conspiring to reassemble as they move along. Small ceramic sculptures on a low shelf twist and turn like upended ice cream cones or like Tatlin’s leaning tower. As the architect Eladio Dieste once wrote, “The resistant virtues of . . . structures . . . depend on form.” A very simple logic, but with the inhibitions of

David Rhodes