Diana Baldon

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  print October 2008

  Ryan Gander

  “There exists only one definition for everything, everywhere at any one time”: So reads the inscription disguised as a mathematical equation and engraved on Didactease, 2006, a Tiffanys sterling-silver coin discreetly worn as a pendant by a gallery assistant at Ryan Gander’s recent show, “Heralded as the New Black.” The assistant also wore a white Adidas tracksuit with embroidery resembling bloodstains, suggesting an injury despite the unmistakable decorative effect of the embroidered pattern. Both works initiate various routes of meaning depending on how and when they are experienced, exemplifying

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  picks September 25, 2008

  Hans Schabus

  How does an artist disappoint the public? This question underlies Hans Schabus’s latest exhibition, which may appear an act of deliberate provocation directed at the Austrian artist’s devotees. Rather than his typically monumental, uncanny interventions that dislocate his spectators’ imaginations, a few puzzling small objects confront viewers, undermining the standard perceptions of Schabus’s practice.

  Übrig geblieben (Welt) (Leftovers [World]; all works 2008), a wall piece consisting of six black containers holding stamps placed with their back sides to the viewer, evokes concealment, incompleteness,

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  picks September 16, 2008

  Jeff McMillan

  Jeff McMillan is not a typical painter. In many ways, he is not a painter at all. For his first solo exhibition in Austria, the US-born, London-based artist presents a series of small-scale figurative paintings found in thrift stores and antiques markets around the world that he has dipped, literally, into a pool of oil paint. What persuades about this simple act is the precision with which the artist has decided to stop immersing the canvases in his large basins filled with bright pigment. In each painting, a wall of intense color rises or drops (depending on the orientation) to a quarter, a

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  print May 2008

  Hans Schabus

  The Curve gallery in the Barbican—one of London’s major performing-arts centers, located in a landmark Brutalist housing complex built between 1965 and 1976 on a thirty-five-acre site destroyed by bombing in World War II—is notorious for its awkward ninety-yard-long semi-circular shape, which curves around the back of the stage of the center’s main concert hall as a sound buffer. Hans Schabus, an artist perhaps best known for having surprised visitors at the 2005 Venice Biennale by radically transforming the Austrian pavilion into a large-scale replica of a mountain peak, was an inspired

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  print February 2008

  Nedko Solakov

  Above a desk stained by black and white ink, a pair of hands is glimpsed in a moment of intimacy, in the act of writing on a sheet of immaculate white paper. It is immediately apparent that this photograph, used by Nedko Solakov for the announcement of his latest solo exhibition in Italy, represents a peek into his studio and thus into his mind: He feels, we read on the card as well as in a longer text handwritten on a wall of the gallery, like a “container-creature” able to assume multiple artistic identities. Solakov trained in mural painting, and his practice can be perceived as responding

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  print January 2008

  the 1st Athens Biennial

  “THE MINDLESSNESS OF POWER sometimes creates a memory from what was meant to be amnesia,” Chris Marker observes in Inner Time of Television, 2007, the words appearing on a wall above a bank of video monitors as part of an installation made by the London-based Otolith Group in collaboration with the French filmmaker—and put on view in this past fall’s First Athens Biennial. Appropriately enough, given the setting, the work is centered on Marker’s Owl’s Legacy, 1989, a little-known television series (never before screened in Greece) consisting of interviews with some forty intellectuals—including

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  print January 2008

  Deborah Ligorio

  “The audacity of modernity has trained us to challenge the double vertigo of abyss and sky at the same time.” This is not a passage from a Futurist manifesto but the voice-over from an old TV documentary on Mt. Vesuvius, which is incorporated into Italian artist Deborah Ligorio’s latest video, Il Sonno (Sleep; all works 2007). Excavated from Italy’s largest cinematographic archive, the Luce Institute, the clip mixes the crackling noises of radio broadcasts and the mesmerizing sounds of a psychedelic score. The extracts accompany aerial sequences shot in flight during a journey that starts at

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  print September 2007

  Tobias Rehberger

  SINCE THE BEGINNING of his career, German artist Tobias Rehberger has made the creative input of others integral to his practice. He has constructed living-room-like spaces based on his friends’ notes and sketches for a “relaxed and meditative environment” (for the project Fragments of Their Pleasant Spaces [In My Fashionable Version], realized first in 1996 and again in 1999); once he even arranged for craftsmen in Thailand to make full-size, functional versions of high-end cars on the basis only of rough pencil sketches he provided (Nana, 2000). More recently, Rehberger built a thirty-six-foot-long

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  picks February 22, 2006

  Pablo Bronstein

  For his first solo exhibition, Pablo Bronstein unites architectural extremes, synthesizing historic styles from the vernacular architecture of the 1980s to those of the internationalist eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The main space features an intervention in the gallery wall—Doorway in the Style of James Stirling, 2006—that exposes the girders and makes a tall portico reminiscent of a frou-frou pseudo-classicist architecture of the early ’80s. Accompanying this work is a series of drawings that play with a range of architectural methods and concerns, from the proposal sketch to

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  picks January 25, 2006

  David Spero

  In recent years British photographer David Spero has visited communities spread among the forests of the British countryside in which houses and communal spaces—built with natural and often recycled materials locally sourced, make use of renewable energy sources. His new series “Settlements” presents portraits of these dwellings designed with a great respect for nature. He seems to deliberately have chosen moments of idleness and mimetic symbiosis between humans and their environment to best capture ideas about sustainability, independence, and an intuitive understanding of nature’s rhythms.

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  picks January 19, 2006

  “Open-Ended”

  This group exhibition brings together three artists whose Conceptual practices are marked by ephemeral gestures enacted upon everyday objects and by interventions into overly familiar situations. Pierre Bismuth’s Newspaper: Heavenly Harmony. The Irish Times, Thursday 12 August 1999 consists of two identical images coupled on the front page of a newspaper. On the other hand, Gabriel Kuri uses newspapers to wrap avocados placed in a bowl (The Recurrence of the Sublime, 2003) or as boards on which to stick products’ price labels. A closer inspection of the former work reveals that Kuri’s newspaper

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  picks January 12, 2006

  Yevgeniy Fiks

  Russia-born, New York–based artist Yevgeniy Fiks’s first solo exhibition at this gallery centers on Hollywood movies produced during WWII that, depicting popular(ist) images of life in Soviet Russia, were meant to improve the American public’s opinion of the wartime ally against Germany—or so Franklin D. Roosevelt hoped. Fiks’s “Songs of Russia” paintings capture key moments in films like The North Star and Mission to Moscow with a quick, Photorealist style that recalls socialist realist painting. The imprimatur of ’40s Hollywood is likewise evident in the works’ richly variant black-and-white