print October 2017

Monika Sosnowska

Monika Sosnowska’s crumpled, hulking sculptures often manifest a fossil-like quality. Resting solemnly in Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous space, a shiny black-steel carcass bisected the opening gallery, its studded spine rising and falling atop a tangle of twisted ribs. But the thirty-five-foot-long piece was in fact a twisted industrial staircase (correspondingly titled Stairs, 2016): Its front rested partially and helplessly on its stringer while its back balanced precariously on splayed treads. Installed nearby, Handrail, 2016, consisted of loop after torqued loop of a cochineal ribbon of PVC

print January 2017

Lisa Williamson

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” wrote Joan Didion in “Los Angeles Notebook,” her now-iconic mechanistic meditation on the city’s environmental precariousness. “What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point.” “Body Boards,” Lisa Williamson’s quiescent exhibition, distilled this psychic and electrical charge in five terse, vertically

print December 2016

Wu Tsang

The revision of historical narratives—rooted in feminist and civil rights movements and inflected by subsequent discourses on identity, hybridity, and intersectionality—is a vital, if perhaps over-rehearsed, artistic strategy. For Wu Tsang’s immersive installation “The Luscious Land of God Is Sinking,” the story reimagined was that of Qiu Jin, a turn-of-the-century Chinese feminist and revolutionary martyr, and that of her friend and biographer, the calligrapher Wu Zhiying. There is no overt historical record of a romantic relationship between the two, but this exhibition, based around

print October 2016

“3 Women”

“3 Women,” which takes its title from Robert Altman’s 1977 film in which three characters merge into one, reached across divisions of time and circumstance to draw connections between the practices of Lenore Tawney, Loie Hollowell, and Tanya Aguiñiga, each of whose work mines the intersections of craft and fine art. Perhaps in a nod to the titular trio, three of the late Lenore Tawney’s elegant open-warp woven forms greeted viewers near the gallery’s entrance. Recalling hanging obelisks, they were freely suspended above flat, white rectangular plinths that enhanced the works’ vertical orientation

print May 2016

William N. Copley

Over the course of his lifetime, the wayward yet prolific William N. Copley occupied three positions in the art world: those of collector, patron, and artist. “The World According to CPLY,” the first American survey of his work, considers each role in a sprawling exhibition that displays works that were formerly part of Copley’s personal collection alongside his own profuse output of paintings and the periodical editions he funded and published. Presented together, they reconstruct a worldview that is as dark as it is candied, as deadpan as it is expressive, and as infuriating as it is endearing.

print October 2015

James Benning

In keeping with one of the primary tenets of his formally rigorous filmmaking, James Benning’s exhibition “Thirty-one Friends” observed a strict framework, in which thirty-one unique works were dedicated to thirty-one friends and gifted to them at the close of the exhibition. Friend was here defined by a multitude of affections, ranging from professional esteem to paternal love: Old flames mingled with blossoming romantic interests, artistic admiration with gratitude, in seemingly inexhaustible and shifting combinations that characterize the dance of intimacy. In and of itself, the list of

Erin Kimmel