picks July 29, 2022

“September Issues”

Anyone who has ever put a magazine issue to bed knows that the process is one of unexpected contingencies, high-speed troubleshooting, and panic-soothing deep-breathing exercises. With the group exhibition “September Issues,” curator Mohamed Almusibli charges eight artists to play with the different connotations of the word issue.

Suspended from the ceiling, Miriam Laura Leonardi’s sculpture We don’t need another hero, 2019, hovers over a constellation of works that respond to the infinitely broad definition of identity. Printed on fabric and compressed between two Plexiglas sheets, Shuang Li’s

picks January 10, 2022

Talia Chetrit

The sixteen works on view in Talia Chetrit’s sixth solo exhibition at this gallery span twenty-seven years of the artist’s work, going back to early black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken during the 1990s such as the staged composition Murder Picture #6, 1997/2021, or the youthful and enigmatic Raver and Hippie, 1998/2021, both portraits the artist made as a teenager, and which Chetrit has repurposed and recontextualized for this occasion.

In more recent work, red and blue emerge as a leitmotif, as in the uncanny inkjet print Ash, 2021, portraying a figure holding a cigarette while dressed

picks March 11, 2021

Tommy Malekoff

French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-lieu (non-place) to describe transient locations that somehow fail to acquire the status of “proper” places. Liminal, un-relational sites designed to serve a specific purpose, Augé’s non-places—airports, motorways, shopping malls, and other spaces of in-betweenness—are the geographical embodiment of “supermodernity,” a concept advanced, in a different idiom, by Rem Koolhas’s essay “Junkspace” (2002) and the “low-grade purgatory” he postulates as the byproduct of modernization.

For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Tommy Malekoff turns his

picks August 05, 2020

Giulio Paolini

To create the new body of work on view here, Giulio Paolini looked to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s 1791 fresco Il mondo nuovo (The New World), a painting of a crowd, viewed from behind, gathered around a mysterious attraction in a Venetian square. Although the attention-grabbing spectacle remains unknown to the viewer, the collective’s curiosity suggests something astonishing—the future?

With his exhibition “Il mondo nuovo,” Paolini, who is seventy-nine years old, meditates on the passing of time with his usual poetic existentialism. In the venue’s first room, the installation Il mondo di prima (The

picks March 04, 2020

Anna Franceschini

In her first solo exhibition here, Milan-based artist Anna Franceschini conducts a quasi-fetishist investigation into the window display as a para-cinematographic device. “Did you know you have a broken glass in the window?” is inspired by an event that transpired at the jeweler Tiffany & Co. in New York in 1984: A customer mistook a display of broken glass conceived by the brand’s artistic director Gene Moore for accidental damage. Four photographs printed on cotton paper and a new eight-minute-long silent film, all installed in a gallery with walls painted dark gray, bring to life an intentionally

picks February 05, 2020

Michael Dean

In 1945, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci were murdered and hung in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. For this solo exhibition, the British artist Michael Dean references the image of the corpses—which were made available for collective, heinous violence—as a recent historical example of visceral emotionality. Occupying Fondazione Converso, a two-room, sixteenth-century former Roman Catholic church, Dean’s installation investigates the nature of the space to establish a holistic cosmology of sculpture, sound, and performance.

The End, 2020, the sole work on view, builds on a new piece

picks December 06, 2019

Renata Boero

The six works on view here, spanning from 1968 to 2019, illustrate Renata Boero’s ongoing, stratified interest in the fields of nature, alchemy, and painting. Although the artist’s practice inevitably intersects with the medium of drawing, her primary concern is how paintings can be made with a degree of spontaneity. Boero draws influence in this regard from her Jungian academic background, which supports reading of painting as an altered mental state—one achieved through impulsiveness and unconscious gestures. Indeed, Boero’s work has a performative quality: Her canvases are stained with the

Federico Sargentone