Hiji Nam

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  interviews March 21, 2019

  Ben Morgan-Cleveland

  The New York–based artist Ben Morgan-Cleveland is perhaps best known for co-owning the Brooklyn gallery Real Fine Arts, which closed last year. His work has been exhibited at Shoot the Lobster, Eli Ping Frances Perkins, 15 Orient, Greene Naftali, and elsewhere. His upcoming solo show, “Gallery with Words,” will be on view at Kai Matsumiya in New York from March 22 through April 27, 2019. Here, Morgan-Cleveland discusses the sculptures he’s been making in the commons of a New York City park.
   
  I’VE BEEN MAKING WORDS out of branches in a quiet part of Prospect Park. There’s a lot of rearranging, an
  
  

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  interviews March 12, 2019

  Bunny Rogers

  Bunny Rogers’s preferred email sign-off is a sentiment that rings true to her work: Sincerely. It is the slipperiness of connection, however, that allows her to calibrate so sensitively the inner illogic of our own narratives and memories in her practice, which spans sculpture, performance, coding, and writing. “Pectus Excavatum,” her solo exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, revisits familiar motifs from past work—animals, toys, mops, and ribbons—to excavate sites of personal and mass media mythology. The show is on view through April 28, 2019. 

  I’VE MOURNED THE LOSS

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  interviews February 19, 2019

  Keren Cytter

  One feels continuously jolted by an element of disjunction in Keren Cytter’s work. In her videos, for instance, subjects interact with each other, but the potential for intersubjectivity seems simultaneously to be stripped away. Things happen, sometimes over and over, but never within the breadth of typical temporality. Bringing together a selection of her videos, children’s books, animations, and drawings, Cytter’s solo exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy, “Mature Content,” is on view through April 28, 2019.

  I MADE THREE ROOMS at the Museion in which to show my films, with the entrances

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  picks February 12, 2019

  Doris Guo

  Doris Guo’s exhibition is solemn, as if one has been summoned to a church or a graveyard for prayer. Here, a funereal series of Chinatown restaurant chairs are nestled within wooden, coffin-like receptacles. Though the chairs appear to be upright, the artist has amputated their back legs, giving us only a truncated front view. (They won’t be seating anyone for a happy communion anytime soon.) These innocuous objects are meant to, both literally and symbolically, contribute to the circulation and consumption of Asian food, yes, but also bodies, capital, and a certain kind of aesthetic. They are

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  interviews February 01, 2019

  Dora Budor

  Dora Budor’s current exhibition at 80WSE in New York blends historical fact with fable to tell the building’s story of transformation, reflecting a fascination with the ways in which subjectivity is inflected by reactive, evolving environments. Originally built in 1879 as a residence exclusively for single men, primarily artists, the so-called Benedick Building—nicknamed after the bachelor character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing—was bought in 1925 by New York University, and turned into offices and dormitories as part of its accelerated expansion. Here, Budor speaks about starting with

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  interviews January 25, 2019

  McArthur Binion

  In an extension of what Lawrence Alloway called “systemic painting”—abstraction with a simple, methodical organizing principle based on repetition and difference—and an expansion upon the medium’s potentialities, McArthur Binion’s four-decade practice combines gridded, gestural strokes, created in his signature wax crayon, with biographical elements. Here, the Chicago-based artist discusses developing upon the narrative and materiality of his earlier output for his latest exhibition of oil-stick canvases, “Hand:Work,” on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through March 2, 2019. The exhibition

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  picks November 08, 2018

  Franz Gertsch

  Installed in the back room of the Swiss Institute’s ground-floor galleries, like the children’s section in a bookstore, are some of Franz Gertsch’s earliest works, such as small drawings based on fairy tales of teapots come to life, Begegnung (Encounter), 1957, and a woodcut print of a man cursed to become a bear, Vor dem Spiegel (Tristan Bärman) (In Front of the Mirror [Tristan Bärman]), 1961. The artist returns to the subject of the mirror stage in his later photorealist paintings, based on photographs he projected onto canvas and painted in darkness. At Luciano’s House, 1973, depicts adolescents

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  interviews October 19, 2018

  Yasumasa Morimura

  For over thirty years, Yasumasa Morimura has been practicing tactics of appropriation to enact embodied challenges—one might say glitches—to the canon of Western art history. “Ego Obscura,” which runs until January 13, 2019 at the Japan Society, marks Morimura’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York City.

  I FIRST STARTED making self-portraits in 1985, using prosthetics, cosmetics, and sets to assume the roles of figures who signify more than themselves—individuals or works that have become archetypes, including old masters’ paintings, Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait, 

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  picks September 28, 2018

  Pati Hill

  In the early 1970s, Pati Hill (1921–2014) began using a photocopier to create life-size images of mundane objects that together call to mind the song “My Favorite Things” by those famous Teutonic Singvögel, the von Trapp family: a rumpled brown paper bag, a box tied with twine, a seashell, spools of thread, and a frayed shirtsleeve. Hill’s chosen medium simultaneously evokes the drudgery of adult administrative duties and the messy thrills of high-school collages and punk zines. But her ambitious spirit was decidedly youthful: In 1980, at almost sixty years old, she moved to Paris, intent on “