Ida Panicelli

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  picks August 13, 2020

  Paolo Canevari

  The “materia oscura” that gives this show its title is Paolo Canevari’s medium itself: inner tubes and tires for tractors and trucks, cars, Vespas, and go-carts. The material, inert and poor, rough and dirty, is in his hands transformed into pliable sculptures of bitter, enigmatic beauty. In his three-decade exploration of the formal and affective properties of rubber, Canevari has created tanks and bombs, monoliths and Colosseums, revealing himself to be a worthy heir to a generation of Roman artists from the ’60s who worked between nature and artifice, such as Pino Pascali and Gino Marotta.

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  passages July/August 2020

  GERMANO CELANT

  PARIS, JUNE 1981. Germano Celant and I are drinking at a bar after the opening of his exhibition “Identité italienne. L’art en Italie depuis 1959” (Italian Identity. Art in Italy Since 1959) at the Centre Pompidou. He points to a young woman on a banquette, engaged in intense conversation. “That’s Ingrid Sischy, the new editor of Artforum,” he said. “I’ll introduce you.” That introduction transformed my life.

  Germano and Ingrid changed the magazine forever. They were perfect partners, truly phenomenal, each bringing out the best in the other. She: street-smart, a voracious consumer of the present

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  print July/August 2020

  “Dancing at the Edge of the World”

  Ten brave female-identifying artists put the body—and its empowerment—at the center of this provocative show, curated by Marcelle Joseph and inspired by the gentle feminist utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1989 book Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Observing how the body clashes with social mechanisms, these young artists analyzed the dichotomies and contradictions of gender identity and the oppressive strategies of the patriarchal system with a critical gaze in a wide variety of mediums. The approaches range from Megan Rooney’s domestic portraits immersed in

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  picks March 11, 2020

  Sabina Mirri

  In the four collages and pastels on rice paper included in Sabina Mirri’s latest rabbit hole of a show, “Gonna be a cult character,” an epicene and anthropomorphized white hare appears in scenes of indecent leisure. In one collage, our leporid seducer lies recumbent on a grass-green chaise longue, sporting high heels and suspenders while displaying its (male) sexual organ, puffing a cigar, and imbibing its favorite gin. In another, under the spell of a large spliff, it shows small breasts and large hips. As utterly strange as the March Hare and perhaps a cousin to Joseph Beuys’s famous dead

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  print March 2020

  Pat Steir

  For the past year and a half, a beautifully illustrated German book has been sitting like a totem on Pat Steir’s worktable. Werner Spillmann’s Farb-Systeme 1611–2007 (2009) details a wide range of color theories and color wheels invented over the centuries, from Isaac Newton’s scientific studies on light, to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s studies of color and mysticism, to Paul Klee’s and Le Corbusier’s experiments. (Only one woman’s efforts are included.) But Steir is not fluent in German. The inspiration she has taken from that silent oracle has been entirely visual: no theories, just colors,

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  print March 2020

  Fiamma Montezemolo

  Fiamma Montezemolo, an Italian-born artist based in San Francisco, has a background in anthropology, and her six years of fieldwork in Tijuana, Mexico, starting in 2001, gave her a clear sense of life along the frontera. In this exhibition, “Entanglements,” curated by Matteo Lucchetti, she explored frontier regions as delicate as human skin or as intangible as the liquid borders in the Mediterranean Sea in order to find images for the marginalization and oppression of otherness as a paradigm that has been repeated at different historical moments. The show’s title not only refers to the phenomenon,

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  print February 2020

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Forget the cakes, ice creams, and pastries that pop into your head when you hear “Wayne Thiebaud.” Nothing was sugarcoated in the mountainous solitary landscapes that appeared at Acquavella. Across thirty-three works in sundry media—oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, gouache, and assorted types of prints—the artist confronted vertiginous territories with the same enchanted, impassioned eye as that of Caspar David Friedrich. Altitude doesn’t frighten Thiebaud, because he’s able to convey monumental scale, even in more modestly sized pieces. His vision extends over spectacular, unobstructed vistas—and

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  print October 2019

  Guglielmo Castelli

  Iposcenio, or “hyposcenium,” refers to the below-stage space where scenery and props are kept out of sight in the deep bowels of a theater. It was a fitting title for this exhibition of Guglielmo Castelli’s paintings, all tied to introspection or, rather, to the possibility of giving form to what lies hidden in the unconscious. This young Turinese artist’s idiosyncratic work contains no real narrative but offers potential plots and stories on the verge of being, or that might have been but never happened. Viewers are offered rapid glimpses into the interval between a before and an after, the

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  print Summer 2019

  Lauretta Vinciarelli

  Bringing to light the women artists who lived in the shadow of their more famous male partners is hard. To focus on Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943–2011), we must extricate her legacy from her ten-year relationship with Donald Judd as a professional collaborator, friend, and lover. Between 1978 and 2000, Vinciarelli was a distinguished professor at New York’s Columbia University, where she taught studio courses that questioned the values of modernist architecture through the study of building typologies. The Italian-born artist’s cultural interests were vast, ranging from Greek and Latin literature

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  print May 2019

  Cuoghi Corsello

  Monica Cuoghi and Claudio Corsello began working together in Bologna, Italy, in the mid-1980s, and in the vibrant, creative climate of that period they soon became the city’s best-known street artists. Picking up on the hip-hop stimuli of graffiti, they moved beyond the spare and repetitive modes of street writing and invented stylized animal figures, elegantly applied to the city’s buildings and next to its railroad tracks as well as to the walls of friends’ houses. At the time, their two most famous tags, the Pea Brain goose and CK8 (a play on the Italian for cooked dog, cane cotto), were like

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  previews May 2019

  “MARIA LAI: HOLDING THE SUN BY THE HAND”

  Curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli 

  Presenting approximately 250 works from both private collections and the Maria Lai archives, this exhibition celebrates what would have been the hundredth birthday of the eclectic Sardinian artist (1919–2013). Divided into five thematic sections, it will reflect the overlapping concerns that harmonize in Lai’s oeuvre. The ancient power of myths and popular legends, deeply embedded in her native land’s collective unconscious, are entwined within works that take different forms, from weaving to performance to sculpture, and are made from

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  print March 2019

  “The Street”

  WITH ITS UNAMBIGUOUS TITLE and broad inclusion of upward of two hundred artworks by more than 140 artists from every habitable continent, “La strada. Dove si crea il mondo” (The Street: Where the World Is Made) addresses how art, design, and architecture shape our urban environments and influence how we participate in daily life. Hou Hanru, Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo’s artistic director and the exhibition’s curator, identifies the street as a predominantly political space, one defined by the totality of systems that animate it: transportation, business, and work, as well as food,