interviews November 06, 2020

Marzia Migliora

Titled after English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1766–1834)—whose contentious prediction that the world’s population would grow more rapidly than its means of subsistence pointed to the limits of anthropogenic activity on our planet while also influencing social Darwinism and eugenics—Marzia Migliora’s “The Spectre of Malthus,” curated by Matteo Lucchetti at the Museo Arte Gallarate and on through December 13, explores the risks posed by the production system of industrial agriculture. This minimal installation makes its visual richness a secret: Nothing is revealed until the viewer

print September 2020

Tendai Mupita

I can obsess over obsessive artists. And in Tendai Mupita’s exhibition “Kuedza Mudzimu nesengere” (whose title means something like “those who are willing to take dangerous risks”), I let myself wander among the labyrinthine lines of his large-scale drawings, inspecting his curvilinear ink webs as closely as I would Agnes Martin’s geometric pencil marks—though the work of the two artists could hardly be more different.

Mupita, born in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1990, studied fine art some seventy miles away from his hometown at Chinhoyi University of Technology, where he did research on fractals,

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.

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

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

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

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,

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,

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

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

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

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

Ida Panicelli