Ingrid Luquet-Gad

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  picks December 05, 2019

  David Wojnarowicz and Marion Scemama

  David Wojnarowicz’s canonization cemented his reception as a forever outcast, the self-proclaimed Rimbaud of a quickly gentrifying New York. The poet, painter, photographer, activist, and filmmaker’s short but prolific career—from the first works in 1978 to his death in 1992—was a teeming and explosive imbroglio of desire, outrage, and mourning. It has been tempting to explain his work, on one hand, as the creation of a timeless “genius,” or, on the other, as a historical document of the East Village scene and AIDS crisis of the 1980s. (These opposing tendencies, both pitfalls in a sense, were

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  picks October 03, 2019

  Valerio Adami

  Valerio Adami will forever remain affiliated with the French intelligentsia of the ’70s. Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida wrote essays about him, and in turn, Adami provided them with a fertile ground on which to implement their idea of art as language—one composed of thick black lines delineating sinewy, fragmented mannequins moving through a flat and shadowless space. Here was an art conceived as a cosa mentale, or “mental thing,” one that would allow one to “think through the eyes” (so Lyotard). A member of the Narrative Figuration group, Adami is a self-described drawer-painter. To

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  picks June 03, 2019

  Wolfgang Stoerchle

  Wolfgang Stoerchle’s video Penis with Disney Characters, 1970–72, is pretty simple: A flaccid penis, the artist’s, casually births one miniature Disney character—Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck—after another. At the same time, those looped four minutes of repeated nonaction contain the curled narrative of a whole era. The Sony Portapak used by the artist, who was born in 1944 and died in 1976 in a car crash, was a staple of early video art, and connects him to Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, and Bruce Nauman. In 1970, Stoerchle had just started teaching at John Baldessari’s Post-Studio Art program

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  picks April 17, 2019

  Trevor Yeung

  Trevor Yeung is averse to close gallery interactions—at least between people. To discourage them, he contrasts works big enough to hide someone (himself, at openings) with tiny ones visitors must bend down to acknowledge. And just like that, you are left alone, face-to-face with closed-circuit microcosms. Plugged into a socket on floor level, plastic mushrooms rear their heads from a clutter of adapters. Like a child’s night-light, the tiny arborescent structure exudes a soft, multihued glow. Yet the effect discomforts. The useless adapters of Night Mushroom Colon (Four), 2017, indicate a

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  picks March 01, 2019

  Cinzia Ruggeri

  Like a warm, unlit lightbulb, Cinzia Ruggeri’s sculptural gloves, boots, and dresses suggest a just-vanished human presence. Sure, most of the items could still be worn or used. Some of them may have been. For any fashion connoisseur, Ruggeri evokes emblematic designs of the postmodern era. Closely associated with the Memphis Group, she transposed their geometrical shapes to the body in movement. Take, for instance, Homage to Levi-Strauss—a 1983 dress featuring her trademark ziggurat motif along the collar and skirt. Later, she would become one of the first designers to experiment with electronic