Ivy Cooper

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  print October 2013

  Lari Pittman

  “A Decorated Chronology,” curated by Kelly Shindler at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, was a welcome (if modest) survey of works by the illustrious and prolific painter Lari Pittman. The show came on the heels of the artist’s solo presentation at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, this past spring and was his first solo museum exhibition in the US since a 1996 midcareer survey organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Though the twenty-eight paintings and twenty-four works on paper included here were primarily from the past decade, a few carefully selected earlier pieces showcased

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  print Summer 2012

  *“In the Still Epiphany”

  To celebrate the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts’ tenth anniversary in its Tadao Ando–designed building, the institution decided to showcase the world-class reserve of work collected by its founders, Emily Rauh Pulitzer and her late husband, Joseph R. Pulitzer Jr. Charged with selecting a curator, Emily Pulitzer invited New York–based artist Gedi Sibony, a surprising choice, given that he is known for staging minimal sculptural gestures in decidedly unmonumental materials—drywall, plastic sheeting, patches of industrial carpet. But to the extent that his practice is largely one of responding

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  print April 2012

  Balázs Kicsiny

  As a visiting artist at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis last spring, Hungarian artist Balázs Kicsiny spent two months collaborating with graduate students in the production of his most recent installation, Killing Time, 2012. The room-size work involves four life-size figures—those of a chef, a waitress, and two diners. With their faces shrouded and their heads capped with military helmets outfitted with video-surveillance cameras, they were carefully positioned in a circuslike arena such that the chef stood poised to throw knives at the

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  print May 2011

  Thea Djordjadze and George Maciunas

  In 2008, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis launched its Front Room, a modestly sized gallery space off the entrance lobby, in which guest curators organize experimental, short-run shows. This March, an unlikely pairing of works by the late, Lithuanian-born Fluxus artist George Maciunas (works selected by Mari Dumett) and Georgian, Berlin-based artist Thea Djordjadze (curated by Mel Trad) produced some unexpected revelations, and even a few formal parallels that encouraged us to read process-based narratives into Djordjadze’s often opaque installations, while synthesizing the odds and ends

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  print March 2011

  Johannes Wohnseifer

  Inside a seven-by-seven-by-nine-foot wooden box built within a living room in south Saint Louis, Cologne-based artist Johannes Wohnseifer posted The Thin Commandments, 2010. Emblazoned across ten silk-screened prints, the work relayed ten self-directed comments common to eating disorders: for example, THOU SHALT NOT EAT WITHOUT FEELING GUILTY; IF YOU AREN’T THIN YOU AREN’T ATTRACTIVE; BEING THIN IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING HEALTHY; and so on. Each dictum appeared on a discrete, brilliantly colored poster bearing subtle patterning, squeegee marks, modulations of saturation, and ghosted letters.

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  print January 2011

  Ann Hamilton

  This past summer Ann Hamilton installed stylus, 2010, a single, institution-spanning, multipart work at the Pulitizer Foundation for the Arts (where it remains on view through January 22). In so doing, she carried on the engagement with the topos of communication—textual, vocal, aural, recorded—that has grounded much of her work. But while stylus has the distinction of being Hamilton’s most interactive project to date, offering viewers multiple points of ingress and opportunities for participation, the resulting exchanges remain profoundly elusive. Interaction is invited, but rewards

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  print May 2010

  Jerstin Crosby

  For Jerstin Crosby’s first exhibition in Saint Louis, “In the Manner of Smoke,” he plastered the gallery’s full-size, outdoor billboard with an image of two men, their faces covered by bandannas, displaying a spray-painted banner that reads YOU CANNOT CONTROL WHAT IS WILD. The work alludes simultaneously to a 2001 arson action by the Earth Liberation Front, in which that slogan was found spray-painted amid the burned remains of a poplar farm, and to Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which the titular proto-ecoterrorists burn, among other things, dozens of commercial billboards.

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  print May 2009

  Gaylen Gerber

  Chicago-based artist Gaylen Gerber’s recent installation at White Flag Projects presented a group of his photographs in a constantly changing environment of color and light. The walls of the irregularly shaped gallery were painted in gentle tones of gray, yellow, and amber, while the windows and skylights were covered with colored gels, turning the atmosphere into a rich pastel bath. Centered on each wall was a square, black-and-white gelatin print under a sheet of Plexiglas, most of them color tinted. Three of the photographs “show” something (flowers, a beach house, and a shabby landscape);

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  print December 2008

  Dan Flavin

  It appears we are in the midst of a Dan Flavin renaissance. In recent years, his work has seen a host of exhibitions around the world, including, most notably, a comprehensive retrospective organized by the Dia Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Art and accompanied by a catalogue raisonné. Coming on the heels of that survey, whose extensive tour ended last year, “Dan Flavin: Constructed Light” might have gotten a little lost. It shouldn’t have. Although modest in size (consisting of seventeen works, ten of them undergoing color changes halfway through the exhibition’s run), “Constructed