Jaleh Mansoor

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  print May 2023

  Rebecca Belmore

  Hacer Memoria (Try to Remember), 2022, an outdoor installation by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, features nine Brobdingnagian garments crafted from industrial tarp and arranged on the facade of the Polygon Gallery; each one has been printed with a different letter so that they collectively spell out the word HEREAFTER. Belmore’s orange and blue robes face east, past a public square and restaurant, as though confronting the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples—comprising the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish tribes—which became sites of accelerated deforestation and

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  print October 2014

  Ursula Mayer

  Ursula Mayer’s recent exhibition “Not a curse, nor a bargain, but a hymn” offered a précis of the dominant culture, melding literary “classics,” fashion editorials, the metapolitical propaganda of the liberal press, science-fiction mise-en-scène, soap operas, and high-end commercial display. This maelstrom of hypercapitalist spectacle referenced the ascendance of corporate feminism—we might call it “New Economy Feminism”—over the course of the economic restructuring that began three decades ago and continues unchecked. Drawn from the play Ideal by Ayn Rand (a key figure in this strand

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  previews January 2014

  Lucio Fontana

  This thorough overview of the Argentinean-Italian artist’s materially and aesthetically heterogeneous oeuvre will fill the Musée d’Art Moderne this spring. Realized in collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation, the exhibition will include some two hundred works, presented chronologically, beginning with the artist’s earliest output—including his 1930s sculpture and ceramics, which notably cut across the stylistic divides of primitivism, abstraction, and realist figuration. In addition, expect neon installations from the ’50s, a broad

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  print February 2013

  Cory Arcangel

  When New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a solo show of Cory Arcangel’s work in 2011, it aimed to address the lacunae where the history of Pop and Minimalist seriality conjugates with “new media” (aka the expanded field of communications technologies, predominantly the personal computer, used to generate objects that the institutional apparatus then makes into “art,” at least nominally). Arcangel’s work near seamlessly delivers the hit strategies of postwar art practices via such popular forms as Nintendo and YouTube, Web interventions, and the use of other informatic materials so

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  print February 2012

  Robert Orchardson

  Abstraction’s star has risen once again, if not reached a peak over the last round of biennials. However, institutional exhibition value is not tantamount to resolving the crisis of legitimation that has trailed practitioners of abstraction almost since its inception. That legacy is not lost on Robert Orchardson, who seems to thrive on the search for motivation. While many contemporary artists exploit the tension between logos and form (consider Tauba Auerbach’s Alphabet motifs) or try to press the gray area between design and abstraction into some kind of socially active site (Liam Gillick’s

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  previews September 2011

  Francesca Woodman

  Thirty years after Francesca Woodman’s suicide at the age of twenty-two, her oeuvre is being comprehensively presented in its first American exhibition in twenty years. Woodman’s photographs—with their reframing of the relationship between the body and space, and their hybridization of photography and performance—have helped to redefine parameters of feminist art history as well as lead the medium of photography into an expanded field. This retrospective will free Woodman’s work from its habitual imprisonment in agenda-driven discourse by exposing it to a broader

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  print April 2011

  James Lee Byars

  A Lilliputian show in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s already miniature Forum Gallery, “Ordinary Madness” plucked James Lee Byars (who died in 1997 at the age of sixty-five) out of the general history of Fluxus and reframed his practice with some astonishing and wide-reaching results. On view were heretofore unexhibited letters, photographs, and films that documented Byars’s happening-like events and traced his involvement with the Carnegie between 1963 and 1966. There was also one choice “performable object”—a thousand feet of folded Chinese paper activated in a work that Byars had staged at

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  print February 2011

  Julia Margaret Cameron

  With “For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron,” the Pittsburgh Frick organized this nineteenth-century photographer’s fecund practice around the contents of a mammoth tome containing works that the artist dedicated to her sister. The collection of seventy images includes photographs by Oscar Rejlander and Lewis Carroll and forty-seven taken by Cameron herself.

  While the actual album occupied a vitrine at the center of the main gallery, its heft and inaccessibility intimating entombment, the individual photographs, by contrast, unfolded the filaments of

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  print November 2010

  Mark Bradford

  THE SOME OF ITS PARTS, 2004, made of billboard paper, acrylic gel medium, and strips of a material that resembles tape, exemplifies Mark Bradford’s so-called abstract paintings. Like the thirty-seven other wall pieces in this exhibition, a midcareer retrospective curated by Christopher Bedford that also includes video, three-dimensional objects, and installation, The Some of Its Parts is decorative, compositional, and made up of colors, apparently arbitrary, drawn from mid-’80s Pop—and mid-2000s pop-culture regress: Peter Halley meets neo-expressionism meets Kanye West. These hot pinks and

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  print Summer 2010

  Laura Larson

  Laura Larson’s video Electric Girls and the Invisible World, 2008, skims the edge of the impossible. Its deadpan tone exaggerates that of neo-avant-garde documentary, from Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, to Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, 1999. But what Larson’s film documents cannot be represented: “the Invisible World,” or the paranormal; and that ineffable species, adolescent girls. The latter have been understood as perceptually unknowable since Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, and Larson does not pretend otherwise. The half-hour video, which ran this past spring

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  previews May 2010

  Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers

  Moving fluidly from indulgent materialism to transcendental spiritualism, from modernist painting to conceptual practices, Yves Klein has often seemed enigmatic.

  Moving fluidly from indulgent materialism to transcendental spiritualism, from modernist painting to conceptual practices, Yves Klein has often seemed enigmatic. This large retrospective—co-organized with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—offers another chance to ponder his seemingly contradictory practice. On view are his iconic blue monochromes and “Anthropometries,” along with many lesser-known works, including several rarely shown films. The catalogue builds on the exhibition’s argument for Klein’s work marking “the shift from modern to

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  slant May 2009

  Piero Manzoni at Gagosian

  PIERO MANZONI HAS APPEARED in only a small handful of shows in the US over the past two decades, among them the grand “Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994, curated by Germano Celant, and “Minimalia: An Italian Vision in 20th Century Art” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 1999, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. Both positioned Manzoni’s work as an enigmatic last gasp of modernist painting, and just one example among many of a proliferation of artistic brilliance and productivity in Italy in the 1950s and ’60s. Yet “Piero Manzoni: A